AI Aurora shoved her palm against the nearest oak standing stone and felt it give, not in weight but in willingness, like a door that decided to remember hinges. The Heartstone pendant knocked once against her sternum. Warm. Warmer. Then it pulsed, a small living beat on a silver chain.
“All right,” she whispered, and hated how her own voice sounded swallowed.
The gap between the stones narrowed behind her as she stepped through. Grass brushed her trainers. Wildflowers pressed against her jeans with soft, unseasonal insistence, as if the grove stored a hoard of spring and refused to share it with the rest of London. She tasted something on the air, not scent exactly, more like a flavour that sat at the back of her tongue, sugared and metallic.
She kept walking because stopping felt like agreeing to be watched .
Rory slid her phone out, thumbed the torch, and pointed it low. The beam caught a spill of white petals and a ring of mushrooms that looked too neat to be natural. Beyond the torch’s reach, the grove held its dark close, thick as velvet , stitched with the faintest gleam of eyes that could have belonged to foxes, cats, or nothing that belonged here at all.
She lifted the pendant. The deep crimson gem glowed from within like banked coals.
“That’s the trick, then,” she muttered. “You lead, I follow.”
The pendant warmed again, answering her like a pulse under skin. It tugged her forward with heat rather than force, a direction you felt in bone. She adjusted the strap of her courier bag on her shoulder. The bag held nothing but a bottle of water, a small first-aid kit, and a stubby kitchen knife she had stolen from the Golden Empress’s prep station and regretted immediately. Yu-Fei would notice. She always noticed. Rory had left a tenner on the counter as if that made it less of a theft.
She had not come to steal. She had come because the Heartstone had started reacting in her flat, thumping warm against her chest when she stood near the bar’s back door, then cooling when she climbed the stairs. A compass made of blood-coloured glass. A warning, or an invitation.
London offered plenty of oddities. This one had a direction.
She followed a narrow track that did not look cut by human feet. It curved with a lazy confidence, as if it had all the time in the world. Rory kept her light trained on the ground, but her eyes flicked up in quick checks, left, right, forward, then back. A habit from delivery runs in dodgy estates, from learning which stairwells held needles and which held men with nothing to lose.
The grove held no litter. No cans. No crisp packets. Not even a lost glove. The absence scraped at her nerves.
Something clicked in the dark.
Rory froze, torch steady, breath held. The sound came again, a dry little snap like a beetle’s shell cracking. Then a second, answering click, closer, and a third from farther off, like someone testing stones together.
She aimed the torch into the trees.
The beam caught a trunk, then another. The bark looked smooth, too smooth, as if the trees had shed texture. A ribbon of pale lichen climbed one like writing. The light slid over it and the marks seemed to shift, not changing shape, only changing the way her eyes understood them.
Rory lowered the torch.
“You can stop that.” She spoke to the dark with the tone she used on drunks outside the bar. Calm, flat, a line drawn in her voice. “I’m not here to play.”
No answer came. The grove did not even offer an echo . Her words died where they left her mouth.
The pendant pulsed again. Warm. Directional.
She walked on, forcing her stride to stay even. She had a good head for panic, meaning she rarely panicked. Fear sat behind her ribs and watched, but she did not let it drive. She counted her steps to keep the edges of her mind occupied, one to four, then back to one, a rhythm that gave her something she controlled.
At nineteen she had learned that control mattered more than courage.
The track opened into a clearing so suddenly it felt staged. Flowers crowded the grass in thick patches, colours too rich to be honest. The torch beam caught blue petals that seemed to glow back . In the centre of the clearing stood a low stone slab, slick and dark, like a table that waited for a meal.
Rory’s pendant heated until it stung.
She hissed and yanked the chain away from her neck. The silver links bit her fingers with heat. The gem throbbed against her skin as if it wanted to burrow into her palm.
“Hel portal,” she said, and the words sounded ridiculous out loud. Yet the pendant insisted.
She had no book of lore. No mentor. Only scraps, rumours, overheard talk from the sort of patrons who drank in Silas’s bar when they wanted their secrets drowned. The word Hel had come up once, wrapped in a joke that did not sound like a joke. A doorway down. A place that answered bargains.
Rory walked towards the slab. Each step made the pendant burn more. The air thickened, pressing against her face, not like humidity but like resistance, as if she moved through a substance that disliked being parted .
At the edge of the slab, her torch flickered .
The beam dimmed, brightened, then dimmed again. Her phone stayed solid in her hand, battery icon stubbornly full. It should not have flickered at all.
Rory angled the light along the slab’s surface.
Scratches crossed it in arcs and lines. Not random. Not quite letters. The marks looked like someone had drawn a map of a river delta, branching paths that ended in sharp points. She reached into her bag, took out a pen, then stopped.
Don’t touch. Don’t mark. Don’t make it personal.
She put the pen away.
Something brushed her left wrist.
Rory flinched and stepped back, torch swinging. The light caught her own arm, the small crescent-shaped scar on her wrist gleaming pale. Nothing else. No insect. No leaf. Yet the touch lingered, a memory of pressure like a finger that had tested her skin.
