AI The gate at Richmond Park should have been locked .
Rory stood with her hands in the pockets of her courier jacket and stared at it, the red insulated bag from the Golden Empress slung over one shoulder and going cold against her hip. After ten the pedestrian gates clanged shut. She knew that because she had biked past them often enough on late runs for Yu-Fei, coasting home to the flat above Silas's bar with sesame oil still in her nose. Tonight the tall iron gate stood ajar by the width of a palm, its chain hanging loose and swaying just slightly though there was no wind on the road.
She checked the ticket taped to the bag. PEMBROKE LODGE — NORTH SIDE — LEAVE AT STONE. No name. No phone number. The order had come through at 11:14, handwritten on a slip and pressed into her hand by Yu-Fei himself without a word, which was unlike him. He was not a man for mysteries. He was a man for shouting about overcooked noodles.
At five-six in her battered trainers, Rory did not look imposing , and she knew it. Straight shoulder-length black hair tucked behind her ears, bright blue eyes narrowed against the dark, she had long ago learned to do cool-headed instead of tall. Cardiff University pre-law had taught her how to argue. Leaving Cardiff — leaving Evan, with his apologies that left bruises — had taught her everything else. Eva had told her, come to London, sleep on my couch until you find your feet. So she had. And now her feet were here, on wet tarmac outside an open gate in November, at midnight, with a bag of food going cold.
She pushed the gate. It did not creak. That bothered her more than if it had.
Inside, Richmond Park swallowed sound. The traffic of Richmond fell away in three steps. Her trainers scuffed on the path, too loud. Above her the sky was a flat orange-black, London's glow blotted out by low cloud, and the bare branches of oaks latticed across it. Her breath came out white. She zipped her jacket higher and felt, through her T-shirt, the small hard shape of the pendant.
She did not know who had given it to her. It had arrived two weeks ago in a jiffy bag with no return address, left with Silas downstairs: a deep crimson stone roughly the size of a thumbnail on a fine silver chain, with a note that said only FOR WHEN THE WAY THINS. No signature. She should have thrown it away. Instead she wore it, because she liked the weight of it against her sternum and because she was twenty-five and still stupid about pretty things. Tonight it had a faint inner glow when she looked down, a ember-deep red she first mistook for a reflection.
The path curved away from the road and the city lights thinned to nothing. Rory flicked on her phone torch. The beam shook a little. She steadied it with the practical annoyance she used on herself when she got scared — Brendan Carter's daughter did not go wandering after ghosts, her father the barrister would have said, and her mother, Jennifer Ellis that was, would have told her to use her sense.
By that sense, the trees should not have been so close. On the map Pembroke Lodge was a big Georgian house with a car park. This was not that. The tarmac gave out to churned leaf-mould. The oaks pressed in, ancient and vast, their roots bulging out of the earth like knuckles. Between two of them stood stones.
They were not the sort of stones the park service put up with a plaque. They were tall, taller than Rory, slabs of weathered oak-wood turned almost to stone with age, or stone grown over with bark — in the torchlight she could not tell which. Lichen glowed pale on them. They marked a boundary, two posts and a lintel of dark air between them. Beyond them was a clearing.
She stopped. Wildflowers bloomed year-round, that was what the old stories said about certain places, but this was November and the night was cold enough to numb her fingers. Beyond the stones, the grass was thick and green and dotted knee-deep with white campion and yellow tormentil and tiny violet things she had no name for. Their scent rolled out, sweet and too heavy, summer-sweet. It hit the back of her throat.
That's wrong, she thought, clearly. That's wrong and I know it's wrong.
The Heartstone pulsed faintly with warmth against her skin.
It was not her imagination. The heat came through her shirt in a slow throb , in time with nothing she could hear, and then again, stronger. She pulled the chain out with her left hand and saw the crescent-shaped scar on her wrist go white in the torchlight, the old childhood mark from her mother's garden wall. The stone at the end of the silver chain was lit from within now, crimson deepening to something almost black at the core.
Rory's first intelligent thought was to leave the food and go. Leave the bag at the stone the ticket said and walk backward out and call Eva from the main road and laugh about it. Her second thought, quick and out-of-the-box the way her friends teased her for, was that if she turned around right now she would not remember which way was out.
She stepped between the standing stones anyway because the delivery had to go somewhere and because standing still felt worse.
