AI The engine of the Golden Empress delivery scooter ticked as it cooled in the damp night air, a sharp, metallic rhythm that faded into the sprawling silence of Richmond Park. Aurora Carter zipped her insulated courier jacket up to her chin, attempting to ward off the biting London chill , but the cold was not what had drawn her out into the dark. It was the heavy pull against her sternum. Beneath the layers of synthetic nylon and cotton, the thumbnail-sized gemstone rested against her skin. The silver chain felt like ice around her neck, but the deep crimson artifact itself radiated a steady, unnatural heat.
Rory pressed a palm to her chest. A faint inner glow bled through the fabric of her shirt, casting a dark red wash over her fingers. Her unknown benefactor had never provided an instruction manual for the heavy piece of jewelry, only the quiet assurance that it was important. Lately, the heartstone had been largely dormant. Tonight, it felt like a living ember.
She left the paved path and stepped onto the unruly grass, her boots crunching dead autumn leaves. The park was officially closed, abandoned to the foxes and the restless wind, but Rory knew exactly where she was going . She had been here once before, guided by Eva during her frantic first weeks in the city, back when London still felt like a labyrinth designed to swallow her.
Ahead, the ancient oak standing stones loomed out of the gloom . They did not look like trees. They looked like gray, petrified sentinels , their thick trunks twisted into pillars that marked the boundary of a place that did not belong entirely to Earth.
Rory hesitated at the threshold. She rubbed the thumb of her right hand over the small, crescent-shaped scar on her left wrist, a childhood accident that now served as an anchor when her nerves frayed. She was a pre-law drop-out, a delivery driver, a refugee from a bad past. She liked logic. She liked puzzles with neat solutions. She did not like magic, and she did not like the way the air between the massive oaks seemed to ripple, like heat rising off a tarmac.
The crimson stone pulsed against her chest. A warning, or a summons.
Rory took a slow breath, dropped her hands, and stepped between the ancient oaks.
The transition was immediate and disorienting. The biting autumn wind vanished, replaced by an absolute, suffocating stillness. The temperature spiked from freezing to uncomfortably balmy. Rory stood frozen just inside the treeline, her bright blue eyes wide as they adjusted to the impossible landscape.
This was the Grove. Isolde's grove, some called it. A pocket of reality wedged uncomfortably between London and the Fae realm. Time did not work here. Eva had warned her that an hour inside this clearing could deposit her back in Richmond Park a minute after she left, or a week later.
Beneath her boots, the dead leaves of November were gone . In their place, an unbroken carpet of wildflowers spread across a vast clearing, their petals unfurling in the dark. They were entirely colorless in the moonlight, a sea of gray and silver blossoms that smelled sickly sweet, like rotting honey and crushed jasmine.
Rory swallowed hard. The silence was absolute. No traffic from the distant roads. No wind through the canopy. Not even the rustle of an animal in the brush. The stillness was so heavy it made her ears ring.
Then, the heartstone flared.
The heat bloomed into a sharp, localized burn against her collarbone. Rory winced, reaching into her collar and pulling the pendant out. The deep crimson stone was glowing fiercely now, throwing off enough red light to illuminate the nearest cluster of wildflowers.
Her heart did a slow, heavy roll in her chest. The pendant did not react to Fae magic. It only possessed one measurable behavior. It pulsed when near a Hel portal.
Rory looked at the deep red light spilling across her hands. She was not standing in a serene, hidden sanctuary . The Grove was compromised .
She turned to leave. Finding the anomaly was no longer the priority. Getting back to her flat above Silas's bar, locking the door, and making a pot of tea was the only logical course of action. She took a step back toward the ancient oak standing stones.
Something shifted in the deep shadows of the clearing.
Rory stopped. She forced her breathing to quiet, straining her ears.
A wet, heavy slide. Like a sack of damp soil being dragged over the wildflowers.
It was a hundred yards away, deep in the thickest patch of the unseasonal blooms, but in the dead air of the Grove, it sounded as if it were right next to her ear.
Panic, familiar and sharp, clawed at the back of her throat. It felt like the nights she had spent listening to Evan's footsteps in the hall of their shared apartment, waiting for the door to open. But Rory was twenty-five now. She had fled Cardiff to escape being a victim. She drove her nails into her palms, marshaling her cool-headed intellect. If there was a Hel portal in the Fae Grove, something had crawled out of it. And it was highly likely that the sudden, brilliant flare of her pendant had acted like a lighthouse in the dark.
She tucked the silver chain back inside her shirt, attempting to smother the red glow under her insulated jacket. Total darkness swept back over the clearing, save for the pale wash of the moon.
