AI The air in Richmond Park after midnight held a damp, earthy chill that seeped through Rory’s denim jacket. She stood at the edge of the tree line, the city’s distant orange glow a faint smear on the underside of the clouds. In her hand, the Heartstone pendant was a cold, inert weight against her palm.
Eva’s text had been frantic, a series of voice notes left just before her phone went dead. *‘The grove, Rory, it’s wrong. The stones are singing. It’s not Isolde’s song. It’s something else. I can see the roots moving.’* Then silence . For three hours. Rory had waited, called every contact, paced her flat above Silas’s bar until the worn floorboards creaked in protest. In the end, there was only this . Come to the grove. Find Eva.
She knew the way, though she’d only been twice before with Eva guiding her. You didn’t find the Fae Grove; it found you, if it was willing. You walked a specific, meandering path through the older part of the park, counting oak trees, stepping over a particular fallen log covered in bright green moss. If the magic was thin, or the realm was closed , you’d just walk in circles. Tonight, the path opened for her on the first try. The wrongness began there.
The ancient oak standing stones that marked the boundary usually stood silent and mossy, sentinels sleeping under the moon. Tonight, they hummed. A low, sub-audible vibration that she felt in her teeth and in the small crescent scar on her wrist. It wasn’t a song. It was the sound a power line makes before it snaps. The wildflowers that bloomed year-round in the clearing beyond were not just blooming ; they were *writhing *, petals opening and closing like tiny, hungry mouths, their colors too vivid, too electric under the sliver of moon.
Rory stepped between the stones. The air changed instantly, becoming thick and sweetly cloying, like rotting honeysuckle. The grove was a perfect circle of close-cropped, silvered grass, maybe fifty feet across, walled by dense, dark forest. In the center, the remains of a small fire pit sat cold and black. No Eva.
“Eva?” Her voice was swallowed by the grove. It didn’t echo . It just died, flat and final.
A rustle came from the tree line to her left. Not the wind—the air was perfectly still. This was a deliberate, sliding sound, like something heavy being dragged through dry leaves. She spun, her heart a frantic bird in her ribs. Nothing. Just the impenetrable black between the trunks.
She fumbled the Heartstone pendant out, letting it dangle from its silver chain. It was supposed to pulse with warmth near a Hel portal. It was cold. Stone cold. But as she watched, a faint, dull crimson light kindled deep within the gem, not a pulse but a slow, steady ember . Pointing it toward the trees did nothing. Pointing it at the ground at her feet made the glow intensify slightly .
*Great. So the wrongness is right here.*
Another sound. This time from directly above. A soft, wet *snap *, like a green branch breaking under great weight . She looked up. The canopy was a tangled black lattice against the slightly lighter sky. For a second, she saw nothing. Then a shape detached itself from a thick limb and flowed, liquid and silent, to a lower branch. It was too dark to make out details, just a suggestion of long, spindly limbs and a torso that seemed to bend in ways that hurt her eyes to follow . It froze, becoming part of the tree again.
She didn’t breathe. She took a slow, careful step backward toward the standing stones. The exit.
The thing in the tree mirrored her. A faint *creak * as it shifted its weight .
“Eva’s not here,” Rory said, forcing her voice to be level, cool. The intelligence Eva always praised her for felt like a brittle shell . “Whatever you are, you used her voice to get me here. Why?”
A laugh answered her. It came from everywhere and nowhere, skittering around the clearing like a dropped bag of marbles. It was a child’s laugh, but fractured , played backward and at the wrong speed. It ended in a wet gurgle.
The Heartstone’s glow burned brighter, casting a bloody little puddle of light on the grass by her boots. She followed its glow downward. The grass wasn’t grass. Not anymore. Each blade was a thin, pale filament, and they were curling , slowly , sinuously, around the toe of her boot. As she watched, frozen in revulsion, they tightened with the gentle, inexorable strength of growing vines.
She yanked her foot back. The filaments held for a second, then snapped with tiny, brittle sounds. A sigh went through the clearing, a collective exhalation of disappointment.
The thing dropped from the tree.
It landed twenty feet away with a soft, meaty thud, on all fours. It was taller than a man when it uncoiled, a knot of shadows and angles. Moonlight caught the edges of it: skin like polished wet bark, too many joints in its arms and legs, a head that was a smooth, featureless oval save for a vertical gash that might have been a mouth. It had no eyes, but she felt its attention like a physical pressure on her skin.
It didn’t advance. It cocked its head, the movement jerky, insectile.
The Heartstone was hot now, almost burning against her chest. The deep crimson light bled out, illuminating the thing’s torso. For a flash, she saw something nestled against its bark-like skin, held by tendrils of dark root: a familiar turquoise friendship bracelet, braided with tiny silver beads. Eva’s bracelet.
A cold, clear fury cut through Rory’s fear. “Where is she?”
The thing’s mouth-gash split open. No teeth, just a deeper darkness. A voice emerged, a horrible parody of Eva’s warm London cadence, stitched together from stolen syllables. “She… is… here. She is… the invitation.”
It took a step forward. Its legs bent the wrong way, like a stag’s.
Rory’s mind raced , discarding options. Run? It was between her and the stones. Fight? With what? Her fists? The pendant was just a beacon , not a weapon.
The thing took another step, and the ground itself seemed to flinch beneath it. The writhing flowers recoiled. The humming from the standing stones rose in pitch, becoming a pained whine.
*The stones mark the boundary.*
It was an old rule, something Eva had mumbled once when tipsy on Fae wine. The grove was a pocket, but the stones were the doorframe. The magic that sustained it was neutral, mostly. But something from outside, something like *this *, would strain the geometry. The wrongness was the grove itself trying to reject a poison.
The thing was inside the circle. She was inside the circle. The only way out was through the stones.
It lunged. Not with a roar, but with a sound like tearing canvas . Its limbs stretched, impossibly long, fingers like sharpened twigs reaching for her throat.
Rory didn’t think. She dropped into a crouch, the movement automatic, and scooped up a handful of the silvered, filament-grass and the dark, rich soil beneath it. As the thing’s shadow fell over her, she flung the dirt and grass not at the creature, but at the nearest standing stone .
The earth of the grove, hitting the stone of the boundary.
The reaction was instantaneous. The stone’s hum became a shriek. A pulse of raw, white energy shot from its surface, a silent shockwave that passed through Rory like a gust of wind and hit the creature full-force.
It screamed. A real, raw, agonized sound that was nothing like Eva’s voice. The borrowed cadence shattered . The light seared its bark-like skin, leaving smoking, phosphorescent welts. It staggered back, clawing at the air.
Rory was already moving , scrambling on hands and knees toward the gap between the stones. The grass filaments lashed at her wrists, her ankles, trying to hold her. She tore free, feeling skin rip.
She burst through the stones and into the ordinary, cold night of Richmond Park. The transition was a physical slap. The cloying sweetness vanished, replaced by the clean scent of frost and damp leaves. The silence was broken by the distant rumble of a late-night plane.
She collapsed onto the normal, unmoving earth, gasping. Her hands were scratched and muddy. The Heartstone against her chest cooled rapidly, its glow fading to a faint ember once more.
She looked back.
The Fae Grove was gone . Just dense, ordinary forest. No humming. No writhing flowers. No spindly, broken thing wearing her friend’s voice.
But in her clenched fist , held so tight her knuckles were white, was a single, snapped blade of that strange silver grass. And around it, wound tight, was a frayed thread of turquoise yarn from a friendship bracelet.