AI Rory's fingers closed around the Heartstone and it throbbed like a second pulse , hot and urgent against her palm.
She stepped off the last stone and the ground drank her boot. The soil was not soil, not by any honest name; it glistened like candied mud, sticky with syrup that smelled of orange and iron. Vines braided themselves into great rope, heavy with fruit the size of a child's head, their skins studded with tiny, perfect teeth. A bowl nearby brimmed with a soup so luminous it looked like molten copper . A wooden spoon stirred itself.
"Lovely place for a picnic," Isolde said, voice smooth as river glass, and her words dropped into the clearing as if they were coins. She stood a hair's breadth above the earth, her silver hair pooled around her like moonlight, her boots leaving no mark. Her pale lavender eyes watched everything without blinking.
Nyx did not stand at all, at least not for long. They had melted into a column of shadow at the trunks of the orchard and then unfolded like smoke into a silhouette that towered over Rory. Their violet eyes glowed faintly inside the dark. The air around them hissed, small particles of the grove bending toward the void that made them.
"Don't be silly," Rory said. She kept her voice flat because panic had a way of turning sensible people into something else. The Heartstone warmed as if the world inside understood her and disapproved. "We came here for a tear. Isolde said the Veil thinned at the standing stones. This one… felt wrong, so we followed the pulse ."
Isolde tilted her head. "A tear hushes like a secret, then gapes like a maw . Choose your words carefully ." She stepped forward, and the wildflowers at her feet bowed away.
They moved deeper. Every step shifted the feast around them. Candles rose from the ground, tall and waxen, their flames green, humming with a tone like a throat clearing. A platter of figs began arranging itself into a pattern that spelled nothing at all, then reassembled into a map of streets they had walked through London that week. Wine puddles reflected a sky the colour of old amber glass. The light made Isolde's hair the colour of ash.
A procession threaded between the tables. Waiters, dressed in clothing cut from folded leaves and pie crust, carried trays that sagged with offerings. Their faces were those of people Rory half-remembered—an old woman who used to serve coffees on King Street, a butcher who had disappeared last winter, a lecturer who had liked to laugh too loudly. Their smiles were too wide.
Nyx moved through the procession as if they were a breeze. They touched a waiter's shoulder and the man's smile burned out like a candle snuffed. His head bucked, his jaw slack, and a ribbon of thread unfurled from where the man's throat should have been. It attached itself to the next waiter, and the next, an invisible puppet string. The string pulsed , then twitched.
"Strings," Nyx breathed, voice barely a sound . "Threads for greed. They were never meant to be full."
Isolde's mouth curved. "The table takes what is offered and offers it thrice. Take care that you are not the main course."
Rory kept her hand over the small crescent scar on her left wrist, the old injury worrying the muscle there. The Heartstone's pulse aligned with her heartbeat, then ran ahead of it, eager, impatient. She remembered the last thing the unknown benefactor had said when they left the pendant in her small delivery bag: Keep this close, sometimes you will need a reason to come home. Keep safe, sometimes you will not.
The orchard opened into a hall. It was not a hall in any earthly sense. Columns of braided bread rose like pillars from a floor that smelled of sea salt and cinnamon. Lanterns hung from invisible ropes, each cage cradling a single roasted raven, still smoking. A long table stretched to a horizon that was not quite a horizon; it bent the light so that the far end receded and returned like a ripple . At the head of the table, an empty chair had a back carved to look like a ribcage.
They saw bodies slumped in the chairs. Not dead, not alive in a way that mattered. Faces slack, eyes clouded, mouths masticating on invisible food. Around their wrists were silver bands etched with names, tiny contracts hammered into skin. Every so often, a hand would twitch and lift a spoon to a mouth that it could not feed.
Nyx traced a fingertip in the air and the nearest band hummed. A string of music threaded from it, a melody that tasted like regret . Rory felt the music in the pit of her stomach —an ache for excess, for one more thing, and the knowledge that the more you wanted the less you had.
"Hel," Isolde said simply. "Not here by accident."
"Prince Belphegor's gardens are famous for their hospitality," Nyx said. "And their bargains."
Rory pressed the blade Isolde had given her to her palm for a moment, letting the moonsilver chill carry up her fingers. Its edge seemed dull and sharp at once, like memory. She had practised not to flinch at the cold. The dagger hummed faintly in answer to the music of the bands. It wanted work.
They skirted a kitchen where pots whispered among themselves and a roast that had eyes looked up when they passed, wet and furious. A chef—his apron dotted with sugars like frost, his hands clean as if he had never killed—turned a spatula and revealed a face embedded in the iron. It looked up at them and mouthed with muffled intent. The spatula clattered to the floor. A chorus of plates chimed in annoyance.
"Offerings accept offerings," Isolde said. "Here, gluttony is a recipe and the recipe calls for the same ingredient over and over. Souls. Memory. Time."
Rory wanted to ask how the fae could run a place like this; how they could bend hunger into architecture. She did not. Questions on their own sometimes made the world lean toward answering with teeth.
They found a courtyard where fountains spilled liquid made not of water but of late-night ales and honeyed cream. As they approached, the hearths around the courtyard glanced off in a dozen reflecting pans, and time tightened like a string. The Heartstone sang through Rory's skin; hot then cold, like breath. A thin seam opened in the floor, not through stone but through experience , and a faint blue smoke rose, caught, then swallowed a spoon.
"Here," Nyx said. They stepped down as if into a pool and did not get wet. "The Veil has been torn and sewn with ribbons of appetite. The leak smells of spice. Dangerous."
Isolde placed her palm above the seam and did not touch it. The wildflowers at her feet shivered, then arranged themselves into an arrow that pointed at the seam. "Where hunger sleeps, the door yawns. You have a key that remembers the burn."