Another sound. A rhythmic , deliberate sequence of clicks, like overgrown fingernails tapping against stone.
It was closer. Fifty yards.
Rory backed up slowly , keeping her eyes locked on the sea of wildflowers. The stems were waist-high in places. The moonlight painted harsh, deceptive shadows across them. As she scanned the pale expanse, the wrongness of the place began to press heavily against her mind. The air smelled too thick. Her movements felt sluggish, as if the strange time dilation of the Grove was physically fighting her muscles.
A tall silhouette detached itself from the trunk of a great oak near the center of the clearing.
Rory stopped breathing entirely.
The thing was too tall to be human. It stood draped in the shadows, its limbs elongated and weeping dark fluid that hissed as it hit the blooming flowers. The flowers did not just crush beneath its feet. They withered, turning instantly to black ash. It had no discernible face, just a pale, featureless shape angled directly toward where she stood.
It was hunting her.
Rory took another slow, silent step backward, reaching blindly behind her for the rough bark of the boundary oaks. Her hand found only empty air.
She risked a quick glance over her shoulder. The twin oak pillars were completely gone. The boundary had shifted, or the temporal distortion of the Grove had spun her around without her realizing it. Behind her was only endless, impenetrable forest.
The clicking sound started again. Rapid. Excited.
Rory snapped her gaze back to the clearing. The tall shadow was no longer fifty yards away. It stood twenty paces from her, looming over the silver blossoms. Its long, disjointed arms hung past its knees. The wet dragging noise came from an appendage it dragged behind it on the ground.
Her chest felt like a furnace . The heartstone was searing her skin, vibrating violently on its silver chain.
Out-of-the-box thinking. She needed an erratic angle. Running blindly into the woods would only disorient her further in a pocket dimension where distance and time were fluid. The entity was clearly tracking the heat and magical signature of the artifact.
Rory moved her left hand slowly to her zipper. She dragged it down with agonizing care, trying to mask the abrasive sound of the teeth parting. The red light of the pendant spilled out in a brilliant, damning beam directly onto the creature.
In the crimson light, the entity seemed to shudder. The featureless head snapped back, and a sound like grinding stone tore from exactly where its throat should be. It scrambled backward, shielding itself from the direct blast of the deep crimson glow.
It was a creature of the darkest, coldest depths of Hel. The pure, concentrated energy of the heartstone was not just a beacon . It was a threat.
Taking her chance, Rory yanked the silver chain over her head. The metal bit sharply into her skin, leaving a red welt across her neck. The gemstone burned her palm, but she tightly gripped it, stepping aggressively toward the towering shadow.
The creature recoiled, its long limbs contorting as it hissed, terrified of the intense light and heat.
Rory did not run away. She walked forward, sweeping the crimson light back and forth like a lantern, driving the impossible thing deeper into the Grove, away from the area where she suspected the portal had shifted. She trusted her sharp intellect to remember every step, every crushed flower, reverse-engineering her path relative to the creature's hiding spot.
As she forced the entity back, the oppressive pressure in the air began to thin. To her left, caught in the periphery of the red glow, the texture of the darkness subtly changed. A pair of ancient oak standing stones materialized from the gloom , their rough bark grounded in reality.
The creature realized she was flanking it. It let out another horrific, grinding shriek and lunged, limbs slicing through the flowers toward her side.
Rory threw the heartstone with all her might.
She did not throw it at the creature. She threw it in a high arc over the nearest cluster of thick, thorny brush. The creature, instinctively tracking the source of the overwhelming Hel-linked magic, violently changed direction, diving after the falling stone into the deep undergrowth.
Rory sprinted. She abandoned caution, her boots tearing the blooming wildflowers from their roots. She threw herself shoulder-first into the gap between the ancient oaks just as the heavy, wet dragging sound whipped around in her direction.
The transition hit her like a physical blow. The suffocating warmth collapsed. The biting London wind slammed into her face, smelling of car exhaust, damp asphalt, and rain. The blaring horn of a distant night bus echoed through the trees.
Rory stumbled forward onto the paved path of Richmond Park and fell to her knees. She gasped the freezing air, her straight black hair clinging to the cold sweat on her cheeks.
She stared back at the wrought-iron silhouette of the trees, but she saw only typical, dormant autumn oaks. The standing stones were just trees again. The Fae Grove was closed.
Rory knelt on the cold pavement for a long time. Her chest felt terribly bare without the familiar weight of the silver chain. She rubbed the crescent scar on her left wrist, staring into the dark, knowing exactly what she had left stranded inside, and wondering how long it would take for it to find its way out.