AI The oak stone bit Rory’s shin through her scuffed delivery boots as she stepped over the boundary, and she hissed, grabbing for the tree’s bark to steady herself. It was November, for God’s sake, two weeks past Halloween, and the Richmond Park air outside the treeline had bit at her cheeks sharp enough to make her eyes water, but here? Warmth wrapped around her like a damp blanket, thick with the scent of clover and jasmine and something under that, rot, like leftover dumplings forgotten in the bottom of her Golden Empress delivery bag for three days. She brushed her straight, shoulder-length black hair out of her bright blue eyes, fumbling for her phone to check the time, and her stomach dropped first, small and sharp, before any other fear had a chance to creep in. She’d crossed those stones at 11:27 PM, had counted the twelve steps it took to clear the boundary, less than a minute of walking. Her lock screen said 3:14 AM.
She refreshed, swiped at the screen to pull up service bars, and came up empty. No emergency signal, no Wi-Fi, nothing. Eva had ranted about this grove once, last spring when they’d gotten drunk on cheap tequila in Rory’s flat above Silas’ bar, had said the old tales weren’t just tales—time slipped there, people went in and came out to find their families had grown old without them, or didn’t come out at all. Rory had laughed then, had called Eva a stoned idiot for buying into the fae bullshit their nans had warned them about as kids. Now she laughed, quiet and shaky, and reached under her leather jacket to wrap her left hand around the silver chain resting against her sternum, the crescent scar on her wrist digging into her palm as she curled her fingers around the small crimson gem hanging there. The Heartstone, the one the unknown customer had slipped into her takeout bag three weeks prior, tucked between an order of General Tso’s chicken and a carton of egg fried rice, with a crumpled note scrawled in blue ink: If Evan finds you, go to the Richmond grove. The oak stones will keep you safe. It had glowed faint that night when she’d found it, had stayed cool as a shadow until she’d parked her Yamaha at the park entrance, had only started to warm when she’d spotted the first standing stone through the trees.
She shone her flashlight ahead, the beam cutting through the dark to paint the clearing in wobbly yellow. Wildflowers stretched as far as she could see: poppies, daisies, bluebells, things that hadn’t bloomed in the UK since summer, let alone mid-November, just like the old stories said. She told herself that was all this was, a weird little pocket of nature that didn’t play by the rules, nothing to be scared of. The benefactor would show up, he’d said he would, would lead her to a safe house up north where Evan would never find her, where the restraining order her dad had bullied a Cardiff judge into issuing would actually mean something. She’d fled Cardiff for London to get away from her ex, had thought she was finally safe until a week prior, when she’d come home to find Evan’s favorite gray hoodie draped over her fire escape, the one he’d worn when he’d broken her phone after she’d tried to leave him. She’d packed a bag that night, had run, had remembered the note tucked in her wallet, had driven straight to Richmond.
A flash of movement at the edge of her vision made her spin, the flashlight beam whipping across the treeline. There, for half a second, she’d seen a slouched figure in a gray hoodie, just like Evan’s, and her throat tightened. She shone the light back, fingers shaking so bad the beam wobbled, and it was just a pile of tangled blackthorn branches, twisted into the shape of a man if you squinted hard enough. Paranoia, she told herself, just the stress of running, of looking over her shoulder every time she left the restaurant. She shifted her weight, and froze. Behind her, half a dozen feet back, she heard her Yamaha’s engine sputter, the same rough idle it had had ever since she’d bought it used from a guy in Brixton, the same sound it made when she left it running outside a customer’s flat to run a order up to their door. She spun, heart hammering, and the clearing was empty. No scooter, no man, just flowers swaying in a wind she couldn’t feel.
She lifted her left wrist to check the beat-up Casio watch she’d had since her first year of pre-law at Cardiff, the one thing she’d never been able to throw away even after she’d dropped out, even after she’d run. The second hand was spinning backwards, fast as a top, a blur of black and white that made her head hurt. That was no phone glitch. That was real.
She turned to run, to bolt back the way she’d come, and she’d marked the entrance stone, hadn’t she? She’d torn off a strip of red packing tape, the kind she kept in her jacket pocket to seal leaky delivery bags, and stuck it to the third oak stone from the gap she’d squeezed through, so she’d never lose her way. She walked for ten minutes, boots crunching on clover, and every stone looked the same: ancient, pitted, carved with faint lines she couldn’t parse, no red tape anywhere. She leaned against one to catch her breath, and her breath caught in her throat anyway. Carved into the oak’s bark, right at eye level, was a small crescent scar, the exact same shape as the one on her left wrist, the one she’d gotten when she’d fallen off her bike at seven, the one she’d traced a thousand times while Evan yelled, while she waited for him to calm down.
The Heartstone burned suddenly , hot enough to singe the cotton of her t-shirt, and she yelped, yanking it out from under her jacket to hold it away from her skin. The crimson gem glowed so bright it cast red light over the grass at her feet, pulsing in time with her hammering heartbeat, and she remembered the scrawled postscript on the note, the line she’d thought was just flowery nonsense: it pulses near a Hel portal. It will keep you close to what keeps you safe. She looked up, and every flower in the clearing had turned its head towards her. Not towards the half-moon hanging low in the sky, not towards the glow of the city miles away, all of them, every poppy and daisy and bluebell, their petals tilted to face her, like a crowd of silent, staring eyes.
A voice breathed her name from behind an oak, soft and familiar : “Rory.”
It was her voice. Exact same Cardiff lilt , same rough edge from years of smoking, same way she drew the name out, Ro-ree. She shone her flashlight towards the sound, her hands shaking so hard the beam bounced off the tree trunks. “Who’s there? I have the pendant, you said to bring the pendant.”
The voice came again, closer, and this time it was Evan’s, warm and cruel, the name he’d forced her to answer to curling off his tongue like smoke: “Laila. Where you hiding, baby? You can’t run from me.”
That name, the one she hated, the one that made her skin crawl, made her stumble back. The flashlight beam landed on a figure stepping out from behind the tree, and for half a second she thought it was him, really him: gray hoodie, scuffed work boots, the thin scar slicing through his left jaw that she’d memorized, the one he’d gotten in a pub fight their first year of university. But his eyes were wrong, milky white, no pupils, no irises, just blank nothing. It took a step towards her, and the Heartstone flared, throwing a wall of red light between them, and the thing hissed, a sound like metal scraping on metal, and stumbled back.
She scrabbled backwards, tripping over a root, and fell hard on her palms, the grass warm and damp under her skin. When she looked up, the oak standing stones that had ringed the clearing a hundred feet out when she’d arrived were now twenty feet away, closing in, the circle shrinking by the second. They weren’t keeping her safe. They were trapping her. The thing stepped forward again, and its voice shifted, deepening into the tone of the unknown benefactor, the man who’d handed her the takeout bag three weeks prior, who’d called her by the name she’d never shared with anyone, the name only the mysterious benefactor had ever used: “Malphora. You came just in time. The portal needs a soul to feed it, and you’re perfect . All that fear, all that guilt, all that running. It’s enough to keep it open for a hundred years.”
The Heartstone pulsed so hard against her palm it felt like it would break, the crimson glow dimming for half a second before flaring bright again. She looked up at the thing, at the closing stones, at the thousands of flowers still staring at her, and she realized she hadn’t escaped one monster. She’d walked straight into the arms of a worse one, and there was no way out.