Rory did not tell them about the pendant's hot gift, how it had burned for the first time since she'd found it when a man with a smile had left it wrapped in receipt paper in her bag. The pendant pulsed faster when she knelt and peered into the seam. From the blue smoke a shape tried to form, like an idea fumbling for language.
Nyx leaned in, becoming more shadow than not, and whispered into the smoke. The smoke listened. It answered with a taste of tallow and a name, one syllable that unspooled like a ribbon.
"Belphegor," someone behind them said, and the name made the lanterns all around them wince .
The sound had not come from any throat. It had arrived with the iron taste of old wealth. It came instead from the far end of the table, where a tray folded like a wave and a shadow shaped itself into a presence. They felt the air press, not against skin but against memory . A chair scraped. Silverware sang in expectation. The bowls leaned to catch every morsel of sound.
Isolde's eyes narrowed . "He does not come uninvited."
The floor trembled underfoot. A vine uncoiled and struck the table, snatching a goblet and drinking from it as if it were a living thing. The goblet's owner, a man with a ledger stuffed under his arm, blinked and became very alert, his hands moving with the reflex of a man who keeps minute accounts.
"Why are we here?" Rory asked aloud because a question demanded an answer and answers often arrived dressed as danger.
Nyx's shadowed mouth made a small smile. "Curiosity, like hunger, invites company." Their voice wrapped around a serving tray and left it spinning and empty. "Or a favour."
Isolde watched the seam like a cat. "Beware bargains that offer safe passage dressed in hospitality. They will seat you and dress you and ask your name, then keep the plate."
Rory's breath used her, sharp in the chest. She had learned to split focus in narrow slices—watch the path, watch the people, hold the thing that could save you at the ready. She took one measured step toward the seam, the pendant burning brighter. It warmed the scar at her wrist until pain was a white thread. The Heartstone's glow kissed the seam, and for a second the smoke lifted enough to show a shape beyond. Not a place but a thing . A mouth beneath the ground, wet and patient, lined not with teeth but with fine knives .
A laughter ran like oil through the hall. It did not belong to a single throat. It came from every polishing of every spoon. The bodies at the table straightened as if prodded. The bands on their wrists tightened and chimed like bells.
Something moved beneath the seam, a pulse answering the pendant. A long, pale finger, luminous as marrow, probed the air, smelling for warmth . It touched the hem of Rory's boot and the Heartstone screamed.
Rory moved to pull back, the Fae blade rising, moonsilver hungry. Her hand closed on the handle and it bit into her palm like ice. At the same instant, a shadow sleeve coiled around her ankle, cool and slick, dragging the tip of her boot toward the seam.
"Rory," Isolde said, softer than a petal. "Do not give it cause."
"Easy to say," Nyx whispered. They threw their form forward, a living shade shaped like a blade, and tried to sever the reaching thing. The shadow and the marrow finger met and screamed together, two noises that did not belong in the same tongue.
The table jolted. Plates flew like flocks and knives rose, spinning with the impatience of newly sharpened teeth. A waiter whose eyes had been sold for the recipe of a crown lunged, his tray a shield. The hollow music of the bands shifted into a cadence that matched a heartbeat that was not human.
Rory swung the moonblade, silver whisper against vine, and the thing at her ankle tightened. The floor beneath the seam shivered and the blue smoke coalesced into a face, its lips sealing into a grin full of knives.
"We leave," Rory said, because saying things made them start to be true. She tasted copper. Her legs refused to obey simple decisions.
"Leave," Nyx echoed with them, and their shadow split and tied itself into a knot at the seam, fingers into a lock.
Isolde's laugh was a bell that had been left too long in moonlight. "The table will not release without payment."
The Heartstone flared until the world blurred. Heat seamed through Rory's veins, hot as a furnace, but the pain of the pendant was clean and sharp, useful. The marrow finger tightened and something else came with it, a pressure that filled the courtyard, like being watched through a thousand forks.
A set of hands, not belonging to any of them, clasped Rory's wrist from under the soil. They were warm and damp, tasting of honey and old promises. Her dagger slid, barely, leaving a silver scratch across a knuckle that smelled of iron.
"Enough," a voice said, deeper than an oven and amused.
Silence fell and then broke like glass as the chair at the head of the table leaned forward, not to sit, but to breathe . The empty space where Belphegor might be exhaled a fog into the courtyard. It carried the scent of feasts that would never end and a whispering list of names.
Isolde reached out and touched Rory's shoulder, not to steady her but to measure . "The Veil opened for you and spat you out like a pitiful kernel. Now it will ask what you owe."
Rory felt the names in the fog. They were familiar ; some were people she'd delivered food to, some belonged to faces in the postbox she had once scanned for a job. The fog tasted of all the little hungers she had ever carried and every promise with a price. It moved toward them with the slow, elegant patience of a thing that had always been fed .
"Move," Rory said, and this time she meant it. She planted her other foot, twisted, and tried to wrench her ankle free. The hand below tightened like a fist and the pendant burned like a lit coal, singing a language no human tongue held.
Knives rose, a chorus, and for the first time the name Belphegor found a body at the head of the table, a presence like a shadow wearing a suit stitched from fat and silver. His face had the curve of a feast table, his eyes were candle stubs. He smiled and his smile was an invitation.
The courtyard inhaled. The vines leaned close to drink. The world narrowed to silver edges and the scream of the pendant. Rory braced, the blade a promise in her hand, and the hand under the soil tightened until it no longer felt like a stranger's clasp but like a root.
The light folded, and the chamber devoured the sound of their breathing.