AI Aurora Carter caught her sleeve on the bark and swore under her breath as the pendant slapped cold against her sternum.
The silver chain bit into the back of her neck when she twisted free. Ahead, the ring of ancient oak standing stones rose out of the dark like broken teeth, each trunk-thick pillar furred with moss and old lichen. Her phone had lost signal three bends back. The torch app still worked, but its weak white beam seemed to soak into the grove rather than cut through it. The light made the wildflowers at her feet shine in brief, strange bursts, bluebells beside foxglove beside pale blossoms she did not know and did not want to touch.
She pulled her sleeve down and checked the Heartstone Pendant. Deep crimson. Warm.
Too warm.
“Brilliant,” she muttered. “That’s not ominous at all.”
The stone gave a faint pulse against her thumb, as if some small thing inside it had rolled over in its sleep.
She had come because Yu-Fei’s nephew, Min, had gone missing for six hours and then turned up on the pavement near Richmond with mud on his shoes and blood under his nails that did not match his own. He remembered almost nothing. Only flowers. A woman laughing. Standing stones. Then cold, a cold so deep his teeth had cracked from clenching . He had whispered one more thing when Aurora brought him ginger tea in the restaurant kitchen.
She had one of those red stones.
He meant the pendant.
Unknown benefactor. Useful timing. Bad sign. All roads led to somewhere rotten.
Aurora stepped between two of the stones.
The shift came at once, not with a flash or gust, but with a pressure change, a soft drop in the middle of her body, as if she had missed a stair in the dark. The torch beam bent. The smell changed. Damp earth and leaf mould gave way to crushed herbs, sweet pollen and something older beneath it, mineral and stale, like the inside of a sealed crypt.
She stopped.
Nothing moved.
That should have calmed her. It did not. Richmond Park had its own language, rustle and snap and distant animal sound. This place had gone too still, still in a way that felt arranged.
Aurora turned in a slow circle. The grove opened around her in a broad clearing. Wildflowers covered the ground in thick drifts, wrong for the season and too neat in some patches, as though careful hands had combed them. Silver-barked trees leaned at the edges. Their trunks twisted in elegant knots, and their branches met overhead in a loose lattice that hid the sky. Little pale lights hung among them. Fireflies, she thought at first. Then one drifted lower and she saw no insect body, only a bead of light suspended in the air, blinking on and off with the rhythm of breath.
She put her phone away. The screen felt vulgar here.
“All right,” she said to the clearing . “I’m here. I’m not lost. I’m not yours. I want to know who’s opening doors.”
Her voice travelled farther than it should. The last word came back from somewhere to her right, flattened and thin.
Doors.
The pendant warmed again. Aurora followed it, picking her way through flowers and low roots. A narrow track appeared where there had not been one a moment earlier, pressed flat between white star-shaped blooms. She crouched and touched one. The petals folded at once. Not a flower. Something like skin.
She snatched her hand back and wiped her fingers on her jeans.
“Right. Fine. We’re doing that.”
The path led towards a pool she could not have seen from the stones. Black water sat still in a bowl of smooth rock, reflecting not the branches above but a dim red shimmer that moved under its surface. The pendant glowed in answer, faint inner light meeting the thing below.
Aurora knelt at the edge. Her trainers sank into damp moss. The water smelled metallic, not rank, not fresh. She leaned closer and saw shape inside the red, not light but depth, an opening under the pool, a wound in the world .
A Hel portal.
Small. Hidden. Fed from somewhere else.
She reached into her jacket pocket for the little folding knife she carried for parcels and bad decisions. Before she touched it, something clicked behind her.
Not a twig. Too crisp.
Aurora froze. Every muscle in her shoulders locked.
Then another sound. Three quick taps on wood. Tick-tick-tick.
A bird, she told herself.
No bird answered.
She stood and turned.
The clearing looked much the same. Flowers. Trees. Floating lights.
One of the lights blinked twice, then dropped to the ground and went out. In the dark it left behind, something slim slid behind a tree.
Aurora stared at the trunk until her eyes watered.
“I can hear you.”
Silence.
“I’d prefer not to do the whole creepy little game. If you want something, ask.”
The answer came from behind her left shoulder, close enough to stir the hair near her ear.
“You brought one already.”
Aurora swung round. Empty air. Her pulse lurched hard enough to make her vision spark.
The voice had been young. Female, perhaps. Or made to sound female. Soft, amused, with that careful clarity some people used when they spoke to children or foreigners.
She backed away from the pool. “Show yourself.”
A laugh drifted through the trees. Not loud. Not mad. Worse because it sounded social, intimate, as if she had missed the opening line of a joke.
