AI The pendant burned against her sternum before she reached the pedestrian gap in Richmond Park's gate. The silver chain had grown uncomfortably warm over the last mile, the deep crimson gem pulsing against her collarbone like a second heart. Rory shoved it beneath her hoodie and kept walking. It had done this twice before, and both times she'd found something she wished she hadn't: a dead fox arranged like a sacrifice by the canal in Hackney, a child's shoe hanging from a branch in Hampstead Heath with something still inside it. The pendant never warned her off. It led her to trouble, and she kept following it because since Eva vanished three weeks ago, trouble was the only trail she had left.
She'd left the night bus at the stop near Roehampton Gate, the last one running this far south. The driver had given her a long look in the mirror and she'd given him one back. He'd shrugged. Londoners learned fast not to ask questions at midnight.
The park gates loomed . Closed, of course. Richmond Park shut at dusk, but Eva had shown her the gap years ago, a twisted section of railing where someone had once cut through for reasons known only to them. Rory slipped through, catching her jacket on a loose spike, tearing a small hole above the hem. She swore softly and kept moving.
The path wound between ancient oaks, their branches knitting overhead until the moonlight came through in pale coins. She clicked on her torch. The beam cut a weak cone through the dark, catching on deer eyes here and there, glowing emeralds that blinked out as quickly as they appeared. The air carried a wrongness she couldn't name at first. Not the usual November bite, not the damp earth smell of leaf mould. Something sweet curled through it, like the perfume counter at Boots, but older, thicker, as if someone had distilled a thousand flowers into a single cloying note. Underneath it, copper stung her nostrils. Blood. Recent.
She paused, listening. No traffic from the road. No foxes calling. No wind in the leaves. The silence had a held-breath quality, as though the park itself waited for her to do something. The pendant pulsed again, warmer now, insistent. Rory followed it.
The grove appeared between one blink and the next. One moment she was pushing through scrubby undergrowth, the next she stood before three standing stones, moss-eaten, older than anything else inthe park, arranged in a triangle that didn't quite look accidental . Inside them, wildflowers bloomed. In November. Blue and white and deep crimson petals, all growing in perfect concentric circles, unmarked by frost, unbothered by the cold. They glowed faintly, not from the moonlight, but from within, like the pendant's inner shine. Someone had tended this place recently. The petals carried no dew, no dust, no sign of weather at all. As if the flowers had been placed there hours ago and would still be fresh in a hundred years.
Rory stepped between the stones. Her torch flickered , buzzed, died. She shook it, slapped it, and it stayed dead. Moonlight filled the grove instead, brighter than it had any right to be, silver-washed and wrong. She looked up. The moon sat fat and low between the oak branches, but the clouds around it hadn't moved since she'd arrived. She counted her breaths. One. Two. Three. The clouds stayed frozen, painted, patient.
The pendant went hot. Not warm. Hot. She hissed and clawed at the chain, but the clasp wouldn't come undone. The crimson gem glowed through her hoodie now, visible even through the fabric, casting a thin red light across her collarbone.
"You're late, Malphora."
The voice came from everywhere and nowhere at once, soft as silk drawn over a knife's edge. Rory spun, torch raised like a weapon. The grove stood empty. The flowers shivered, though no wind touched them.
"Who's there?" Her voice came out steadier than she felt.
No answer. The silence pressed in, thick as water. She backed toward the gap between the standing stones, the way she'd come, and her heel struck something that hadn't been there before. She looked down. A fourth stone. Where the gap had been. It stood identical to the others, moss in all the same places, as if it had grown there centuries ago. As if it had always been there. Rory's throat tightened. She turned slowly , counting. The triangle now had four corners. She'd walked in through a gap that no longer existed.
The flowers rustled. Not one rustle, but many, as though something moved among them, passing from bloom to bloom, unhurried, patient. Rory backed against the new stone. The cold of it seeped through her jacket, deep into her spine, and the pendant throbbed against her chest in answer.
"There's no point leaving," the voice said, closer now, almost conversational. "Time doesn't move for you here. It never did."
Rory's fingers found the clasp again, twisted, pulled. The chain snapped. The pendant dropped into her palm, burning hot, and she nearly dropped it. But she didn't. She held it tight, the warm crimson light spilling between her fingers, and for a moment the wildflowers dimmed, as if afraid of it.
The voice laughed. A soft, delighted sound, like wind through dry grass.
"Oh, you kept it. I wondered if you would."
Something moved between the stones. Tall, thin, shaped like a person but not moving like one, its limbs jointed wrong, its head tilted at an angle that made Rory's stomach lurch . It stepped into the moonlight, and she saw its face. Or rather, she saw the shape where a face should be, smooth as a closed orchid, featureless, pale. It had no eyes, yet it looked at her. She felt it look at her, felt the weight of that gaze settle on her skin like frost.
"Give it back," it said. "You've carried it long enough. Malphora was always meant to return it."
The pendant flared. The warmth turned searing , the red light blazing between her fingers, Drumming like a heartbeat, like a warning, like a name someone had forgotten calling her. Rory looked at the creature, at the waiting stones, at the frozen moon overhead. She gripped the pendant tight, sparked the chain around her wrist, and ran.
straight through the flowers toward where she prayed the gap still was.
The flowers screamed.
Not a sound she heard with her ears. A sound that tore through her skull directly, white-hot, needle-thin, a thousand voices braided into one, all shrieking the same word over and over:
*Malphora. Malphora. Malphora.*
She hit the stone wall. No gap. She scrabbled at moss, at lichen, at seams that didn't exist. The stones were unbroken, ancient, immovable. Behind her, the creature stepped closer, unhurried. It didn't need to hurry. Time didn't move for her here. It never did.
The pendant burned in her fist. And somewhere deep inthe stone, something answered it.