AI Rory locked the flat door behind her and didn’t turn the key all the way. The click sounded too loud in the stairwell, like the building wanted to answer back.
She’d come from Silas’ bar, up above it, and she’d waited until the last person with a laugh left the street. Even then, she’d carried the delivery bag for an hour too long, pretending she’d still clocked out properly. Her phone had sat face down in her pocket, screen dark, like it could lie about time.
Now the night air hit her lungs hard. Richmond Park lay quiet under a bruised sky, the kind of quiet that didn’t feel empty—just paused. She walked with her shoulders set, not rushing, not lingering. Her bright blue eyes tracked the standing stones as if she could force her gaze to behave like a compass.
The ancient oaks marked the boundary. Their trunks looked old in the ordinary way, ridged with bark like weather had chewed on them. Nothing about them screamed fae. No glitter. No warning. Just the feeling that the space between one step and the next held a gap she couldn’t see through.
Rory reached into her jacket and touched the pendant at her throat. The Heartstone sat against her skin with a faint warmth , deep crimson under her collar. It pulsed—soft, patient—like it had been listening for her approach.
She didn’t call out.
She’d promised herself she wouldn’t. Calling made you sound like you wanted something. She’d come for a reason. She’d paid for that reason with a week of sleepless shifts and a stack of unread messages she couldn’t bring herself to open.
At the stones, she stopped. The boundary didn’t look like a boundary. It looked like dirt and grass and fallen leaf mould. Yet when she stepped over the first oak marker, the air changed. Cold air didn’t bother her. This did.
The night smelled sharper. Like wet pennies. Like lightning had struck somewhere far off and the scent had crawled into the roots.
Behind her, the park’s distant sounds flattened. No cars. No late walkers. She heard only her own breathing and the faint scrape of her trainers on gravel.
A little clearing opened ahead, hidden between tree trunks that didn’t seem to line up the way they had a minute ago. Wildflowers grew year-round here, bright and stubborn against the dark, their petals catching what little starlight the sky allowed. The ground under her feet felt springier than it should have, as if the earth held itself back.
Rory held her breath without realising it.
Then she exhaled and the air returned to normal. The wrongness stayed.
At first it only bothered her because she couldn’t locate it. The clearing was still. The wildflowers stood. The standing stones faded behind her, like the trees had decided she no longer needed landmarks.
She’d expected a messenger. A sign. A person waiting with the reason she’d come. Instead, she found a path that wasn’t there when she’d walked in—packed earth leading deeper between the oaks.
Her pulse ticked in her wrists.
The pendant warmed against her skin again. It didn’t get hot; it didn’t flare. It simply threaded heat into her throat in tiny, regular beats, as if it matched something else—an unseen rhythm somewhere beyond sight.
She followed the path.
Each step felt measured . Her eyes kept skimming the corners of the clearing, the spaces between trunks where a shape could hide. She didn’t see anything. That didn’t reassure her.
On her left, a cluster of wildflowers shifted. The movement looked like wind, except the air stayed still. The stems bent and lifted once, like a hand brushing down grass.
Rory stopped. She listened hard enough that her ears ached.
No wind. No birdcalls. No leaves.
A sound came from deeper in the grove: a soft knock. Not the wooden knock of branches. Not the clack of a stone settling. It sounded like knuckles against a hollow surface.
Rory held her breath. The pendant’s warmth pressed against her pulse , steady as a heartbeat.
Knock. Pause. Knock.
She hadn’t told anyone she’d come here. She hadn’t even asked Yu-Fei for the day off properly. She’d just disappeared between deliveries and paperwork, and Eva’s earlier text had sat on her screen like a weight .
If you want proof, go now.
Eva had warned her to bring the pendant. Rory hadn’t asked why. She’d asked once, weeks ago, in the brief moment the words wouldn’t turn into panic, and Eva had stared at her like the answer might burn.
Don’t come alone, Evan’s voice had teased in Rory’s memory. Don’t—don’t—don’t.
She’d never said it out loud.
Now, alone in the Fae Grove, she tightened her grip on her jacket zipper until her fingers hurt.
Knock. Closer.
Rory forced her legs to move again. She walked toward the source, even though every instinct told her not to chase a sound that could belong to anything.
The path narrowed, trees drawing in like shoulders hunched around a secret. Wildflowers grew in patches, their colours too vivid for the way the sky looked. A faint mist hung between branches, not thick enough to hide a body but thick enough to blur the distance .
