AI Aurora Carter had learned to trust the small alarms first.
The hitch in a stranger’s smile. The pause before a lie. The way a room changed when someone dangerous decided to own it.
Tonight, she trusted the silence .
It sat over Richmond Park like a lid, heavy and complete, swallowing the city’s distant hum until even London seemed to have forgotten the place existed. The taxi had dropped her at the edge of the park and gone without argument, the driver too eager to be rid of her after he’d seen the hour and the road ahead. Rory had stood under the weak orange spill of a streetlamp with her delivery bag slung over one shoulder and the collar of her coat turned up against the cold, watching the cab’s taillights vanish.
Then she’d checked her phone.
No signal.
Of course there was no signal. That would have been too easy. Her thumb had hovered over the screen anyway, as if stubbornness alone might force bars to appear. Then she’d slid the phone away and kept walking.
The path into the park was dark and wet with mist. It curled between trees black as old bone, their branches knitted together overhead so tightly that only scraps of moonlight reached the ground. Rory kept her pace steady, boots whispering against gravel and roots. The air smelled of damp earth, rotting leaves, and something else underneath it all—sweet, faint, and clean, like flowers after rain.
Wildflowers, she thought, and frowned.
It was winter. Or near enough to it that flowers should have surrendered with dignity months ago.
But as the path opened, she saw them: little pale blooms clustered stubbornly at the edge of the way, white and violet and gold, bright in the dark as if someone had strewn them there on purpose. They leaned toward her as she passed, and she had the absurd, chilly thought that they were listening .
The reason she’d come here sat warm against her chest.
She touched the Heartstone pendant through her shirt, feeling the silver chain shift beneath her fingers. The gem was small, no bigger than her thumbnail, but even through the fabric it pulsed faintly with heat, a steady low throb like a distant heartbeat. It had been cold when she first found it in her flat, waiting on her kitchen table where no one could have left it without a key. Now it was warmer, almost impatient.
Near a Hel portal, the note had said.
No name. No explanation. Just a slip of paper and the pendant, as if that should be enough to send her into a London park after dark.
Aurora had spent enough years surviving on instinct and half-answers to know when something was bait. She also knew that sometimes bait was the only thing in reach.
The grove should have been further in, beyond the standing stones she’d been told about. Isolde’s grove, the message had said, as though it expected her to know what that meant. Rory had not liked the name. It sounded like a place that remembered too much.
The trees changed subtly as she walked. The trunks thickened, bark ridged and pale under the moon. Branches arched overhead in long, watchful curves. The path widened into a clearing, and there they were: ancient oak standing stones, gray and towering, half swallowed by moss and shadow. They stood in a rough circle, each one marked by age and weather and something deeper, as though the wood itself had been there before the earth had decided what shape to take.
Rory stopped just short of the boundary.
The pendant burned once, a sharp quick pulse against her skin.
“Right,” she muttered under her breath . Her voice sounded wrong here, too loud and too small at once.
She stepped forward.
The air changed.
It wasn’t dramatic. No burst of light, no crack of thunder. Just a subtle pressure behind her ears, a sense of passing through an unseen curtain. The hairs on her arms rose. The cold deepened and then vanished in the same breath. The clearing beyond the stones seemed to draw her in.
The Fae Grove lay hidden there, open and still as a held breath.
Wildflowers covered the ground in thick drifts, blooming as if it were spring. Their colors glowed softly in the moonlight, so bright they looked almost wet. The grass moved without wind. At the center of the grove stood a ring of old roots and stone, twisted together around a shallow dip in the earth where dark water gathered like an eye.
Rory stood very still, letting her gaze travel over everything without letting it linger too long.
Nothing moved.
That was worse than if something had.
She took another step in, then another. The pendant at her throat warmed more with each pace, the heat spreading under her collarbone like a warning being rewritten into insistence. She lifted a hand to her neck and tried not to think about the fact that the grove seemed to breathe with her.
The message had said the portal might be visible when the pendant reacted. That much at least had proven true. Somewhere in the clearing, not far from the stone ring, the air shimmered faintly, a distortion so slight she would have missed it if the pendant had not suddenly throbbed hard enough to make her flinch.
There.
She narrowed her eyes. The shimmer hung between two leaning stones, a seam in the dark. Not a doorway exactly, not in any sensible human sense. Just a suggestion of a shape, a slit of wrongness where moonlight bent and folded back on itself. It reminded her, uncomfortably, of looking into deep water and seeing something move below the surface.
Rory drew in a breath and went still again.
From somewhere behind her came the soft crunch of a footstep.
She turned at once.
Nothing.
The grove was empty behind her. Stone, flowers, shadow. No movement. No person. Just the boundary trees standing black and silent under the moon.
Rory kept her face blank by force. Her pulse kicked harder. “Hello?” she called, and regretted it immediately.
The word dropped into the grove and seemed to die there.
No answer. Not even an echo .
She listened. The silence that came back was unnatural in its completeness. Not no sound at all—worse. There was the faint rustle of leaves, the tiny click of a twig settling somewhere out of sight, the whisper of grass against grass. But there were no birds, no insects, no distant road noise. The grove had swallowed every ordinary thing and left only the subtle sounds that belonged to it.
She turned slowly back toward the shimmer.
The pendant was hot now, heat unmistakable against her chest.
Rory reached for it and wrapped her fingers around the stone. Its surface throbbed under her palm. She let out a breath through her nose and moved closer to the distortion. The air around it tasted faintly metallic. Her skin prickled.
