AI My palm slipped on moss slick enough for ice. I’d scrambled over the first gnarled oak standing stone three breaths prior, left my scuffed running trainers caked in the same muck that glistened on the ancient trunks, thought I’d heard a taxi horn from the main Richmond Park road behind me. Now that sound was gone . All the park’s usual night noises — the hoot of a tawny owl, the rustle of foxes in bramble, the distant rumble of a plane heading for Heathrow — had vanished. The only sound was the crunch of my boots on wildflower stems that shouldn’t have been blooming in mid-November. Bluebells, primroses, clover that smelled not of grass and rain, but of overripe fruit left to rot in a bin .
I pulled the Heartstone from under my work jumper, the thin silver chain warm against my throat. The crimson gem, no bigger than my thumbnail, pulsed under my thumb, faster than it had ever beaten on any of the test walks I’d taken around London’s tube stations, the places the scrap of paper had warned held weak spots between worlds. I’d found the pendant tucked into my delivery bag a week prior, left on the back seat of my moped after I dropped an order of chow mein to a flat in Camden. Tucked next to it was that scrap of brown paper, scrawled in ink that smudged when I touched it: Evan is not a man. He feeds on the gaps between worlds. The Grove is the only place you can trap him. Bring iron nails, three, forged before 1950. Don’t look at the faces. Don’t step off the clearing’s central path.
I’d laughed at the time. Laughed at the idea that my ex, the bricklayer from Cardiff who’d smashed my laptop and chased me through the city streets, was anything more than a sad, violent man. I’d stopped laughing three nights prior, when I came home to my flat above Silas’ bar to find my front door jemmied open, and on my kitchen table, a photo of me outside Golden Empress, taken that morning. No note, no fingerprint, just the photo. And a single black crow feather, the same kind I’d seen tucked into Evan’s work boot the day I left him.
So I’d driven to Richmond, hiked three miles off the marked paths, found the three oak stones the note had described, and crossed over. My phone had read 11:02 PM when I stepped over the first stone’s root. Now it was a dead black slab, no signal, no battery, nothing. I tapped the face of my beat-up Fitbit, the only other piece of tech I carried, and its screen flared to life. The date stared back at me: November 17. I’d crossed into the Grove on November 15. Two days lost, in the span of ten minutes.
The grove’s twisted time. I’d skimmed that line in the note, the throwaway warning that hours inside could be days outside, or days inside mere minutes out. I rubbed the crescent scar on my left wrist, the old childhood habit that kicked in every time my chest tightened with fear, the scar I’d got when I fell off my bike at seven, splitting my wrist open on a rusted drain cover.
“Rory.”
The voice drifted from the treeline ten paces to my left. It was my mother’s. Soft, Welsh lilt rolling over the name, the same tone she’d used to call me in for dinner when I was a kid, hiding in the woods behind our Cardiff house. Jennifer Carter had died three years prior, crashed her car into a lorry on the M4, her body identified by her dental records. There was no way she could be standing in a fae grove in London.
“Who’s there?” My voice carried, but it didn’t fade. It bounced off the oak trunks, warped, stretched thin, until it came back to me, higher, childlike, mocking.
I stepped back, my boots scuffing the packed earth of the central path, and squinted into the shadow under the trees. A figure stepped out from behind an oak, wrapped in the blue wool coat my mum had been buried in, the coat I’d picked out from her wardrobe, the one with the coffee stain on the cuff she’d never managed to wash out. Her face was hidden in mist, but I could see her hand lift, the same chipped mint-green nail polish she’d worn for as long as I could remember glinting in the faint silver light that hung over the clearing.
“Come home, love. I missed you.”
The note’s warning screamed in my head: The grove feeds on what you grieve. It will wear the faces of the ones you left, the ones you lost, to lure you off the path. If you step off, it will keep you. Forever. I squeezed the Heartstone so hard my nail dug into my palm, the gem growing hotter, searing a little into my skin. It pulsed faster, matching the beat of my own heart.
“Rory.”
That voice was Eva’s. My childhood friend, the one who’d paid my deposit on the London flat, who’d driven me out of Cardiff in the middle of the night with nothing but a bin bag of my clothes, who was supposed to be in Edinburgh starting a masters that week. She called from the other side of the clearing, her voice cracking, raw with fear.
“Evan found me. He hurt me, Rory. Please, come get me.”
I shifted my weight , fumbling in my jacket pocket for the pepper spray I carried, the small canister I’d bought after Evan first started harassing me. My fingers closed around it, but I didn’t move. I knew Eva was safe. I’d facetimed her that morning, she’d been in her Edinburgh flat, surrounded by unpacked boxes, the Scottish rain lashing at her window behind her. This was a trick. A lie.
The standing stones behind me creaked. I spun, my heart slamming into my ribs, and saw the three oak stones shifting, their roots dragging across the earth, closing the gap I’d climbed through ten minutes prior. The only way out was sealed. The light over the clearing dimmed, the silver glow turning to a murky red, matching the pulse of the Heartstone in my hand. I remembered the gem’s purpose, the line in the note I’d skimmed past: it glows hot when a Hel portal opens. Evan was here.
“You always were a clever little thing, weren’t you?”
That voice was his. Low, rough, the Cardiff lilt thicker than I remembered, the same tone he’d used the night he smashed my laptop, screaming that I couldn’t leave him, that I belonged to him. I spun back to the far end of the clearing, my pepper spray raised, and saw the rift opening in the air, a black tear that oozed thick, cold smoke that smelled of copper and burnt hair. Evan stepped through, his work boots caked in the same moss that covered the stones, his leather jacket zipped to his throat. His face was half shadow, I couldn’t make out his features, but I saw his smile, the gap between his front teeth that I’d once thought was cute, that I now flinched from.
“You thought you could hide from me in a patch of fairy woods?” He stepped forward, and the two figures that had worn my mother’s and Eva’s faces stepped out from the treeline to flank him. Their faces cleared now, their eyes empty black pits, their mouths stretched too wide, grinning. “You thought a lump of rock and a handful of iron nails could stop me?”
I fumbled in my other pocket, the one I’d stowed the three iron nails in, the ones I’d bought from an antique shop in Portobello Road that morning. My hand came up empty. I’d dropped them when I slipped on the moss, ten minutes, two days, however long ago, when I first crossed the stones. I looked back up at Evan, ten paces away, the rift behind him growing wider, the Heartstone in my hand burning so hot it felt like it was melting into my skin, and I realized I’d walked straight into the trap he’d laid for me. The note hadn’t been a warning. It had been an invitation.