AI The pendant burned against Rory's sternum before she even reached the stones.
She'd felt it at sundown, a warm pulse like a second heartbeat under her shirt, and it had dragged her across half of London to Richmond Park with nothing but a torch, her bike, and a stubbornness her mother called the Carter curse. Now the standing oaks rose out of the dark ahead of her, ancient and pale, arranged in a ring like the teeth of something that had died with its mouth open.
The pulse quickened . Thud. Thud. Thud.
"Fine. I'm coming."
Her voice came out smaller than she intended. The park behind her had gone quiet a mile back, the distant hiss of the A3 fading as if someone had turned a dial, and no gate had marked where the noise ended. She'd simply walked through it, like a curtain.
The Heartstone flared as she stepped between two of the oak stones. Warmth flooded her chest, then vanished. Cold took its place, the wet, green cold of a cellar, and the clearing opened up around her.
Wildflowers carpeted the ground, a full bloom in the dead of winter. White campion, violets, foxgloves. Her torch beam swept across them and they shivered, all together, in the same direction, though no wind touched her face. Rory stood still and counted. One, two, three. The shiver came again. Same direction. Toward her.
She lowered the beam. *Trick of the light. Roots shifting. Something under the soil.*
She took out her phone. 11:42 pm, three bars of signal, and a text to Eva already typed and unsent: *At the grove. You were right about the stones.* Eva had asked her to come here two weeks ago, before Eva stopped answering her phone. Before the pendant arrived in a padded envelope with no return address, deep crimson stone on a silver chain, and a note in handwriting Rory almost recognised: *Wear it. Go where it pulls you. Don't go alone.*
She'd gone alone anyway. Eva's note had also said *don't trust the quiet *, and Rory had laughed at that, alone in her flat above Silas' bar. Nobody was laughing now.
The clearing was perhaps forty feet across, ringed by the stones, and the sky above it held more stars than London had any right to see. That was the first wrong thing, she realised. Not the flowers. The sky. It was too clear, too deep, and the moon sat fat and orange over the treeline like a held breath. The second wrong thing was the birdsong. Full, bright, springtime birdsong, robins and blackbirds and something that sounded like a nightingale, coming from trees that stood bare and black and empty. She swept the torch across every branch. Nothing. The song continued, sweet and layered and coming from nowhere, and beneath it, faint as a pulse under skin, something answered.
A tapping. Wood on wood. Steady. Patient.
Tap. Tap. Tap.
The pendant went cold against her chest.
Rory turned a slow circle, torch up. The tapping kept its rhythm regardless of where she pointed the beam, which meant she couldn't find its source, which meant it was moving, or she was. Her boots had stopped crunching on frost at some point. She looked down. The ground beneath the flowers was dark and soft and gave slightly under her weight , the way a mattress gives, the way flesh gives.
She stepped back onto it anyway. There was nowhere else to step.
"Eva?" Her voice bent the birdsong aside. For a full breath, everything held. Then the birds answered her.
"Rory."
Not Eva's voice. Not quite. It had Eva's cadence, the lilt of it, the way she swallowed the second syllable, but the pitch sat half a tone low, like a recording played a fraction too slow. It came from the trees on her left.
"I know that trick." Her hands shook anyway . "You did the same thing through the letterbox in Cardiff. October. You made me jump so hard I dropped my tea."
"Rory." Closer now. From the trees on her right, the opposite side, though nothing had crossed the clearing between the two points. This time the voice had found the right pitch, and it hadn't found Eva. It had found Evan. Her Evan. The soft, patient tone he used when he was explaining , for the third time, why the bruise was her fault.
"You're not him either."
"Come and see."
Tap. Tap. Tap.
The moon had moved. Rory noticed it the way you notice a picture frame hanging crooked, a small domestic wrongness that took a moment to become enormous. She'd been in the clearing for minutes. Five, ten at most. The moon had cleared the treeline and now stood high and white and small, hours of sky away from where it had been. Her phone screen agreed: 3:07 am. The battery icon sat in the red. She'd charged it at half nine.
"Okay." She kept her voice level, the way she kept it with difficult clients at the restaurant, with Evan, with anyone who might bite. "Time moves wrong here. Noted. Eva warned me. So we're going to be very calm about this."
The birdsong stopped. All of it, at once, like a plug pulled.
In the silence , the flowers turned. She caught it at the edge of the torch beam, a soft collective shift across the clearing, every white face of every campion swivelling on its stem. Not toward the trees. Not toward the sky.
Toward the centre of the grove, where nothing stood.
Yet.
The tapping became a knocking. Wood on wood, or something harder, and it came from the empty air at the clearing's centre now, from a patch of darkness the torch refused to light. Rory's beam passed across it and slid off, the way light slides off deep water, and inside that darkness, a seam opened. Vertical. Thin as a coin slot. Orange light bled from it, the colour of the moon's held breath, and the seam widened by inches, and the knocking became frantic, both fists now, a sound she'd heard a thousand times through a hundred doors.
Someone wanted out.
The pendant flared so hot she gasped and clutched her chest through her shirt. The crimson stone pulsed in time with the seam's widening, quick and quicker, a heart racing , and the wildflowers at the darkness's edge began to die. She watched them brown and curl in a spreading ring, frost racing up their stems, and the seam yawned wider still, tall enough now for shoulders, and from inside it came a smell she knew. Copper and earth and Eva's shampoo.
The knocking stopped.
"Rory," said the darkness, in Eva's voice, in Evan's voice, in her mother's voice, all at once. "You came alone."
A hand pressed against the inside of the seam. Pale, familiar, five-fingered, with a small crescent-shaped scar on the left wrist.
Her scar. On a hand that was not hers, because her hands were here, shaking, one holding a torch and one holding a phone that read 3:07 and was now ringing, the screen flashing EVA across the dark, and the hand in the seam curled its fingers, and the seam began to open like a mouth.