AI
The ancient oak standing stones rose from the earth like broken teeth, their surfaces slick with a dampness that had nothing to do with the night air. Aurora Carter’s boots sank slightly into the soft, unnaturally vibrant grass of the clearing. The Heartstone pendant against her skin pulsed , not with its usual faint warmth, but with a slow, deep thrum of cold . Wrong. Everything was wrong.
She had come to the Fae Grove on a whisper , a fragment of a lead from a man in a pub whose eyes had been too wide, whose hands had trembled over his pint. He’d spoken of a door, a flicker of impossible darkness seen between the oaks at dusk. A Hel portal. It was the kind of nonsense Rory usually dismissed, but the pendant had grown cold for the first time since Dymas had given it to her. Cold, not warm. That was the detail that had landed her here, in the heart of Richmond Park after hours, trespassing in a place that felt older and more dangerous than London itself.
The wildflowers, a impossible tapestry of blues and purples and crimsons, should have been beautiful. They weren't. Their colours were too vivid, too saturated in the slivers of moonlight that pierced the canopy. They looked painted. Like a child’s drawing of a meadow, missing all the subtlety of life.
A twig snapped behind her.
Rory froze. Her hand went instinctively to the silver chain around her neck, her thumb stroking the cool, smooth surface of the crimson gemstone. She didn't turn. Turning was what prey did. She listened, her breath held tight in her chest.
Nothing. Just the sigh of wind through branches that sounded too much like a long, drawn-out breath. She scanned the perimeter, her gaze tracing the line of standing stones. They formed a perfect circle. A boundary. A cage.
She started walking again, her steps deliberate, her eyes scanning the ground. The man had said the flicker was near the centre of the grove. She moved towards the largest of the flowers, a cluster of bell-shaped blossoms the colour of fresh blood. The air grew thick, heavy with the cloying scent of pollen and something else. Something metallic and familiar . Copper. The sharp, tangy smell of old blood.
The pendant pulsed again, a beat of icy dread against her sternum.
She stopped. The silence that fell was absolute. Not just the absence of sound, but a presence of it . A thick, muffling blanket that smothered the rustle of leaves, the chirp of insects, the distant hum of the city. The only thing she could hear was the frantic thrum of her own heart.
A shape detached itself from the shadows of a great oak on the far side of the clearing.
It was tall and impossibly thin, its limbs long and jointed like a spider’s legs. It moved with a stuttering, unnatural gait, a lurching motion that defied biology. For a moment, she thought it was a trick of the light, a strange configuration of branches cast in the gloom . Then it took another step, and the moonlight caught the pale, waxy surface of its skin.
It had no face. Just a smooth, featureless oval of skin that turned towards her.
Rory’s blood ran cold . This was not Fae. This was something else. Something from the other side of the door she was looking for. Her mind, her cool-headed, quick-thinking mind that had gotten her out of more scrapes than she could count, went blank with a primal, animal terror. Run. The single word screamed through her consciousness.
But her legs wouldn't obey. They were rooted to the spot, held fast by the sheer, impossible wrongness of the thing. It raised one long, spindly arm, its fingers elongating, stretching like warm wax. It pointed at her.
Or rather, it pointed at the pendant.
The gemstone flared with a sudden, intense cold, a painful shock that jolted her from her stupor. She stumbled backwards, her boots catching on a root. She fell hard, the impact knocking the wind from her lungs. The wildflowers beneath her hands felt brittle, like dried paper, not soft and living.
The creature began to move towards her, its stuttering, lurching steps eating up the distance. It was silent. Utterly silent. No footfalls on the grass, no rustle of clothing. It just flowed, a nightmare given form.
Scrambling away, Rory's hand brushed against something hard and smooth in the dirt. A rock. No, not a rock. A shard of bone, pale and yellowed in the moonlight. Beside it, another. And another. A small pile of them, nestled amongst the too-vibrant flowers. Human bones.
The creature was halfway across the clearing now. The featureless oval of its head tilted, a gesture of unnerving curiosity. It knew she was trapped. It was playing with her.
Her fingers closed around the bone shard. It was sharp. Useless, but it was something. A weapon, however pathetic. She pushed herself to her feet, her back pressed against the rough bark of an oak. The standing stones loomed , silent sentinels to her doom.
A sound broke the suffocating silence . A soft, wet, tearing noise, like cloth being ripped slowly in half. It came from the creature. A thin, dark line appeared on its smooth, featureless face. It widened, stretching vertically, revealing not a mouth, but a glistening , spiralling void, a vortex of absolute blackness that seemed to drink the light around it .
The smell of copper intensified, a wave of nausea that made her gag. The portal. It wasn't in the centre of the grove. It was the creature.
The void in its face pulsed , and with the pulse came a sound. A low, guttural chittering that echoed from a thousand throats at once. It was a sound of hunger, of ancient, patient starvation.
Rory did the only thing she could think of. She raised the bone shard and, with a scream that tore from her throat, she hurled it at the thing.
It passed straight through the creature's chest without touching it, as if it were made of smoke and shadow.
The chittering grew louder, more excited. The long, spindly arm raised again, but this time it wasn't pointing . The fingers, now longer and thinner than any human's, uncurled like the legs of a dead spider. They reached for her.
The cold from the pendant became an agony, a shard of ice lodged in her chest. The crimson stone flared, not with its inner glow, but with a light so black it was darker than the shadows around it. The creature froze, its reaching hand inches from her face. The spiralling void in its face wavered , the chittering cutting off into a strangled hiss.
A new sound filled the grove. The frantic, rhythmic drumming of footsteps . Many of them. They were coming from the trees beyond the standing stones, from the world she knew. The creature’s featureless head swivelled towards the sound, then back to her. The void in its face began to shrink, closing like a wound.
With a sound like tearing silk , it dissolved, its long limbs folding in on themselves until it was nothing more than a wisp of shadow that melted into the ground. The coppery smell vanished. The suffocating silence broke, replaced by the frantic pounding of her own heart and the approaching footsteps .
The pendant’s cold retreated, leaving a dull, aching throb in its wake. Rory sank to her knees, her body shaking uncontrollably. She was alive. She didn't know how, or why, but she was alive.
The footsteps stopped just outside the circle of stones. A figure emerged from the darkness, silhouetted against the faint glow of the moon. It wasn't a policeman or a park ranger. It was a man, tall and slender, dressed in a impeccably tailored suit that seemed utterly out of place. He stepped into the clearing, his polished shoes making no sound on the unnaturally soft grass.
His eyes found hers, and in their depths , she saw no concern, no alarm. Only a cold, calculating interest. He smiled, a slow, predatory curve of his lips.
"Aurora Carter," he said, his voice a smooth, cultured baritone that sent a fresh wave of dread through her. "We have so much to discuss."