AI Rory pressed the knife into the chalk line and the air peeled open like silk snipped on a tailor's table.
The cut breathed, warm on her face, and the Heartstone on her chest beat a quiet heat in time with it. Nyx hovered at her shoulder, all edges and absence, a human shape that did not quite belong to surfaces . Isolde stood back from the door, silver hair loose down her back, one pale hand lifted as if she held an invisible bird.
"Do not swallow," Isolde said, eyes half-lidded . "Not a scent, not a sigh. This threshold eats first-timers whole."
"Comforting," Rory said. She shifted her grip on the moonsilver. The blade drank heat as it always did, a little bite into her palm, a little steadier breath in her chest. "We go right, we go fast. If anything talks, we don't believe it."
Nyx laughed and it came like wind under a door. "Believe nothing, taste less, step where the salt has kept its courage."
"Great," Rory said. "Wish me luck."
She stepped through.
Light changed like the taste of tea turned to wine mid-sip. The corridor they entered curved like a corkscrew cellar, though no mason had laid those bricks. Rows of bottles grew from the walls as if the stone had budded them. They bulged like green and black grapes, glass veined with trapped colours, a thousand eyes of wine watching. A drip hit the floor and fizzed. Her shoes stuck for an instant in a gloss of sugar, and the Heartstone under her shirt warmed another notch.
"Belphegor's pantry," Nyx whispered. "He labels eternity and arranges it by mouthfeel."
"Walk," Rory said. "Keep your hands to yourself."
Isolde smiled without teeth. "Hands tucked, heart loud. Speak kindly to the bones of this place, child, for they feed kings."
They moved deeper and the air thickened around them, sweet with burnt sugar and something briny under it, like tears cooked down. A cart track cut the floor, grooves powdered with salt. Rory's footprint pressed into it, dampening the white to grey. Isolde's feet kissed nothing. Even the salt did not complain under her.
"This is wrong," Rory said.
"Correct," Isolde said.
Rory almost snorted, then did not, because sound carried too well in there, darting ahead of her like mice. Far down the curve, she heard knives in an empty kitchen. Not cutting, practising. The metal drew breath, then stopped. Someone unseen approved and clicked a tongue.
The bottles hummed as if they kept bees. Rory edged her shoulder away from the glass. Faces blurred and vanished in their depths , stretched thin as gold leaf. She caught her own for a heartbeat, black hair a tangle, blue eyes too bright in the murky glow. The crescent scar on her wrist looked like a bite taken from her .
"Don't look too long," Nyx murmured. "Some vintages take you back in the glass and leave the skin to walk."
"Noted," Rory said.
The corridor unfurled into a hall large enough to swallow a stadium. No walls contained it, just lines of trellised vines rising and falling in gentle arcs, like green ribcages breathing. Clusters of fruit hung heavy, heart-sized, their skins a dinner-plate of colours, rainbows turned to flesh. Hearts, not heart-like. They beat, faint and regular, a thousand polite patients on the other side of a hospital ward.
"Orchard," Rory said. "Of course."
"Of course," Isolde said. "Eight hundred trees and not a bird, for the birds here leave full and never fly again."
Rory tipped her chin at the path. It had been laid in alternating tiles of salt and charred bone. Her feet made honest sounds on the bone, soft suss on salt. Time wobbled around them, the way a heat shimmer wobbled a road, and the pendant pulsed like a cat purring too close.
She could have stared. She wanted to. The vines had fat, white flowers like mouths caught mid-laugh. A breeze that did not exist turned the petals, and somewhere an audience held its breath. Above, through the trellises, the sky was amber, thick as honey, and not the colour of anything she wanted in her lungs.
"Keep to the path," she said.
They kept. The tiles led past low tables carved from old barrels, their surfaces burnt with brands. Not letters, not any writing she knew, just knife scores arranged in patterns, tallied like battles won in kitchens. A bell sat on each table, little silver tongues peeking, waiting for fingers to summon.
"Competitions," Nyx breathed. "Every century, every hour. He measures genius in courses and ends it with applause."
"Whose genius," Rory said, eye caught on a knife jutting from a stump. The handle had been polished by slow hands, thousands of them maybe. The blade wore a nick that matched the notch in her scar, and her stomach turned a slow circle.
