AI The gate on Sawyer's Hill had been locked since dusk, but the fence beside it sagged where someone had leaned on it for years, and Rory went over it with her delivery bag still slung across her back out of habit. She'd left the bike chained outside the Roehampton gate. It felt wrong to bring it any further, as if it belonged to a part of her life that shouldn't come with her.
The pendant had started warming around half ten, somewhere between a flat in Putney and a lamb-and-black-bean order that had gone cold because she'd stopped at a red light and pressed her palm flat against her sternum, feeling the Heartstone throb through her jumper like a second pulse . Faint, then not faint. It had never done that more than a few seconds at a time. Tonight it hadn't stopped.
So here she was. Richmond Park at midnight, November, her breath smoking in front of her and the grass silvered with early frost.
She knew the way. She'd walked it twice in daylight, and both times she'd come out of the trees to find the sun in the wrong place in the sky. She checked her phone now. 00:14. One bar of signal. Battery at sixty-one percent. She made herself remember the numbers.
The deer were out. She could hear them before she saw them, the heavy, careless shuffle of big bodies through bracken, and then the shapes resolved : a loose herd of does on the slope to her left, heads down, grazing. One raised its head as she passed. Then another. Then all of them, together, the way a crowd turns at a noise.
They weren't looking at her. They were looking past her, toward the trees she was walking into.
Rory kept walking.
The ground dipped, and the path, such as it was, threaded between hawthorns into older wood. The city's glow faded behind her, that dull orange smear London puts on every night, and the dark closed in blue-black and complete. She didn't turn on her torch. The first time she'd come here, the woman in the grove had told her lights were rude. Rory had thought she was joking .
She smelled the flowers before she reached the stones. It hit her like walking into a warm kitchen, honeysuckle and meadowsweet and something green and crushed, absurd in the frost. Then the trees thinned and the first of the standing stones rose out of the dark. They weren't stone at all. They were oak, ancient oak, trunks worn smooth and grey as bone, each one taller than a man and leaning slightly inward like people bending over a cot.
She passed between two of them, and the cold went away.
Not gradually. It simply stopped, the way sound stops when you step into a car and shut the door. The air in the clearing was mild and still. Wildflowers came up to her shins, pale in the starlight: foxglove, campion, oxeye daisies that should have died back in September. Somewhere at the centre of the grove, water was moving, though she had never found a stream.
"Hello?" she said, and hated how small it came out.
Nothing answered. The water kept moving.
Rory stood still and let her eyes adjust. The Heartstone was properly hot now, not burning, but insistent , and she closed her left hand around it through the fabric. The small crescent scar on her wrist pulled tight when she made a fist. She'd always been able to feel that scar in the cold. She could feel it now, and it wasn't cold.
She counted the oaks, because counting was something to do. Eleven. She'd counted eleven last time, too. She remembered, because she'd wondered why not twelve, why not a proper number.
A bicycle bell rang behind her.
Two quick trills. Bright, tinny, unmistakable. The exact sound of the bell on her own bike, the one with the dent in the dome where she'd dropped it outside the Golden Empress her first week.
She turned. Nothing but the gap between the oaks and the black wood beyond. Her bike was a mile away, chained to a railing. She knew that. She'd checked the lock twice.
She did not call out again.
She made herself walk the edge of the clearing, keeping the oaks on her right, because standing still felt like being looked at . The flowers brushed her jeans. Each step released another breath of scent, thick, almost cloying, like a bouquet left too long in its water. Her footsteps made soft sounds in the growth.
After a dozen paces she realised there were more footsteps than there should have been.
Not many more. Not loud. Just a softness following her own, a half-beat late, like an echo in a room with no walls to make one. When she walked, it walked. When she stopped, it took one more step, and then it stopped too.
Rory's heart was going hard enough that she could feel it in her teeth. She kept her face forward. Something her father used to say from the courtroom came to her unbidden: *never show a witness you've been surprised .* She breathed through her nose. She took out her phone, as if to check the time, and angled the dark screen so she could see behind her in the reflection.
Flowers. Oaks. The glassy dark of the gap.
The screen woke under her thumb. 00:14.
She stared at it. She'd been walking for ten minutes at least. More. She watched the numbers, and they didn't change, and they didn't change, and then they read 03:52 and her battery read nineteen percent, and the one bar of signal was gone .
She put the phone away very carefully , the way you'd set down something that might go off.
Somewhere to her left, at the very corner of her eye, one of the oaks moved.
Not swayed. There was no wind. It *shifted *, the way a person shifts their weight when they've been standing too long. When she turned her head it was still, grey, bone-smooth, leaning in with the others. She counted again, lips moving silently.
Twelve.
She counted a third time, slower, touching each with her eyes. Twelve. The new one stood between the fourth and fifth, where there had been a gap wide enough to walk through. It was the same height as the others. The same pale, worn grey. It leaned inward exactly as they did.
Only its lean was toward her.
The water sound had stopped. She didn't know when. The grove was so quiet now she could hear the faint tick of the pendant's chain against her collarbone as her chest rose and fell. And under that, something else, so low she thought at first it was her own blood in her ears.
Breathing.
Slow. Deep. Patient. In, and a long pause, and out.
Rory held her own breath to be sure.
It went on without her.
She was aware, in the cool, precise part of her mind that had always gotten her through the worst of things, the part that had packed a bag while Evan slept and walked to Cardiff Central without looking back, that she had options. The gap she'd come in through was behind her and to the right. Twenty paces. Maybe twenty-five. She knew it was there because she knew it was there, and she would not look at it, because she had a sudden and total certainty that if she looked she would find it closed.
The Heartstone throbbed against her palm, hot, hot, like something alive trying to get out of her fist.
"Aurora."
The voice came from the far side of the clearing, from somewhere low among the foxgloves. It was her mother's voice. Not a close copy. *Her mother's voice *, the soft Valleys lilt on the second syllable, the exact tired warmth of Jennifer Carter calling her in from the garden when the streetlights came on. Nobody in London called her Aurora like that. Nobody in London knew how.
"Aurora, love. Come here and let me see you."
Rory's eyes stung. She didn't move.
Something in the flowers moved instead. She couldn't see it, only the flowers themselves bending, a slow furrow parting the pale heads of the daisies, coming toward her across the grove at a walking pace. No shape. No sound but the whisper of stems and that long, patient breathing, getting closer.
She took a step back. The furrow didn't hurry. It didn't need to.
Then she saw the flowers.
All of them. Every foxglove bell, every campion, every white-rayed daisy in the grove. She'd walked past them facing the sky, the way flowers face the sun even at night. They weren't facing the sky anymore.
They had turned, silently, every one, and they were facing her.
The breathing stopped just in front of her, close enough that the daisies at her feet trembled .
And the bicycle bell rang again, twice, bright and cheerful, from somewhere right behind her ear.