AI The gate should have been locked, and the fact that it wasn't stayed in Rory's mind long after she pushed it open. The iron was cold enough to sting her palm, and it swung inward without a chain, without the usual rattle of a padlock she had heard on other nights when she cycled past Richmond Park after her shift. She stood a moment with one hand still on the bar, listening for a keeper, a car, a late dog walker, anything to make the open gate look ordinary. There was only the dark beyond the trees and the faint smell of damp earth. She told herself she would turn back if the pendant went cold. Instead she stepped through and pulled the gate shut behind her, too quietly, as if someone might have been watching her do it.
She should have gone straight home. By day she worked part-time deliveries for Yu-Fei Cheung's Golden Empress, and the last order had left her arms aching and her bike light flickering in the rain that never quite fell. Her flat above Silas' bar would have been warm, the floorboards creaking under the familiar weight of the building, and she could have put the kettle on and pretended this had never happened. But for three nights the pendant had woken her at the same hour, warm against her sternum, pulsing once and then again, as if something under the floor had pressed a fingertip to it. It had come in a plain box with no stamp and no return address, the sort of gift that made her uneasy rather than grateful. A folded card inside had said only, Keep it close when it wakes. She had meant to ask Eva about it, to laugh it off over coffee, but instead she had kept it secret, and tonight she had followed the map scratched on the back of the card all the way here, into Richmond Park after closing, because the stone in her hand was warm again and would not settle.
Inside the park the dark had a different weight . Rory was used to London at night, to the orange spill of streetlights and the reassuring noise of traffic even on quiet roads. Here the black between the trees was unbroken, and her bright blue eyes took a long time to adjust. She ducked under a low branch, her straight shoulder-length black hair brushing her neck, and thought abstractly that at five foot six she was tall enough to notice every branch that had been left unchanged by the wind. There should have been deer. Richmond was famous for them, and at night they moved through the grass in pale, uneasy shapes, their breath visible, their eyes catching torchlight. She heard no hoofbeats, no snort, no sudden rustle as an animal broke cover. Even the usual small sounds, a fox in the undergrowth, a distant owl, had been switched off. Her own footsteps were too loud on the path, and the louder they seemed, the more carefully she placed them, until walking became a conscious act she resented.
The standing stones found her before she went looking for them. She had not expected to reach the Grove so quickly , and the suddenness of their arrival made her stop. Ancient oak did not grow in a ring, yet the trees stood that way , their trunks dark and ridged, their branches interlocking overhead. Between them were stones older than the park, older than the city in any form she could picture, each one furred with moss and damp. Underfoot the path was soft, not with fallen leaves but with flowers . Bluebells, cow parsley, buttercups and a scatter of white star-like blooms she could not name crowded the verge in a profusion that belonged to late spring, not to this cold, wet night. They were not dead and they were not struggling . They looked tended, their petals beaded with water, their stems lifting eagerly toward a moon she could not see. Rory crouched without meaning to and touched one, and the petals closed a little where her finger had been, then opened again when she drew away. The soil beneath her boots was warm through the sole.
She stood too quickly and felt the pendant pull at the silver chain around her neck. It was no heavier than a thumbnail and no larger, a deep crimson stone with a faint inner glow that she had learned to see only in darkness. Now, in the Grove, the glow steadied and strengthened, and warmth spread from the stone into her skin in small, deliberate pulses. Not heat from her body. A beat waited, then another, as though it were answering something. Her heart answered before she could stop it. She pulled the pendant out from under her shirt and held it in her left hand, where the small crescent-shaped scar on her wrist caught the crimson light. The scar, left from a childhood accident she could barely remember, felt suddenly raised and tight, as if the cold had found the old break in her skin and refused to leave.
The first sound came from somewhere too far away to place. A tap, regular and patient, like a knuckle against wood. It stopped. It began again, closer. Rory held her breath and counted the intervals without wanting to, the way she had once counted the seconds between Evan's footsteps on a stairwell and her own front door. She knew what it was to be followed by a person. A person got tired, changed pace, announced himself by accident with a cough or a shoe scraping stone. This had none of the clumsy humanity she knew how to escape. The tapping matched her steps for a while, then fell half a beat behind, then found her again. When she stopped walking, the tapping stopped too, but not at once. There was a small, terrible delay, as if whatever made the sound was listening for her decision before it made its own.
She took out her phone because thinking had always steadied her more than panic ever could. Cool-headed was what her friends called her, quick out of the box, and she reached for that part of herself as she reached for a rail. The screen lit her face blue-white and showed no signal, which was impossible so near the road, and the time read eleven forty-seven. She had pushed through the gate at eleven forty-five, or perhaps at eleven twenty, because the walk from the restaurant had blurred with tiredness and rain. She stared at the minutes until they changed and convinced herself the clock was merely old. Then she put the phone away, and in the returning darkness she saw a shape between two of the stones.
It did not move. That was the worst of it. A deer might have stood frozen in the beam of a torch, all long legs and listening ears, but this was too tall and too narrow, and it occupied the space between the trees with an ease that made the trees look like they had been arranged around it. She blinked, and in the space of that blink the shape was gone . Not running, not fading. Gone. She blinked again, harder, and felt her eyes water from the effort. The stones were empty. The flowers swayed where there was no wind, a slow movement that travelled outward from the place where the shape had been, as if something had passed through them too quickly to see.
