AI The delivery app said the customer was waiting at the park gates. The park gates said otherwise: a padlocked chain, a sign that read CLOSED AT DUSK, and nobody for half a mile in any direction. Rory balanced the thermal bag on her hip and checked the order details again.
One order of golden dumplings. Address: Richmond Park, Pen Ponds, "by the old oaks." Notes field: *she will come.* Paid in advance, with a tip that covered her rent.
*She will come.* Not *they *, not a name. She'd told herself it was a typo. She'd told herself that all the way across the river, and she was still telling herself now, standing at the gate with the bag's warmth bleeding away into the November air.
The pendant against her sternum was warm. That was the thing she hadn't told herself, because there was no sensible version of it. The Heartstone had sat cold on its silver chain for three months, a curiosity from an anonymous sender, and tonight it had started to pulse . Faint, like a second heartbeat a half-beat behind her own. It had started the moment she accepted the order.
"Nope," she said to the empty gate. "Absolutely not."
She climbed over.
The chain was easier to clear than it looked. Her trainer found the second rail, her hand found the top bar, and then she was on the far side, in the dark, and the gate's creak behind her sounded wrong, stretched, like a recording played at half speed.
Richmond Park at night was not silent. She knew that. Deer moved through it, foxes screamed in it, planes dragged their lights across the sky above it. But the path toward Pen Ponds had gone quiet in a way that pressed on her ears. No traffic hum from the A308. No distant sirens. London didn't switch off, and yet somewhere between the gate and the first bend in the path, it had.
The pendant pulsed .
*Left,* it seemed to say. *Left and down.*
"You're a rock," she muttered. "Rocks don't give directions."
Her feet took the left fork anyway. The thermal bag bumped her thigh with each step, a soft rhythmic thud that was hers, that was normal, and she clung to it. The trees thickened. Oak and beech, black against black, their branches interlacing overhead until the sky shrank to a ribbon of grey. Her phone's torch carved a cone out of the dark, and the dark closed in behind it like water.
The dumplings had gone cold. She noticed because she reached back to check the bag's seal, out of habit, and the vinyl was room temperature. She'd cleared the gate eight minutes ago. Ten, maybe. The food had been fresh out of the wok when Yu-Fei handed it over.
Her watch said 11:04. Her phone said 00:47.
"Huh."
She stopped walking. The torch beam steadied on a tangle of roots ahead, and she gave both screens a long look, because a wrong watch was a battery, and a wrong phone was a glitch, and both at once was neither.
The pendant pulsed harder.
When she looked up, the oaks had changed. Not the trees, the oaks, specifically. The path had bent toward a stand of them, ancient and vast, their trunks pale as bone in the torchlight. They stood in a rough ring, and the ground inside the ring was bright.
Wildflowers. A whole clearing of them, white and violet, nodding gently in a wind she couldn't feel. In November. In the dark.
Every rule she had, and she had a lot of them, she was a list-maker from way back, said to turn around. She turned around.
The path was gone .
Behind her stretched more clearing, more flowers, and the oaks of the ring stood at her back now as well as ahead, as if she'd walked into their centre without taking a step. She swung the torch in a slow circle. Bone-white trunks, flowers, dark beyond the flowers. Bone-white trunks, flowers, dark. The ring had her in its middle, and she had no memory of arriving there.
"Okay." She kept her voice level, because her father had taught her that a level voice keeps a level head, and because some stubborn animal part of her insisted that whatever was listening would enjoy a scream. "Okay. Think."
The air smelled of honey and rot. Not one then the other, both at once, layered, like flowers laid on something that had been dead a long while. She'd noticed it at the gate, she realised. Faint, then. A rumour of a smell. Now it was a headline.
Something moved at the edge of the torchlight.
Not an animal. Animals crossed, flickered , fled. This slid, keeping its distance exactly at the rim of the beam, a pale suggestion of height that stayed low like something that had learned that standing tall gets you seen. She whipped the torch toward it. Flowers. Only flowers, shivering in that windless air.
She turned the torch back. The shadow was behind her now, at the new edge of the beam, patient.
"Delivery for..." She read the name off the app, and her mouth went dry around it. "Delivery for Laila."
The flowers stopped nodding. All of them, at once, across the whole clearing, a held breath in a field of white and violet.
Nobody called her Laila. Nobody knew the name; it was an old thing, a childhood thing, a name from her mother's stories that she'd never written down, never spoken aloud since she was seven. The app shouldn't have it. The customer shouldn't have it.
The pendant flared. Heat bloomed against her sternum, sharp enough to make her gasp, and the gemstone's crimson glow leaked out from under her jacket collar like a wound. In its light she saw the crescent scar on her left wrist, the one from the fall she'd taken when she was nine, and it was glowing too, faintly, the old silvered skin lit from beneath.
*She will come.*
The shadow at the edge of the torch stood up.
It had been crouching all this time, she understood then, out of courtesy or out of habit, and its full height kept going past what the trees should have allowed. It didn't step forward. The clearing folded toward it instead, flowers and dark sliding past her like a train platform past a window, and then it was near, at the edge of arm's reach, and the honey-and-rot smell was thick enough to chew.
"You wore the stone to the door." The voice came from everywhere the shadow wasn't, gentle, female, amused. "Sensible girl. It saved us both so much shouting."
Rory's hand found the mace in her jacket pocket, the flat canister she'd carried every night since Evan, and her thumb settled on the trigger, and the shadow laughed, low and delighted, a sound like ivy growing over a window.
"Oh, bring it. Bring all of it. The little fire in the can, the clever legs, the lists you make when you're frightened." It leaned closer. Where a face should be there was the suggestion of one, drawn in absence. "But first, Laila. Before you decide what you are in this story."
The pendant burned white-hot. The oaks groaned, all twelve of them, roots shifting somewhere beneath the flowers like a sleeper rolling over.
"Tell me what you did with the man who sent it."