AI The pendant burned.
My fingers flew to the silver chain, but the crimson stone pulsed harder, throbbing against my sternum like a second heartbeat I had not invited. I stood between the ancient oak standing stones in the Fae Grove, my black hair whipping in a wind that touched nothing else, and the wildflowers carpeting the clearing glowed faintly, unnatural, blooming in the dark. Bioluminescent petals, pale as fish bellies, lined the path I had walked a hundred times in daylight, but tonight they breathed, expanding and contracting with a rhythm that matched the throb in my chest.
I came here to close the door. The Hel portal had torn open in my bathroom at 3 AM, spilling frost across the tiles and filling the flat with a smell like burning hair and rotting lilies. Eva, my oldest friend, the one who had pulled me out of that Cardiff flat and into London, who had taught me to ride a bike and to file taxes and to recognise a narcissist before he could gaslight me, had texted me three days ago from this exact spot. She had dropped coordinates on the map, a warning scrawled in the margins: *Don't let them see you standing still.* Then silence . The pendant, pressed into my palm by a faceless stranger in a dream, had gone thermonuclear against my skin at midnight, pointing here, to this pocket between worlds where Richmond Park bent into something older and hungrier.
My watch read 11:47. It had read 11:47 when I left the flat above Silas' bar. Three hours ago.
The Grove swallowed sound, but tonight it sang back. A wet, clicking noise echoed from the tree line, rhythmic and wrong, like a tongue dragging across broken glass. I froze, my hand drifting to the crescent scar on my left wrist, a nervous habit from childhood accidents with hot irons. The sound came again, closer. Not an animal. Animals did not click like that.
"Hello?" My voice cracked, the word dissolving into the dark. The flowers nearest my trainers twitched.
I should have run. Cool-headed Rory, the girl who fled Cardiff, who out-thought Evan when he cornered me in our kitchen, who delivered dumplings through London rain without breaking a sweat, who studied law because she liked systems and order. But my trainers stayed rooted to the loam, because the pendant was screaming now, a high whine only I could hear, vibrating in my fillings, pulling me toward the centre of the stone circle.
Something shifted at the edge of my vision. I spun, bright blue eyes straining against the dark. Nothing. Just the standing stones, black silhouettes against a sky that showed no stars, no moon, and the endless, impossible flowers that never died here, blooming year-round in defiance of seasons.
The pillars themselves were massive, oak trunks turned to stone centuries ago, carved with spirals that seemed to writhe when I did not look directly at them . Moss clung to their northern faces, but the southern sides were bare, scorched black, as if something had burned against them recently. I touched the nearest stone. It was warm, pulsing with a slow, arrhythmic throb that matched the pendant against my chest.
The oak stones hummed. I felt it in my molars, a resonance that made my teeth ache, that tasted of copper and old pennies. The ground beneath my feet grew warm, then cold, then warm again, flip-flopping between temperatures like a fever dream. My breath misted, though the air around me stayed still, trapped.
Footsteps crunched behind me.
I whirled. The path stood empty, but the mud told a different story. Fresh prints, deep and distinct, led from the tree line toward the stones. My size. My tread pattern. The Dunlop trainers I had bought last month. The mud was dark, rich, turned up in clods. The prints were fresh, the edges sharp, not yet collapsed. They led from the hawthorn bushes, directly to the centre of the circle. But I had walked here alone. I was certain of it. I had checked the car park, seen no other vehicles, heard no other footsteps on the gravel path. And yet, here were feet that matched mine, step for step, as if someone had followed me, or I had followed myself.
The clicking stopped.
Silence rushed in, thick and suffocating, pressing against my eardrums. I checked my watch again. 11:47. The second hand ticked forward, then jerked backward, stuttering like a broken film reel, tick-tocking in reverse. Time moved differently here. An hour inside could be minutes outside, or days. Eva had been gone three days. Three minutes here. Time was a folded thing in this place, a ribbon twisted back on itself.
I was not alone.
Cold certainty pooled in my stomach , sharp as broken glass. The pendant flared, crimson light spilling across the grass, illuminating the footprints. They ended three feet from where I stood. They had not circled me. They had not approached from behind. They had simply stopped. Waiting. Watching. Mimicking.
"Show yourself." My voice did not shake. Pre-Law training, perhaps. Or sheer terror masquerading as courage, the same way I had faced my father's disappointment, the same way I had walked out on Evan.
A whisper slithered through the flowers. Not words. A sound like wet leather splitting. The petals nearest my boots trembled , then turned. All of them. Hundreds of pale, glowing blooms rotating in unison, their faces tracking me, following my movement with the terrible patience of predators that had all the time in the world, because time here was a lie.
The standing stones groaned. Stone on stone, grinding like teeth. The ancient oak pillars, older than London, older than the Welsh valleys where my mother taught, older than the Irish law courts where my father argued, began to shift. I watched, paralyzed, as the circle tightened, the gap between them narrowing, trapping me in the centre, the stones moving with a grinding, deliberate slowness.
The footprints in the mud began to fill with water. Clear, dark water, rising from nowhere, erasing the evidence of whatever had walked there. The level rose, ankle-deep, freezing cold, soaking through my trainers. It should not be here. There was no stream. No rain.
My phone buzzed in my pocket. I pulled it out, hands shaking now, the scar on my wrist tingling, hot and raised. No signal. Of course. The Grove ate signals, ate time, ate people. But the screen lit up with a message, glowing crimson to match the pendant.
Unknown sender. Timestamp: 11:47. The same time. Always the same time.
The text read: "You left the door open. Now we're coming through."
The ground beneath my feet split open.
Not metaphorically. The earth cracked, a fissure yawning wide, black and hungry, splitting the circle of stones. The pendant ripped against my chain, the silver snapping with a sound like a gunshot, the crimson stone flaring so bright it blinded me, searing my retinas. I stumbled back, but the stones were closing in, the circle shrinking to nothing, and from the crack in the world, something grey and wet and infinitely long reached up, fingers grasping for my ankle, pulling, dragging, and I screamed, and the Grove swallowed the sound, and the last thing I saw was the flowers turning their glowing faces to watch me die.