At the edge of the mist, she saw something that didn’t fit.
A line of dark marks on the ground, like dragging. It started at her path and veered off to the right, stopping abruptly as if whoever—or whatever—had lifted its weight . The marks weren’t fresh. They looked old enough to have collected leaf mould, but the edges still held a crispness that made her stomach tighten.
She crouched. The Heartstone pulsed harder. Warmth surged, then eased.
Her reflection wavered faintly in the pendant’s crimson face. Not a perfect mirror. More like a memory of her. Her bright blue eyes looked deeper in the stone’s glow. Her scar on her left wrist stood out like a crescent caught in a photograph.
Her breathing sounded too loud. She swallowed and tasted metal.
“Are you here?” she asked, and the question broke the stillness too sharply . It felt like she’d slapped the air .
The clearing answered with a scrape.
Not from the mist. Not from behind her.
From above.
Rory jerked her head back. For a second she thought she saw movement between branches, the silhouette of something too tall to be an animal. Her eyes tracked it—and then it slid sideways out of the angle she’d chosen.
No scuttling. No flapping. Just a smooth shift, like a shadow changing its mind.
She stood slowly and kept her hands open at her sides. She didn’t reach for a weapon. There was no weapon here except whatever her body already carried: her size, her stubbornness, her lungs.
The knocking resumed, now in the trunk of one oak. She hadn’t approached it yet, but the sound came from its bark as if a person leaned close from inside.
Knock.
Rory stepped nearer despite herself. The oak looked ordinary up close, ridged bark and a shallow hollow where rainwater collected. If someone knocked from inside, the sound should’ve been muffled . Instead, it struck the air cleanly, like a drum hit from close range.
She pressed her palm to the bark. The wood felt cold, not dead cold but cold with purpose .
The pendant warmed again until she could feel heat through her fingertips, though she held it on her throat, not against her hand.
Then the bark under her palm moved.
Not bulged. Not split. It shifted like a membrane stretching over a hollow body, responding to her touch. Her skin prickled.
Rory pulled her hand back so fast she stumbled a step. The knock didn’t stop. It kept going, quickening.
Knock-knock-knock.
A whisper threaded through the branches, barely audible, like someone speaking into her ear from underwater. The words didn’t form properly. They sounded like the shape of her name without the letters.
Rory spun in place. The mist swirled with her movement, and for a heartbeat she saw a figure at the clearing’s far edge.
It stood between two wildflower clusters. Tall. Lean. Its outline suggested a person’s shoulders and head, but the details refused to settle. The colours in its shape seemed wrong—too grey, too thin, like it belonged to a different kind of light.
Her eyes locked onto it. The figure didn’t step forward.
It tilted, as if listening to her breathing .
Rory’s throat tightened. She forced her voice steady. “I came for—”
A sound cut her off.
Not a scream. Not a growl.
A soft laugh, close enough that it tugged at the hairs on her arms. The laugh came from her left side, just beyond her shoulder.
Rory didn’t turn.
Her body wanted to. Her instincts had grown sharp after Evan, after the way he’d used laughter like a handle. She didn’t give it the handle.
Instead, she stared straight ahead at the grey figure.
The grey figure’s head moved again, slow. It shifted its weight without moving its feet. That didn’t make sense. Yet her eyes kept registering the movement, like her vision refused to correct it.
The laughter near her left side stopped. Silence dropped in like a curtain.
Rory heard something else then: the faint tap of nails on stone. The sound came from behind her, from where the standing stones should have been.
She didn’t look back.
The Heartstone pulsed in steady beats that matched the tapping. Warmth threaded up her throat, down toward her collarbone, like it wanted to guide her attention away from the sound.
Her mouth went dry. She remembered Evan’s hands on her wrists—how he’d held her in place and talked like he owned time. She remembered her scar, crescent-shaped, and how she’d learned pain could look like control.
“Stop,” she said, and the word scraped her tongue . “If you want something—talk.”
The grey figure drifted closer, still not quite stepping . It moved through the space between wildflowers as if the plants parted for it. Its outline sharpened slightly , revealing a head with no clear facial features. Where eyes should have been, there was a dark suggestion, like ink soaked into paper.
The mist pulled around its legs and didn’t cling properly. It slid away, leaving the impression of a body without the substance to dampen air.
Rory’s pendant warmed until it hurt.
Her hands shook once and then steadied. She shoved them into her jacket pockets to hide the motion.