"Those who bargain," Isolde said, "and those who break."
Rory's tongue had a memory of lemon curd on it, sharp and bright and gone before she had swallowed. Mum on a Sunday with a glass bowl and a whisk and a grin that climbed her cheek. She stopped dead.
"Do not," Isolde said, soft and sharp. "Do not chase tastes here. They are hooks."
"Fine," Rory said. Her voice came out tight. She rolled her shoulders. "We look for a service door. Nyx, shadows."
"Shadows," Nyx agreed, and stepped into the shade of a table. They stretched and thinned and slipped across the floor as if the ground were a pond and they, a skater. Their shape found a seam in the far wall, a line where tile met tile and the air tasted like iron filed fine . "There," they whispered from everywhere and nowhere. "A path the cooks keep for blood and bargains."
Rory went to it. The seam looked like nothing, a trick of eye, grim grime. She laid her wrist against the wall and the Heartstone gave a pleased breath of heat. The seam exhaled the scent of clove and hot coin.
She brought the Fae blade up, its slender, leaf-shaped length humming in her bones. She pressed the tip into the seam and pushed. The wall opened as if it had been waiting for that exact touch. Cold air spilled out. Real cold, not the lush chilled darkness of a cellar, but the breath of something that did not need heat in its life. It tasted like the inside of old porcelain . Rory stepped through, blade up.
The service corridor beyond ran straight and mean. Hooks hung from chains at intervals, empty and swaying as though the staff had gone the minute before and left their breath behind to move the metal. Shelves lined the left wall, laden with jars sealed with wax. Labels, careful handwriting on stained paper. Rory read a few as she passed and slowed until she stopped.
"Jennifer Ellis, Lemon Curd," she said. Her throat closed on the name. The jar looked innocent, the sort of thing you would pick up at a fete, a charity stall, a school fair. Pale yellow light lived in it, trapped summer made spreadable.
"She made that the day I crashed my bike," Rory said. "I split my wrist. She let me lick the spoon while Dad moaned about sugar."
Nyx's head cocked. "Memory and taste, married and bottled. Belphegor is sentimental in the way that knives are sentimental. They like the shape of a throat."
Isolde stepped close enough for the silk of her hair to whisper across Rory's shoulder, close enough for her lack of warmth to be felt like a thought . "Take nothing that already took you."
Rory breathed out and left the jar, hands shaking and fists closed. She moved along the shelf. Names she did not know peered back, old ladies' penmanship and block scrawls, little hearts dotting i's. Food as spell and chain. A stew that smelt like childhood by half the city if you had a nose for it.
"Who gave me the pendant," Rory said, voice flat . "That is what this is about, isn't it."
Isolde looked at her without blinking. "A heart finds its house."
"Not an answer."
"A gift binds," Isolde said. "A lure shines. You were called as a fish is called, and here you came, clever mouth snapping only when you saw the line. But you saw it."
"Who," Rory said.
Nyx drifted ahead. "Names in Hel are paid by the slice," they said. "Ask me later, when we stand on shadows and not on bones."
They reached the end of the corridor and a door made from the same porcelain taste, white with a sheen under it like a fingernail. No handle. The blade in Rory's hand quivered with a cold eagerness. She pressed the point to the seam and cut.
The room inside glowed red as banked coals. No fire burned, yet heat moved in thick pulses from the thing that sat in the centre, a heart of stone big as a barrel, veined with darker lines that beat , beat, beat. Its surface glistened, not wet, not blood, something like fat that never cooled . Pipes ran from its base into the floor. The air sharpened with cinnamon and regret.
Nyx's voice went small. "Hearts do not belong in kitchens."
"Everything eats," Isolde said.
The Heartstone on Rory's chest gave a thrilled hum, a little animal excited to see its mother. She stepped forward without deciding to. The pendant tugged on its chain. Her hand went up and caught it without thought. The stone under her fingers felt alive. Not beating, not quite, but awake .
"Rory," Nyx said, rebuke and worry and want.
"It came from here," Rory said. She heard the click of the silver chain on her nail. "It knows it."
"All hearts know their home," Isolde said. "Not all should go back."
