AI Aurora sank the cold Fae blade into the hairline crack and dragged it down. The air tore like wet linen. The pendant at her throat burned hot as a coal.
The basement under Silas' bar stank of spilled stout and disinfectant. White paint peeled in long curls along the brick arch. A crate tower brushed her shoulder as the crack widened into a mouth. Nyx leaned in without weight , a slope of midnight unfurling from the corner where light never landed.
"Do not linger," the whisper slid around her ear, carried by nothing she could name. "This cut will bleed."
Aurora looped the pendant chain around her fingers and took a breath that tasted of yeast and old wood. The blade thrummed in her palm, unforgiving and cold. She pushed through the opening while it still had the grace of a doorway and not the teeth of a trap.
Heat rolled over her. Not a sun's heat, not a hearth's. Sweetness hit her tongue before smell caught up, a slick velvet taste of honey and fat and overripe fruit. Her boots sank a fraction into something that gave like sponge and sprang back. She caught herself on a vine the colour of fresh bruises and yanked her hand back when the thorns swivelled to catch her pulse .
Nyx flowed after her and then pulled tall, a ripple coalescing into impeccable absence of detail. Only the eyes, low violet fire, betrayed an outline against everything else. Their voice came like breath through a keyhole.
"Dymas."
"Not exactly Soho," Aurora said. The joke steadied her, small, sharp. The pendant beat against her clavicle, a second heart. The blade in her right hand flashed a cold grin.
She looked up and stopped. The sky ran amber, like good whisky caught in a glass, light seeping from nowhere in particular. Vines shouldered over vines in greedy confusion, heavy strands braided with living things that did not belong in any botanical book. Fruit blistered along them in swollen clusters, skins too thin for what pushed inside, translucent enough to show veins pulsing. Insects stitched glittering lines from bud to blossom, sugar-bodied things whose wings chimed when they cut the air. Somewhere not far away, iron rang on iron and cooks shouted in languages her mouth could not shape.
Aurora swallowed bile and hunger in the same breath. The ground looked like earth until she scuffed it with her heel and stirred a soft avalanche of crumbs. Not dirt. Crust. The smell changed when she balled a little between finger and thumb and rubbed it, sweet and rich and old. Bread flour, ground with something darker. She wiped her fingers down the seam of her jeans and left a pale smear. Her stomach tightened, not with normal hunger, but with a pulled thread of desire , stitched here for strangers.
"The prince keeps a clean table," Nyx said. "He polishes sin until it gleams."
"Belphegor," she said, as if saying the name let her file it in a cabinet. "The glutton."
Nyx's eyes flickered . "A prince counts, and the count is taste."
The pendant thrummed harder, tugging not north or south but along a feeling that had no cardinal point. She turned until the tug smoothed out to a steady beat and took a step. The ground sighed under her weight with a faint crackle, crust giving and settling.
A dark line cut between the vineyard rows, not a path they had made for visitors, but a trench of pressed grape skins and stems, glossy and black, shining with a wet sheen. It moved under its own breath, a slow creep, as if drawn toward something with a pull of its own. Her body did not want to step into it. Her hand did, the hand that held the pendant. She set her boot on the compacted skins and felt them yield and firm like a muscle.
The rows broke past a stand of twisted pear trees, their leaves lacquered, their fruit the size of her head and sweating. The pears sagged on their stems as if the trees could not bear them, and from one, a thin stream of something clear and sharp-dripping hit a porcelain bowl placed beneath it. A man in a white apron, crisp and immaculate despite the sap flecked on his forearms, held a spoon out with reverent care. He tipped it to his tongue and sighed.
His apron said Leitham House in an elegant script. The words had been clean once. The fabric under them had a brand seared through it, a circle with a crown and a fork, puckered and angry still. His eyes lifted and found Aurora and widened, not with hope so much as calculation. He glanced at Nyx and then fixed on the blade at Aurora's hip as if knives were the only language he trusted.
