AI Rory’s fingers closed around the pendant just as the ground gave a soft, wet sigh beneath her boot.
She froze with one foot over the threshold of the grove, one hand braced against the nearest standing stone. The oak bark under her palm felt slick, not with rain, but with a skin-like sheen that made her stomach tighten. The crimson gem at her throat warmed against her collarbone, a small, stubborn pulse that matched the dull throb in her wrist where the old scar ached.
“No.”
The word came out under her breath as she stared into the clearing.
Wildflowers crowded the grass in a pale, restless sea. White, yellow, blue, each bloom too fresh, too clean, as if some unseen hand had combed them into place moments ago. Ancient oaks ringed the grove like sentries. Their trunks twisted up through the dark, thick and knotted, their branches arching over the clearing until the whole place looked caged.
Rory stepped fully inside.
The world behind her thinned at once.
Not vanished. Thinned. The way glass dimmed when breath fogged it. She turned before she could stop herself and saw the shape of the park path through the trees, blurred and far away, as if someone had dragged it backwards through water. The pendant at her throat grew warmer.
“Cheers,” she muttered to no one .
A leaf brushed her cheek.
She flinched hard enough to send her shoulder into the nearest oak. The bark bit through her jacket. Her eyes snapped up.
Nothing.
No breeze. No birds. No fox rustling through undergrowth. Not even the steady hiss of traffic from beyond Richmond Park. The silence here had weight , a pressed hand over her mouth.
Rory slipped her phone from her pocket and checked the screen. One bar, then none, then one again. The lock screen stared up at her with an unreadable black shine. She tapped it once. Nothing. Again. The screen flashed, glitched, and gave her a reflection instead of a display.
For a second, she saw someone standing behind her.
She spun round so fast her shoe skidded in damp earth.
Empty grove.
Her heart punched once, hard, then settled into a colder rhythm. She forced herself to breathe through her nose. Slow. Count. Assess.
“Brilliant,” she whispered. “Fantastic choice, Rory.”
The words sounded wrong in the grove, too small to belong here.
She touched the pendant. It sat warm against her skin, a deep crimson spark hidden under her shirt. The unknown benefactor, the anonymous little note, the address scrawled in careful ink, all of it had led here, to the Fae Grove in Richmond Park, with its old stones and its nonsense rules about time and borders and things that smiled at you with too many teeth.
The pendant had pulsed once she crossed the outer trees.
A Hel portal.
That was the theory. One of several. None of them cheerful.
She moved deeper into the clearing, boots sinking into moss and root. The air smelled sweet, almost cloying, like crushed petals left too long in a closed room. Under that sweetness lurked something harder to place. Iron, maybe. Or old pennies. Or the metallic tang of fear rising off her own skin.
One of the standing stones stood half-hidden behind a curtain of leaves. Rory stopped before it. The oak looked older than the park itself, older than anything that ought to sit in London with a bit of moss on it and a smug expression. Carved into the bark near its base was a knot of symbols she did not recognise. The lines were shallow, recent. Freshly cut.
She ran her fingers over them.
The wood shivered under her touch.
Rory jerked back and stared. The shiver ran upwards through the trunk, a ripple beneath the bark, like something trapped inside had twitched in its sleep.
She snatched her hand away and tucked it into her sleeve. “Nope.”
A sound answered from the far side of the grove.
Not a voice. Not quite. A scrape, thin as a fingernail dragged over stone.
Rory turned in place. Her pulse climbed. The standing stones threw long black shapes over the flowers, and between them the shadows looked deeper than they should have, as if someone had cut holes in the ground and left them open.
The scrape came again.
Closer.
Her tongue pressed to the back of her teeth. “I’m not in the mood.”
Something shifted beyond the nearest stone. A pale shape, quick and low. She caught only the edge of it, white as peeled bone, then nothing. Her eyes locked on the gap where it had been.
A flower bent.
Then another.
Rory did not move. The pendant at her throat burned with a clear, pinpoint heat.
“Hello?” The word left her in a flat line, not a question so much as a dare.
No answer.
A shape crossed the edge of her sight to the left. She snapped her head round. Empty grass, flowers trembling in a neat little arc, as if something had just knelt there.
Her stomach tightened. She made herself look away from the far shadows and back at the stones. That was the trap, if there was one. Let the corners of her vision feed her panic until she stepped where she should not.
She kept her chin level and walked.
Three steps in, a voice brushed the side of her ear.
“Late.”
Rory stopped dead. Every muscle in her body locked so hard it hurt. She looked over her shoulder.
No one.
The voice had been close enough to tickle the hair at her neck. Dry. Old. Amused.
She swallowed once. “Show yourself.”
A low chuckle came from somewhere above her, and she looked up too fast. Branches knitted together overhead, black limbs snagging at one another. Between them the sky held no stars, just a blank, dark pressure. Something pale and narrow moved along a branch, too quick to resolve .
Her pendant flared hot.
Rory ripped the chain out from under her shirt and held the pendant in her fist. The crimson stone shone through her fingers with a dim inner glow. Warmth spread across her palm.
“Right,” she said to the empty grove. “That’s helpful.”
The air changed. It tightened, like a room sealed too long. Rory drew a breath and tasted something bitter, green, and cold.
Then she heard it.
Footsteps.
