AI Rory had no business being in Richmond Park at that hour, and she knew it in the precise, unsentimental way she knew most things. The gates were supposed to be locked. The delivery run from the Golden Empress had ended at ten, and she had showered and changed in the small flat above Silas' bar, hung her black hair loose down to her shoulders, and then sat on the edge of her bed with a folded piece of paper and a pendant that would not stay cool.
The note had not been signed. It had been slipped under her door while she worked, or left on the counter at the restaurant where Yu-Fei Cheung pretended not to see it. Richmond. The Grove. Midnight. Bring it with you.
It. The Heartstone pendant. A deep crimson stone roughly the size of a thumbnail on a thin silver chain, given to her a month earlier by an unknown benefactor in a box with no name on it, and since then warm against her skin in a way a stone had no right to be. She had told herself a dozen logical stories about it. A novelty. A trick. A cheap heat pack. She believed none of them entirely, which was why she was here.
She cut through the park because the note had said the Grove, and because a part of her trained at Cardiff to argue both sides of a case wanted to see, with her own bright blue eyes, what would make her go out at night for a gem.
At eleven forty-seven she passed the last lamp on the path and the trees swallowed the light. She was five foot six and had to duck under a low oak branch that had not been there on her afternoon deliveries, or perhaps had been and she had been too busy dodging cyclists to mark it. The air changed as she walked. That was the first wrong thing, and it was a small one, rationalizable. London air in Richmond smelled of damp leaves and distant traffic and, faintly, cooking oil from her uniform that clung to her jacket no matter how often she washed it. Inside the standing stones the smell was different. It was colder, and sweeter underneath, like wet earth after rain that had not fallen.
The stones marked the boundary. She had seen them in daylight when taking a shortcut to a house on the edge of the park, ancient and lichen-spotted and unremarkable, waist-high and rough. At night they were taller than she remembered. The oaks around them had grown closer together, or the path had narrowed. She counted as she stepped between two of them. Seven stones in a broken circle. She counted again without meaning to, because counting was a thing she did when professors tried to rush her. Eight. The eighth was set deeper in, where the ground dipped, and its top was flat, as if something had sat on it for a long time.
She put her hand in her pocket and touched the crescent scar on her left wrist, a childhood accident, a fall on a Cardiff pavement she could still reconstruct in detail. The habit steadied her. The pendant was warm. Then, as she took the last step into the clearing, it pulsed .
That was the word her brain supplied. Pulsed. A faint inner glow spread under the crimson surface, and the heat increased against the hollow of her throat, then faded, then increased again, in a rhythm that was not quite her heartbeat . She lifted the chain and held the stone between finger and thumb. It was warm. When she let it fall back against her skin, it was cool. When she held it again, it warmed immediately, as if it liked being looked at.
She told herself she was imagining it. She was cool-headed. She was intelligent. She was not the sort of girl who believed in curses or fairies or pocket dimensions between Earth and somewhere else. She had left an abusive ex, left Cardiff, left pre-law, and built a life out of deliveries and a flat above a bar and friends who called her Rory and meant it affectionately. Eva would have laughed at her now. Eva would have said, come home, you idiot, and put the kettle on.
The wildflowers stopped her before Eva's voice could finish.
They bloomed in a ring around the centre of the clearing, year-round, the location said, but in November, at night, under no moon worth mentioning, they should not have been open at all. Cornflowers and foxgloves and cowslips, their colours muted to grey in the dark, their heads lifting at the same time, like faces turning toward a sound. She walked closer, because not walking closer would have felt like fear, and she did not want to be afraid of flowers. She crouched. The petals were cold and damp. The soil was soft and impossibly rich, black and warm. Her black hair fell forward over her shoulders and brushed the blooms, and for a second she had the absurd thought that they were leaning away from her hair, or toward it.
She stood up too quickly . The pendant pulsed again, harder this time, a throb of warmth that climbed up her neck.
From the trees beyond the stones came a sound. A step. Not loud. A single, deliberate step on leaf litter, then another. She pictured a deer. Richmond had deer, famous deer, lords of the park with antlers like branching coral. A deer would make that sound . A deer would be still between the oaks, watching her with dark eyes that caught no light. She waited for the third step. It did not come.