Rory stopped at the edge of a circle set into the floor around the furnace heart. The circle had been inlaid with salt and char, same as the path outside, except here the salt was pink with some old bleed and the char had been polished smooth by the soles of men who had paced and paced until their bargains ran out. Symbols sat at the cardinal points, curved and ugly. She did not know the language, but she felt the meaning. Occupied. Reserved. Property.
"You two ready to run," Rory said. Her breath smoked and then did not, a trick of the eyes. "Because if I touch this and it throws a fit, there will be bells."
"Bells," Nyx agreed, thin and delighted and sick.
"We will run," Isolde said. "And we will not run far enough."
Rory crouched and slid the blade under the first sigil. The moonsilver spoke to nothing and yet the salt hissed as if a snake turned under it. She lifted, careful and steady, and the rune broke with a tidy little pop. The room took a breath.
Somewhere behind them, bells began to ring.
Rory shut her eyes for one heartbeat, opened them and slashed the second sigil and the third. The fourth lay under a thin glaze of sugar that gleamed like frost. She cut that too. The circle shivered. The furnace heart's beat skipped and came back angrier, louder, more awake. The pendant on her chest flared with heat enough to sting. She pulled it up and held it in her palm. The deep crimson glowed like wine seen through a candle. The glow inside it brightened, tugging, answering, desperate.
"Careful," Nyx said.
"Show me careful later," Rory said.
She stepped through the broken circle and put her hand to the stone.
Sound went flat. The heartbeat under her hand slowed and then strobed, frantic as a trapped bird. Heat roared through her skin and pain climbed her arm like something with legs. Behind her, Nyx made a noise like smoke caught in a throat. Isolde's hand brushed her back with that same not-weight , not-warmth , a ghost telling her to live.
"There is a door behind this," Rory said through her teeth. "A proper one. The Veil barely covers it."
"Barely," Nyx said, awe and hunger twined. "The skin of the world is a gauze here."
Isolde placed two fingers on the stone, closed her eyes and smiled in that way she had when she liked what hurt. "Dymas breathes against us. We are in his mouth."
"Grand," Rory said. "I am going to steal his tooth."
She shoved. She did not have a lever. She had the knife and the necklace and her will, and sometimes that had been enough. The Fae blade slid between heart and pipe as cheerfully as a key in a familiar lock. The stone whined. The pipe strained. The pendant in her palm yanked towards the seam so hard the chain cut her fingers, and she bared her teeth and leaned without grace.
A crack ran up the heart, clean as a glass scored and snapped. Amber light burst out of it and washed over her face, on her tongue, in her ears. The Heartstone screamed soundlessly in her hand. The air thickened around them, then gave. For an instant, the Veil's shimmer bled into sight, a film of water dropped over an oil fire. It tore, just a little. Enough.
A voice rolled out of the split. It came like soup ladled into a bowl, like laughter across a table and grease on a lip.
"Contestants," it said, polite and delighted. "To your stations."
The doors they had not seen in the walls opened like mouths. Figures came in, wearing aprons white and spotless, eyes wide and smiling, knives in their hands and hunger in their faces. Jars rattled to attention on shelves. The bells went mad, each with its own small scream. The trellised vines in the hall outside shook themselves awake and the heart-fruits tightened their beats and listened.
Nyx flicked from shadow to shape. "We run now," they said.
Rory yanked the blade free and the crack widened. Sugar dust sluiced from the ceiling in a glittering rain that cut like sand. Isolde closed her hand into a fist and three of the smiling staff turned their heads at a wrong angle, hearing a riddle. For one second they did not move.
"Door," Rory said, but the place answered before any of them could . The service corridor behind them trembled and fell flat to an impossible distance. Between here and there, the air thickened into something like jelly, wobbling . The first of the chefs lifted a lid from a pan and steam poured out, thick and rich and full of a smell that made Rory want, down to old bones. Her stomach knotted. Her mouth watered. Her hand rose without permission.
Isolde's fingers closed on her wrist, cool as marble . "Eat not," she said, voice a blade.
The chef's smile widened and snapped twice, once on each side, a grin too big for any human face. He raised his knife.
The furnace heart bucked under Rory's palm and the crack spat light and dark both. From that seam, something long and lean and full of wet joints began to push through, testing the room as if a tongue tested teeth, hunting for the softest part of what it would first bite.