AI Rory told herself she would not run.
Running was what you did when you had already decided to believe the worst, and she had not decided that yet. Not when she slipped through the side gate into Richmond Park five minutes before midnight. Not when the gate, which should have been locked , swung shut behind her with a soft, deliberate click. Not even when she realized she could no longer hear the road.
She had come for answers. That was the sensible, solid reason she kept turning over in her mind while the dark closed around her. For three weeks the Heartstone pendant had hung cold and dull against her skin, a thumbnail of deep crimson stone on a silver chain, no more remarkable than cheap jewelry. Tonight it had woken her at eleven by growing warm. By eleven-thirty it had been pulsing. By eleven-forty, when the note appeared in the pocket of her coat — a coat she had locked inside her flat above Silas’ bar — it had been hot enough to make her catch her breath.
Bring it where the stones stand. Come alone. Midnight.
The handwriting had been elegant and unfamiliar. The benefactor who had given her the pendant had never written to her before, never spoken to her at all, as far as she knew. She might have ignored it. She might have thrown the stone into the Thames and changed the locks and been, for once, the kind of sensible person her mother wanted her to be. Instead she had dressed, put the chain around her neck, and taken the night bus to Richmond.
Cool-headed, Eva called her. Good in a crisis. Right now those words felt like a challenge issued by someone safely elsewhere.
The park at night was not the park she knew by day. Rain had fallen earlier, and the paths held a black shine. Mist clung low over the grass, thinning around the trees and thickening again where the ground dipped. Richmond was famous for its deer, but she saw none. No shapes grazed beyond the fence lines. No owls called. Even her own footsteps sounded muted, as if the wet leaves were absorbing more sound than they should.
She checked her phone as she left the main path. No signal. The time read 12:03, though she was certain more than three minutes had passed since the gate. When she looked again a little later, after following the narrow break in the bracken that she had found in daylight two days ago, it still read 12:03. The seconds counter beneath it had stopped too.
Preparation, she told herself. That was why she had come in daylight first. To know the way. To prove there was nothing here but trees and grass and a pretty clearing people on folklore forums insisted was older than the park itself.
Daylight had not prepared her.
The first oak appeared out of the mist without warning, its trunk so broad she could have hidden behind it and never been found . Then another. Then the stones between them — or what she had first taken for stones during the day. They stood in a rough ring at the edge of the clearing, gray, moss-bearded, taller than she was, but their shapes were subtly wrong for rock. They leaned. Their tops branched into knots like frozen roots. Ancient oaks turned to stone, or stones that had once remembered being trees.
Rory stopped at the boundary. The pendant throbbed against her sternum.
Warmth meant a Hel portal was near. That was what she had been told , the one fact she possessed that might have passed for an explanation. Warmth, a faint inner glow, the sense of something on the other side of a thin place pressing close. The stone tonight did not feel merely warm. It felt rhythmic . It pulsed in time with her heart for three beats, four, then slipped half a beat behind, as if something else were trying to learn the pattern.
The clearing beyond the stones was full of flowers.
They carpeted the ground in pale clusters despite the season, despite the dark — white and violet and a blue so faint it looked like frost . Wildflowers that bloomed all year here, whatever the weather. In daylight they had seemed improbable and lovely . Now every open face was turned toward the path where she stood, though there was no sun to follow and no wind to bend them.
Rory lifted her phone and tried the torch. The beam cut the mist into a pale tunnel and died against the center of the ring, as if the dark there were denser than elsewhere. The flowers nearest her feet gave off a sweet smell, but underneath it was another odor, green and stagnant, like water that had stood too long in a vase.
“I’m here,” she said.
Her voice sounded very loud and very young. No answer came. She had not expected one, not really, but the silence after she spoke had a quality that made her regret breaking it. It felt attentive.
She stepped over the boundary.
Nothing happened, which somehow made it worse. No flash. No pressure in her ears. Only the pendant giving a single, stronger pulse , and all the flowers in the clearing closing at once.
Rory froze with one foot still raised. The petals folded with a faint, collective whisper , thousands of tiny movements adding up to a sound almost like fabric being smoothed . When it stopped, the clearing looked shaved and blind. Her torch beam trembled, and she steadied it with both hands. The battery icon flashed red, though she had charged the phone before leaving.
“Faulty battery,” she said quietly, because saying ordinary words helped. “Cold. Damp.”
From somewhere behind her, very faintly, a twig snapped.
She turned.
The path was empty. Mist slid between the oaks in slow ribbons. The boundary stones stood where she had left them — she counted without meaning to: one, two, three, four, five, six, seven. She looked back into the clearing, then toward the path again.
Eight.
