AI The pendant flared against her collarbone the moment her boot crossed the line between the last oak and the first.
Rory stopped. The warmth spread through the silver chain and into her skin, a steady pulse like a second heartbeat, faster and more insistent than her own. She pressed her palm flat against the crimson stone and counted to ten. It kept throbbing.
"So you do work," she murmured.
Richmond Park at eleven at night was meant to be empty. She had climbed the fence by Roehampton Gate with a torch in her teeth, torn her coat on a barb, and walked forty minutes through darkness with the pendant doing nothing at all. Now, three steps past the standing stones, it behaved as though she had walked into a furnace.
The rain had stopped an hour ago. Water still dripped from the oaks in slow, irregular taps, each one landing somewhere different, a soft percussion that never found a rhythm. Under it, the grass. She was standing on grass that should have been mud. Wildflowers pushed up around her ankles, blue and white, absurd in November, and when she touched one, the petals felt warm as skin.
"Eva?"
Her voice went out into the dark and did not come back. Not an echo , not a rustle. The trees simply swallowed it whole.
Rory swung the torch beam across the clearing. The circle of standing stones was wider than she remembered, wide enough for a cricket pitch, and the great oaks at its edge leaned inward like people listening. Between their roots, something pale caught the light. A ribbon. Pale blue silk, knotted around a root, the ends frayed as though something had worried at them.
Her stomach dropped. She knew that ribbon . She had watched Eva tie it into her plait the morning she left, laughing about how the colour clashed with her coat.
Rory crouched and worked the knot loose with two fingers. The silk was soaked through, cold, and smelled of iron. She lifted it to her face and breathed in. Iron and wet earth and, faint beneath, something sweet. Something gone over.
"Right," she said, mostly to hear a voice that was her own. "Right."
She stood and swept the torch further into the clearing. There, a shoe. A trainer, white, lying on its side in the flowers. Twenty feet beyond it, the other one, upright, as if someone had stepped out of it and kept walking.
She walked toward them. The pendant beat faster.
Halfway across the clearing, the sounds began.
Not loud. That was the thing. A rustle in the canopy to her left, and when she turned the beam there, nothing but branches, and the branches were still. She held the light steady on them for a full ten seconds. She counted. A leaf turned over on the wet grass behind her, and she spun about face, and there was nothing there either, only the line of oaks and a darkness between them so solid the torch could not push through it.
She thought, quite calmly, that in an ordinary wood the torch would at least show her bark at forty feet. Here, the beam simply stopped. The dark drank it.
"Eva!" Louder now. The word cracked in her throat. "Eva, it's Rory!"
The clearing answered with a long, low creak. An oak bending. Then another, further off, at the far edge, a sound like a ship's hull shifting in a swell. The whole ring of trees, flexing.
Rory backed toward the standing stones. Nowhere to run yet, she told herself. Find the edge, keep the stones behind you, keep something solid at your back. She had spent enough nights in London to know that you did not let a strange place get behind you.
Her torch found the second shoe. She picked it up. The laces were still tied, and inside the heel, a small dark smear. She did not look at it closely.
Then the flowers moved.
Not all of them. A patch at the clearing's centre, a foot wide, where the blue blooms bent outward from a point and then slowly straightened. As though something small had passed through and the stems were remembering how to stand. She aimed the torch there. Nothing. Wet grass, flowers, a stone the size of a fist.
She took a photograph. Then another. Each flash lit the clearing white for a heartbeat and left her vision worse afterwards, a green burn in the middle of each eye, so on the third flash she stopped, because the darkness after it felt deeper than before, and in the darkness, she was no longer certain how many standing stones there had been.
Twelve. There had been twelve. She had counted them on the way in, because counting was what she did when fear got into her hands.
She turned the torch slowly , bringing the beam around the circle, and counted them again.
One. Two. Three. Four. Five. She passed the gap where the grass had been trodden flat by Eva's feet and swallowed. Six. Seven. Eight.
Nine.
The beam slid across nine and the ninth was taller than the others, narrow, grey, and she was certain, certain, she had walked past it an hour ago and it had come no higher than her shoulder. She raised the light to its top. The stone stood a good three feet over her head now, and its surface was not rough. It was smooth. Wet, and smooth, and curved, and at the top it tapered to something that looked almost like a shoulder.
She lowered the torch. She did not want to see the rest of it.
"It's the grove," she said. The words came out flat and thin. "Time moves differently here. Eva said so. An hour inside could be days out. That's all this is."
The pendant blazed against her chest.
And then, from somewhere deep between the trees, very quietly, someone called her name.
Not Rory. Not Eva's voice, not any voice she knew.
"Laila."
The name she had not used since Cardiff. The name on a passport she had burned in a bin behind Euston station. Her hands went cold, then hot, and the torch slipped in her grip, saved only by the strap around her wrist.
"Who's there?"
"Laila." Closer now, though no leaf stirred, no branch bent. It came from everywhere and nowhere, from inside the ring of stones and outside it at once, and it was not unkind. That was the worst of it. It sounded fond.
"That's not my name," she said.
The flowers at her feet leaned toward her, all of them, every blue head in the clearing swinging round as one, and the wind that should have come with such a movement never came. The grass was still. The air was still. Only the flowers moved, and the oaks above them, and the pale ribbon in her fist, which stirred against her wrist as if something out in the dark had breathed.
The pendant's pulse stopped.
Not slowed. Stopped. Cold silver bit into her skin and the crimson stone went dull as a pebble, and in the same instant the torch beam shrank to a yellow pinprick, and then to nothing, and she was standing in a dark so complete she could not tell whether her eyes were open.
"Laila," it said again, and now it was at her ear, and she felt the warmth of breath on her neck, though she had heard no footsteps and the grass around her was undisturbed.
Three rules for a bad night in a strange place, she thought. She had learned them the hard way, in alleyways, in a flat above a bar, in the years that had taught her to sleep with a chair against the door.
Don't answer to a name that isn't yours.
Don't run toward a voice that knows you.
And never, ever turn round.
So she did not turn. She reached into her pocket, found the lighter she had brought for exactly this, and struck it.
The flame caught. Small, orange, useless against the dark. But it lit the flowers, and the flowers had risen. Every stalk in the clearing stood knee-high now, weaving slowly this way and that like a crowd deciding where to look.
Beyond them, between the oaks, something the size of the ninth stone began to walk.