She tried the out-of-the-box approach, the thing that had always made her useful on a bad night at the restaurant when an order went wrong and Yu-Fei needed a solution that was not on the menu. If something was watching, it expected her to run or to freeze. She did neither. She clapped once, sharp, and turned in a slow circle on the spot, taking in every tree, every stone, every shadow at the edge of her vision.
The clap had no echo .
That was impossible in a clearing surrounded by trees and stone. Sound should have come back to her, thinned and late. Instead the clap seemed to fall into the dark in front of her and stay there. The silence that followed was not the normal silence of a park at night, which always had foxes and a distant siren and the buzz of a streetlight somewhere. This silence had weight . It pressed on her eardrums. Her own breathing, which she had not been listening to, suddenly sounded too loud.
She clapped again, louder, and this time said, "Hello?"
Her voice went out and did not return. She heard herself as if someone else had said it, a long way off, and then nothing.
Movement caught her eye, at the far side of the circle, between two stones. A vertical thing, taller than she was, dark against dark. It did not step forward. It did not move at all, which was worse. Deer shifted. People shifted. This thing held itself with a patience that implied it had been holding itself for a very long time and intended to continue. She blinked. It was gone . Or perhaps it had never been there, and her eyes, starved of light, had invented a shape to fill the gap between the trees.
She blinked again, deliberately , and looked at the place where it had been. The wildflowers there were standing a little straighter.
The pendant throbbed with heat. She pulled it out from under her shirt. The crimson stone glowed faintly now, enough that she could see the silver around it, enough that it threw a small, soft light on her hand. In that light she saw her own fingers clearly, and the scar on her wrist, and beyond her hand, for a fraction of a second, a reflection that was not hers. Not a face. Just a darker blue, like eyes in the trees, catching the glow and returning it. She turned her head. There was nothing. The light died in the stone as quickly as it had come, and the cold returned.
She wanted to make a list. Half of her education was making lists under stress. One, the gates. Two, the stones. Three, the flowers. Four, the echo . Five, the time.
She took her phone from her pocket at eleven fifty-two, she thought, though she had not looked at the time on arrival. The screen showed no signal and a clock that read three minutes past midnight. Or, when she pressed the button again, a clock that read eleven fifty-three. She locked it and unlocked it. The time flickered between the two as if undecided, then settled on a time that was neither, a string of numbers she did not recognize in the dim glow. She put the phone away before she could read it again. The moon, when she remembered to look for it, was in the same place it had been over the trees. It had not moved. Not a fraction. She had read that time moved differently in places like this, in stories meant to warn children. She had not believed it. She believed the moon was being stubborn.
Behind her, something brushed a branch. Not a step. A brush, soft and unhurried, as if a shoulder had passed too close. Her hair lifted on her neck. She whipped around. The clearing was empty. The flowers were still. The stones were still.
Except now there were nine of them.
She counted again, slowly , mouthing the numbers. Seven around the outside. One in the dip. One added, at her back, where she had entered, a fresh stone in the sense that the moss on it was darker, undisturbed, as if it had always been there and she had only just learned to see it. It was flat-topped, like the one in the dip. Like a seat.
She considered screaming. She considered that screaming might be what it wanted, or what it was listening for. She was cool-headed. She filed the thought and moved on.
"Rory."
The voice said her name from the trees, not loudly. It was not a man's voice and not a woman's, and it had the cadence of someone who had learned English from other people saying her name in other places. It sounded, horribly, a little like her mother, Jennifer, back in Cardiff, saying it across a kitchen when she was sixteen and in trouble. It sounded a little like Eva, too. It was Rory as she was called by friends, softened at the edges, as if the speaker was trying it out.
She did not answer. Answering felt like giving it permission .
The pendant was warm again. The warmth travelled in waves now, a pulse every few seconds, and with each pulse she became more certain, not of anything supernatural, but of a simple, animal fact she had been trying to list her way around. She was not alone in the clearing. She had not been alone since she stepped between the stones. Something had been there before her that night, and it had noticed the thing around her neck, and it was deciding what to do about it.