The change was immediate and physical, like stepping through a bead curtain of cold water. The sound of her own breathing doubled. The torch flickered . The air in the clearing was warmer by ten degrees and utterly still, and the wildflowers did not move though she felt something brush her calves. She swung the light down. Nothing. Only stems, beaded with dew that should not have been there.
She set the bag down carefully on the grass and called out, her voice thin. Hello? Delivery from Golden Empress.
The clearing took the words and kept them. No echo . The oaks around the edge were too tall now. She was sure they had not been that tall from outside. Their crowns knotted together overhead, shutting out the orange sky. In its place was a depth of dark blue pricked with too many stars, too sharp, arranged in patterns she did not recognize.
Her phone screen dimmed. 00:07, it said. Then 00:06. Then 00:07 again. She stared at it until her bright eyes watered, willing the numbers to behave. When she looked up, the torch beam had dimmed to a yellow smear, and at the edge of it, just past the leftmost stone, something shifted.
Not a person. A displacement. The air folded where a person should be, tall and narrow, and unfolded again. Rory's chest went tight. She told herself owls, deer, a fox. Richmond Park had deer. Deer moved like that, a flicker at the periphery that resolved into nothing when you looked straight on.
Only this did not resolve . It stayed unresolved, and then it was behind her.
She heard it before she felt it. A soft compression of grass, a stalk at a time, circling. Not footsteps . The absence between footsteps . Her cool head catalogued it while her hands went cold: weight , pace, intent. It was pacing the boundary of the light, testing it. The scent of flowers grew stronger, cloying, until she could taste pollen on her tongue.
The pendant throbbed harder, hot now, insistent. Near a Hel portal, the note in her head said, though no note had ever said that. The knowledge was simply there, cold as a coin on her tongue. The stone beat like a second heart.
Is someone there, she said, and hated how reasonable she sounded, how Cardiff-polite. She tried again, lower. I can see you.
A lie. She could see nothing. But the circling stopped.
Silence pooled. It was a complete silence , without even the blood-rush in her ears, and in it Rory became aware that she had been hearing something all along underneath everything else: a low, wet breathing that was not her own, too slow, syncopated wrongly with the pulse of the stone. It came from the center of the clearing where a moment before there had been only flowers.
Now there was a hollow in them, a long depression as if something large had lain there a long time and just risen.
Rory backed up a step. Her heel hit the insulated bag and she nearly went down. She caught herself, arms windmilling, torch beam slashing wildly across the trees — and for half a second it caught it.
Between two oaks, at the very limit of the light, stood a shape the exact height and narrowness of a woman. Its hair hung straight and black to its shoulders. Its eyes caught the light and threw it back too bright, too blue. Around its throat something glowed crimson.
It wore her face without wearing it correctly, like a mask held slightly to one side.
Rory did not scream. Her throat closed around it. She thought of Evan's flat with the door locked from the inside and how she had learned to be very quiet and very fast. She thought of Silas wiping glasses downstairs while she lay awake above the bar listening to last orders. She thought, with absurd clarity, that she had left her bike unlocked by the gate.
The thing tilted its head. The movement was insectile, too smooth at the end. The flowers around its ankles — her ankles — bent toward it though there was no wind.
The pendant burned. Rory gasped and closed her fist around it, silver chain biting into her palm, stone searing . The heat grounded her. Think, she told herself. Think sideways. The ticket had said LEAVE AT STONE. An offering. A trade.
She bent slowly , never taking her eyes off the treeline, and fumbled the containers out of the bag with numb fingers. Steam rose impossibly in the warm air, prawn dumplings, dan dan noodles, Yu-Fei's best. The smell of chilli oil cut through the flower-sweet for a moment and the breathing in the dark hitched.
She set the food on the grass and stepped back between the standing stones, stone to stone, the boundary at her back. Take it, she whispered. It's paid for.
The stars overhead seemed to lean closer. Time stuttered — her phone flashed 23:58, 00:31, 00:07 — an hour inside could be minutes or days outside, and she felt it now, minutes peeling off her like skin. The wildflowers shivered all at once though nothing touched them.
At the edge of vision, the not-Rory took a step forward into the thin yellow of the dying torch. Then another. It did not walk so much as it was permitted closer. The grass compressed under bare feet she almost shared.
Rory held the Heartstone up between them like a lamp, like a key, like a warning, and its faint inner glow flared crimson across the clearing, lighting the hollow flowers and the tall oaks and the thing that stopped, just out of reach, and smiled with a mouth that had learned smiling from very far away.