AI The biting wind off the Thames didn't reach this far into Richmond, but the cold settled in Aurora’s bones regardless. She killed the headlight on her bicycle, plunging the gravel path into a suffocating darkness. The silence of the park at 2:00 AM felt heavy, a physical weight pressing against her eardrums.
She swung her leg over the frame, boots crunching on the frost-dusted path. The silver chain around her neck felt like a wire heated by a flame, the Heartstone pendant beneath her layers pulsing with a rhythm that didn't match her own heart. It had woken her up, a searing heat against her sternum that demanded movement, demanded presence.
"Alright. I'm here. Cool off."
She rubbed the crescent scar on her left wrist, a nervous tick she hadn’t managed to shake since childhood. The pendant didn't listen. It throbbed harder, a dull crimson ache radiating through her sternum.
Aurora pushed the bike into the underbrush, locking the frame to a hawthorn sturdy enough to hold it. Leaving the reliable metal frame felt like abandoning a limb . She adjusted her jacket, breath pluming in white clouds before her face, and turned toward the cluster of ancient oaks that marked the boundary.
Most people saw trees. Aurora saw the threshold.
The oaks stood like gnarled sentinels , their branches interlocked to form a natural archway. Between them, the air shimmered with an oily, translucent quality, confusing the eye. It looked like heat haze on tarmac, but the night was freezing.
She stepped through.
The transition wasn't physical—no pop, no wind. It was a shift in density. The air inside the Fae Grove tasted sweet, cloying like rotting jasmine and overripe peaches. The biting London chill vanished, replaced by a humid, stagnant warmth that made her skin crawl under her heavy coat.
Aurora unzipped the jacket. "Isolde? This better not be some cryptic fae game."
Her voice didn't echo . The sound simply dropped dead three feet from her lips, absorbed by the moss and the unnatural stillness.
The grove defied the season. While Richmond Park outside withered under winter’s approach, here, foxgloves and poppies stood tall and vibrant, their colors oddly saturated in the gloom . They didn't sway. There was no wind here. They stood perfectly , terrifyingly still.
She clicked on her torch. The beam cut a stark cone through the humidity, illuminating the suspended dust motes. They didn't drift; they hung in place until she walked through them.
The pendant cooled slightly , its job apparently done now that she stood in the center of the clearing.
"Great. You dragged me out of bed to look at flowers."
She swept the light across the perimeter. The tree line seemed further away than she remembered. The boundary stones were gone , swallowed by thickets of briar that hadn't been there ten seconds ago.
A twig snapped.
Aurora spun, the beam of light whipping through the darkness. It landed on a patch of ferns. Nothing.
She lowered the light, forcing her breathing to even out. Logic. Think. Animals lived here. Foxes, deer, badgers. Even in a pocket dimension, things had to eat.
Another snap. Louder. Directly behind her.
She turned slower this time, keeping the light low to preserve her night vision. The dense canopy blocked out the stars, leaving the grove in a pitch blackness that felt intentional.
"If that's you, Silas, it’s not funny."
Silence answered. Not the quiet of an empty room, but the held breath of a room with someone standing in the corner.
She took a step forward. A wet, sucking sound came from beneath her boot. The ground, previously firm moss, had turned to bog. She lifted her foot, and the mud made a noise that sounded disturbingly like a tongue clicking against the roof of a mouth.
*Click.*
Aurora froze. She hadn't moved her foot that time.
The sound came from the left, deep in the shadows of the briar patch. It was wet, rhythmic .
*Click. Click.*
She shone the torch toward the noise. The light caught the glossy sheen of leaves, the thorns long and hooked like rusted nails. Deep within the tangle, two points of light reflected the beam.
Eyes. Too wide apart to be a fox. Too low to be a man.
"Who's there?"
The eyes blinked. Side to side, not simultaneously. First the left, then the right.
Aurora backpedaled, her boots sliding on the slick mud. The air grew heavier, the floral scent souring into something metallic, familiar . Copper. Blood.
The eyes vanished. Not moving away, just ceasing to reflect.
She kept the light trained on the spot, her other hand instinctively going to the pocket where she kept her box cutter from the delivery job. A useless piece of metal against whatever lived in a place where time didn't obey physics, but the weight of it in her palm grounded her.
A rustle to her right. Fast.
She jerked the light. Nothing but foxgloves, heads bowed.
"Show yourself."
A giggle floated through the air. It sounded like a child, high and breathless , but it ended in a gargle, like water filling a lung.
Aurora’s stomach turned over. She checked her six, spinning in a tight circle. The grove was closing in. The briars had crept forward, shrinking the clearing. She was sure of it. The path back to the oaks was gone , replaced by a wall of thorns.
She needed to move. Standing still made her prey.
She picked a direction that looked less dense and walked, keeping her steps light. The mud seemed to grab at her ankles, eager to pull her down. Every movement she made was accompanied by a delay—the squelch of her boot echoed a fraction of a second too late, creating a disorienting feedback loop.
*Step. Squelch. ...Squelch.*
*Step. Squelch. ...Squelch.*
She stopped.
*...Squelch.*
The third step hadn't been hers.
Aurora killed the light. The darkness slammed into her, absolute and suffocating. If she couldn't see them, maybe they couldn't see her. She crouched low, the damp soaking through her jeans immediately.
She held her breath, counting the beats of her pulse in her ears.
*One. Two. Three.*
Something brushed against her hair.
She flinched, slapping a hand to her neck, expecting a spider or a branch. Her fingers came away wet. Not water. It was warm. Viscous.
She wiped her hand on the grass, fighting the urge to vomit. Above her, the canopy groaned. Not the creak of wood, but a vocalization . A low, wooden moan of exertion.