"Hello?" she said, and her voice came out smaller than she wanted. It did not carry. The sound seemed to be absorbed by the damp air before it reached the stones, leaving a silence that felt personal. She waited for an answer because after saying it she had the absurd certainty that an answer was the one thing she did not want. Nothing replied. Then, from behind her, so close that she felt the words against the back of her neck, someone said her name.
It was not Eva's voice, though at first it borrowed her friend's softness. Eva would have said Rory, with the familiar lilt of someone who had known her since childhood. This voice said Aurora. It said it slowly , with a teacher's patience, as if testing the shape of her full name in the air . Jennifer Carter might have spoken it that way, her Welsh mother who had taught in Cardiff and rarely lost her temper. Rory's hand tightened around the pendant until the chain bit into her fingers. She did not turn. She had learned in London that turning too fast could be a mistake, and whatever stood behind her was not a man with bad intentions and a predictable stride. Still, she made herself breathe in through her nose, out through her mouth, and she said, "Who's there?" Her own voice sounded like it belonged to someone else .
No one answered. She walked on. The path curved between the oaks and showed her the same bent branch she had ducked under minutes before, the same stone split by a dark line of moss, the same patch of bluebells bright as struck matches. She had not turned around, and she was certain she had kept to the main path, yet the Grove seemed to have folded and offered her its beginning again. The pendant pulsed faster now, warm enough to make her palm sweat. Her black hair stuck to her temples. She thought of the flat above Silas' bar and the cracked mug she kept by the sink and the way the radiator clicked before it heated the room. Ordinary things. She clung to them deliberately , naming them in her head, because naming was a sort of anchoring and she was not ready to admit that the anchor might be dragging.
The footprints appeared in the soft earth beside the path. She noticed them because they were bare, long and narrow, and because they were wet even though the stones overhead kept the rain off. They kept pace with her, a little to her left, as if someone were walking beside her without quite stepping onto the path. When she looked down directly she could see only her own bootprints filling with water. When she looked ahead, the prints were still there. She slowed. The prints slowed. She stepped sideways, intending to cross the path and put distance between herself and the unseen walker, and found flowers crushed under her feet that had not been flattened before. The bare prints changed direction with her. Whatever it was, it was not following from behind. It was keeping company.
Rory stopped walking altogether and let the silence assemble itself around her. The tapping did not resume. The breathing she thought she heard was her own, caught in her throat. She counted to ten and took one step forward, then back, then forward again. Each time, after the smallest pause, a sound answered her from the trees, not a footstep but a soft displacement of air, like a coat brushing a branch . She began to understand that running would only teach it her speed. She had always been good at improvising under pressure, at finding the unexpected route through a problem. So she did not run. She chose the direction that made the least sense, away from the path and deeper between two stones where the oaks leaned too close, and she walked with her hands by her sides and her eyes fixed on the ground.
The glow from the pendant lit her fingers from below. Crimson light pooled in the lines of her palm. When she lifted her left hand, the crescent scar showed white at its centre, an old moon on her wrist, and for a moment she thought of the unknown benefactor who had chosen her for this. An unknown benefactor did not send a stranger a stone that woke in the dark. She had replayed the delivery a dozen times, the plain box, the card, the lack of any name to trace. Now the stone beat harder, once, twice, three times, until her own pulse was only an echo of it. The warmth spread up the chain to her neck and made her swallow. Somewhere ahead, beyond the blind weave of trees, something large and slow shifted its weight , and the flowers bent toward it all at once.
She changed direction again, sharply , and came out where she had not expected to be: at the edge of the Grove, with the standing stones behind her and the rest of Richmond Park opening into ordinary night. The change was so abrupt that she stumbled on grass that seemed suddenly normal under her boots . A fox barked once, far off, and the sound was a shock of relief. It was followed by the low, distant hum of a car on a road she could not see. She did not look back as she walked. She kept her pace steady and took care not to hurry, even when the soft sound resumed at the edge of her hearing, keeping the same distance, one step behind and to the left, patient as a shadow that had learned to move on its own. Her phone, when she dared to glance at it, said twelve oh three. The time inside the Grove had stretched and contracted like a held breath, and she could not tell whether she had been gone for minutes or for the better part of an hour.
The gate was where she had left it, and this time she opened it with both hands. Beyond it the tarmac of the road shone wet under a streetlight, and the light made the world look plain and honest again. She stood for a moment in that light with her back to the park, breathing hard, the pendant still warm in her fist. When she lifted her head she saw, at the edge of the streetlight's circle, a shape that was only a suggestion of darkness against darkness, tall enough to be a tree and still enough to be something else. It did not come closer. It did not need to. Rory understood, with the clear and unheroic certainty that had carried her out of the Grove, that it would follow her home at exactly the pace she set, and that if she turned to face it she would give it the only thing it had asked for all night. So she buttoned her coat over the pendant, tucked her hair behind her ears, and walked toward the noise of the city, listening for the step that was not hers and refusing, step after step, to look back.