AI The wall along Sawyers Hill was lower than it looked from the road, which was the first thing that went right all night and, Rory would think later, probably the last.
She dropped onto the grass on the far side and crouched there with her palms flat against the cold, listening. Richmond Park after dark was not silent. It was simply emptied of people, which left room for everything else: the dry rattle of bracken, an owl working through its two notes somewhere east, the far-off sigh of the A3 like surf against a shore she couldn't see. The gates had closed at dusk. The deer owned the place now, and they didn't care for visitors.
Isolde had said midnight. *Come alone, come on foot, and don't bring anything iron.* Rory had left her bike chained outside the Golden Empress and her keys in the flat above Silas' bar, and she felt the lack of them the way you feel a missing tooth, a small hollow her attention kept returning to.
She walked. The moon was a thin, reluctant thing behind cloud, and she didn't use her phone torch because Isolde had told her not to, and because some small, animal part of her didn't want to be the only lit thing for a mile in any direction.
It took twenty minutes to find the first stone.
It wasn't really a stone. That had confused her the first time, back in the summer, when Isolde led her here by the hand and laughed at her face. Ancient oak, grey and fissured, worn so smooth and so old that it had forgotten being a tree. Nine of them stood in a loose ring among the bracken, each one about the height of a man, and between them the air had a texture, a faint resistance, like walking through the surface of warm water.
Rory put her hand on the first stone and stepped through.
The cold went away. That was expected. So was the smell, green and honeyed and absurd for November, and the wildflowers, which crowded the clearing knee-deep in the dark: foxgloves and campion and something pale she'd never learned the name of, all of them open as if it were noon in June. The grove never slept. Isolde said it didn't know how.
What she hadn't expected was the quiet.
Outside the stones there had been the owl, the bracken, the road. In here there was nothing. Not the gentle nothing of a still night, but a stopped, held nothing, as though the clearing had drawn in a breath when she entered and hadn't let it out.
"Isolde?"
Her voice didn't carry. It fell from her mouth and landed in the flowers a few feet away, and the grove absorbed it without comment.
Rory checked her phone out of habit, cupping the screen against her coat. 23:58. No signal, which she'd known there wouldn't be. She was early. Fine. She'd wait.
She found the flat-topped stump near the centre where Isolde usually sat, and she didn't sit on it. She couldn't have said why. She stood beside it instead, hands in her pockets, and let her eyes adjust.
It was then that she noticed the warmth against her breastbone.
She drew the Heartstone out on its silver chain and looked at it. The pendant lay in her palm no bigger than her thumbnail, deep crimson, and the faint inner glow she'd grown used to seeing had thickened into something that almost looked like a pulse . Warm. Warmer than her skin. Beating slowly , steadily, like a thing with its own small heart.
She knew what that meant. She'd felt it twice before, and both times she'd been standing within sight of a Hel portal.
Rory turned in a slow circle.
Nine stones. Flowers. The dark edge of the clearing where the pocket-world thinned back into the park. Nothing that looked like a tear in the air, nothing that smelled of sulphur or rot. The grove was Fae ground. It belonged to Isolde's people, and they guarded it jealously. Hel had no business here.
*Then why is it warm, Carter ?*
She tucked the pendant back inside her collar and felt it settle against her skin, throbbing gently , and she wished she hadn't looked at it at all.
23:58.
She frowned at the phone. She'd been standing here at least three minutes. Longer. The number sat unmoving on the screen, and she watched it for a full slow count of sixty, and it stayed 23:58.
Time moves differently inside, Isolde had told her. *An hour for us might be a minute for you, or a week. Don't think about it too hard.*
Rory put the phone away and tried not to think about it too hard.
Something rustled on her left.
She turned her head without moving the rest of her body. The flowers there stood motionless. Tall foxgloves, their spotted bells hanging open. Nothing beneath them. No deer, no fox. The sound had been soft and deliberate, a single step through foliage, and then it had stopped.
"Isolde, if this is a joke—"
It hadn't been Isolde. Isolde didn't make noise when she walked. None of them did.
Rory breathed in through her nose and out through her mouth, the way she'd taught herself to do in the flat she'd shared with Evan, back when the quiet in the next room could mean anything. Cool head. Think. The clearing was maybe forty feet across. She could see all of it, more or less. If something were standing among those flowers she'd see it.
She looked across the grove, to the stones on the far side, and in the corner of her eye the foxgloves on her left leaned toward her.
She snapped her head round. They were upright. Of course they were. Plants didn't lean.
She counted the stones instead, because counting was a thing her mind could hold. One, by the gap where she'd come in. Two. Three, split down its length by some old lightning strike. Four, five, six. Seven, with the knot like a closed eye. Eight.
Nine.
Ten.
She stopped.
She counted again, slowly , pointing with her finger now like a child, hating how the finger trembled . One through nine. And the tenth, standing a little apart between the eighth and the ninth, where she was almost sure there had been a gap. Grey. Man-height. Smooth.
Nine, Isolde had said. The ring had always been nine.
Rory did not take her eyes off the tenth stone. It didn't move. It was very good at not moving. And the longer she looked at it, the more she thought its surface was a slightly different grey from the others, a slightly softer grey, the colour of old skin, of something that had been standing in the dark for a very long time learning how to look like wood.
The pendant beat against her chest. Faster now.
"Rory."
The voice came from behind her. Warm, amused, pitched low. Isolde's voice, unmistakably, down to the lilt she put on the *r *.
Rory didn't turn around.
She wanted to. Every muscle in her neck wanted to. But Isolde never called her Rory. Isolde called her *little mortal * or *Carter * or, when she was being unkind, *Malphora *, and she had never once, in all the months they'd known each other, used the name Rory's friends used.
"Rory," the voice said again, closer . "You came."
Footsteps in the flowers. Unhurried. Each one placed with care, as if whatever was making them was still practising .
Rory kept her eyes on the tenth stone, because it was the only thing in the clearing she was sure of, and as she watched, the tenth stone was no longer there. The gap between the eighth and the ninth stood empty and dark, the flowers in it gently swaying, as though something tall had only just walked through them.
The footsteps behind her stopped.
She could feel it now. Not breath, nothing so honest as breath. Just a presence, the way you can feel someone standing over your bed with your eyes closed. Close enough to touch the back of her neck. Patient. Waiting for her to turn.
The crescent scar on her left wrist began, very faintly, to itch.
Rory looked down at her phone, still clutched in her pocket, and brought it out slowly , and tilted the screen so that its black edge caught, like a mirror, a sliver of what stood at her shoulder.
23:58, said the screen.
She did not look at the reflection. She put the phone face down against her thigh, and closed her eyes, and in the dark behind her lids she began, very quietly, to walk backward toward the gap she'd come in by, counting her steps, while the voice that wasn't Isolde's said her name, and said it, and said it, in no hurry at all.