AI The third stone was warm.
Rory lifted her hand off the bark and held it in front of her face, half expecting something on her palm. Nothing. Just skin, and the old crescent scar on her wrist catching what little light came down through the oaks.
Nine stones. She counted them from where she stood: one to five, five to nine. Then she counted again, because the first pass had come out at eight and that was a problem.
Anticlockwise. "Nine stones, Rory. You walk anticlockwise and you don't stop until you've counted every one of them." Three weeks old, that voicemail. The wind had eaten the rest of the sentence, and under the wind, faint enough that she had replayed it eleven times to be sure, a woman humming through her teeth.
She started walking.
The pendant lay against her sternum, warm as the stone had been. Deep crimson, thumbnail sized, hanging off a silver chain that had arrived in a padded envelope with no note and no return address and no postmark at all, which the post office in Lewisham had been unable to explain. It had pulsed for fourteen nights, quiet as a pulse in a wrist, and on the fourteenth she had stopped pretending she wasn't coming .
So: a torch she didn't need, a bottle of water, her phone at eighty-three per cent, and nobody in the world who knew where she had gone. She had told Yu-Fei she was taking the morning off. She had told Silas nothing.
The grove had no gate. She had come in over the ditch at the bottom of Sawyer's Hill, past the deer that stood in the dark and watched her the way deer did, still as fence posts, then kept walking when they decided she wasn't worth the running. Somewhere behind her and a mile to the east, the park should have been carrying its night noise: the low river of traffic off the A3, helicopters swinging towards Heathrow, foxes screaming at each other like children being murdered . She had walked this park at night before and it had never once been quiet.
She stopped and listened to it now.
Nothing. Not the hush of a still night. A held breath. The kind of silence that arrives in a room a second after an argument, when everyone has decided what they think of you.
Rory looked at the stones. Oak, all of them, planted or grown or something in between, waist high and worn smooth on the tops where centuries of hands had rested. Nine of them in a ring, and inside the ring, the wildflowers.
That was the first thing that had been wrong.
Wildflowers in the middle of the ring in a season that had no business flowering at all, bluebells and campion and something small and yellow, all of it upright and open in the dark. Flowers closed at night. She knew that much from her mother's garden in Cardiff, from twenty years of watching things shut themselves against the cold. These were open, and they were facing inward.
She stepped over the boundary and the noise of the world went out like a switch.
Not faded. Went. One step, both feet on the other side of the oldest stone, and the hum she had not even registered was gone from behind her ears, and the air had a thickness to it, like standing in a room where someone had just left.
The pendant beat once against her ribs and lay still.
"Right," she said, out loud, to hear something. Her voice came back without echo , as though the trees had taken it and put it in a drawer.
Anticlockwise. She moved.
One. The oak on her left, bark cold under two fingers. Two. Cold. Three. Warm, the one she had touched already, the heat rising up through her hand like a stove ring left on. Four. Cold. Five. Cold. She kept her eyes on the ground, because the ground was measurable, and because she had caught herself twice now glancing at the gap between two stones on the far side where something had seemed to shift.
Fox. It was a fox. Everything was a fox.
Six. She took a mouthful of water and capped the bottle.
And it was only when she had swallowed that she heard the bell.
One clear note, small and bright, the kind you got from a cyclist telling you to move off the towpath, ringing out from beyond the ring, out among the trees, where no path ran and no rider could be and no light showed between the trunks.
Rory turned towards it. Held still.
The bell rang again.
"Hello?"
The word went into the dark and did not come back. Somewhere in the distance, a fox screamed, or a child did, or nothing did, and she was no longer able to tell which of those things she was inventing .
She walked.
Seven. Eight. Nine. She counted her steps as she went because counting was a job for the front of her mind, and the back of it was doing something else, something entirely its own, listing the things in the ring that ought not to be there. The flowers, upright and facing in. The warmth in the wood. The bicycle bell.
Her fifth step rang slightly after her fourth.
She stopped. The sound stopped with her, obedient, stupid, obviously her own boots on leaf litter, obviously nothing. She waited three seconds, and took one step, and the step behind her took one step too, half a beat late, as though it had been waiting for the noise to be free.
Rory did not turn round. That much of Cardiff she still had in her. Never turn to look at what is following you, because whatever it is will take that as an invitation.
She pulled her phone out instead. Twenty-three forty-eight. She had left the car at ten past eleven, and the walk in was forty minutes, and she had spent four or five of them counting stones.
The clock said twenty-three eleven.
She watched the screen. The numbers did not move. She held them for a long time, long enough for the light to fade down and the screen to dim, and in the seconds before it blacked out she saw the flowers behind the glass, twelve feet away, all of them bent in one direction, like grass under a wind that was not blowing .
The chain bit into the back of her neck.
She reached up without thinking and closed her hand around the pendant, and it was cold. Colder than it had ever been, cold the way the third stone had been warm, cold all the way through, cold enough that her fingertips went numb in the time it took her heart to beat twice.
Something moved in the gap between the second stone and the third.
Not a shape. The place where a shape would be. A subtraction, a piece of the dark that had been cut out of the dark and was now standing in it, and the flowers in the ring leaned towards it, all of them, every open head, and the pendant went from cold to nothing at all, as if the heat had been drunk out of it.
Rory's hand dropped to her side.
Ten stones. She counted them because she could not stop counting them, and it was not a decision, it was the only instrument left in her head. One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine.
Ten.
The tenth stood where she had been standing ten minutes ago, waist high, smooth on top, worn from the hands of people who had never existed.
Behind her, something inhaled.
"Malphora."
Her mouth went dry. Nobody had ever called her that. Nobody living and nobody dead, nobody in Cardiff or London or the flat above Silas' bar, nobody who had ever loved her or wanted to.
"Malphora," it said again, closer .