Run: 2026-02-17-01KHMRAZ73QTMPCSW5JE7G8DJ5

The grove smelled of wet moss and night-blooming flowers, a hundred subtle perfumes tangled under the trees. Rory slipped between the ancient oaks that rose like standing stones, their broad trunks silvered with lichen. Moonlight pooled on the grass as if it had substance, and the air held that strange, held-breath stillness the place always had—like a chapel waiting for someone to speak. She felt for the pendant at her throat, thumb catching the tiny heart of it, smooth as a river stone. It was warm already. “You come to feed a hunger that is not your own,” Isolde said softly. Her voice didn’t belong to any one age; it slid through the dark like a ribbon. Silver hair spilled down her back, gleaming in the lantern-moon. She moved, and the dew didn’t bend. “I’d settle for answers,” Rory said. She kept her tone loose. Conversation had edges here. Moonlight sifted through the canopy. A low wind lifted the fine hairs on her arms, then died. Nyx uncoiled from the shadow of a fallen limb with the easy disinterest of a cat. For a heartbeat they were nothing, a darker smear among darks, and then the outline of limbs and shoulders drew itself from the air. Their eyes were two soft coins of violet that caught light where there shouldn’t be any. “It’s warmer,” Rory told them, curling her fingers around the pendant again. The silver chain clinked against her skin. “If this doesn’t lead anywhere, I’m buying our mysterious benefactor a drink and throwing this into the Thames.” “Warmth speaks of thresholds,” Nyx whispered. Their voice lifted as if a draft carried it. “Something stirs on the other side.” Isolde’s pale gaze shifted, the kind of look that saw two places at once. “A door that eats those who eat. Step through only with your mouth closed.” Rory snorted. “Not much of a feast, then.” “Appetite is never sated by the mouth,” Isolde said, and if there was a smile, it was the sort that might not be there at all. Rory studied the space between the two oaks. The grove’s boundary stones had always made her itch, their bark warped into shapes that didn’t look like any tree she knew, whorls that suggested eyes. Tonight the air between them shook, subtle as heat on a road. She narrowed her eyes and, because stubbornness had gotten her this far alive, she reached her left hand into the shimmer. Cold kissed her fingers, then pressure, like a second skin trying to push her back out. The little heartstone beat once against her throat in answer. It wasn’t pain—more like the aftertaste of winter. She drew her hand back to find it pale with dew. Her crescent scar flashed a paler line on her wrist. “Not just a threshold,” she murmured. “The Veil is thin as a soap bubble,” Nyx breathed. “Push, and you will fall through.” Isolde lifted her chin toward the trees beyond. “The sky there is never blue, Aurora. Do not expect your eyes to tell you true.” She hates it when you use my full name, Rory thought—a reflex, bitter and private. But she nodded. She dug the moonsilver knife from inside her jacket, the Fae-forged blade that sat cold against her ribs on nights she couldn’t sleep. It shed a faint, wrong sheen even without moonlight. For all her bravado, that cold steadied her. She took one slow breath. She stepped. The world snapped. Her ears popped. The familiar damp of London vanished like a coat lifted away. Warmth washed over her, and not the blunt press of a summer day—more like the warm blush of a fire-lit dining room when someone has just pulled a pie from the oven. She stumbled one step then caught herself. The ground under her boots gave slightly, like soil too rich with loam, and breathed sweet air up at her. It smelled like roasting chestnuts. Above, the sky lay in a wide burn of amber, viscous as poured honey. Light drifted in syrupy ropes across it, and distant motions pulsed rather than moved, as if even time had to thicken here. Nyx came through at her shoulder, shadow finding new ways to be shadow in the honeyed gloom. Isolde stepped after, her hair a river in the unreal glow. Their passage left no mark on the earth but for Rory’s bootprint, which, to her sharp unease, slowly puffed back up and smoothed itself, as if the ground were inhospitable to absence. Vines rose in ranks ahead of them, trellised on lattices that looked like polished bone and smoked glass. Leaves wider than plates turned to face her as if curious, veins pulsing with light in their green like the slow breath of sleeping animals. Grapes hung in temptingly perfect clusters: dark as spilled ink, pale as new pearls, bloody with some inner juice. They wept; dew trembled at their ends in globes so clear they hardly seemed