AI The pendant thudded against her sternum, an impatient heartbeat pressed beneath her jacket, and Aurora kept moving between the standing stones as if momentum could outrun the wrongness.
An hour earlier the Heartstone had warmed in her pocket on Portobello Road, a faint, almost embarrassed heat that made her fingers tense. A warmth for a portal meant a place people ought not know but someone, somewhere, did . The unknown benefactor had written Isolde's Grove on a scrap of paper in a script that smudged like it had been written with a thumb, and Rory had come because she could not unhear the pendant. She told herself that was pragmatic. That was a delivery driver following a lead. That was reason.
Wildflowers, impossibly bright and careless, crowded the path. They smelled like perfume at the edge of memory, cloying and green. Time folded wrong as soon as she passed the last oak; the air stretched, like elastic, and her watch blinked the same time twice. She shoved it into her pocket. Electronics meant little between Earth and Fae, and she did not trust clocks tonight.
The Grove kept its secrets by moving at the edges of sense. Sounds arrived thinly, as if heard through paper. A robin called with a wrong, staccato rhythm, then fell silent as though it had forgotten the rest of its song. Leaves made a soft, repetitive sound that could have been whispering, or a sewing machine half-remembering a stitch. Rory kept her shoulders down and her steps measured . She had not come to breathe poetry. She had come to trace warmth .
The Heartstone pulsed, a faint inner glow against the silver chain. She fingered it without thinking until the crescent scar on her left wrist felt hot where cold metal kissed skin. The scar used to be a child's accident, a sliver of too-close glass. Tonight it seemed to listen.
A laugh came from the hedge, high and quick. Not the easy laugh of someone sharing a joke, but a thin child's laugh, as if the darkness itself had been taught to mimic play. Rory stopped. Her mouth shaped words she did not hear. She squinted through the gloom and saw only a shift of wildflowers at the edge of her vision, as if the flora herself had taken a small step to the right.
"Laila?" It sounded like paper folded, like someone testing the syllables for elasticity.
Rory's skin went tight. She did not use that name in public since she leaked it once drunkenly at a funeral and found it lodged in the wrong mouths. Only a handful of people called her Laila now, and none of them were likely to be humming nursery songs in Richmond. She answered aloud, because remaining quiet felt like drawing a curtain .
"No one here called me that," she said, and her voice came back wrong, lagging by a breath. It sounded as though she had said it underwater.
Something moved behind a ring of bluebells. Not fast, just the suggestion of motion, a slide of shadow along the bark. Rory turned her head, slow, deliberate, making sure not to startle whatever had the patience to wait. Her breath came out in clouds, though the night had no right to be that cold. The Heartstone warmed against her sternum, as if the pendant had pressed closer to listen.
Footsteps, but not hers. A soft scrape, like boots on damp earth. They threaded the space between the stones and stopped at the edge of the clearing, where moonlight pooled in a stone basin. Rory could not tell how close the sound was, because distance did not behave properly in the Grove. The noise belonged to the right place and the wrong time.
She moved toward the basin. Her shoes sank slightly into moss that sighed. The stones here bore shallow grooves, old as language. Symbols sat half-hidden in lichen; someone had carved an arrangement of thin lines and small spirals that made the skin at the inside of her forearms prickle. The Heartstone pulsed once, then twice, then again, each beat warm and certain. Near a Hel portal, the Heartstone would not merely glow, it would insist. The pendant urged, like a compass with an opinion.
Rory crouched, breath loud in her ears. She slid two fingers past the silver chain and pressed the pendant into the carved groove on the stone. It heated so that she could feel it through the metal; warmth bled up her wrist and met the crescent scar. The scar shivered, a ribbon of memory. Her teeth tightened. She had expected heat. She had not expected recognition.
Something answered the touch, not with sound but with a movement of air that smelled suddenly of iron and old paper. The wildflowers swayed as if a hand had cupped them. The robin called once and then, impossibly, spoke a word like it had been taught to speak human.
"Rory." The syllable did not belong to the bird. It came from the throat of a tree, then from the grass, then directly into the bones behind her teeth.
She pulled her hand back as if stung. The pendant left a faint red mark on the stone where it had rested, a thumbnail-sized bruise of light. The Heartstone flared, quick and bright, then retreated into its regular hush. A footstep near the stones. Close enough that she could have reached out and touched the newcomer if she had not been busy measuring escape routes in her head.
"Who are you?" she asked. Questions had rhythm; that kept her from sounding like someone speaking to spirits in a graveyard.
"Who do you think?" The voice was silk and gravel. It used too many of her names at once, nicknames overlapping in a way that felt like someone riffling through private drawers. "Laila. Malphora. Aurora."
The last name hit like ice. A person cannot speak a private name and still be a stranger. If this thing knew Malphora, it knew the six-year-old hiding in a wardrobe, knew the woman who had once dared to sign essays under an invented surname to keep a professor from finding her. Knowing a name called for a certain intimacy, and intimacy was dangerous in the Grove.
