AI The delivery address didn't exist.
Rory checked it three times, one foot hooked on the pedal, phone glare stinging her eyes at the Richmond Park gate. The pin sat on open grass half a mile from the nearest road. No building. No postcode. Just a note typed beneath the order in capitals: BRING IT TO THE STONES. LEAVE IT INSIDE THE RING. SIXTY POUND TIP. CASH.
"Not this one." Yu-Fei had slapped the ticket flat on the counter of the Golden Empress. "Park address. Middle of the night. No."
"Sixty quid, Yu-Fei. That's most of rent."
"That's bait."
Rory had taken the bag anyway. Silas didn't accept bait as currency, and his envelope was due Friday.
The gate should have been locked. The park shut at dusk; she'd cycled past enough evenings to know the chain, the padlock, the rangers' signs. Tonight the chain hung in a neat loop and the padlock lay open on its hasp, hooked there like a tongue. Someone had wanted it to look closed.
She wheeled the bike in, because rent was rent.
The path carried her a few hundred metres before it dwindled to a deer track. She left the bike against a beech, looped the lock through the frame out of habit, hooked the insulated bag over one shoulder, thumbed on the phone torch, and walked.
The wrongness arrived quietly, the way wrongness does.
First, no planes. Richmond sat under the Heathrow approach. She had never stood anywhere in this borough without an engine overhead, that low constant grumble you stopped hearing after a week. Tonight the sky held nothing. No road hum from the A307 either. The dark had a padded quality, like the inside of a cupboard.
Second, the flowers. Her torch beam combed the grass and lit drifts of them, campion and foxglove, open and dewed, in the second week of November. Their faces turned after the light passed.
Third, the pendant.
It gave a slow throb of warmth against her sternum, like a coal someone had breathed on. Rory stopped walking. The heartstone had come in the post six months ago, no note, no sender, a thumbnail of deep crimson on a silver chain, and in six months it had done nothing but sit there looking expensive. Now it pulsed in time with her pulse , and it pulled, faint but insistent, the way a compass needle pulls north.
She should have left. She noted that the way you note a fact about someone else, and kept walking, because the pull had a direction and the direction had to be the stones, and the stones were the job. Drop the bag, photograph it, go. London ran on weird orders.
Then she heard the humming.
It threaded through the oaks ahead, thin as a hairline crack, and it went sing-song in a tune she knew down to the bone. Suo Gân. Her mother's lullaby, the Welsh one, the one Jennifer Carter used to hum while hanging washing, while marking exercise books, while pretending not to watch the drive for Brendan's car. Rory had not heard it in years. She had never once heard it in England.
Her feet had stopped without asking her.
She stood still and listened to her own heart, and under it, soft as felt, came the press of feet in leaf litter. One. Two. Stop. A half-beat late, like an echo that hadn't learnt the distance yet.
She walked on. The steps walked on. She stopped short. The steps took one extra, small and apologetic, like a dance partner who'd trodden on a toe.
Right. Cool-headed. She turned a slow circle with the torch. Grass. Oaks. A fallow deer between two trunks, antlered, mid-graze, watching her. Deer in Richmond were furniture; she'd dodged a hundred on the roads. She swept the light past and kept walking, and when she swept it back the deer stood ten metres closer, still mid-graze, still watching, jaws working on nothing. Its eyes caught the beam and shone green, and then, though the beam held steady, stopped shining at all, the way a television goes dark.
Clip-clop. Hooves on stone, unhurried, off to her left. The path was grass.
The stones rose out of the dark ahead.
There were seven, or nine; the count slid each time she took it. Weathered grey, each one gripped at the base by the roots of an ancient oak, so that stone and tree had grown into a single knuckled fist. Inside the ring the grass lay flattened in a slow spiral. The air stood warmer there. The wildflowers grew so thick they crackled underfoot like frost.
The pendant had gone from warm to hot. It glowed through her shirt, a seam of crimson at her collarbone, pulsing faster than her heart now, towing her towards the ring. Under her watch strap, the crescent scar on her left wrist itched for the first time since childhood.
She checked the phone to log the delivery. 02:17. It had been 23:38 at the gate, twelve minutes ago by her own counting. The screen flickered , refreshed, and said 23:39 with the smugness of a caught liar. No signal. The order screen spun its little wheel forever.
"Rory."
Eva's voice. Bright, warm, out there in the black between the oaks, and wrong, pressed flat like a recording played through a wall. Eva was in Brixton. Eva was asleep with earplugs in and the telly murmuring. Rory knew the shape of Eva's voice the way she knew her own hands, and this was a tracing of it.
She did not answer. Something in her, older than Cardiff, older than the stones, said don't give it your name back.
"Rory." Closer. "Laila." Her courier name, the one on the app, in Yu-Fei's voice. "Aurora." Her father's, soft the way it only went in court. It was reading her. It was working down the list like a man working through a bunch of keys.
Job. Do the job. She crossed into the ring, and the warmth closed over her like a held breath, and she set the bag on the flat stone at the spiral's heart, and photographed it with a phone that had forgotten what time was, and turned to go.
The chewing started behind her.
Wet. Unhurried. Open-mouthed. The smell of sesame oil and hot grease cut through the flower-sweet air. She looked back. The bag was gone . On the flat stone sat the receipt, weighed down with coins, old gold, cold when she touched one, stamped with the profile of a king she didn't know, a king with antlers. Sixty of them. Payment rendered.
The chewing came from somewhere without a body, and when her torch found it, it stopped, politely, the way you stop when someone enters the room.
She left the coins. Bait, Yu-Fei had said, and Rory was done arguing.
She walked out of the ring the way she'd come in, counting her own steps, thirty-one, and at thirty-one there should have been the deer track, and there was grass, unbroken, dewed, shining faintly under a moon she couldn't find. Her footprints in the dew led the other way. They led back into the ring. She stood at the end of them, in her own shoes, watching her own trail come walking home to her.
The phone died in her hand. Clip-clop, nearer now. The humming again, Suo Gân, harmonising with itself, a choir of one.
Between the two tallest stones the dark had thickened. It stood the way a door stands ajar, and cold breathed out of it, cold with a smell beneath, earth and salt and something long kept shut. The pendant dragged towards it hard enough to lift the chain off her skin, burning, blazing, crimson as a coal in a bellows. Rory dug her heels into the flattened grass and leaned away, and the cold said, in a woman's voice, in no voice, in the voice stones would have if stones could be bothered:
"Malphora."
No one living knew that name . She had never said it aloud. She had dreamed it, once or twice, the way you dream a word that was always yours.
"There you are," said the dark, with enormous satisfaction, and reached through.
A hand closed around her left wrist, thumb finding the crescent scar like a key finding its lock.