AI Rory locked her bike to the railings outside Richmond Park and stood for a moment with her hands in her pockets, listening.
The gate should have been shut. After dark the main gates closed and the whole vast black acreage of the park went quiet, or that was what the sign said in white on green. The sign also said no cycling after sunset and no entry after eleven, and her phone said 12:04. She had stared at the delivery docket for a full minute back under the heat lamps of the Golden Empress, Yu-Fei shouting for the driver to go, go, the noodles getting cold. No name. No street. Just a pin dropped in the middle of Richmond Park and a note in careful block capitals: GROVE ENTRANCE. MIDNIGHT. TIP IN CASH.
She should have refused it. Three months running deliveries for Yu-Fei had taught her which orders to take and which to leave for the lads with bigger locks and louder voices. This one prickled. But rent on the flat above Silas's bar was due and her father Brendan would have called it an unreasonable risk and her mother Jennifer would have worried, and both of those thoughts made her lift her chin and take the bag. She was twenty-five, not a first-year pre-law at Cardiff anymore, and she had left Evan and Cardiff and all of that small, bruised life behind for London precisely so she would not have to be afraid of walking alone.
Her breath fogged. September had turned the night thin and cold, the kind of cold that got into the seams of her jacket. Her straight black hair, cut blunt to her shoulders, lifted against her neck when the wind moved. Under the sodium light by the gate her eyes looked almost black, but they were blue, a bright, startled blue that missed very little. She checked the docket again, then the pin on her phone, then the gate.
The gate was open an inch.
Not broken. Not forced. Just open, as if someone had left it for her.
Rory pushed it with two fingers. It swung inward without a sound. Well-oiled hinges. That bothered her more than rust would have. Parks did not oil their side gates for delivery girls at midnight.
The path beyond was gravel, pale in the dark. On either side the grass ran out into blackness, and further out the trees stood up in a solid wall. London fell away behind her very quickly . That was the first wrong thing. She could still hear the North Circular if she turned her head, a low wash of tyres, but when she faced forward into the park there was nothing. No traffic. No planes. Richmond at midnight should still have had foxes screaming and distant sirens and the rattle of the last District line trains. Here there was only her own trainers on gravel, too loud, crunch crunch crunch, and the plastic rustle of the takeaway bag banging against her leg.
She walked. The pin pulsed on her phone. No signal bars. The map had frozen with a blue dot hovering over green nothing.
The path bent. The trees closed in.
She knew this park in daylight. Roehampton Gate, dog walkers, kids on scooters, deer far off like tan commas. This was not that park. The air changed ten steps past the bend. It got warmer. Not much, just enough that the cold lifted off her face and the back of her neck prickled with sweat under her hair. She smelled earth and crushed green and something sweet, honeysuckle or jasmine, far too sweet for September. Her torch beam caught color low to the ground where there should have been only wet leaf litter.
Wildflowers. A drifts of them, white and yellow and a startling violet, open at midnight, heads upturned. They should have been closed . They should not have been blooming at all this late, not in this tangle, not this thick. She crouched before she thought about it, cool-headed Rory who noticed things, and touched a petal. It was warm. Living warm, not sun warm.
She stood up too fast. Her left wrist knocked against the takeaway bag and the small crescent scar there, white since she was nine and fell on a broken mug in Cardiff, throbbed as if she had just cut it.
Against her sternum, under her T-shirt, the Heartstone moved.
It was ridiculous to call it that, but she had no other name for it. It had come three weeks ago in a padded envelope with no return address, no note, left with Silas downstairs. A stone roughly the size of her thumbnail, deep crimson, cut badly or not cut at all, on a plain silver chain. When she held it to the light there was a faint inner glow, like an ember banked under glass. She had meant to take it to a pawn shop. Instead she had put it on and never taken it off, and told Eva it was nothing, just a thing someone left.
Now it pulsed faintly with warmth , once, twice, in rhythm with nothing she could feel in her own body. A slow heat that spread out through the silver and into her skin.
Rory stopped walking. She pressed her palm flat over it through her shirt.
The heat came again. Stronger.
Okay, she said aloud, just to hear a human voice. Okay. Cool.
Her voice fell dead two feet from her mouth. The trees ate it. She could see them properly now where the path opened. Ancient oaks, huge, bark black with damp, set in a loose ring around a clearing she did not remember from any map. They were too evenly spaced to be natural. Like standing stones. Like something placed to mark a boundary. Between the two nearest, the gravel simply ended and the ground became soft and flower-thick, and the night beyond them was a different texture, denser.
This was Isolde's grove. She had heard night staff at the bar talk about it, laughing. The Richmond grove. The place where you lost an hour and found a week gone. A pocket, someone had said, between here and somewhere else.
She had laughed too, at the time.
The blue dot on her phone had stopped moving. The time still said 12:04.
She lifted her head and the wrongness settled properly over her, like a hand on the back of her neck.
