AI The deer were the first wrong thing, though Rory didn't know it yet.
She passed them at the top of the rise, a loose herd of maybe twenty, pale shapes in the dark bracken with their heads lifted. Richmond Park was full of deer. She'd seen them a dozen times on the way to the Grove, and they always did the same thing: froze, stared, then broke and ran in a clatter of hooves. Tonight they froze and stared, and that was all. She kept walking. Their heads turned to follow her, slow and in unison, like sunflowers tracking a lamp.
She told herself it was the cold. It was the sort of November night that got into the joints, the air damp and heavy and smelling of wet leaves and, faintly, the chip-fat she hadn't managed to wash out of her jacket after her last Golden Empress run. Her phone said 11:52. She'd climbed the fence by Robin Hood Gate at half eleven and had been walking since, torch off, following the path by memory and starlight because the torch felt like shouting .
The pendant had started it. She'd been carrying a bag of Singapore noodles up three flights in Hammersmith when the Heartstone, tucked under her shirt, had gone warm against her sternum. Not the faint living warmth it always had, the little glow she'd grown used to, but *hot*, a coal-heat that had made her stop on the landing with one hand pressed flat to her chest. It had lasted maybe five seconds. Then it had faded, and she'd delivered the noodles, and ridden back to the restaurant, and ignored three texts from Eva, and lain awake in the flat above Silas' bar listening to the last drinkers argue on the pavement, and at eleven o'clock she had given up pretending and got dressed.
The pendant only did that near a Hel portal. And there was only one place in London she could think of that sat close enough to the seams of things to be worth checking.
Isolde would know. Isolde always knew. That was the reasoning, anyway, and it had sounded better in her bedroom than it did out here.
The oak stones rose out of the dark ahead of her, and Rory slowed.
She'd always thought of them as stones even though they were wood: great grey trunks of ancient oak, dead so long they'd gone hard and silvered, standing in a ring at the edge of the clearing like the teeth of something buried. She'd walked between them maybe fifteen times now. Every time there had been a little lurch , a sense of stepping off a kerb she hadn't seen, and then the air would change, go soft and warm and full of the smell of flowers, and the Grove would open around her in the middle of winter like a held breath let out.
She stepped between the stones.
Nothing lurched .
The air didn't change. It stayed cold and wet and ordinary, and for a moment she thought she'd come the wrong way. Then her eyes adjusted and she saw the wildflowers, the ones that bloomed year-round, the foxgloves and campion and the little white stars whose name she'd never learned, and every one of them was closed. Folded up tight on their stalks. Heads bowed.
"Isolde?"
Her voice came out smaller than she meant it to. The clearing swallowed it without an echo .
No answer. No wind, either, she realised. The bare trees beyond the stones should have been creaking, the bracken hissing. Instead there was a silence so complete she could hear the blood moving in her ears. She could hear, faintly, the rustle of her own jacket as she breathed.
She took the pendant out from under her collar. The crimson stone sat in her palm, no bigger than her thumbnail, its inner glow a dull ember in the dark. It was warm. Not hot, not like on the landing, but warmer than her skin, warmer than it had any right to be on a night like this. She turned slowly in a circle, holding it out like a dowsing rod, feeling like an idiot. The warmth didn't change. It wasn't coming from any one direction. It was just there, steady, the way a room is warm.
Rory checked her phone again. 11:52.
She stared at it. She'd climbed the fence at half eleven. She'd walked twenty minutes at least. She'd been standing in the clearing for — what, two minutes? Three? She watched the screen until it dimmed, and the numbers didn't move.
*Time moves differently here *, Isolde had told her once, laughing, when Rory came out after what had felt like an afternoon and found three days of missed calls. *Sometimes faster. Sometimes slower. It depends what the Grove wants.*
It had never stopped before.
She put the phone away. Her hands, she noticed, were steady, and she was distantly proud of that. Cool-headed Rory. Think it through. The pendant was warm, which meant something from Hel was near, or had been near. The Grove was wrong, which meant something had happened to it. Isolde wasn't answering , which meant she was elsewhere, or — no. Elsewhere. The sensible thing, the obviously sensible thing, was to leave, go home, and come back in daylight with Silas or Eva or anyone at all.
She turned to go, and counted the stones without meaning to.
It was an old habit, one she'd picked up the first time she came here, the way you count stairs in a new building. Thirteen. There had always been thirteen oak stones, and she always touched the seventh one, the one with the split down its middle, on her way out, for luck.
She counted fourteen.
She counted again, slowly , her lips moving. Fourteen. The split stone was where it should be. The gap she'd come through was where it should be. And to the left of the gap, at the very edge of her vision, where she was fairly sure there had been open ground, there was another tall grey shape.
She didn't look straight at it. She couldn't have said why. It was just a feeling, bone-deep and animal, that looking at it straight would be a kind of permission.
Behind her, in the middle of the clearing, something shifted its weight .
It was a small sound. The soft compression of grass under a foot, the sound she herself had made walking in. Rory went very still. The pendant pulsed once in her fist, a single throb of heat like a heartbeat that wasn't hers.
*The deer *, she thought. *One of the deer followed you in.*
But deer didn't stand like that. She could feel exactly how it was standing , the way you can feel someone behind you in a queue: upright, close, patient. Not breathing. She was listening so hard her ears rang, and there was no breath.
She kept her eyes on the gap between the stones. Ten steps. Maybe twelve. She could do twelve steps.
She took one. The grass behind her whispered as something took one too.
She stopped. It stopped.
Around her feet, very slowly , the closed flowers were lifting their heads. She saw it out of the corner of her eye, a ripple through the pale stalks, each bowed bud straightening and turning. Not toward her. Past her. Toward whatever stood at her back, the way the deer on the rise had turned, the way a congregation turns when the doors open at the back of the church.
"Rory."
The voice was low and warm and very close to her left ear, and she knew it. That was the worst of it. She knew it the way she knew her own scar, the little crescent on her left wrist that she was pressing now, hard, with her thumb, the way she used to in the kitchen in Cardiff when she heard his key in the lock. The voice had a lilt she'd spent two years trying to forget. It said her name the way he had said it, as if it were already an apology and a warning at once.
Evan was in Cardiff. Evan didn't know where she lived. Evan had never heard of Richmond Park.
"Rory, love. Look at me."
She didn't. Her eyes burned from not blinking. Twelve steps, eleven now, and the gap between the stones had never looked so far away, and at the edge of her sight the fourteenth stone was not quite where it had been a moment ago . It was nearer the gap. It was leaning, very slightly , the way a person leans to catch your eye across a room.
The pendant was hot now. Hot the way it had been on the landing in Hammersmith, and she understood, with a clarity that went through her like cold water, that it hadn't been warning her about something in Hammersmith at all. It had been warning her about tonight. About the decision she'd been about to make.
"You came all this way," the voice said, gently , reasonably, the way he'd always been reasonable. "The least you can do is turn round."
Rory closed her fist around the burning stone until it hurt, fixed her eyes on the dark between the oaks, and did not turn round.
She took the next step.
Behind her, patient as a held breath, so did it.