AI The Heartstone pulled at her collarbone like a small, warm hand, and Rory stopped walking.
She'd followed it through three gates and two shortcuts that didn't exist on any map, her trainers crunching over gravel paths that seemed to rearrange themselves behind her . Now the pendant pulsed again, a gentle thrum against her sternum, and she stood at the edge of a clearing she'd never seen before, despite living three streets from Richmond Park for over a year.
The standing stones were taller than she'd expected. Ancient oaks, their bark split and silvered with age, rose at irregular intervals around the clearing's perimeter like knuckles on a buried fist. Between them, wildflowers carpeted the ground in impossible colour, whites and deep purples and crimson reds that gleamed without a moon to catch them.
She checked her phone. 11:47 PM. The signal had died somewhere past the boot gate, a single bar flickering once before surrendering to a crossed-out circle.
Something had led her here. Not the pendant exactly, though it had certainly done its part. More like a thread, thin and barely there, tugging at the base of her skull. She'd felt it since leaving Silas' bar, threading through her headaches for the past three days, waking her at 3 AM with a certainty she couldn't name.
Rory stepped between the first two stones.
The air changed. Not temperature, though the warmth of London's late summer dropped away entirely, replaced by a coolness that settled into her bones like water filling a glass. The sound changed too. Traffic from the Park Lane roundabout, a sound she'd heard every night from her flat, simply stopped. In its place: silence so complete it pressed against her eardrums.
The wildflowers swayed. There was no breeze.
She counted seven steps into the clearing before her phone screen went black. Not died, went black. The battery indicator had shown forty percent a moment ago. She pressed the power button. Nothing. She pressed it again, harder, and felt the plastic housing creak under her thumb.
The pendant pulsed warmer against her skin.
"Don't do this," she whispered to herself, because she'd spent enough time in courtrooms to know that talking through a problem kept the logic centres firing. "You're standing in a field. It's a field."
The oak standing stones did not respond.
She looked at them anyway, one by one, starting with the nearest. Lichen mapped the bark in fractal patterns, pale green and sickly white. Carved into the wood at roughly eye level, she found markings. Not recent. The edges had softened to almost nothing, worn smooth by centuries of rain and hands that might have been hands.
A spiral. A spiral with something inside it. She leaned closer, her breath fogging slightly despite the still air, and traced the inner shape with her fingertip.
It was a hand. Reaching out.
She pulled her finger back and rubbed it against her jeans. The skin tingled, a pins-and-needles sensation that crept up to her wrist and settled there, just above the crescent scar from when she'd been ten and tried to ride her brother's bike down the hill at Pontcanna.
A sound behind her.
Not loud. Not dramatic. The soft, deliberate placement of a foot on grass, the kind of sound a person makes when they're trying not to be heard and getting close.
Rory turned.
The clearing stretched behind her, unchanged. Flowers, stones, darkness pressing at the perimeter where the oak trunks gave way to deeper parkland. Nothing moved. Nothing breathed.
She counted to five in Welsh, a habit from her mother's kitchen, and listened.
At four, she heard it again. Further left this time. The whisper of fabric against bark.
"Silas?" she called, because Silas kept odd hours and drank worse, and if anyone in her life would be lurking in Richmond Park at midnight it would be him. "If that's you, I swear I'll—"
Silence swallowed the rest.
She pressed her hand over the pendant. It burned now, not painfully, but with the steady insistence of a cup of tea held too close . The faint glow beneath her fingers had shifted from crimson to something darker, a purple-black that seemed to drink what little light the clearing offered.
Rory walked deeper.
She didn't decide to walk deeper. Her feet simply carried her, one after the other, across the wildflower carpet toward the far side of the clearing where a cluster of stones formed an archway she hadn't noticed before. The thread at the base of her skull pulled harder, and she followed it because standing still in a place where footsteps arrived without owners struck her as worse.
The archway was narrow. Enough room for one person, shoulders brushing both sides. The stones on either side were covered in the same carved spirals, hundreds of them, layering over each other like the scribbles of a patient confined to a cell.
Through the arch, the clearing continued, but different. The flowers here grew taller, waist-high, their petals opening wide despite the darkness, each one turned slightly to face the same direction. Toward her.
A breeze finally arrived, carrying a scent she couldn't place. Not flowers. Not earth. Something older, the smell of a room sealed for decades, of dust and damp stone and something faintly sweet underneath, like fruit left too long.
The pendant jerked against her chest, a sharp pulse , and Rory's hand flew to it.
"Hel," she said, the word tasting foreign in her mouth. The pendant had led her to a portal before, or near enough, and Yu-Fei had explained what Hel was in the only way Yu-Fei ever explained anything: in riddles, with tea, while watching Rory's face for the moment understanding dawned.
Now the pendant pulsed again, and again, rhythm changing, faster, and the glow had shifted to deep green, the colour of canal water in August.
Behind her, something moved between the oak stones.
This time she saw it. A shape, tall and thin, sliding from one trunk to the next with a fluidity that no human body could replicate. It didn't run. It glided, as though the air had thickness it could push through. Between the stones, in the gaps between trunks, it moved in perfect silence , and she tracked it because looking away felt like feeding it .
It stopped behind the third stone. Waited.
Rory's pulse hammered in her throat. She measured the distance to the archway. Ten metres, maybe twelve. The shape behind the stone didn't follow. It waited, and its patience felt worse than pursuit.
"Show yourself," she said, and her voice came out even, level, the courtroom voice she deployed when facts had gone sideways and the only weapon left was composure.
The shape stepped out from behind the stone.
It had no face. Not hidden, not shadowed. The space where features should have been was smooth and pale as river stone, catching light that had no source. It stood as tall as the oaks, maybe taller, and its limbs bent in places that made Rory's stomach lurch , elbows folding outward before bending inward, fingers too long, reaching.
The pendant shrieked against her collarbone, a heat so sudden she gasped, and the glow turned white, blinding, throwing her own shadow behind her in four directions at once.
The shape recoiled. Its featureless head tilted, and though it had no eyes, Rory felt the weight of attention, heavy and cold, pressing into her skull like fingers pushing into clay.
Then it smiled.
Not with a mouth. The smooth surface simply curved, a crack splitting the stone-pale skin from ear to ear where ears would have been, and inside was darkness with teeth, hundreds of them, small and white and filed to points.
The wildflowers around Rory's feet began to wilt. One by one, petals curling inward, stems bowing, colour draining to grey and then to nothing, leaving behind stems as thin and sharp as needles.
The shape took a step toward her.
The pendant burned so hot it branded her skin, and Rory ran.