"You came wrong," he said, voice rough, accent London with old training under the polish. "Guests enter through the kitchens."
Aurora let her weight slide to her heels. "We did not dress for the door list."
He looked past her again, into the vines, into a path she could not see. "Are you judged?"
"Wrong table," Aurora said.
"Then leave." He dipped the spoon again and then did not lift it. His hand shook. "No, wait. Foolish. Stay and do me a small kindness for a friend of a friend. A minute's work."
Nyx unfolded a little taller, inhuman grace in a tight place. "A minute here is a crooked measure."
The man's laugh came down to a thread. He turned the spoon in the bowl and spoke without looking at them. "They bind scent to a name. If I give this jar to the Taster, he will own me for one more turn of the table. I said yes when I came. Contracts held like sugar glass, beautiful and useless once cracked. They will not crack for me."
Aurora's wrist throbbed where an old crescent scar traced pale on her skin. The pendant radiated heat toward a direction that ran through his body and past him into the vines. She thought of the bar upstairs and Silas chewing a matchstick, of rent due and a life lived between takeaways and closed doors. She thought of Evan's hand around her wrist and a promise she had not kept that time because she had no blade to cut the promise in two. She had a blade now. She did not pick the man's jar up.
"What do you lose if we say no?" she said.
He looked up. Tears had tenderised the red rims of his eyes. They had not fallen. "My tongue next, I expect. They take parts that offend them with their beauty. I would prefer to keep mine."
Nyx's head tilted. "Your tongue began this," they said. "It will finish it."
The chef flinched. He looked at the pendant on Aurora's chest, and his breath hitched. "Who gave you that?"
"Someone who did not leave a name," Aurora said.
"That stone knows its maker. That stone knows the way to the heart of the Feast." He drew his lips back from his teeth, a grimace that wanted to be a smile. "Everyone here runs toward or from the same kitchen."
Aurora glanced at Nyx. The violet fire said nothing she could use. The pendant beat hotter in her grip, a demand now, not a pull. She moved past the man and let the thread in her chest lead.
The trench of skins widened into a canal. Wine ran deep and slow, dark as blood in a vein. Froth gathered in delicate flurries where submerged objects interrupted the flow. The air steamed raisins and oak and something medicinal that warned her nose even while her mouth watered. A wooden bridge arched over the canal, varnished gleam like sugar glaze. When her boot hit the first plank, it sank and oozed. She snatched her foot back before it swallowed leather and toes and pride.
"Once across," Nyx murmured, "you will not find the same boards beneath you again."
"Helpful," Aurora said. She scanned the edge. Grapevines tangled into stiff lattices, braided with bones so small and so many that the lattice held like steel. A cart sat half up on the bank, wheels stuck in the candy glaze of a petrified drip, piled with split barrels that breathed. The barrels drew in and out almost imperceptibly, a slow respiration that matched the tug of the canal.
She spotted a line of stepping stones set just below the surface, flat ovals pale against the dark. Sugar loaves, shaved and compressed. They glinted like teeth. She tightened the pendant chain in her fist and stepped on the first one. It held. She took another, heel to toe, eyes on the far bank. The wine skinned over around her boot soles and then broke, sticky cold catching her ankles in a clinging caress that felt like welcome and wanted to be possession.
Halfway across, a shadow shifted beneath her. A fish, she thought, then discounted it when a ladle, long-handled, sprung from the surface to lap at her calf with a silver bowl. It left a bright smear where it touched. Her pulse thudded. She moved. The ladle followed, slurping enthusiastically, a child's tongue at a sweet. Another joined it with a polite clink.
"Nyx," she said through her teeth.
Cold touched the back of her knee, not water-cold, not ice-cold, but absence . Arms shaped from shade gripped her and lifted as if fireflies made a net and strange physics agreed to be kind for once. She skimmed the last three stones. The far bank hit her soles, hard, clean, and she stumbled to her knees. Liquid laughter rippled under the surface of the canal behind her, sounding like cutlery in a drawer.
