AI The deer fence caught my jacket on the way over and held it, the way a child holds a sleeve. I tore free, dropped onto wet grass, and landed badly on one knee with the delivery bag clutched against my chest like it contained a newborn.
Chicken chow mein. Salt and pepper squid. Two portions of egg fried rice and a single fortune cookie, which nobody ever ordered separately, but this customer had.
The ticket had printed at 11:52, twenty minutes after Yu-Fei flipped the sign to closed. No phone number. No card details. Just a scrap of thermal paper curling out of the machine with an address that wasn't an address.
*Oak stones. Richmond Park. For Isolde. Paid in full.*
And beneath it, sitting on the counter where no one had been standing, a neat stack of fifty-pound notes tied with a green ribbon.
My phone buzzed in my pocket. I thumbed it without looking.
"Tell me you turned around."
"I'm over the fence."
"Aurora." Yu-Fei only ever used my full name when she was counting something, usually money, sometimes my mistakes. "Four hundred pounds for chow mein is not a tip. It is bait. My grandmother would call it bait."
"Your grandmother isn't paying my rent."
"My grandmother would have burned the money and salted the doorway."
"Did you?"
A pause. Paper rustled on her end of the line.
"It smells of honey," she said. "Why does it smell of honey?"
The signal died before I could answer. Three bars to none, as if someone had closed a door on it.
I stood up and brushed the mud from my jeans. Richmond Park at night was not the Richmond Park of Sunday strollers and photographers crouched in the bracken waiting for stags. The city glowed behind me in a dirty orange smear, but ahead the land folded into itself, hill behind hill, all black grass and blacker trees. The sodium haze stopped at the fence line. Out here, the dark had texture. It had weight . It pressed against my eyes until I saw shapes that weren't there, fizzing grey specks, the ghost-static of a detuned telly.
I switched on the phone torch. The beam died three metres out, swallowed.
*Right. Good. Lovely.*
I walked.
The pendant started before anything else did. A small warmth at the hollow of my throat, the crimson stone waking against my skin like a coal someone had breathed on. I'd worn the thing for eight months, since it arrived in a padded envelope with no return address and no note, and in eight months I had learned one thing about it: it warmed when something was wrong. When something was *open *.
I pressed two fingers over it. The heat pulsed back, slow and patient. A heartbeat that wasn't mine.
The grass changed underfoot. Dry autumn stalks gave way to something softer, springier, and when I angled the torch downward I saw flowers. Hundreds of them. Harebells, cowslips, pale starry things I had no name for, all blooming in November as if nobody had told them the year was dying . They grew in a ring that widened as I walked, and every single head had turned in the same direction.
Towards me.
I stopped. The flowers stayed as they were, tilted , attentive, a crowd of tiny pale faces craning for a better look .
*Plants follow light *, I told myself. *You're holding a torch. Basic biology. Year Seven stuff.*
I switched the torch off.
In the dark, very softly , a sound rose around my ankles. A dry, shifting whisper , like pages turning in a library a long way off. The sound of several hundred flower heads adjusting their angle.
I switched the torch back on and did not look down again.
The stones appeared the way bad news does, all at once and already there. Great slabs of oak, not rock, grey-black with age and polished smooth as bone, standing in a loose circle at the crest of the hill. They leaned inward. Their shadows didn't match the torch beam; they stretched outward in every direction, as if lit by something at the centre that I couldn't see .
I counted them. Habit. Dad used to make me count exits in every restaurant we entered, a barrister's paranoia passed down like a family recipe.
Seven stones.
"Hello?" My voice came out too loud and too flat, the way voices do in rooms full of carpet. "Delivery for Isolde. Golden Empress."
Nothing answered. Not an owl, not a fox, not the distant rumble of a Heathrow approach. The silence was so complete I heard the faint crackle of the thermal bag's foil lining as I shifted my grip.
Then I heard my footsteps .
I wasn't walking .
