AI The Heartstone pendant burned against Rory's sternum.
She'd felt it before, that particular heat, but never like this. A slow, insistent throb, like a second heartbeat trying to synchronise with her own. She pressed her palm against the silver chain, and the warmth flared, then settled into something almost patient. Waiting.
Richmond Park had emptied hours ago. The deer had retreated to the deeper woodland, and the last of the joggers and dog-walkers had long since fled the dropping temperature. Rory stood at the edge of the Fae Grove, her breath clouding in sharp, white bursts, and stared at the standing stones.
They hadn't been here when she'd visited as a child. Or perhaps they had, and she'd simply never seen them. The oak trunks were carved with spirals that seemed to shift when she looked directly at them, settling into stillness only when her gaze drifted to the edges . Three stones, arranged in a triangle, their surfaces slick with moss that glowed faintly, a pale luminescence that had no business existing in a London park.
Eva had sent her the coordinates. *Come alone *, the message had read. *Bring the pendant. Don't bring anyone else.*
Rory had almost laughed. Eva, who'd fled to Brighton three years ago and hadn't spoken to her since, who'd stopped answering calls and deleted her social media, suddenly resurfacing with cryptic instructions about a place Rory couldn't find on any map.
But the pendant had arrived that morning . No postmark. No name. Just the silver chain and the crimson stone, pulsing now with a warmth that matched the rhythm of her own pulse , as if it had learned her heartbeat and decided to keep time with it.
She stepped between the stones.
The air changed immediately. Not temperature, exactly, though her skin prickled with a cold that had nothing to do with the November night. The Grove existed in a pocket, Eva had written. Time moved differently here. An hour inside could be minutes outside. Or days.
Rory had prepared for this. She'd packed a torch, a power bank, protein bars, a notebook. Practical things. The things she'd learned to carry after Evan, after the flat in Cardiff where she'd woken to find him standing over her bed, after the months of looking over her shoulder in London, waiting for him to find her again.
She clicked on the torch.
The beam caught wildflowers. Bluebells, foxgloves, winter roses, all blooming in impossible profusion, their colours too vivid, too saturated, as if the Grove itself were a photograph that someone had overexposed. The scent hit her next, thick and cloying, like honey left too long in the sun. Sweet. Wrong.
"Hello?" Her voice came out smaller than she intended, swallowed by the unnatural silence .
No birds. No insects. No distant traffic from the North Circular, which should have been audible even here. Just the pulse of the pendant against her chest, and her own breathing, too loud, too present.
Rory walked deeper into the clearing. The flowers parted around her boots, stems bending without wind, and she found herself walking faster, her practical preparations suddenly feeling absurd. The torch beam trembled in her grip.
Something moved at the edge of the light.
She froze. The torch held steady, illuminating a circle of impossible flowers, and beyond that circle, darkness that seemed thicker than the night outside . But in that darkness, something had shifted. A shape, perhaps. Or a shadow cast by a shadow.
"Who's there?"
Silence. Then, from somewhere behind her, the sound of water. A stream, perhaps. Or something that mimicked a stream. The sound came in irregular bursts, as if whatever made it were learning the rhythm, practising.
Rory turned. The torch swung with her, and for a moment she saw the standing stones again, but they were wrong now, tilted at angles that hurt to look at, their carved spirals writhing like something beneath skin.
She turned back to the path ahead.
The flowers had changed. Where there had been bluebells, now there were lilies, white and fleshy, their centres dark as bruises. The scent had shifted too, from sweet to something else, something organic and close, like the inside of a mouth.
The pendant burned hot.
Rory ran.
Not far. Just a few steps, enough to put distance between herself and the lilies, and then she stopped, gasping, and realised that she didn't know which direction was back. The torch beam showed only more flowers, more darkness beyond, and the path she'd taken had vanished, swallowed by the blooming, by the wrongness of this place.
She checked her phone. No signal, of course. But the time, when she finally found the screen, made her stomach clench. 3:47 AM. She'd entered the Grove at 11 PM. Nearly five hours, and she'd walked perhaps two hundred metres.
Or perhaps she'd walked for days. The Grove didn't care about her measurements.
" Eva?" The name tasted strange in her mouth. "Eva, if you're here, this isn't funny."
The stream sounded again, closer now, and beneath it, something else. A voice, perhaps, or the memory of a voice. She couldn't make out words, only the shape of speech, the cadence of someone calling her name.
Rory walked towards it.
She told herself it was the pendant, that the warmth was guiding her, that Eva was somewhere ahead and the Grove was simply... testing her. But her feet moved without her decision, drawn by the sound, by the promise of another person in this place that had no business containing people.
The flowers thickened. She pushed through them, stems snapping with a sound like breaking bone, and found herself at the edge of a pool. The water was still, black, reflecting nothing. Not the torch beam. Not the flowers. Not the sky, which above the pool showed only stars that didn't belong to any constellation she recognised.
And on the far side of the pool, sitting on a stone that rose from the water like a natural throne, was a woman.
She wore white. Or something that had once been white, now stained with the colours of the Grove, with moss and pollen and something darker that Rory didn't want to identify. Her hair hung to her waist, black and straight, and her face, when she turned it towards Rory, was beautiful and terrible and wrong in a way that Rory's mind refused to process.
"You brought it." The woman's voice was Eva's voice, but layered, as if several people spoke through the same throat. "Good. She always does, in the end."
Rory's hand went to the pendant. It pulsed once, sharply, and she felt something tear in her chest, some connection severed or established, she couldn't tell which.
"Eva?" The word came out as a whisper . "What is this? What have you done?"
The woman smiled. Her teeth were too white, too numerous, and when she stood, the water didn't ripple. She simply rose, dripping nothing, leaving no wake, and stepped onto the bank as if the pool were solid ground.
"Done?" The smile widened. "I've done nothing, Aurora. I've only waited. As she waited. As they all wait, in the Grove, in the dark between, in the places where your kind don't look." She extended a hand, and Rory saw that her fingers were too long, the joints bending backwards, and she understood with horrible certainty that this was not Eva, had perhaps never been Eva, had simply worn Eva's shape like a coat.
"But you," the thing continued, stepping closer, and the flowers between them bowed away from its passage, "you have something she needs. Something that burns. Something that remembers."
The Heartstone pendant blazed against Rory's chest, and she felt it now, the truth of it, the reason it had been sent to her, the reason Eva had fled and vanished and finally, desperately, reached out. It wasn't a gift. It was a key. Or a lock. Or both.
The thing that wore Eva's face reached for her.
And from the darkness beyond the standing stones, something else answered, something that had been waiting longer than the Grove, longer than the woman in white, longer than the pendant's crimson glow. Something that heard the Heartstone's pulse and came running, hungry and patient and utterly inhuman, and Rory understood with perfect , terrible clarity that she had not been lured here.
She had been delivered .