The flowers near the pool began to turn. Not towards her, towards the pendant.
Aurora clamped a hand over it. The warmth had become heat now, a live coal under her palm.
“I’m not here to trade,” she said.
“Everyone comes to trade.”
This time the voice came from ahead. Between two silver trunks, a shape stood half in shadow, too pale to be bark, too still to be human. Aurora caught only fragments before it slipped back, the line of a narrow shoulder, a fall of white cloth or hair.
“Min came through here,” Aurora said. “A young man. Twenty. He works in a restaurant in Soho and panics when anyone asks him to use the phone. Ring a bell?”
No answer.
“He came back hurt.”
“He came back.”
That soft amusement again. “Many do not.”
Aurora edged sideways, keeping the pool to one side and the path behind her in sight. She had dealt with strange before. Strange loved attention. Strange loved names. Strange loved bargains hidden in politeness. The trick was to move like you had not agreed to anything.
“What opened this portal?”
The floating lights had begun to gather, drifting lower in a ragged ring around the pool. Their glow painted the petals and moss in corpse-pale silver.
“What fed it?” she asked.
“Need.”
“Whose?”
The pause that followed felt deliberate, weighted.
“Yours, a little.”
Aurora’s fingers tightened on the pendant chain until the links dug into her skin. “No.”
The laugh came again, but now it carried an echo under it, a second voice lagging half a beat behind the first. “No is a door as well.”
Something brushed her ankle.
She jumped back and looked down. A vine, thin as wire, lay across the toe of her trainer. It had not been there before. As she watched, it drew itself through the flowers with a dry whisper . Another slid over the moss near the pool. Another eased down a tree trunk, slow and careful.
The grove had started moving all at once and with terrible patience.
Aurora drew the folding knife. The blade looked absurdly small.
“All right,” she said. “You’re done being subtle.”
“You stepped inside,” said the unseen voice. “Subtle ended there.”
The lights went out together.
Darkness slammed down, complete and close. Aurora heard her own breath, sharp through her nose, and the wet little sound of vines crossing one another through the flowers. Her free hand fumbled for her phone. Before she could get it out, a face rose inches from hers.
Not a face, not properly. Pale oval, smooth as wax, with hollows where eyes should have been and a slit of a mouth too wide and shut too tight.
Aurora stabbed.
The blade hit something with the give of fruit. The thing recoiled without sound. Her phone hit the torch app by chance and a weak beam flashed up, catching white limbs folding away into the dark, too many joints, elbows bending in both directions. She saw one hand, if it was a hand, hanging from a branch above her, finger bones long and delicate as roots.
Then the beam died.
“Cheap bastard phone,” she hissed, shaking it.
From all around her, the grove answered in little clicks. Dozens of them. Tick-tick. Tick-tick-tick.
Not birds. Not branches.
Teeth.
Aurora bolted for the path she had used, shoulders low, knife out. Flowers slapped her shins. Vines snagged at her laces. The pendant burned now, so hot it seared through her shirt. She yanked it free from her skin and it flared crimson, casting just enough light to show movement pacing her through the trees, white and lean and silent except for those hideous clicks.
The standing stones should have been ahead.
They were not.
She skidded to a stop in a part of the grove she had never crossed, where the trees stood farther apart and strips of faded cloth hung from the branches. No, not cloth. Sleeves. Shirt fronts. Bits of old dresses. Each piece had been tied in a knot around the bark. Offerings. Warnings. Trophies.
One scrap stirred though no wind touched her face. The fabric turned just enough for her to see a restaurant logo dark with old mud and older blood.
Golden Empress.
“Min,” she breathed.
A shape dropped from the branch above the cloth with a soft, boneless thud.
It unfolded to full height, taller than any person, draped in something white that clung like soaked silk . Its head tilted with birdlike curiosity. The blank face had changed. Two shallow dents marked where eyes should be now, and a mouth had opened into a small, neat smile.
“You found what was left behind,” it said in that gentle voice. “Will you leave something too?”
Aurora slashed at the nearest vine and backed away. More figures stepped from the trees behind the first, each one pale, slim, and wrong in a slightly different way, one with arms too long, one with knees that bent like a deer’s, one with a crown of flowers growing straight from its scalp. They formed a half circle without haste.
The pendant blazed in her fist. The pool’s red light answered from somewhere behind them, stronger now, rising through the trunks like the glow of banked coals.
The first creature lifted one hand. In its palm lay a neat pile of silver chains, all tangled together.
One held a small deep crimson stone the size of a thumbnail.
Aurora stared.
The creature smiled wider. The skin at the corners of its mouth split without blood.
“Oh,” it said. “You were not the first.”