A shape moved at the edge of her vision.
She snapped her head to the side.
Nothing. Just flowers bending in a breeze she could not feel .
She held her breath for a count of three, then four. The sensation of being watched settled over her with patient certainty, not a sudden pounce but a slow placement of hands at the back of her neck . It was not the same as fear. Fear was simple. This was recognition without memory.
Someone was there.
Not behind the trees. Not just in the dark. Here. In the grove. Near enough to hear her breathing if they wanted.
Her mind ran through options with cold efficiency. Leave. Mark the route. Don’t turn your back. Keep the pendant visible. She had lived long enough with men like Evan to know that the first sign of danger was often the one most ignored.
Rory shifted her feet and brought herself around in a careful half-circle, scanning the stones, the flowers, the roots. The moonlight changed as she moved, or perhaps the grove did. One moment the clearing was open, the next the shadows between the trees had deepened so much they looked solid.
Something pale glimmered near the boundary stones.
She looked directly at it.
Again, nothing. Just a strip of moonlit bark. But the shape lingered in her mind: too tall for a person crouching, too thin for a trunk. It had been there and gone so quickly that she could not be sure it had ever existed at all.
Rory swallowed.
The pendant gave a soft, eager pulse .
That was when she heard the whisper .
Not words. At first just a thread of sound, thin as silk dragged over glass. It came from somewhere within the grove, circling just beyond the reach of her sight. She froze, every muscle in her body tightening at once.
The whisper came again.
Closer.
A human voice, maybe, but stretched wrong, softened at the edges. It could have been speaking her name. Or nothing at all.
She turned in place, slow and controlled. “I’m not here to stay,” she said, because saying it out loud made her feel less foolish. “I just need the portal.”
The whisper stopped.
The grove went very still.
Then, from behind her left shoulder, a laugh.
It was quiet. Almost amused. And it was so close that Rory’s skin prickled all the way down her arms.
She spun.
No one.
Her breath came sharp. The wildflowers at her feet trembled , though the air had not moved. On the far side of the stone ring, the shimmer of the portal had brightened, a narrow slit now visible even to her naked eye. It pulsed faintly, as if breathing in time with the pendant .
Rory backed toward it, keeping the center of the grove in sight. Her heel struck a root, and she caught herself before she could stumble. The grove seemed to lean with her. The trees watched. The flowers bent.
There was a sensation then, more than a sound, of something large shifting just beyond the stones. Not footsteps . Not quite. A displacement in the dark, a weight settling where it should not.
Rory’s mouth went dry.
She reached into her coat pocket and closed her fingers around the small flashlight she’d brought, but she did not switch it on. Light felt too vulnerable here, too revealing. Instead she kept moving backward toward the portal, one measured step at a time.
The whispering started again.
Not one voice now, but several, layered together under the trees and beneath the earth and perhaps inside her skull. Too quiet to understand, too intimate to ignore. It rose and fell like speech overheard through a wall.
She caught one clear fragment, or thought she did.
Carter.
Her stomach turned cold.
Her grip tightened on the pendant until the edges bit into her palm. The stone was scorching now, far hotter than any jewelry had a right to be, but she did not let go. She could feel a faint vibration in it, as though something on the far side of the seam had noticed her and was answering .
The portal widened by a fraction.
The air around it rippled.
Rory stopped just short of it and stared into the seam of dark. There was nothing visible beyond, and yet the space beyond seemed to lean back at her, immense and expectant. The feeling of being watched sharpened into certainty so complete it was almost calm.
Not alone, she thought. Not now. Not ever since she crossed the stones.
A soft sound came from the portal itself.
Like breathing.
Rory drew in a careful breath of her own and, very slowly , lifted her free hand toward the seam in the air. Her fingers hovered a few inches away. The temperature dropped around her hand, then rose again in a wave that made her skin sting. From somewhere behind her, one of the flowers snapped shut as if in sudden fear.
She did not turn.
Instead she focused on the slit in the air and waited for it to give her something she could use. Her mind, calm in the way it always became when danger sharpened everything to a single point, tracked the pattern of the pulse in the Heartstone. Heat. Rhythm. Response. If it was drawn to Hel portals, then this was one. Or close enough.
A portal to what, though, she could not guess.
The whispered voices rose around her, no longer hidden. They moved through the grove like a current. The trees swayed though no wind touched them. Somewhere in the dark, something took a step.
Rory’s heart slammed once, hard.
She forced herself not to look.
The portal brightened.
For one brief instant, the seam in the air opened just enough for her to see a flash of color beyond it—green so deep it was nearly black, and silver light wound through with it like thread through cloth. Then it closed again, leaving only the shimmer.
A scent came with the glimpse, sharp and sweet and impossible, like crushed blossoms under rain.
The pendant pulsed violently against her throat.
Rory understood, with a sick lurch , that whatever was on the other side had noticed the pendant too.
A shape crossed the edge of her vision, tall and narrow and moving too smoothly to be human.
She looked that way at last.
The grove was empty.
No, not empty. Occupied. The absence had texture now, a distortion between two stones near the trees where something seemed to stand just outside the thin reach of moonlight. She could not see a face. Could not see hands. Only the sense of a figure there, watching her with patient, almost polite attention.
The whispering stopped.
The silence that followed was absolute.
Rory stood at the edge of the portal with her pulse roaring in her ears and the Heartstone burning in her fist, and knew with sudden, cold clarity that she had come too far to pretend this was just a search anymore. Whatever had called her here had been waiting. Not for anyone.
For her.