AI The wall along Sawyer's Hill was lower than Rory remembered, or she was more desperate than she'd been in daylight. She swung her leg over the cold brick, dropped into wet grass, and crouched there a moment with her heart going too fast, waiting for a torch beam or a shout from the gatehouse.
Nothing. Richmond Park after closing was a different country. The city had been switched off behind her. No traffic hum, no sirens, only the enormous dark of open ground and the smell of bracken rotting down into the soil.
She pulled her jacket tighter and started walking.
The pendant sat against her sternum under three layers of clothing, and she could feel it. That was the problem. That was why she was here at half eleven on a Tuesday instead of asleep in the flat above Silas' bar with the jukebox thumping up through the floorboards. For three nights the Heartstone had been warm. Not a warmth you could argue away as body heat, but a steady, deliberate pulse , like a second pulse , like something small breathing in its sleep. Tonight, halfway through a delivery run for the Golden Empress with a bag of Yu-Fei's char siu bao cooling on the back of the bike, it had flared so hot she'd nearly dropped the bag in the road.
Warm meant close. Close meant a door. She didn't know what else to do with that except go to the one place she knew where doors were supposed to be.
The deer should have been out. She'd seen them on night walks before, the herds folded down in the grass like grey stones, heads lifting to watch her pass. Tonight the grass was empty in every direction. She told herself they'd moved to the Isabella Plantation, that deer went wherever deer went. She kept walking.
It took her twenty minutes to find the oaks. They always seemed to shift a little, never quite where her memory placed them, and when they finally rose out of the dark she felt the familiar lurch in her stomach , the sense of a step missing on a staircase. The standing stones weren't stone at all but old oak, silver-grey and furrowed , taller than a man, set in a ring so exact no one could have planted it by accident. Between them, the clearing glowed faintly with flowers.
She stopped at the boundary.
In daylight the Grove was absurdly lovely. Foxgloves, cornflowers, poppies, meadowsweet, all blooming together in defiance of the season. Isolde had once laughed at her for asking how. *Time is a suggestion here, little mortal. The flowers simply decline to take it.*
The flowers were still blooming . That wasn't what stopped her.
Every one of them was closed.
Not wilted. Closed, the way daisies closed at dusk, each bloom drawn tight into itself like a fist. Hundreds of them. Thousands. The whole clearing clenched shut, and when the breeze moved through it the stems didn't sway. They held perfectly still while the grass around the oaks bent and hissed.
"Isolde?" Her voice came out smaller than she wanted. She cleared her throat. "Isolde. It's Rory ."
Nothing answered. She hadn't really expected anything to. The fae came when they chose.
She stepped between the two nearest oaks.
The air changed at once. It always did, a pressure behind the ears, the sense of passing through the skin of a soap bubble. But tonight it was thicker, and warmer, and the smell of the park vanished entirely. Here the air smelled of cut stems. Of sap. And under the sap, faint, something like a struck match .
The Heartstone throbbed against her chest, once, hard enough that she put her hand over it.
She walked toward the centre of the clearing, careful where she stepped, and that was when she heard the birds.
A blackbird, first, somewhere in the oaks. The full, liquid dawn song, bright and busy and entirely wrong at midnight. Then a robin joined it. Then a wren, that ridiculous loud trill. Within seconds the clearing was ringing with a dawn chorus, dozens of birds singing their hearts out in the pitch dark, and Rory stood with her boots sunk in closed flowers and turned slowly in a circle and could not see a single one.
She looked up. The branches of the oaks were bare black lines against a sky with no moon. No shapes moved in them.
The singing stopped.
All at once, mid-phrase, like a needle lifted off a record.
In the silence she could hear her own breath. She could hear the blood in her ears. She made herself count, the way she'd learned to in the long months with Evan when the only thing she could control was the inside of her own head. *One. Two. Three.* Cool. Logical. Something was playing with her, and things that played with you wanted a reaction.
She took out her phone. The screen lit her hand blue-white. 23:52. One bar of signal, flickering. She watched it and the minutes didn't move, and after a while she realised the seconds weren't moving either. The little colon between hours and minutes, which should have been blinking, simply sat there.
She put the phone away.
When she looked up there was something standing beside the far oak.
Or there wasn't. Her eyes went straight to it and there was only the tree, grey and furrowed and ordinary. But she had seen, in the corner of her vision as she lifted her head, a second shape close against the trunk. Narrower. Paler. The height of a person.
"Hello?" she said.
The flowers at her feet rustled.
She looked down. They were still closed. They were still perfectly still. But the rustling went on, a dry, papery whisper moving outward from her boots in a slow ring, as if something small were walking through the stems all around her, circling.
Rory didn't move. She kept her eyes on the far oak and let the sound go around her once, twice, and on the third time it stopped directly behind her.
She didn't turn around.
She wanted to more than she had ever wanted anything. Every nerve in her back was lit up, the skin between her shoulder blades crawling as if a breath were resting on it. But some old instinct older than law school and London and Cardiff told her with total certainty that if she turned, whatever was there would be very glad she had.
She began, instead, to count the oaks.
She'd done it before, on a bored afternoon while Isolde spoke to the wildflowers in a language that made her teeth ache. Nine. Nine oaks in the ring. She'd remarked on it and Isolde had smiled the way she smiled when a human had noticed something they weren't meant to.
Rory counted them now, turning only her eyes. One, two, three by the path she'd come in. Four and five on the eastern side. Six. Seven. Eight, the far oak, the one with the shape she hadn't seen.
Nine.
Ten.
She counted again. Her lips moved. Ten.
The tenth stood between the fourth and the fifth, where there had always been a gap wide enough to walk through. It was the same silver-grey as the others. The same deep furrows. But it was thinner, and it stood not quite straight, and when she let her eyes rest on it she had the impression, which she could never afterwards explain, that it was leaning forward very slightly . Toward her. The way a person leans in to hear better.
The Heartstone was burning now. Not warm. Burning, a coin left on a radiator, and she could feel the heat of it spreading through her collarbones and up the side of her throat, and in the dark she could see the faint crimson glow of it leaking through the weave of her jumper.
The tenth oak was closer.
She hadn't seen it move. She would have sworn on anything she hadn't looked away. But the gap it had filled was open again, between four and five, and the thin grey shape stood a little inside the ring now, among the flowers, and the flowers nearest to it had begun, one by one, to open.
They opened toward her.
Behind her, very close to her left ear, something breathed out. It smelled of struck matches.
Rory ran.
She didn't decide to. Her body simply went, straight ahead, toward the path, through the gap between oak two and oak three, boots tearing through the stems. She felt the soap-bubble pressure of the boundary and then she was through it and the cold air of the real park hit her face like water and the grass was bending in the wind and somewhere far off a car horn sounded on the Upper Richmond Road, the sweetest noise she had ever heard.
She didn't stop until she reached the wall. She put her back against the brick and slid down it, gasping, and pulled the pendant out of her collar with shaking fingers.
It was cool. Entirely cool. The faint inner glow had dimmed to almost nothing.
She took out her phone. 23:53.
One minute. She had been in there one minute.
Rory sat with her knees pulled up and the crescent-shaped scar on her wrist pressed against her mouth, an old habit from childhood, and made herself breathe until her heart slowed.
Only much later, back in the flat, lying awake while the jukebox downstairs played something slow, did she let herself remember the last thing . The thing she had heard in the moment before she ran, whispered warm against her ear in a voice that was almost kind.
Not *Rory *. Not *Aurora *.
A name she had never heard before in her life.
And how, when it was spoken , the Heartstone had pulsed once against her chest, like something answering.