The click-click returned, nearer now, circling the clearing. It came from different points, always just outside the torch’s reach. Not footsteps . Not twigs. Something harder. Something that struck itself against stone.
Rory kept the light low and turned slowly . The flowers moved as if something passed through them. Not wind. Not an animal’s body. The stems bowed in a smooth wave, then rose again after the unseen thing slid by.
“All right,” she said. “I see you.”
She did not. That was the point. But she had learned that predators liked honesty. It made the game cleaner.
The pendant in her fist pulsed , and with each pulse a faint hum joined it, a vibration in the air that set her teeth on edge. The slab’s scratches seemed to deepen under the torch beam, shadows forming in their grooves.
Rory swallowed and forced her hand to unclench. The gem left a red imprint on her palm, warm as a brand.
She slipped the pendant back over her head. The chain cooled as it touched her neck again, as if it preferred skin to air. It lay against her collarbone, heavy with purpose.
The humming grew louder.
Rory took another step towards the slab. Her trainers scraped against something that should not have been there, a gritty resistance. She aimed the torch down.
A line of ash crossed the grass in a perfect arc around the slab, half-hidden under flowers. Not scattered, not natural. A boundary. Someone had marked this place.
Rory crouched and pinched a bit of the ash between her fingers. It crumbled, dry and fine. The taste of it rose in her mouth as if it had touched her tongue, bitter like burnt paper.
Behind her, something exhaled.
The breath did not smell of lungs. It smelled of old cupboards, of forgotten rooms, of fabric that had held bodies and then emptied.
Rory stood in one sharp movement and spun, torch beam snapping up.
The light caught nothing but flower-stuffed grass and the dark wall of trees. Yet the clearing felt crowded. The hair at the back of her neck lifted.
A shape moved at the edge of the beam, tall and narrow. It shifted behind a tree, then behind another, too smooth, too controlled, as if it slid through gaps rather than walking.
Rory pointed the knife down by her thigh and kept the torch aimed forward. She did not brandish the blade. Showing fear invited attention. Showing a weapon invited judgement.
“I came because this thing dragged me here,” she said, and tapped the pendant with her knuckle. “If you wanted privacy, you chose a poor lure.”
The grove answered with a sound like distant laughter played backwards. Soft. Wrong. It did not carry joy. It carried teeth.
The slab’s surface shone under her torch as if something beneath it shifted. Not a reflection. A movement under stone, like a fish under ice.
Rory backed up until her heel hit the ash line. The moment she crossed it, the pendant cooled.
Her stomach tightened. Boundary confirmed.
She stepped forward again. The pendant flared hot, and the humming surged, a low note that made her bones feel hollow.
She looked at the ash line more carefully . It ran in a near-perfect circle, broken in one place by a gap the width of her shoulders. A doorway. An invitation with rules.
A soft voice came from the trees. Not in her ear, not in her head. In the air, as if the grove had learned speech and wanted to show off.
“Rory.”
She froze so hard her muscles ached. Only a handful of people called her that. Eva, for one. Not this place. Not the dark.
The voice came again, closer, speaking with a familiar lilt , Welsh vowels bent just so.
“Rory, love.”
Her throat tightened.
“No.” The word came out rough. “Don’t use that.”
The flowers nearest the gap in the ash line bowed, flattened, then rose, as if something invisible had stepped through. Rory aimed the torch at the gap.
The beam shivered, then steadied.
A figure stood there, just inside the circle. Human shape. Human height. A woman with straight, shoulder-length black hair and bright blue eyes that caught the torchlight and threw it back. For a second Rory’s brain accepted it because the details matched what she expected.
Then the figure smiled.
The smile held too many small decisions. It showed teeth that looked right until you noticed the gums sat a fraction too high, the enamel too even, as if carved.
It wore Rory’s face the way a thief wore a stolen coat.
Rory lifted the knife.
“Step out of my skin.”
The double tilted its head, slow and curious. It moved without sound, feet not disturbing a single petal. Its gaze dropped to Rory’s left wrist, to the crescent scar, and the smile widened with a kind of satisfaction that turned Rory’s stomach .
It raised its own left hand.
On its wrist, the same scar gleamed, fresh and pale, as if it had just been cut.
The humming rose into a chord. The slab’s scratches lit from within, thin lines of red like veins beneath translucent skin. The pendant against Rory’s chest burned and throbbed , keeping time with the light.
The double took one step towards her, and the ash line did not stop it.
Rory lunged back, but the circle behind her folded like paper. Trees slid inward, closing the clearing in a silent rush. The standing stones she had entered through vanished behind a wall of trunks.
The double moved again, and this time it moved fast. Its borrowed face blurred, eyes locked on Rory’s pendant.
Rory swung the torch up, light slamming into its features.
The skin rippled under the beam, and something underneath shifted, slick and pale, pressing outward as if the face wanted to peel off.
The slab cracked with a sound like ice splitting, and from the fissure a thin line of darkness spilled up, not shadow but a substance that drank the torchlight. The pendant seared Rory’s chest, and the double reached for it with a hand that had begun to unfurl into something jointless and long, fingers stretching into delicate hooks.
Rory slashed with the knife, steel cutting air, and the darkness under the slab surged towards her ankles like a living tide.