AI The stone was warm. That was the first wrong thing.
Rory snatched her hand back and flexed her fingers. Frost silvered the grass of Richmond Park. Her breath smoked. And yet the standing stone, older than the city at her back, held heat like a banked coal.
"Geology. Deep earth. Fine."
The dark took her voice apart and handed nothing back.
Under her fleece, the Heartstone pendant gave another slow pulse against her sternum. Three nights of this. Each one stronger. Tonight it had woken her at half eleven, hot through her pyjama top, and set its hook behind her ribs, and she had dressed and caught the night bus out of Hammersmith like a woman sleepwalking. Whoever had posted it through her letterbox, no card, no name, only a silver chain in a box, had known exactly what it would do. She wanted answers. She had told Eva she was working a late drop for Yu-Fei.
The gap between the two nearest stones stood wide as a door. The pendant pulled her towards it, and Rory, who prided herself on not being pulled anywhere by anyone, not since Evan, went anyway. Answers. That was the deal she had made with herself on the bus.
She stepped through, and the world changed pressure.
Silence closed over her ears like deep water. The park's distant hum, the A-road, the foxes, gone. Inside the ring of stones the frost ended in a clean line, as if someone had drawn it with a ruler. Wildflowers furred the grass instead. Foxgloves. Cowslips. Tall spires of something white she couldn't name, all of it blooming in November, all of it breathing out a sweetness that sat at the back of her throat like a funeral parlour.
Second wrong thing.
Her mobile said 03:47. Then it said 00:12. Then the screen died under her thumb, and the torch she had lifted from the restaurant flickered once, twice, and settled into a thin yellow thread that reached about as far as her doubt.
"Right. List it."
Her voice came out steadier than her hands. One, warm stone, geology. Two, flowers, microclimate, Richmond had strange corners, everyone said so. Three, cheap torch, cheap phone. She worked the list the way she worked difficult tables at the Golden Empress, one plate at a time, no panic, and her heart began to believe her.
Then she heard her own footsteps arrive half a beat late.
She stopped. The clearing stopped with her. Grass, flowers, the slow turn of her breath.
She took one step. Crunch. And after it, soft as a secret, another crunch.
She stood still and counted to ten. Nothing. She tapped her toe twice against the turf. Two small thuds. Then, a polite half-second later, a third.
"Wind."
The clearing had no wind. The foxgloves stood still as a congregation.
A blackbird began to sing from the oaks beyond the stones, a full daylight song, liquid and confident, the sort of song that belonged to June mornings and garden fences. Rory looked up, and the instant her eyes found the branch, the song cut off. Not trailed. Cut. The silence afterwards had a held-breath quality, the silence of a room where everyone has stopped talking because you walked in.
She became aware, the way you become aware of a toothache, of movement at the edge of her sight. A figure between the oaks. Tall. Patient. She turned her head. A sapling stood there, thin and silver-barked, leaves trembling though nothing stirred them.
She looked away. Counted five. Looked back. The sapling stood six feet closer.
"Lovely. Statues. We're doing statues."
Counting seemed wise. She walked the inside of the ring and counted the standing stones, touching none of them. Twelve. She walked it again, slower, because twelve was a number with dignity, and this time she counted thirteen.
The thirteenth stone was narrower than the others. It hunched. It leaned into the clearing the way a person leans into a conversation they should not be hearing. She did not touch it. She gave it a wide berth, and the whole time she passed it, the skin between her shoulder blades drew tight as lacing.
That was when the humming started.
A tune. Low, unhurried, a little flat in the middle, where the hummer always went flat. Her mother's tune, the one from the kitchen in Cardiff, the one that lived under the sound of running taps and Sunday lamb. Rory's whole body went cold in a way the frost had never managed.
"Mam?"
Stupid. Stupid. Twenty-five years old and the word still came out small.
The humming stopped.
"Aurora," said the clearing. The voice came from everywhere, from the flowers, from the ground under her boots. It was a kind voice. It was wrong the way a smile with too many teeth is wrong.
She said nothing. Her hand had closed around the pendant without her permission, and it throbbed against her palm, faster now, eager.
"Rory," said the clearing, tasting the name, and she heard her own contempt for it in its mouth.
Then, softer, with the exact Cardiff lilt , the exact drop at the end.
"Laila."
Nobody called her that. Nobody alive called her that except her mother, and her mother was asleep in Cardiff with the cat on her feet and the radio murmuring, her mother was not standing in a flower-drunk clearing at midnight in Richmond Park. Still, Rory's knees answered before her head did, one small step towards the sound, traitor knees, and the crescent scar on her left wrist began to itch.
"Malphora," said the clearing.
The pendant flared. Pain seared her palm. She hissed and let go, and in that one white instant every flower in the clearing turned to face her. All at once. Hundreds of small faces. A congregation after all.
The chain had gone taut. It pulled, not towards the stones, not towards the gap she had come through, but inwards, towards the heart of the clearing , where the grass dipped into a hollow she could have sworn had not been there a minute ago. The air above the hollow shivered the way air shivers over summer tarmac. The pendant pulled and pulled, a magnet finding its true north, and Rory understood, with the clean bright horror of a locked door finally opening, that it had never been leading her to the grove.
It had been leading her here. To this exact spot. Or it had been leading something else to her.
From the hollow, in a voice she knew better than any voice on earth because it was hers, the clearing spoke.
"Wind. Foxes. London has foxes."
It was mocking her. It was learning her.
She backed away. Three steps, four, heel catching on a root. She turned to run for the gap in the stones, and the gap was not there. The ring stood unbroken, shoulder to shoulder, twelve stones or thirteen, all of them warm, all of them listening. The narrow one, the hunched one, was unfolding.
"Laila, love," said her mother's voice, from directly behind her, close enough that the words stirred her hair. "You came. I knew you'd come."
Cold fingers closed around her left wrist. A thumb found the crescent scar with the ease of long practice, and pressed.
"Found you," whispered her own voice, into her ear.