She stood. Her knees made a small, distracted sound. "If you want something, speak plainly," she said. "I don't have time for riddles tonight."
Plain speech was a weapon that had never failed her, not with managers, not with exes. It had a way of corralling people. The voice laughed like a drawer full of coins.
"I want what you carry," it said. "Bring it here."
"That is not happening." Saying it steadied her. Saying it made a line. You did not hand over a thing that might be a portal key to a stranger in an oak clearing.
A shadow detached itself from the circle of trees and slid forward, an outline without a face, as if someone had painted the idea of a person and left the colour off. It moved without rustling. The air around it held its breath. Rory could not make the shadow out in detail; the brain obliged by filling in faces that were not there—her father's jaw, her mother's mouth, Evan's smug certainty—but each apparition blurred when she blinked. The pendant pulsed faster, as if impatient.
"Why there is fear," the shadow said, voice shaped like an old radio, "some require understanding. Others require blood. Which are you? Which are you, Aurora Carter of Cardiff?"
She did not flinch at her full name. People had used it to shape her identity into neat boxes and fines. Faces in the dark could not claim more of her. "Neither," she said. "I am a delivery driver. I am not much of anything else tonight."
The shadow's edges shifted. It leaned in, not with hostility, but with a curious hunger . "Then why do you carry the Heartstone? Who gave it to you?"
That should have been simple. The truth was a jagged thing with splinters: a stranger left the pendant with no note, no face; it had arrived unannounced. Saying that now would sound like the tale of someone who had stumbled through an antique shop and come home with a cursed painting. She kept the truth to a shape that would not bleed.
"An anonymous stranger," she said. "It was left for me."
"Convenient." The shadow made the word long. "And yet you found the Grove. You come to a Hel portal alone. You press a thing into a stone like a child fitting a coin into a wishing fountain. Why?"
Because curiosity had teeth and it had bitten. Because the pendant pulsed like a throat. Because someone had decided to plant a path and watch what she did. Because she did not want to run and then wonder. Because being cool-headed meant testing edges. She did not speak these reasons.
A twig snapped somewhere to her left. The sound was too slow. Flora shifted to expose another set of tracks. They were tiny, not quite human, not quite beast, impressions that led from the ring of trees toward a hollow between the stones . The tracks had the neatness of someone who had practised walking without leaving a story, and yet they overlapped with prints that looked peculiarly familiar , like the shape of a child's shoe she once owned.
The Heartstone thrummed against the carved light on the stone. It wanted something, and that wanting spread along the silver chain like a current.
Rory flicked her eyes toward escape, to the path that had led her here. She saw then that the stones had inched ever so slightly , closer like slow teeth closing in a careful jaw. There was no sound to accompany the motion, no snap, merely a suggestion of movement that rubbed the skin the same way a shadow would. The path she had taken back was not the same as the one in front. Routes rearranged themselves in the Grove as if geography were polite and adjusted for moods.
"I asked you a question," the voice said. "Will you give it?"
She heard wetness in the voice now, like breathing through cloth. It was nearer. The shadow's outline pooled moonlight like oil. A hand, if one could call it that, shaped itself from the darkness and licked at the rim of the basin. Its fingers were too long, and when it moved it left a cold track on the air.
"No," she said. Two syllables, solid. Enough to carve a place for her feet.
The shadow's laugh had a sound like wind going through a pipe. "Then we will take it."
It moved with the speed of a decision. A shape leapt from the trees, faster than the eye wished to process. Rory's body reacted without permission: she twisted, tried to shove the pendant deeper to her throat, to use her hand as shield. Cold, sudden as river water, closed around her wrist, not the stone and not the shadow, something living and too slick for the grove floor. The Heartstone skittered in its chain and struck the basin, a bright, annoyed chime that seemed far too musical for the place .
A voice, close now, not a whisper but a press, said one word in a tone that unmade her bones.
"Malphora."
A hand that tasted of river and winter closed on her arm. The night rewrote its rules in a single movement. A pressure pressed at her sternum like a fist of wind. The standing stones held their breath, and the world thinned to the sound of the pendant hitting stone and the throb of something ancient waking.
Rory yanked her arm. Her shoulder screamed. Roots somewhere sighed. The pendant flared a light that tasted of iron and old grief. The hand tightened, patient and certain.
She had asked for answers and fate had delivered its appetite.
The ground beneath the basin gave, not collapsing but unzipping in a slow seam that smelled of peat and the cold mouth of the earth. Something wet and dark shifted in the hollow, a motion like a throat unhooking.
"Give it to us," the shadow said, no longer a voice in the dark, but a chorus from the tree, the grass, the stone itself.
Rory's breath came short, a plead disguised as an action. She shoved her other hand toward the pendant. She would not hand it to whatever wanted it, but she would not let it be wrenched away. Her fingers clutched silver, the chain slick. The Heartstone burned with a rage she did not own.
The hand tightened, and the Grove made a small, hungry sound, like someone clearing their throat before telling you the end of a story.