AI Rory knew she should not have come alone five minutes before she reached the stones.
Richmond Park after dark had none of the ordinary sounds of a park at night. There was no traffic beyond the gates, no wind worrying the trees, no distant bark of a dog carried across the open ground. Her trainers made almost no noise on the wet grass, and that was wrong too. The ground was soft from three days of rain. She should have been squelching. Instead each step landed with a small, flat hush, as if the earth were listening and deciding what to do with the sound.
She stopped by the last of the streetlamps and checked her phone. Twelve minutes to midnight. The note that had come with the Heartstone Pendant, folded beneath the silver chain in a box left outside her flat, had been precise about that. Midnight. Isolde's grove. Come alone, and do not bring anything you are not prepared to leave behind.
She had brought her phone, her keys, a torch she did not quite trust, and a penknife from the kitchen drawer above Silas' bar. The pendant rested against her sternum under her coat, thumbnail-sized, deep crimson, warm as a held coin. It had been warm in the box. It had been warm on the bus. Now, with the dark bulk of the park ahead of her and the ancient oaks rising beyond the fence, it pulsed once against her skin, faint and patient, the way it was said to do near a Hel portal.
Said by whom, she still did not know. That was the reason she had come.
The gate was padlocked . She climbed it where one hinge had sagged, caught her sleeve, swore under her breath, and dropped down on the other side into grass that came up wet to her ankles. Cold soaked straight through her socks. Somewhere far off, where the road should have been, there was nothing. When she looked back, the streetlamp already seemed farther away than it ought to, a small yellow smear behind the bars .
She told herself that was perspective. She told herself that a lot, in the next while.
The oaks marked the boundary first, then the stones between them, grey shapes shouldered up out of the earth, taller than she was and older than anything built by hands had a right to look. There were seven. She counted them because counting gave her something clean to do. Seven stones, nine oaks, a gap in the middle wide enough for one person to walk through without ducking. Beyond the gap, though it was December and frost silvered the grass on her side, wildflowers stood open in the dark. White, yellow, a bruised purple. Their scent reached her before she crossed, sweet and green and entirely out of season, with something under it like cold stone after rain.
The pendant pulsed again. Two beats this time.
Rory pressed her thumb to the small crescent-shaped scar on her left wrist, an old habit from childhood, and stepped through.
The sound changed.
It was not that the Grove was loud. It was that the silence inside had a different texture, close and padded, as if she had walked into a room where someone had just stopped speaking. The flowers did not move. Nothing moved. Yet the air touched the back of her neck with a distinctness that made her turn, fast, torch up, though she had not switched it on.
Nothing stood behind her. Only the gap, the stones, the dark park beyond them, and the streetlamp reduced now to a pinprick. She exhaled and saw her breath. She had not seen it outside.
She switched on the torch. The beam was weak and yellow and it found too little. A clearing, round as a held breath, ringed by the oaks whose branches met overhead so completely that no stars showed. Flowers everywhere, flattened nowhere, as if no animal ever crossed here. In the centre, a shallow ring of darker earth where the grass grew thin. No woman waiting. No benefactor. No portal that she could see, unless a portal was a place where the air in the middle of a clearing looked very slightly wrong, like heat above a road, except cold.
Her phone buzzed in her pocket and she flinched so hard she bit her tongue.
No signal. The time read 00:00. Beneath it, the date had gone blank.
That was when she heard the step.
It came a fraction after her own, when she shifted her weight . Just one. Soft, on grass, to her left and a little behind. She went still and the sound did not repeat, which was worse than if it had, because while she stood there holding her breath she understood that she could hear, very faintly, something else in the clearing that was not her.
Breathing. Not matched to hers. Slower.
Rory had fled an abusive man by thinking clearly while frightened, had talked her way out of worse rooms than this with her heart slamming, and she did the thing that had always worked. She made a plan out of the fear. Do not run. Running in the dark among roots was how you fell. Do not shout. If someone was here, shouting told them exactly what they had already achieved. She lowered the torch beam to the flowers at her feet and, without moving her head, looked as far left as her eyes would go.
The flowers at the edge of the beam trembled , one stem, then another, in a line that had no wind to explain it.
She switched the torch off.
