AI The order had come through at 10:52, which was late even for a Friday. Yu-Fei had held the ticket up between two fingers like something the cat had brought in.
"Richmond Park," she'd said. "Pen Ponds car park, then follow the path to the oaks. Paid in advance. Forty pounds tip."
"The park's shut at night."
"Not my problem. Forty pounds is not my problem either. It is your problem, Rory."
So Rory had cycled out along the river with the insulated bag strapped to her back, the smell of black pepper beef and egg fried rice rising warm through the canvas. The pedestrian gate at Petersham had been unlocked . She'd noted that and decided not to care.
Now the gravel had given way to a deer track, and the track had given way to grass gone silver with frost, and her bike lay somewhere behind her against a fence post she could no longer see.
She checked the slip again under her phone's torch. *Deliver to the stones. Name: Laila.*
Nobody in London called her Laila. She had used it once, on a lease application, in the worst month of her life, and never again. She had decided that was a coincidence. Coincidences were cheap. She was a person who paid her rent with them.
The rut was on. All week she'd heard the stags bellowing across the park, a sound like furniture being dragged through a cathedral. Tonight there was nothing. She noticed the absence only when she was well inside it, the way you notice a fridge has stopped humming.
"Right," she said, quietly . Her voice went out and did not come back.
The oaks rose ahead, black against a sky that was somehow too clear for London. Five, six, seven of them, huge and squat, arranged in a ring far too regular to be an accident. Not trees, she saw as she got closer. Stones. Oak-dark and grained like wood, but stone all the same, each one leaning a little inward as though listening .
The pendant was warm.
She hadn't put a hand to it, but she felt it against her breastbone, a small steady heat through her jumper, as if someone had pressed a thumb there. Rory pulled the silver chain out and looked at the crimson stone. A faint light turned slowly in it, like a coal being breathed on.
"Not now," she told it .
It pulsed once, and she felt it in her teeth.
She stepped between two of the stones, and the air changed. It didn't grow warmer, exactly. It grew *softer*, as if she'd walked through a curtain of breath. The frost stopped at her feet. Ahead, the grass ran on green and thick, and it was full of flowers. Foxgloves, cornflowers, something pale and star-shaped she didn't know. In November. They stood perfectly still, though a wind was moving her hair.
She stood a moment, letting her eyes adjust, and then she smelled it. Under the sweetness of the blooms lay something else, faint, like fruit left too long in a warm room.
"Delivery," she called. "Golden Empress. Hello?"
Nothing. She waited the polite length of time, then a rude one. Then she crouched, unzipped the bag, and set the bag of food on the flat top of the nearest low stone. Job done. Forty quid. She could be back on the bike in ten minutes.
She didn't move.
Her phone said 11:31. She'd checked it when she stepped through. She was nearly sure it had said 11:31 then.
Somewhere behind her, a twig broke.
Rory turned slowly . The ring of stones stood where they'd stood, the gap she'd come through a slot of darker dark. Nothing in it. She let out a breath and turned back.
Something had moved. Not something she saw. Something her eyes had *just * missed, a change in the flowers at the far side of the clearing, a place where the foxgloves now leaned the wrong way. She looked straight at it and they were upright, innocent, still.
"Okay," she said. "I'm going."
She started for the gap, and she heard the footsteps .
They were behind her, and they were good footsteps , soft and measured , the pace of someone strolling. She stopped. They stopped, half a beat late. She took three steps. Three more came after, and they were not quite in time with hers, as if whoever made them was learning her stride .
She did not look round. She had grown up with a father who cross-examined for a living, and she knew the value of not giving a witness what he wanted. She kept her face still and her breathing slow, and she counted the stones ahead. Four. Five. The gap was between the fifth and sixth. Forty paces. Thirty.
The humming began then.
It was very quiet, a tune without a tune in it, just a few notes wandering up and down. It seemed to come from her left, then her right, then from just behind her ear, so close she felt the warmth of it on her neck. Her scar itched, the little crescent on her wrist, the old childhood one. She pressed her thumb to it hard.
She walked. The gap did not get closer.
She stopped and looked down. Her shadow lay long across the grass, pointing away from her. But there was no moon behind her. There was no light behind her at all, and the shadow was thrown *toward * the stones, as if something stood at her back and held a lamp.
Except that there were two shadows. Hers, and beside it another, a little taller, its head tilted to one side.
Rory closed her eyes.
*Think,* she told herself. *Don't run. Running is what it wants.* She did not know why she thought that, only that it sat in her like a fact. She thought of the stag that had gone quiet, and the tip, and the name on the slip. Someone had known that name . Someone had wanted her here and had been sure she'd come.
"I've left the food," she said, and her voice was steady, which surprised her . "It's paid for. Whatever this is, we're square."
The humming stopped.
The silence was worse. She could hear the flowers now, a faint dry whisper as though every petal were turning toward her.
"Laila," said a voice, kindly, from very near.
It wasn't a whisper . It sounded like her own voice, pitched lower , a little wet at the edges, the way a recording sounds when you hear it played back.
The pendant flared against her chest, hot enough to sting. She opened her eyes.
The gap in the stones was ten feet away. She could see the frost beyond it, white and honest, and the black sprawl of the park. She could see, on the low stone behind her where she'd left it, the takeaway bag, and it was open. The lid of the container had been folded back neatly. The food had not been touched . Every grain of rice stood in its place. But the steam still rose from it, and the steam was moving toward something she couldn't see, drawn in like smoke into a lung.
Rory ran.
She did not decide to. Her body went, and the flowers whipped at her knees, and the footsteps behind her broke into a run at last, light and quick and delighted. She threw herself through the gap between the stones and the cold hit her like a slap. Frost crunched under her boots. The stags were bellowing , all of them, wild and near.
She didn't stop until she found the fence, and the bike, and the gate. Only there, with her hands shaking on the handlebars, did she look at her phone.
11:31.
She watched the number until it changed to 11:32. Then it kept changing, too fast, the minutes tumbling over one another, and she understood that they were not counting forward but catching up.
Behind her, back among the oaks, someone began to hum again.