wet, each bead reflecting a tiny, warped version of her face. “Dymas,” Nyx exhaled, tasting the word like wine. Rory swallowed and made her hands stay still. Every sense felt turned up to cruel. The vineyards went on in neat geometries that became less neat the farther they ran, until the trellises knotted into arches and the arches into domes through which orchards spilled, branches re-branching into cunning shapes. The fruit was not fruit as she knew it. Pears that shone metallic at the skin, their flesh spiraled into little labyrinths of seed. Figs with threads like living hair. Some hung low, velvet and promising; others tugged back on their stems as the air stirred, pulling away, resentful, as if they’d learned enough to have opinions. Sound came next—the far clatter of cutlery, a roar of laughter, a roar again, closer, that turned out to be nothing more than the steady boil of a river. The water was red. Not blood—she wasn’t going to do herself the kindness of believing they’d make it that easy—but something about it made her tongue heavy even catching the scent, a sweetness that meant to end in a headache. Foam winked odd colors where it smacked the black banks. On the other side, a long, low building opened its mouth to the world: an unbroken kitchen line running a hundred feet or more, hearths breathing orange, spits turning meat that gleamed as if oiled with stars. “Don’t touch,” Isolde said, and somehow her voice threaded through everything without needing to rise. “As if that was my first instinct,” Rory said. It wasn’t. But the ache behind her teeth at the thought of sinking them into one of those grapes unnerved her. She couldn’t tell if some part near her spine liked the unease. They moved. The trellises became porticos; the porticos bled seamlessly into avenues, the vines trained into living columns that carried roofs of woven boughs. Shadows moved under those roofs that were not wind. The pendant lay against her sternum, ticking small heat into her. Not frantic. Patient. Come on. This way. Rory kept one palm on the dagger’s hilt, the metal a patient winter under her skin. Every so often she brushed a leaf with her sleeve and something soft chittered in the depth of the plant that wasn’t quite insect. Laughter burst close to her left. She flinched—instinct—and found three women under a pergola arranging small pastries into a tower that should have fallen hours ago. Their aprons were white and too clean, their fingers red-stained to the wrist. They moved with impossible precision, placing each tart in increments so shallow she’d have needed a compass to see the difference. One of them turned her head. Her eyes looked like sugared fruit peels—candied translucence over the wet grief of a human iris. “Guests,” the woman said, almost singing, and the others echoed her, their voices like flatware on tile. They smiled. The smiles didn’t reach anything inside. Behind them, through an arch, men in tall hats argued with knives held like styluses. The air roiled with garlic, smoke, the metal-hit of fresh blood, cinnamon so fine it powdered their hair where it drifted. “We won’t keep you,” Rory said, brisk. “We’re lost.” The woman’s smile dented. “Here, no one is lost. You are simply not yet far enough in.” Her gaze slid to the pendant under Rory’s collarbone. “Oh. That has been here before.” Rory felt her jaw work. “It was a gift.” “Many gifts are returnable,” the woman murmured. For a heartbeat something else looked out of her sugar-glazed eyes—the flare of a small-town chef faced with the kitchen rush—and then whatever kept her here smoothed it away. “There is a table laid for you.” “We packed our own lunch,” Rory said, dry, and Nyx shifted, a sound like silk dragged on stone. Isolde tilted her head, mild and monstrous. “Tell us, sweet maker. Where does the river narrow?” The woman blinked. Her compulsion to answer something true twined with her inability to spend it freely—the Fae demand working backwards, binding her tongue. She lifted her chin, looked along the river to a place where the red water quickened. “Where the crushing-stones hang like moons.” She shook herself after as if waking. “You should not cross there. You will get exactly what you ask for.” “Excellent,” Isolde said, delighted. They slipped away before the women could call anyone, though Rory had the feeling the air did it for them, bearing their presence out the way a kitchen carries the smell of fish up four floors. The pulsing warmth at her throat urged a line invisible to anyone without a skin for it. They angled toward the river. Every footstep made the world answer. The path under their feet ran itself ahead, low growth curling, then