She stood. Sticky purple laced her skin where the ladle had kissed. It tingled, a warning that hummed in the old scar on her wrist, a nervous system she did not remember growing. She wiped her leg on the grass. It left no stain there. The grass drank it.
"What would have happened if they tasted more?" she asked.
"They keep samples," Nyx said. "You would have found your reflection on a plate. Some would clap. Some would salivate."
"Right."
They moved. The vineyard ended in a border of tall hedges cut into shapes that did not settle into lions or swans or anything human. The shapes changed while she watched, as though the gardener tasted an idea and then spat it back out. Beyond the hedge, noise rose and fell with the steady cadence of a kitchen at service. Voices overlapped like a woven mat. No one sang.
They slipped through a doorway in the hedge framed by two topiaries that leaned together as if to whisper . The scent shifted from raw sugar to heat and metal and sharp herbs bruised under knife blades. A courtyard opened in front of them, checkerboard tiles worn to soft hollows. On one side stood a row of ovens shaped like gaping mouths, glazed bricks red as a wound scab. Flames licked and curled slow as tongues. On the other, a wet market sprawled, tables heaped with things she could not name. Some writhed. Some watched with unblinking eyes. Human men and women, and things that had chosen forms mostly human out of politeness or practice, worked with measuring cups and cleavers and elaborate spoons, each wearing a mark somewhere on skin or garment. Steel sang against steel. The air tasted of salt and satisfaction and old tears boiled to nothing and scraped from the pot.
A woman with tattoo sleeves of vines up both arms thumped a cleaver through a pile of fruit that bled white, milk-sweet, and tossed the slices into a pan. A tall creature with a fox's skull for a head piped rosettes of something moss green onto desserts that squirmed, settled themselves, then hissed and lay flat, obedient. At the centre of it all, a long table stretched, piled with crockery, each plate engraved with the same circle and crown and fork the man had worn. At the far end of the courtyard, a set of bronze doors stood half open. Heat bled from the gap. The pendant in Aurora's fist pounded until her bones ached.
Aurora and Nyx kept to the shadow of a stacked crate of sugar cones tall as a person. Aurora leaned in, peered over a rim, and made out carving across the bronze doors, small, detailed, a story told in loops and bites. Figures bowed under the weight of full plates. Other figures fed them. In the very centre, a single stylised heart encircled by thorns, not a Fae wreath, not anything she had seen in any church. Beneath that, a notch where a thing the size of a thumbnail might sit and turn.
"The lock," she said.
Nyx inhaled a thought. "The anchor," they said. "Where Earth tastes Hel and cannot decide it hates it."
Aurora unclasped the pendant. The chain slipped cold through her fingers despite its heat. She glanced around. A boy in a stained cap stared at the sugar cones and thought of nothing beyond them. The woman with vine tattoos frowned at her pan as if it had offended her. No faces turned toward the door. She stepped away from the crate and walked, not fast enough to draw a glance, not slow enough to be noticed. The pendant threw heat against her palm until her skin felt the start of a blister.
At the doors, she found the notch again with her thumb. The pendant dropped into it like a key into an old lock, a small, perfect sound. Heat ran up the bronze and turned the carvings a deeper shade. The doors shivered. A ripple went through the flagstones under her feet and came back again, a return pulse that believed it had a right to be answered. The air thickened. There it was, the thin glimmer of a barrier, not seen with eyes but felt against skin like the hum of a live wire . The Veil. Here it groaned.
"Cut," Nyx whispered.
Aurora put her left hand firm on the bronze, breath steady enough to make a measure. She brought the Fae blade up. Cold slid down into her bones, clean and absolute. She set the blade against the shimmer and pushed.