Rory counted a second time, forcing herself to move her eyes slowly . Seven stones had marked the ring in daylight. She had walked the perimeter with her hand out, touching each cold surface, amused at her own thoroughness. Seven. Now an eighth stood a little apart from the others, no taller than she was, its surface darker, wet-looking, and she could not decide whether it had been hidden by mist or whether she was simply tired enough to miscount.
Seven. She pointed the torch at each one and named them under her breath. “One. Two. Three. Four. Five. Six. Seven.”
At the far side of the ring, half screened by an oak, something shifted.
It was not a dramatic movement. If she had blinked, she would have missed it — a narrow lessening of shadow, as if a figure had leaned back out of the light. Rory held the beam steady. Bark. Ferns. The pale underside of leaves. Nothing stood there. Yet the place where the movement had been now seemed emptier than the dark around it, the way a room feels after someone has just stepped out of it .
Her mouth had gone dry. “If this is the meeting, you’re late.”
This time the silence did not answer, but something else did. A second set of footsteps began in the wet leaves to her left, unhurried and soft. They stopped when she stopped breathing. They did not start again when she forced herself to breathe.
Rory swung the torch. The beam found only flowers, all closed now, and the smooth trunks of trees repeated into fog. Her own shadow leaped huge across a stone and settled there, distorted, its head elongated. For one sick instant she thought the shadow had kept moving after she stopped. Then it was only a shadow.
She needed a plan. Plans were solid. She would wait until twelve-fifteen by her own count, because the note had said midnight and punctuality worked both ways. If no one came, she would leave. She began counting seconds, using the pendant’s pulse as a metronome. One. Two. Three.
On the fourth pulse , another pulse answered it from inside the clearing.
It was not a sound, exactly. It was a pressure against her ribs, a warmth blooming at the exact center of the ring where her torch could not properly reach. The crimson stone brightened. Its glow lit the underside of her chin, the small crescent scar on her left wrist where she gripped the phone too hard. Something out there was near a portal, or something out there was the portal, or the pendant was recognizing a signal the way one struck bell recognizes another.
From the trees came the soft noise of a woman clearing her throat.
Rory did not turn immediately. Every instinct in her insisted that turning quickly would be a mistake, though she could not have said why. Slowly, she pivoted.
At first there was no one. Then, at the edge of vision, she became aware of a paleness between two stones. It might have been mist gathered in a vertical seam. It might have been a face turned three-quarters away. The longer she refused to look directly at it, the more distinct the outline became: a shoulder, the fall of dark hair, a stillness that was not the stillness of objects. When she finally snapped her gaze toward it, the torch showed bare bark and empty air, and the paleness was simply gone.
But the flowers along that side of the clearing had opened again. Only those. They faced inward, toward her.
“I’m leaving,” Rory said.
She had not reached twelve-fifteen. She no longer cared. She took one careful step backward toward the boundary, then another. The pendant was burning now, not hot enough to blister but hot enough that she would remember its shape on her skin. Its pulse and the answering pulse had nearly synchronized . Each beat arrived a little sooner. Each beat felt less like a warning and more like a countdown to agreement.
Behind her, close enough that it might have come from just beyond the stones, someone whispered her name.
“Rory.”
It was her own voice.
Not similar to hers. Hers. The same slight Cardiff softness she heard on recordings and always disliked, the same habit of clipping the end of the word. It came from the path she needed to take, from a place her torch had swept not ten seconds before and found empty.
She stopped. Her heart struck so hard against the pendant that she could no longer tell which pulse belonged to her.
Then, farther away, or perhaps deeper in her own head, a second voice spoke beneath the first, lower and unhurried and pleased, using a name she had never given to anyone in London.
“Malphora.”
The flowers in the entire clearing opened. All at once. All facing her.
Rory did the one thing she had promised herself she would not do.
She ran.
The stones let her pass — or seemed to . The path received her. Wet leaves slapped her ankles and branches tore at her coat and the torch beam swung wildly, carving the night into bright, useless fragments. Behind her there were no footsteps . That was the worst of it. Whatever followed her, if anything followed, made no sound at all, while her own breath tore in and out and the park stretched ahead in a long black corridor of trees that should already have ended at the gate.
She ran until her legs burned and the pendant cooled, degree by degree, against her skin. Only when the mist thinned and she smelled exhaust and wet pavement did she slow. The side gate stood open ahead. Beyond it, a streetlamp made a clean orange circle on the road. A bus sighed past, empty and lit, ordinary as a miracle.
Rory looked at her phone. The signal had returned in a rush. The time read 12:04. Fifty-one messages were arriving , buzzing one after another against her palm, but she stared only at the number at the top of the screen.
One minute. She had lost one minute.
Then she saw the date beneath it.
Three days had passed.
And behind her, from inside the park where the gate was already swinging gently shut on its own, her own voice called her name again — patient, unhurried, as if it had all the time in the world to wait for her to answer.