Darkness came down complete. Her eyes, traitorous, built shapes out of it at once. A paler vertical between two oaks. A suggestion of shoulder-length hair. She blinked and it resolved into bark and shadow, but the memory of it stayed exactly where a person would have stood, watching. Her own black hair clung damp to her cheek. She pushed it back with fingers that were not quite steady.
"Hello," she said, because silence had become a kind of consent. Her voice sounded small and very reasonable. "You left the note. I'm here."
The breathing stopped.
Nothing answered. The pendant warmed against her chest, then cooled, then warmed again, and it took her three cycles to realise the rhythm was not hers and not steady either. It sped when she was afraid . It was, she thought with a clarity that chilled her more than the dark, answering something else's heart.
She turned the torch back on and swept it in a slow arc. Oaks. Stones. Flowers unbent. The ring of thin earth. Her own footprints darkening the grass from the gap, a single trail, already looking older than they should. No second trail. She found that the Grove had no smell of fox or wet deer, none of the musk she associated with Richmond Park. It smelled of flowers and cold and, just then, faintly, of the stairwell outside her flat. Soap from the bar below. Her own shampoo.
That stopped her breath in her throat.
"Right," she said, very quietly. "No."
She backed toward the gap, counting stones as she went, not turning her back on the centre because every instinct she owned had aligned on that single point. Seven stones. She passed the place where the air felt thickest and the flowers there, white ones, had closed. In the torchlight their petals were shut tight as fists. All the others stood open.
A step sounded behind her, in perfect time with hers this time, so close in rhythm that she almost missed it. Almost. Hers landed. Then, wearing the same weight , another.
She stopped. So did it.
Rory looked down. The beam shook in a small, humiliating arc. She made her hand be still. At the very edge of the light, where her shadow fell long across the flowers, there was a second shadow, thinner, fallen from no direction she could account for. It did not move when she moved. It waited until she had seen it.
She turned around.
The gap was gone .
Not hidden. Gone. Where she had entered there were only oaks grown close, bark on bark, and stones she had not counted standing among them with moss on their northern faces as established as scripture. She counted, because she had to. Nine stones now. She counted again, slower, touching each number to a shape. Nine. The pinprick of the streetlamp had vanished, and with it any sense that London continued in that direction at all.
Time moved differently here. Eva had said that once, laughing, the way people repeat a story they do not believe. An hour inside could be minutes outside, or days. Rory looked at her phone. Still midnight. As she watched, the colon between the zeros blinked, blinked, then stopped blinking. The screen froze on that unblinking stare and went black though it had been at sixty percent on the bus.
The pendant gave a pulse so warm it bordered on heat. Then another, out of sequence, a stutter. Two rhythms now. Hers, fast. And another, learning.
She did the most out-of-the-box thing she could think of, the thing a cool-headed woman did when a room had been arranged against her. She sat down. Right there in the wet flowers, back against the nearest stone, torch aimed at the centre of the clearing, penknife closed in her fist because opening it felt like an escalation she could not take back. Sitting lowered her silhouette. Sitting said she was not going to run in circles for anyone's entertainment. Sitting let her listen .
For a long time, perhaps minutes, perhaps much longer, there was only her breath going in and out and the occasional tick of cooling bark. Then, at the edge of vision, beyond the torch's reach where she had first imagined a figure, a flower bent. Another bent. Something was crossing the clearing without disturbing it enough to leave a trail, the way a thought crosses a face. The bending came toward her, unhurried, and stopped at precisely the distance a person would stop if they did not want to crowd her.
She could smell her shampoo again, stronger.
"Rory."
It spoke her name the way her friends spoke it, the shortened name, the safe one. It spoke it in a voice she recognised so completely that for one appalling second she felt relief, because help had come, because she was not alone, because Eva had followed her after all.
Then she understood whose voice it was.
It was hers. Not similar. Hers, pitched exactly as hers sounded inside her own skull, with the Cardiff flattened out of it by London years, with the small catch she got before she said something she had rehearsed.
From the darkness just outside the light, wearing patience like a coat, something breathed in and held it, waiting to see if she would answer and teach it the rest.
Rory pressed her thumb hard into the crescent scar on her wrist until the pain was bright and hers alone, kept the torch aimed forward, and did not turn her head toward the place where, very slowly , a second pair of footprints had begun to press down into the wet grass beside her own.