It was too quiet. Not the quiet of an empty place. The quiet of a place holding its breath. No wind in the high branches now, though she could see the topmost leaves moving. No insects in the flowers, though the air was warm enough for moths. Her own breathing sounded wrong, too close, as if the clearing were smaller than it looked.
And under it, very faint, a sound that should not have been there at all. Music, almost. Or voices talking a long way off, the cadence of conversation without any words she could catch. She turned toward it and it stopped. She turned back to the path and her trainers crunched, and half a beat after she stopped, she heard another crunch.
Rory went very still.
She was good in a crisis. That was what Eva always said, what had got her out of Evan's flat with a bag packed while he slept. Think sideways. Do the unexpected thing. Do not run straight.
She did not run. She counted. Three oaks to her left with roots like knuckles. One fallen log furred with moss. The bag in her right hand getting heavy, sesame oil soaking through paper. The pendant burning a small sun against her breastbone.
Crunch.
This time she caught it. A step that was not hers, placed just after hers, from somewhere to her left where there was nothing but flowers and dark between the trees.
She swung the torch. The beam stuttered over petals, bark, wet leaves. Nothing moved, but the afterimage on her retina insisted something had just moved, low and quick, at the edge of vision. A paleness between two trunks that was not a trunk. A height wrong for a deer. Deer did not stand like that.
Hi, she called. The word came out steady, which pleased some distant, lawyer-trained part of her brain. I have a delivery for, she glanced at the docket though she knew it by heart, for the grove? It's getting cold.
No answer. The sweet smell thickened. Jasmine, rot, honey.
The Heartstone pulsed again, hotter this time, almost uncomfortable. The faint inner glow was visible now through the cotton of her shirt, a crimson bloom over her heart.
She took a step forward toward the boundary of oaks, because standing still felt like being watched and moving felt like being followed and she had to choose one. The flowers brushed her ankles. They released more scent when crushed, cloying. Her torch beam shortened, as if the dark were thicker inside the ring. The ground gave softly under her trainers, no gravel now, no crunch to cover other sounds.
Behind her, clearly, gravel crunched.
She spun. The path was empty. The gate was long out of sight. The oaks framed the way back like a throat. And for a second, a bare second, she saw the wrongness in the space between them. The air there was not empty. It was occupied in the shape of a person, the way heat shimmers over tarmac in summer takes a shape if you stare. Tall. Still. Looking at her with no eyes she could see but with attention she could feel , a pressure behind her forehead and on the surface of her teeth.
Then it was just night and trees again, and her heart was hammering so hard the pendant bounced with it.
Rory backed up a step. Her heel caught on a root. She did not fall. She windmilled, caught herself, and laughed once, a short raw sound that the grove swallowed whole.
Right, she whispered. Right.
She thought about time. Her phone still said 12:04. It had said 12:04 at the gate. She had walked at least fifteen minutes. Her hands were cold except where the stone burned. That was data. That was useful. Time moved differently here. An hour inside could be minutes outside, or days. Someone at the bar had said that, and everyone had laughed, and she was not laughing now.
The voices started again, closer. Not voices. One voice, trying out cadences. It came from the trees to her right, then from the left, then from directly in front where the flowers grew thickest and the dark pooled. It sounded like Yu-Fei calling an order, then like Silas pulling a pint, then like her mother calling her in for tea in Cardiff, Jennifer Carter at the back door. Aurora, love. Each imitation was slightly off in pitch, as if the thing making it had heard humans but never been one.
The pendant flared hot.
Rory tore her eyes from the dark and looked down at her chest. The crimson light shone through her shirt, steady now, not pulsing. Pointing. Warming toward something deeper in the grove, where the flowers parted around a patch of bare earth no bigger than a manhole cover. The air above it rippled, faintly, like heat.
A Hel portal. She did not know how she knew the words. They arrived whole in her head, cold as a stone dropped in water. The stone knew. The stone had been leading her here since the gate.
The shape between the oaks crunched forward one graveless step. She heard flowers compress without wind. She saw, at the very edge of her torch beam, the stems bend in a line, one after another, as if something with weight but no visible feet were walking toward her very slowly , learning how to walk.
She was alone in the grove and she was absolutely , certainly not alone.
Rory slipped the takeaway bag off her wrist and set it gently down among the flowers. Her fingers found the silver chain at her neck. The metal was hot enough to hurt. The small crescent scar on her left wrist stood out white as bone.
She did not run for the gate. The thing was between her and the gate, and cool-headed girls from Cardiff who had out-thought worse than this did not run blind into teeth they could not see . She stepped sideways, toward the bare earth, toward the heat, keeping the oaks at her back and her torch aimed low at the bending flowers, and she kept talking, steady and clear, because whatever it was was listening and learning, and she wanted it to learn this first.
I see you, she said. Walk with me, then. But you stay over there.