Crunch. Crunch. Crunch. Somewhere behind me, on the dry grass beyond the flowers, a measured tread came up the hill at the exact pace I had climbed it. Same rhythm. Same slight hitch on the left step, where my knee still ached from the fence.
It stopped when it reached the edge of the flowers.
I didn't turn around. Every animal part of me, the part older than words, screamed at me not to turn around, and for once in my life I listened to it.
"I'll just leave it here, shall I?" I set the bag down on the flat top of the nearest stone. My hands shook. I watched them do it with a detached sort of interest, as if they belonged to someone in a film. "Paid in full. No need for a tip. Have a lovely night."
The pendant flared. Not warm now. Hot. A bright sting like a cigarette end pressed to my collarbone, and I hissed and yanked the chain away from my skin.
I looked at my phone for the time, because the brain grabs at small ordinary things when the large things stop making sense.
11:52.
The same minute the ticket printed. I watched the display. The seconds didn't move.
Then, while I watched, the numbers flickered and rolled forward in a smooth blur, 12:40, 2:15, 3:58, 5:31, faster and faster, the screen dimming and brightening, dimming and brightening, and the battery icon draining from full to red to nothing, and then back to 11:52.
The screen went black.
In the new, total dark, something beside me exhaled.
It wasn't close. That was almost worse. It came from the far side of the circle, a long slow breath let out through the nose, the way someone breathes when they've been waiting a long time and are finally, finally allowed to relax.
I groped for the torch button. Pressed it. Nothing. Pressed it again, hard enough that the case creaked. The phone lit, weak and blue, one per cent, and the beam crawled out across the clearing.
I counted the stones again.
Eight.
The eighth stood between the fourth and fifth, where there had been a gap. It was taller than the others. Thinner. Its surface had the same grey-black grain, the same bone polish, but it didn't lean inward like its neighbours. It stood straight. Upright. The way a person stands.
I moved the beam away from it. Deliberately. Casually. The way you look away from a drunk on the Night Tube so he doesn't decide you're the one he wants to talk to.
At the edge of the light, in the corner of my vision, the eighth stone turned its head.
I snapped the beam back. Stone. Just stone. Oak and shadow and nothing.
But it had moved closer. Not much. A step. The gap between it and the fourth stone had widened, and between it and me the flowers had gone flat, pressed down in a narrow track, as if something had walked across them very carefully .
"Isolde?" I hated how small the name sounded. "Look, I'm just the delivery girl. I don't want any trouble. The food's getting cold."
The breath came again. Closer. Warm, too, and sweet, carrying the thick cloying smell of honey left too long in the sun. It stirred the hair at the nape of my neck.
From behind me.
The eighth stone stood ahead of me, in front of me, I could *see * it, and the breath came from behind.
*Two of them. Or it doesn't need to be where it is.*
I did the only clever thing I could think of. I stepped backwards, out of the circle, towards the flowers and the fence and the orange glow of a city that had rules. One step. Two. The grass crunched under my heel.
And the ground under my other foot was warm.
Not sun-warm. Body-warm. The warmth of a mattress someone has just climbed out of. I looked down and saw the soil between the flowers had gone dark and wet and glossy, and it was *breathing *, rising and falling in a gentle rhythm, and beneath the skin of the earth something glowed a dull, familiar , pulsing crimson.
The same colour as the stone at my throat.
The pendant answered it. Heat to heat. Beat to beat. My heart stumbled trying to keep up.
The fortune cookie cracked.
I heard it clearly, a small brittle snap from inside the delivery bag on the stone behind me. Then the rustle of the bag opening. Then paper, unfolding.
A voice read aloud. It spoke softly , pleasantly, in the patient cadence of my mother reading me stories at bedtime in our old house in Cardiff, and it wasn't my mother's voice. It wasn't anyone's.
"Welcome home," it read. "Malphora."
I had never heard that name in my life.
My body knew it anyway. My knees went loose. The scar on my wrist, the little crescent I'd had since I was six and couldn't remember earning, split open with a sound like a sigh and began to glow.
Every stone in the circle turned to face me.
The ground beneath my feet gave way.