AI Aurora scraped the frost from the seventh stone and counted again. Six stones ringed the clearing. The seventh stood apart, tilted at an angle that made her teeth ache, its surface slick with moss that glowed faintly green.
She had come to the Grove because the Heartstone demanded it. The crimson gemstone, thumbnail-sized and set in silver, had grown warm against her sternum an hour ago, then hot, then burning. Now it throbbed in rhythm with her pulse and dragged her through the dark undergrowth of Richmond Park until she found the ancient oak standing stones. She had read about this place in her grandmother's journals, the ones tucked in the Cardiff attic. A pocket between Earth and the Fae realm. Time moved differently here. An hour inside could be minutes or days outside.
The standing stones were ancient oak, petrified and grey, ringed in a circle that predated the park, predated London itself. Carvings spiralled up their surfaces, Celtic knots that seemed to move when she wasn't looking directly at them . The seventh stone, the tilted one, bore no carvings. Only smooth, wet moss that glowed with that faint green light.
The silence here was absolute. No owls called. No foxes screamed. Even the distant hum of the North Circular, usually a constant drone from her flat above Silas's bar, had vanished. The quiet pressed against her eardrums, a physical weight that made her swallow repeatedly.
The frost crunched under her boots, but the sound returned twice. Once from beneath her feet. Once from three paces behind.
She stopped. Held her breath.
The crunching stopped.
Then resumed, matching her pace exactly, as if something walked in her shadow.
Aurora turned. The beam of her phone torch cut through the dark, illuminating only bare branches and frost-heavy bracken. Nothing moved. Yet the crunching continued, circling her, always maintaining the distance. She touched the crescent-shaped scar on her left wrist, a nervous habit from childhood. The skin there felt numb.
Her knees ached from kneeling. She stood, joints popping, and flexed her fingers. The cold had numbed her toes, but the pendant's heat kept her core warm, a furnace in her chest that refused to cool. Her heart hammered a tick-tock rhythm against her ribs.
Her phone read 03:33. She had left her flat at midnight. Three and a half hours had vanished while she walked, though her legs ached with only twenty minutes of exertion. She checked her wristwatch. The hands spun backwards, then forwards, settling on a time that didn't exist.
The wildflowers shouldn't have been blooming. Bluebells and foxgloves crowded the frostbitten earth, their petals unfurling in the dark. White bluebell bells drooped over centres dark as bruises. Foxgloves stood three feet tall, their spotted throats open like mouths. She brushed past a stem. It was warm, pulsing with a slow, arrhythmic throb . They smelled of honey and rotting meat. The scent clung to her coat, sweet and cloying.
Her breath plumed in front of her, but the vapour didn't dissipate. It hung in the air , forming shapes that almost looked like letters, like words in a language she almost recognised from her father's law books, from her mother's Welsh poetry.
The Heartstone burned against her skin. She pulled it from beneath her coat. The deep crimson gemstone, given to her by an unknown benefactor three weeks ago in a plain envelope slipped under her door, had never been warm before. Now it blazed, radiating heat that scorched her skin through her jumper. The silver chain, delicate and antique-looking, had turned red-hot, glowing like a filament. It cast red shadows across the stones. It pointed, she realised, not at the ground, but at the gap between the sixth and seventh stones. A gap that hadn't existed when she arrived. The air there shimmered like heat on tarmac, though the night was freezing.
Eva had disappeared three days ago. The last text read: Don't follow. The Heartstone had been cold until tonight, then warm, then burning. It had brought Aurora here, to this clearing, to this moment. She needed to find her friend. She needed to close whatever door Eva had opened. Or she needed to escape through it, away from Evan, away from the threats that had followed her from Cardiff to London.
A whisper slithered through the bracken. Not wind. Words. Her name, but wrong. "Laila." The syllables tasted of copper.
Footsteps. Closer now. Not echoing . Real. Heavy. Dragging. Wet.
Aurora spun, her torch beam swinging wildly. The light caught the moss on the stones, making it pulse like a heartbeat.
A figure stood between the oaks. Tall. Thin. Its head tilted at an angle that suggested broken vertebrae. It wore clothes that had been a suit once, expensive and bespoke, now mould and moss. The shoes were Italian leather, green with decay. It moved with a jerky, stop-start motion, like a marionette with tangled strings. Its neck craned, vertebrae clicking like a rosary. It didn't blink. Its eyes reflected her torchlight with a yellow gleam, animal and ancient.
"I know you're here," Aurora said. Her voice didn't echo . It hung in the air , thick and dead.
The figure smiled. Too many teeth. It raised a hand, not to attack, but to beckon .
The pendant blazed brighter. The crimson light intensified, revealing the standing stones in stark relief. The moss pulsed . The gap between the sixth and seventh stones widened. A staircase spiralled down into darkness, steps carved from something that resembled bone, or perhaps stone worn smooth by centuries. At the bottom, a pool of water reflected nothing, a black mirror that rippled without wind. From the depths came the sound of dripping. Drip. Drop. Drip. Drop. And beneath the water, a voice sang in a language that predated Welsh, predated Irish, predated the Celts themselves.
Another whisper , closer. "Malphora." The name resonated in her bones, in the scar on her wrist, in the blood that ran Irish and Welsh through her veins.
"Show yourself," Aurora commanded. She gripped the pendant, but the silver chain had grown hotter, searing her fingers. She couldn't let go. The pain anchored her, kept her present.
The figure stepped forward. The ground beneath it didn't crunch. The frost retreated, leaving bare earth that steamed.
The gap between the stones rippled. A shape pressed against the membrane from the other side. Tall. Familiar. Eva's silhouette, but her head hung at the wrong angle, her limbs too long, her joints bending backwards.
Eva.
The membrane tore.
Eva stepped through. She wore the blue coat Aurora had bought her last Christmas, but it hung wrong, too big, as if Eva had shrunk inside it or the coat had grown. Her eyes were black, pupils dilated to swallow the whites, reflecting the red glow of the Heartstone like a cat's eyes in the dark. She smiled, and her teeth were too sharp, filed to points. "You came," she said. Her voice was layered , two voices speaking at once, Eva's and something older, something that had worn Eva's face like a mask. "I knew you would."
Behind her, the portal tore wider, a jagged gash in reality, and the things that had been waiting in the dark between worlds began to crawl out. The first one emerged on six legs, or perhaps eight, its body segmented like an insect but the size of a large dog. Its mandibles clicked with a wet, chitinous sound. Behind it came others, shapes that had no business existing in three dimensions, their angles wrong, their shadows stretching towards the light instead of away from it.