It pushed back. The shimmer had teeth, not real, not visible, but sensation that bit. The blade bit deeper. The shimmer whimpered like something small and cornered, then snapped like something bigger and hungrier. She rooted her feet and pressed. The Veil's give had always felt like a curtain before . Here it had the resilience of sinew. It did not part. It tasted. It went for the soft flesh of her wrist where the scar lay. Pain shot up her arm bright as lightning.
Blood beaded where the shimmer kissed old skin. The droplet hung, fat, perfect . The bronze warmed as if a giant breath had blown against it. The heart-carving above the notch flickered like a real organ seen through a ribcage. Something listened. Something decided it had heard enough.
A bell struck. It did not sound like a handbell, or a church bell. It sounded like a spoon rapping a crystal rim , precise, impersonal, escalating. One, two, three. The courtyard stilled without silence . Knives paused in air. Pans ceased to spit. Heads turned as if yoked to the same thought.
"Service," someone said, reverent, afraid.
Nyx's hand closed on Aurora's elbow. "Back position. He sends tasters first."
A shadow sidled out through the bronze doors with no movement of hinges, only heat enough to curl her fringe. He paused on the threshold. He wore a modest suit the colour of black tea, exquisitely cut, lapels sharp as razors. His skin had the yellowed gloss of fat under a crisp roast. He had eyes so black they drank the edges of things around them, and when he smiled, his teeth had the sheen of sugar pulled thin and spun. He carried no plate. He did not need one. His tongue unrolled delicately, like ribbon, the colour of rose petals. The tip ended in a knifepoint.
"New palate," he said. He did not look at her and then he did, the way a hawk's gaze finds a mouse. "Give me your hand."
Aurora yanked the blade free and set it low, edge toward him, heart hammering at her throat where the pendant had left red. The courtyard drew a collective breath. The bell chimed again and again, faster.
"Not on the menu," she said.
He blinked slowly , with amused patience. "You came without invitation and pressed your flavour on our door."
"Kitchen smells pass through floorboards too," Aurora said. "Consider it ventilation."
The Taster cocked his head. He did not cross the doors' threshold. He did not need to. The tongue darted, testing air between them. Heat backed up under Aurora's ribs like steam caught under a lid. The pendant in the notch spun a fraction whether she wanted it to or not. The bronze groaned. On the worktables, a thousand small vibrations ran through the plates and cups.
"Now," Nyx breathed, voice thin with strain she had not heard there before. "Now you cut."
Aurora lifted the blade and drove it at the shimmer where pendant met notch.
The bronze door clenched shut on the blade like a jaw. The Fae edge bit, then locked, metal crying in a thin, high scream. The ground bucked hard enough to throw her against the panel. Something in the floor broke loose with a wet snap. From the hedges behind them, a rustle ran like a wave. The sugar cones rattled in their crates and hurled themselves forward. The canal vomited wine in a purple plume. Every oven mouth yawned wider and showed teeth.
The Taster stepped across the threshold, patience finished. His ribbon tongue lashed and coiled around Aurora's wrist with perfect aim, hot and wet and strong as a rope. He yanked.
She did not go to him.
Nyx did not stay insubstantial. They hit the Taster square in the chest like a falling tapestry made of winter. Violet flared. The Taster's tongue snapped back, scored and smoking. The courtyard erupted. Knives took flight in a murmuration. Vines crawled up from between the tiles with hooks ready. The bronze doors bellowed like boars.
Aurora wrenched the pendant with her left hand. It stuck, then slid a fraction. The heart carving beat, once, twice, under her palm.
Something roared from inside the hall and the sound came with scent, rich and choking, truffle and rendered marrow and syrup burnt to the edge, a call to hunger that turned knees to water. The nearest oven tore free of its bricks and lunged.
Heat slammed toward her like a wall. She sank the Fae blade into the gap where door and frame kissed and hauled with everything her spine could give.
The lock gave.
The Veil screamed. The floor ripped like pastry, layers flaking up. The world tilted. The oven's mouth opened above her, all heat and teeth, and something with too many hands grabbed her from behind.