uncurling with a satisfied cat stretch as they passed. The grapes breathed. The ground exhaled bakery-sweet, a yeast-heat that made her heart beat stupid for the pastry case at Golden Empress—custard buns, sesame-coiled swirls—even though she’d eaten before they came here. Hunger here wasn’t the soft emptiness of a missed meal. It scraped. At the river’s narrow, the banks drew close enough she could have thrown a stone over if she could find one; there were none. The crushing-stones hung from narrow arms above the current like pendulums, black, pocked, heavy, dipping in and out. Each time they descended, the water boiled under them. Ropes thicker than her waist ran up into the canopy of vines above, worked by no visible hand. Rory measured the distances, the rhythm of their swing; old habits she didn’t remember picking up, but there they were like muscle memory. Delivery drivers learned when to dart through London traffic. Same skill, different kitchen. “We could find a bridge,” Nyx suggested, curious rather than concerned. “Or we could break something someone spent a lot of time arranging,” Rory said. She watched two cycles, three, felt the tick of the pendant align with the swing. “On my mark.” They went when the left stone dipped and the right hung at the top of its arc. The current ran red and sullen under their boots. The stones passed with a low, resonant tone that made her ribs ache. She thought of a wine glass someone was rubbing the rim of. They leaped the last yard, and the right-hand stone came down hard enough behind them to slap her back with air. Her heart beat in her throat. She grinned without meaning to. Isolde’s hair had hardly stirred. On the far side the vines began to knot in ways that made her eyes want to slide off them—braids inside braids, whorls inside whorls. Spices rode the air in signatures she didn’t know how to name. Whole clove pods, cracked; star-anise halos. The path narrowed under trees whose bark limned quicksilver in the amber light. Fruit hung like bells. The first time one of them chimed, musical and clear, the sound dropped a weight in her belly as physical as a coin. Then another answered, then another. The grove ahead of them sang very softly. She couldn’t say if it was hymn or hunt. “Isolde.” Rory kept her voice low. “Tell me something true I can hold on to.” Isolde’s lips parted. Lavenders for eyes, and too much of the wild under the civilized edges. “You are hungrier for a name than you are for food,” she said, which was so acutely not what Rory wanted that she almost laughed. But it landed. A place between her lungs loosened around the truth of it. “All right,” Rory said. “I’ll take that.” They came to a wall. It rose not from stone, but woven boughs and sugar-glass panes flashed through with imperfections like trapped air. On the other side something moved—lights running, shadows crossing, the relentless choreography of a kitchen mid-service. The heartstone burned properly now, fire under her collarbone. “There,” Rory said. “Through that.” “A ward,” Nyx whispered, fingers tracing not-quite lines along the panes’ edges. Their touch left cooler smears in the air. “I brought a can opener,” Rory said, and put the Fae blade to the seam. Cold rushed from the knife up into her wrist, an arctic thread that made the heat of this place turn feverish. The blade didn’t bite so much as part. Sugar sang, a brittle music, hairline fractures running in lace along the glass. Light fell out through the cut like syrup, pooling around their boots. Rory angled the blade, patient. She’d learned to open taped boxes with a single strip left uncut. Same trick. She breathed, and for a moment the cold under her grip felt like another hand on hers, teaching, steadying—no one she knew, and yet the shape of it was familiar in the way pain is. The last of the sugar let go. The ward slit collapsed inward with the dry sound of a wedding cake failing, and all at once they were hit by a wall of heat and noise so complete it stole her breath. The kitchen beyond was a cathedral to appetite. Fires crouched in wrought-iron mouths; ovens opened to let out panting blasts. Worktables stretched into dimness, crowded with mise—bowls of jewel-bright pickles, skeins of herbs still dripping enough to be alive, strings of ruby shells that might have been crayfish except they pulsed as if they had hearts. Men and women moved among them with swift, constrained grace, branded sigils puckering their wrists and throats like burn-scars. Demons prowled the periphery on soft feet, tails curled up and away like cats unwilling to touch the filth they barred mortals through. Their eyes were coins knocked out of circulation. Nobody