She took a step toward the entrance, between the two stones she had come through, to test the theory of leaving. The trees there were closer than before. The path, which had been a gap in the undergrowth, was now a wall of dark trunks and interlocked branches. She pushed through anyway, shoulder first, the way she would push through a crowd at Silas' bar. A branch scratched her cheek. Another caught her hair and tugged, gently , as if a hand had closed around a lock of it and was testing the hold. She pulled free. When she emerged on the other side, she was in the clearing again, facing the flat stones and the flowers. She was certain she had walked forward. Her body insisted she had not turned around. The view insisted otherwise.
She tried the opposite direction. Same result. The Grove was not large. It should have taken three minutes to cross. She walked for what felt like ten, counting steps, one hundred, two hundred, and came out between the same two stones, breathing hard, hair damp with sweat at her temples despite the cold. The pendant pulsed in time with her breathing now, or hers pulsed in time with it. She could no longer tell which was leading.
Something moved at the edge of her vision again. This time she did not blink. She let her eyes stay soft and unfocused, the trick she used when driving at night to see deer before they crossed. Between the oaks, not behind a stone but between two trunks where there should have been only darkness, a shape stood with its head tilted, as if listening to the inside of her skull . It was too tall. Its proportions were wrong in a way she could not name without looking directly, and looking directly felt like an invitation . She kept her eyes soft. It swayed, very slightly , in a wind that did not touch the flowers.
Then it was not there. Then, without any transition she could track, it was there again, a little closer.
Her rational mind offered a fox. Offered a drunk who had slipped the gates. Offered a trick of light from the pendant itself, a trick of exhaustion after a long shift. It offered them one after another, like plates being set down, and each time the plates were empty. The thing between the trees did not breathe in any way she could see. That was the worst of it. It did not need to. It was waiting for her to breathe first, and she realized, with a clarity that was almost peaceful, that she had been holding her breath for some time and that her lungs were beginning to ache.
She let the breath out slowly through her nose. The pendant cooled. The shape between the trees leaned forward, a fraction. In the glow of the stone, she saw, or thought she saw, that its face was a paler oval, smooth and unmarked, with no features she could focus on. The flowers all turned at once, not toward her, but toward it, as green stems bent in unison .
She heard breathing, her own and another's, offset by half a beat. In. Out. In, a fraction late. Out, a fraction late. It was learning the rhythm, or it was teaching it to her. The sound came from all around her and from nowhere, from behind the stones, from under the ground. She put her hands over her ears. The breathing continued, inside her own chest, echoing in her ribs. She took her hands away because she did not want to be deaf when it decided to stop pretending to be patient.
She thought of Evan, because fear often fetched the worst memories first, and she was angry at herself for it. She had not survived him to be frightened into running in circles among trees. She straightened her shoulders. Her hair fell back into place, straight and black and heavy. Her blue eyes, which in daylight were her most ordinary feature, felt in the dark like they were picking up light from places she could not see. She lifted her chin.
"I came here because of this," she said, to the trees, to the stones, to the shape that was no longer between the trees but behind her, which she knew without turning. Her voice shook only a little. "I want to know who gave it to me."
The silence after she spoke was different. It was attentive. The wildflowers opened wider. The pendant became warm, then hot, a pulse so strong she could feel it through her shirt. The glow lit her hands, her scar, the underside of her chin. In that light, the clearing was brighter than midnight had any right to be, and she could see that the central stone in the dip was not a stone at all, but a stone with something sitting on it, long-legged, patient , its head bowed as if in thought.
She did not turn. She walked, very slowly , backward toward the entrance she could no longer find, keeping her eyes on the flowers. The breathing followed her, still offset, still learning. The shape on the stone raised its head. She felt the movement more than she saw it, a change in the air pressure, a sense that it had stood up.
She stopped walking. She stood in the ring of flowers with the warmth of the pendant against her throat and the cold of the night on her face, and she listened. Somewhere beyond the stones, a siren rose and fell, so faint it might have been inside her own head. A dog barked, far away, in Richmond or in London or in some other version of the park. Her phone, in her pocket, vibrated once, a single, decisive buzz, and went still.
The stepped stone at her back, the ninth one, was warm when she brushed it with her fingers. She did not sit. She did not run. She planted her feet in the soft soil, cool-headed and terrified and entirely herself, and faced the centre of the Grove where the thing that was not alone with her had been waiting, she understood now, not for her, but for the pendant , and for whoever was foolhardy enough to bring it to the place where it belonged.