Aurora scrambled forward on her hands and knees, staying low. She needed cover. Her hand hit something hard—stone. One of the markers? No, this was smooth, carved.
She risked the light for a split second, shielding the beam with her fingers to create just a sliver of illumination.
It was a statue. Or it had been. It looked like a garden gnome, the kind seen in tacky suburban lawns, but distorted. The face was elongated , the mouth stretched open in a silent scream, the ceramic eyes rolled back into the head.
And it was warm.
She yanked her hand back. Stone shouldn't be warm.
From the darkness ahead, the clicking returned. It was faster now. Excited.
*Click-click-click.*
It was coming from multiple directions. The briars rustled, a dry, scratching sound like thousands of insect legs on paper.
"Invited," she muttered, her voice trembling . "I was invited. The pendant."
She clutched the crimson stone. It was cold now. Dead cold.
A voice whispered, right next to her ear. It mimicked her own tone perfectly , stealing her cadence, her pitch.
"Invited."
Aurora lashed out with the box cutter, slicing through empty air. She rolled away, ignoring the mud, and scrambled to her feet.
She ran.
She ran blindly into the dark, arms up to shield her face. Thorns tore at her jacket, snagging the heavy fabric. She didn't feel pain, only the adrenaline flooding her system. The ground was uneven, roots rising up to trip her, but she vaulted them with a dexterity born of panic.
The sound of pursuit didn't come from behind. It came from everywhere. The rustling matched her pace. When she sprinted, the forest sprinted.
A shape loomed out of the fog—a tree, pale and slender. She swerved, her shoulder clipping the bark. It felt soft, yielding like flesh.
She stumbled into a clearing she didn't recognize. In the center lay a bicycle.
Her bicycle.
But it was rusted , the metal pitted and ancient, the tires disintegrated. It looked like it had been rotting there for fifty years.
Aurora stopped, chest heaving. "That's impossible. I just… I just left it."
The wheel of the rusted bike spun slowly , squeaking. The only moving thing in the grove.
*Squeak. Squeak.*
"Rory," the darkness said.
It wasn't a whisper this time. It was a shout. It sounded like Evan. The confident, sneering tone he used when he’d had too much to drink.
"Don't be stupid, Rory. Come here."
The voice came from the rusted bike.
Aurora backed away, her hands shaking so hard the torch beam jittered wildly. "You're not real. None of this is real. It’s the grove. It’s a glamour."
"Real enough to bleed," the Evan-voice said, shifting, dropping an octave into something guttural and grinding.
A shadow detached itself from the tree line behind the bike. It unfolded, limb by erratic limb. It stood seven feet tall, lanky and disjointed, like a stick figure drawn by a disturbed child. It wore the rags of a delivery uniform.
It had no face. Just a smooth, pale surface where features should be.
Aurora gripped the box cutter, the blade extended. "Stay back."
The thing didn't walk. It glitched forward—one moment it was by the trees, the next it was ten feet closer, the space between traversed without movement.
It tilted its head. The surface of its face rippled. A mouth tore open, vertical and jagged.
"Stay back," it mimicked, using her voice again, panic and all.
Aurora scanned the perimeter. The briars were a solid wall now. The only open space was behind the creature.
She tightened her grip on the flashlight. It was heavy, a Maglite she used for late-night deliveries.
"Okay," she breathed. "Okay."
She feinted left. The creature twitched, its movement a blur of shutter-speed jerks.
She threw the flashlight.
It tumbled through the air, the beam spinning dizzily, and struck the creature in the chest. The thing didn't flinch, but the light distracted it for the fraction of a second she needed.
Aurora dove to the right, crashing through a patch of oversized ferns. She hit the ground rolling and came up running. She didn't look back. The sounds behind her changed—the mimicry stopped, replaced by a wet, tearing noise and the heavy thud of weight hitting the earth.
She saw the ancient oaks ahead. They were faint, ghostly outlines in the swirling mist, but they were there. The exit.
She pushed harder, her lungs burning. The distance didn't seem to close. The faster she ran, the more the trees seemed to recede, trapped in a dolly-zoom of nightmare perspective.
Something looped around her ankle—a vine, thick and muscular.
Aurora slammed into the dirt, the air driven from her lungs. She rolled onto her back, kicking out. The vine tightened, dragging her backward into the dark. Her fingernails scraped furrows in the mud.
She slashed at the vine with the box cutter. The blade bit in, and black ichor sprayed across her hand. The vine recoiled, thrashing like a severed snake.
She scrambled up, gasping. The oaks were right there. Ten feet.
The creature stood between them.
It wasn't wearing the delivery uniform anymore. It was wearing a suit. A barrister's suit. Her father’s suit.
It raised a hand, the fingers lengthening, stretching out toward her like willow branches.
"Aurora," it said, in a voice that was a perfect , heartbreaking recording of her mother. "Don't go."
The air pressure plummeted. Her ears popped. The sensation of being underwater returned, crushing and absolute. The pendant on her chest flared hot again, not a warning this time, but a scream .
Aurora stared at the thing wearing her trauma like a costume.
"She's dead," Aurora said, her voice flat, cold . "And you have three seconds to move."
She stepped forward, not away. Complex problems required out-of-the-box thinking. If the distance grew when she ran, maybe it shrank when she confronted it. Fae logic was about intent, not physics.
She walked toward the monster.
It hissed, the mother-voice dissolving into static. The jagged mouth opened wider, splitting the head in two.
Aurora didn't flinch. She kept her eyes on the space between the oaks, visualizing the gravel path, the cold wind, the smell of the Thames.
The creature lunged.