shouted. Even the urgent ones spoke in that tight-breathed way of people who had already screamed themselves hoarse months ago. A man near them, small and freckled, swore softly as his sauce caught and just as softly uncaught, a new pat of butter appearing under his hand as if he’d willed it. He glanced up. His eyes widened in automatic welcome, then closed down the way the pastry-chef’s had, shutters pulled for the night. “No service here,” he said without looking at the demon that had oozed closer. “No menu.” “We’re not eating,” Rory said. The demon’s attention slid over her and stuck to the knife. Its lips wrinkled back in a look that might have been a smile if it hadn’t showed so many clean, wet teeth. It said nothing. The man’s shoulders made a brief, hopeless move as if toward them. Then he caught Rory’s pendant with a glance and flinched. “Oh. You’ll want upstairs.” “Upstairs?” Nyx murmured. He tilted his head, shame in the motion like he was indicating where he kept the cheap whiskey under the counter. “Where the taster sits,” he said. “Where the—” He cut himself off as if the word had a hook in it. “Where it begins.” “Belphegor?” Rory asked, before she could stop herself—not as a name to bait, but because it had found her tongue unheaded. The demon’s tail twitched. “Prince,” it said moderately. It leaned, the bones of its face sharp under a skin like oiled paper, and inhaled at the hinge of Rory’s jaw. “But you smell of elsewhere. And of moonmetal.” It turned its head toward Nyx. “And you. How thirsty you are.” It smiled at Isolde and blinked as if sun had struck its eyes. “You are a mistake.” “Frequently,” Isolde said pleasantly. Rory felt the thing under her skin that was snarl and wrongness and fear all together rise and try to speak for her. She set her teeth. Cool-headed, she reminded herself, the way she recited casework on nights she couldn’t sleep. One step at a time. One course at a time. “Up,” Rory said. “Then down again. We won’t linger.” “Impossible,” the demon said, but it had already turned, bored of them, bored of everything. It could afford to be. The kitchen kept its rhythm whether or not anyone bled. A wide stairway curled along the wall, rough wood worn satin by a thousand feet. Each riser held a shallow bowl carved into it. Some held salts in different stones of white. Others held small clear lumps that, when she leaned in, resolved into tears. Real ones—threaded, desiccated pearls. A few looked fresh. Her stomach did an unpleasant twist. She thought of turning back. The heartstone pulsed, not frantic, but insistent. Not yet. Not here. As they climbed, the sounds of work under them thinned until the laughter of the first feast hall she’d heard sifted in again from some farther place, filtered now by heavy hangings. The sky, through high narrow windows cut in the sugar-glass wall, spread its amber balm. She thought of afternoons as a kid when her mother would keep the television tuned to a cooking show while she graded papers and her father would come in and pretend to be unimpressed and then sit and watch, fingers steepled, eyes going hungry in a way that had nothing to do with food. She made her breath steady. At the landing, a broad door opened onto a long room lit the way old churches were lit—candles in banks, flames caught in every reflective surface and multiplied. A table ran the length of it. It was set for one. Cushions padded the single chair so thickly the person in it seemed almost swallowed. He was not daubed red and black and vast as monsters in paintings. He looked like the sort of man who would run six restaurants and a debt to his own vanity—soft, alert, terrible with attention. His hands lay on the arms of the chair, and his fingers never stopped moving, as if kneading an invisible loaf. His eyes were the exact color of the sky outside. “Welcome,” he said, and the word went into her mouth like sugar and came out of her throat like smoke. He smiled. “New palates are always so refreshing.” Rory stood at the threshold, the knife a cool blue hunger against her spine, the pendant a hot red throb over her heart. She felt Nyx lean toward shadow behind her and Isolde tilt toward mischief at her side. The air in the room tasted faintly of burned orange peel. Somewhere below, a bell-fruit chimed. “We’re not here to eat,” Rory said, and heard in her own voice the small, bright quaver of wonder that felt too like fear to ignore. She stepped forward anyway. The floor under her gave a little, then steadied, like something alive choosing to let her pass. The amber sky threw its glow across the man’s mouth, and for a moment her own reflection slid through his eyes like a fish.