AI The stone felt cold through Aurora's jeans.
Not the crisp cold of winter granite, but a damp, mossy chill that seeped in slow. She shifted on the lichen-covered surface, the slight scrape of denim against damp stone wrong somehow. Too loud. She'd been sitting here, cross-legged, for maybe twenty minutes. Maybe an hour. The Fae Grove had that particular talent. Time went soft around the edges here, blurred like watercolour on wet paper.
She'd come because the dreams were getting worse.
Not nightmares, not exactly. More like… memories. Except they weren't hers. Flashes of a life lived in perpetual twilight, under a sky the colour of a bruise. The faint, coppery taste of ley line energy on the back of her tongue upon waking. Eva said it was stress, the move from Cardiff to London, the breakup with Evan leaving fractures. But Eva hadn't seen the pale, slender figure watching from the tree line behind Aurora's flat three nights ago. A shape that dissolved into mist just before she could be sure.
So, she'd come to Isolde's grove. The place where the veil was thin. If something from the other side was bleeding through, she reasoned, the boundary would be where she'd see it clearest.
She was regretting the logic.
The grove was quiet. Not peaceful quiet. The heavy, listening quiet of a room where someone holds their breath. Even the air felt thick, resistant to movement. Moonlight filtered through the ancient oaks that created a ring of standing stones around the clearing, dappling the year-round wildflowers in silver and shadow. It was beautiful. Unnaturally so. Like a stage set.
Her left hand went to the pendant resting against her sternum. The Heartstone. A thumb-sized piece of crimson crystal set in silver, given to her by a man she’d only met once, in a rain-drenched back alley near Silas’ bar. He’d pressed it into her palm, his skin cold as marble . “Keep this close. It will know before you do.”
It was warm now. Not uncomfortably so, but a pulse of gentle heat against her skin, slow and steady, like a sleeping heartbeat.
She’d first felt it warm near the old, abandoned tube station entrance on Greek Street three weeks ago. It had confirmed something she’d suspected for a while: Hel portals weren’t just stories. They were here, in London, leaking bad air.
The bluebells to her left rustled.
No wind. The air was perfectly still. The sound was dry, a papery shuffle.
Aurora froze, her fingers tightening around the stone. She didn’t turn her head. Her gaze stayed fixed on the centre of the clearing where a cluster of foxgloves nodded in the non-existent breeze. Peripheral vision was a liar in places like this. But ears? Ears were blunt instruments of truth.
The rustling stopped.
A heartbeat passed. Two.
Then, from the opposite side of the clearing, a soft crack. Like a twig snapping underfoot.
Impossible. She was the only one here. She’d been sure of it. She’d followed the path from Richmond Park at dusk, slipping through the gap between two specific oaks that shouldn’t have been adjacent. The entrance was tricky, known to very few. Isolde herself had shown her, once, in exchange for a promise Aurora was still learning the shape of.
Another crack, closer this time.
She slipped off the stone, her trainers sinking into the soft, spongy moss with a soundless squish. She stood, her breath a faint ghost in the cold air.
“Hello?” Her voice was too small, swallowed by the oppressive quiet.
No answer.
The pendant grew hotter. A sharp, insistent thrum against her chest.
From the thicket of ferns directly ahead, a low, wet gurgle.
Not animal. Not human.
It was the sound of mud bubbling up through a grate. Slow, viscous, deliberate.
Aurora took a step back. Her heel encountered the base of the standing stone she’d been sitting on. Trapped.
The gurgling subsided. In its place came a series of clicks. Rhythmic, precise, like telegraph code tapped out on hollow bone.
She could see the ferns trembling now. Not a shaking. A careful, deliberate parting, as if something broad and low was pushing through, stem by stem.
The Heartstone burned. A warning.
She fumbled with the silver chain, her fingers clumsy with a cold that had nothing to do with temperature. She unhooked the clasp, letting the stone drop into her cupped palm. The deep crimson gem pulsed with its own faint inner light, casting a bloody glow across her fingers.
The clicking stopped.
Silence slammed back into the clearing, heavier than before. The air grew colder, frosting her exhales into plumes.
Then she heard it. The breathing.
It came from everywhere and nowhere. A rasping, wet draw of air, followed by a long, shuddering exhale that sounded like dead leaves skittering across stone. It wasn’t in front of her anymore. It was to her left. Right. Behind.
She turned on the spot, the stone held out before her like a wretched little lantern. Its light only reached a few feet, deepening the shadows beyond into impenetrable black.
A shape moved at the treeline.
Not in the trees. Between them. A distortion in the darkness, taller than a man, impossibly lean. It didn’t walk. It seemed to flow, a ripple of deeper night against the black. It had no features, no details, just a sense of terrible, elongated wrongness.
“Isolde?” Aurora whispered, her throat tight . The name was a desperate shot in the dark. The Fae woman who tended this grove was capricious, dangerous, but she was a known quantity. This… this wasn’t her.
The shape paused, as if considering the word .
Then it took a step forward.
The ground didn’t crunch. It sighed. A soft, pained exhalation of earth and root.
The temperature plummeted. Aurora’s breath hitched, her lungs aching with the sudden cold. The Heartstone flared in her hand, so hot it was almost painful to hold, its crimson light blazing against the advancing dark.