Not hers. Not close. Deliberate, careful footsteps circling the grove beyond the stones. Soft tread on grass. Pause. Tread again. Someone pacing with patience.
Rory went still and listened.
One set. Then two.
No, not two. One set that split in the middle, the way a broken recording repeats a second late. Tick, tock. Tick, tock. Her jaw set hard.
She backed towards the nearest stone, keeping her eyes on the darkness between the trunks. “I know you’re there.”
The footsteps stopped.
Silence stretched thin, taut as wire.
Then a shape moved at the edge of the clearing. Human-sized, but wrong in the way a coat on a chair can look like a person until you stop breathing. It stood half-hidden behind one of the standing stones, too still to be alive and too shaped to be nothing.
Rory could not make out its face. Only a pale oval where one should have been, and a line that might have been a smile.
Her skin prickled.
“Fine,” she said. “We can do this the civilised way.”
The shape tilted its head.
A second shape stood behind it.
Rory’s grip tightened on the pendant until the chain bit into her skin. She had not heard anything approach. Not a leaf, not a twig, not a single betrayed footfall . Her eyes jumped from one shadow to the next. There were more of them now, or maybe there had always been and she only noticed because they wanted her to.
The first shape raised an arm.
Long fingers unfolded from the dark. Too long. Jointed wrong. The gesture looked almost polite.
Rory’s mouth went dry.
“Don’t,” she said.
The fingers curled once.
A branch snapped behind her.
Rory whirled, and something brushed past her shoulder with a hiss of displaced air. She spun back and caught a blur at waist height, pale and quick, darting between the flowers. Another shape crossed behind the stones, low and crouched. Then another. Their movement had no rhythm she could follow, no pattern that made sense to a human eye.
She backed up again until her spine hit cold bark.
The trunk behind her answered with a deep, hollow knock.
She whirled, swinging her fist out of instinct. Her knuckles struck nothing. A laugh skimmed her ear, so close she felt it in her teeth. She lashed out again and hit only air and flower stems bending under unseen feet.
“Cowards,” she hissed.
The clearing went still.
A hush settled over the grove so completely that Rory heard the blood in her own ears. She stood pinned between the stones and the trees, pendant hot in her fist, each breath thin and careful.
Then the flowers at her feet began to sway.
Not in one patch. In a widening circle, as if a body moved beneath them.
She looked down.
A hand rose from the grass.
Rory stumbled back with a shout and slammed against the stone. The hand did not break through flesh or soil. It emerged like a root, pale and slick, fingers spread in the flowers. Another hand followed, then a wrist, then a shoulder that looked almost human until it bent in the middle and pulled more body up after it.
Rory fumbled for the knife in her pocket. Her fingers missed the handle once, twice. Her pulse hammered so hard it blurred her sight.
The thing in the flowers lifted its head.
No face.
Just a smooth pale mask where features ought to have been, with a slit opening in its centre like a wound.
A voice came from that slit, warm and intimate.
“You came back.”
Rory went cold all at once. The pendant in her fist gave a strong, eager pulse , as if it had recognised the voice.
She stared at the thing and the thing stared back with no eyes.
“That’s impossible,” she said.
The grove answered with a chorus of soft movement. Flowers bowed. Leaves shuddered. Something went skittering across the stones behind her, nails or claws or both.
The faceless thing took a slow step towards her.
Rory’s back hit the standing stone hard enough to knock the breath from her lungs. She dragged in air and felt the bark scrape her jacket. The crescent scar on her wrist flared with a pulse of pain.
“Get away from me.”
The thing smiled without a mouth.
The slit opened wider.
And a second voice, this one low and breathless and far too familiar , came whispering through the flowers at her feet.
“Rory.”
Her whole body locked.
No. Not here. Not now. Not in this place that bent time and lied with every inch of itself.
The voice came again, soft as a hand under her chin.
“Laila.”
Rory’s vision narrowed to the pale shape rising from the flowers and the dark ring of stones around her and the impossible warmth at her throat. Every instinct screamed at once. Her hand clamped around the pendant. The crimson gem blazed against her palm.
The thing in the flowers flinched.
So did the shadows.
A shriek split the grove, not from the creature in front of her, but from somewhere beyond the trees, high and sharp and furious. The sound ripped through the air like torn silk . The faceless thing jerked upright, its limbs twitching. The figures around the clearing drew back in a sudden, collective recoil.
Rory did not wait to learn what had made that noise .
She drove the pendant forward.
Light burst from the crimson stone, brief and fierce. The thing in the flowers recoiled as if struck. The standing stones shuddered. Rory threw herself sideways at the same instant, ramming her shoulder into the gap between two roots. Pain cracked through her arm. She stumbled, caught herself, and ran.
The grove lunged after her.
Branches whipped down and clawed at her hair. Flowers tore under her boots. Something cold and wet slapped against her ankle, fingers tightening. Rory kicked hard, heard a crack, and kept moving. She plunged between two stones where the dark felt denser, thicker, wronger than the rest. The air itself seemed to fold around her.
Behind her, the voice shouted from the clearing, split into several mouths at once.
“Stay.”
Rory barreled through the narrowing gap, the pendant burning in her fist, and the world on the other side snapped open with a sound like glass breaking.
She landed on her knees in mud that smelled of petrol and rot, one hand still trapped around the crimson stone, and when she looked up the grove had changed its shape entirely.