The thing was close enough now that she could see it didn’t have a face. It had a *smear *. A suggestion of features blurred and run together, like a reflection in a disturbed pond. She could make out the suggestion of eyes, dark hollows that drank the pendant’s light and gave nothing back. A slash where a mouth might be, hanging open slightly .
The wet, rasping breath was coming from that slash.
It raised a limb. Not an arm. Something too long, too jointed, ending in a cluster of twig-like fingers that clicked softly against each other.
It pointed at her.
No. At the stone in her hand.
A sound emerged from it. Not a voice. A vibration that tunnelled up from the ground through the soles of her trainers and into her bones. A single, guttural syllable that carried the taste of stagnant water and damp rot.
“***Mine.***”
The word wasn’t heard. It was felt . It vibrated in her teeth, in the small crescent-shaped scar on her left wrist, a phantom ache from a childhood long past.
Every instinct screamed at her to run. But her legs were leaden, frozen by more than cold. The logic centre of her brain, the Cardiff University Pre-Law part that demanded evidence and precedent, fractured . This was the evidence. This was the precedent. The wrongness she’d felt since arriving wasn’t just atmosphere. It was a presence. A thing that had been waiting. Watching. Hungry.
The creature took another step. The space between them halved. She could smell it now—a sweet, cloying decay, like forgotten flowers fermenting in a cellar.
The Heartstone pulsed once, a frantic, rapid beat. Then the light winked out.
Darkness rushed in, absolute and drowning.
The rasping breath was right in front of her. The sweet-rot smell filled her nostrils, her mouth.
Something cold and dry brushed the back of her hand.
A twig-finger. Tracing the line of her knuckles.
Aurora jerked her hand back, a raw sound escaping her lips. She stumbled backwards, blind, her shoulder slamming into the rough bark of an oak. The impact jarred her, pain sparking bright and clean through the numbness.
Panic, hot and electric , finally unlocked her legs.
She shoved away from the tree and ran.
Not toward the path. That was a memory. The grove, the boundary, the rules of thin spaces—they were gone , rewritten by the dark. She ran on instinct, through the flower beds that tore at her ankles, through the grasping ferns. She didn’t look back. Looking back was a death sentence in stories. She knew that much .
The ground vanished beneath her.
One moment she was sprinting across spongy moss, the next she was falling, tumbling down an unseen slope. She landed hard on her side, the breath knocked from her lungs in a painful gasp. She lay there, stunned, stars dancing in her vision.
Silence.
No rasping breath. No clicking. Just the frantic thud of her own heart against her ribs.
She pushed herself up, wincing. She was in a shallow dip, a dry streambed lined with smooth, pale stones. Moonlight reached down here, a thin silver trickle. She was at the edge of the clearing, right up against the ring of standing stones. One of them loomed above her, a skeletal giant against the sky.
She still clutched the Heartstone. It was cool again. Dormant.
A soft, melodious chuckle echoed through the grove.
It came from above. From the top of the standing stone.
Aurora looked up.
Perched on the ancient, moss-capped crown of the stone was a woman. She was draped in shadows and silvery moonlight, her long hair the colour of frost-kissed ivy. She wore a gown of woven leaves and twilight, and her eyes held the pale, merciless gleam of winter stars.
Isolde.
The Fae woman smiled, a thin, sharp curve of her lips. She looked down at Aurora, then past her, into the dark heart of the grove where the thing with the smeared face had been.
“It seems,” Isolde said, her voice like wind chimes made of ice, “you’ve attracted a rather persistent admirer, little thief.”
Aurora scrambled to her feet, her chest heaving. “Thief? I didn’t—”
Isolde held up a slender hand. Her nail was a long, polished shard of obsidian. “You carry a heart that does not beat in your chest. You walk with a shadow you did not earn.” She tilted her head, her star-pale eyes narrowing. “They always come for what is theirs. You brought the beacon . You lit the flame.”
A low, wet gurgle echoed from the darkness behind Aurora.
It was closer than before.
Isolde’s smile didn’t waver. “Run along now, Rory Carter. The Grove is closed for the evening.”
She gestured, a lazy flick of her wrist.
The world twisted.
The standing stones blurred. The moonlight shattered . Aurora felt a sudden, violent lurch , as if the ground had been yanked out from under her.
She landed on her knees on damp grass, the familiar smell of Richmond Park filling her nostrils—wet earth, distant traffic, the mundane scent of a city night. The oppressive silence of the Grove was gone , replaced by the distant hum of London.
She was out. Back on the human side of the veil.
She knelt there, shivering, the cold night air a shock after the Grove’s unnatural chill . The Heartstone pulsed once, weakly, against her palm, then went still.
From the direction of the oak trees—the ones that now stood a perfectly normal distance apart—a final, shuddering breath whispered through the leaves. It carried a single, echoing word on the wind, so faint she might have imagined it.
“***Soon.***”
Aurora closed her fingers around the stone, its silver chain tangled between her knuckles. She looked down at her hand, at the faint red glow still emanating from between her clenched fingers.
The beacon . The flame.
She had come looking for answers.
She’d found a hunting ground. And she was the bait.