“I brought it,” she said, and she hated how small the admission sounded. She kept her gaze pinned on the figure’s shifting head. “The Heartstone.”
The knocking stopped.
The quiet after it landed heavy. The grove seemed to lean in and wait for her next move.
A new sound started: a low, rhythmic hum, almost too low to hear. It vibrated the air between trees. The mist quivered . Wildflowers bobbed on stems that didn’t bend from wind.
Rory felt it in her teeth.
The grey figure turned its head toward her pendant.
When it moved, her eyes followed and she noticed the thing she’d missed earlier. The figure wasn’t alone in its outline. Something hung behind it, darker. A second shape that didn’t quite follow the first, delayed like bad timing .
The delayed shape appeared at the edge of Rory’s vision only, like her eyes refused to hold it.
She looked away and forced her gaze back, like she could bully her eyes into seeing properly.
The second shape stayed at the edge. When she angled her attention directly at it, it blurred. When she ignored it, it sharpened.
Rory’s stomach turned.
The grove had tricks. She’d heard stories about pockets and time shifts, about doors opening into places that didn’t exist on any map. She’d never believed the full versions. She’d believed enough to survive.
Now the trick felt personal.
Her own footsteps didn’t match the sounds she heard. She took one step and heard two scuffs behind her. She didn’t turn, but her spine knew. Someone else had taken steps too.
Rory lifted her chin and breathed out slowly . She fought the urge to whirl around and confirm the worst.
“You want me to go deeper,” she said. She kept her voice pitched for calm, not comfort. “Tell me what you’re asking.”
The grey figure’s head tilted again.
A whisper came from everywhere at once, threading through bark and mist. This time the words formed. Not as a sentence but as a list of impressions, each one hitting like a memory .
“Door. Warmth. Oath. Blood.”
Rory’s hand found the crescent scar on her left wrist without thinking. Her skin remembered the accident. It remembered the fall, the way the world spun. It remembered the first time pain had turned into a story.
Blood.
She swallowed, hard enough the pendant pulsed again, like it agreed.
She glanced at her wrist and saw the pendant’s warmth reflected in the skin—faint crimson glow in the curve of her scar.
The delayed second shape at the edge of her vision surged forward.
Rory felt it before she saw it. Cold flooded her peripheral vision, a pressure at the edges of her eyes. She couldn’t look at it directly. When she tried, her sight jittered. Her vision smeared like paint dragged over paper.
So she did what she’d done with Evan: she used her attention like a shield. She focused on the grey figure in front of her, on its shifting outline, on the way the mist didn’t behave around it.
“Where is the hel portal?” she asked.
The grey figure leaned toward her. The air between them tightened, like the grove pulled in breath.
A knock started again.
Not on a trunk this time. On the ground near her feet, from beneath a patch of wildflowers. The soil vibrated . The flowers trembled . The hum deepened until it sounded like a distant engine under water .
Rory backed away one step. The soil’s vibration rose. The Heartstone burned with warmth , hot enough to make her skin tingle.
Then the flowers flattened, bending too far. A crack opened in the earth, narrow and dark. Not a hole into nothing. A seam into something that didn’t match any colour around it.
Rory’s stomach dropped.
The seam pulsed . Crimson light bled from it, not enough to illuminate everything, just enough to show shapes within. Movement curled in the darkness—slow, deliberate, like something breathed behind a curtain.
A smell rolled out: damp earth, iron, and—faintly—old incense.
Rory didn’t step closer.
She forced her feet to stay still. “I didn’t come to open anything.”
The whisper responded, closer now, its words pressed into the spaces between her thoughts.
“You already did.”
The laugh returned. Not near her left side now. From behind the seam.
Rory’s throat clenched. She kept her eyes on the crack. She didn’t look away. She didn’t give the laugh anywhere else to land.
The seam widened just a fraction. Crimson light traced the edges of it like a vein. Her pendant pulsed faster, warmth surging in sync. Her heart hammered.
The grey figure in front of her lifted its head. The mist around it pulled into a spiral, drawn toward the crack.
Rory felt the grove tug at her. Not physically—she didn’t get dragged . It felt like the air decided she belonged closer to the seam than she did.
Her mouth opened, but the words got stuck .
From behind her, nails tapped again, closer than before.
Rory spun then, sudden and sharp, because restraint had limits.
She saw nothing in the space between oaks and mist.
Yet the air carried a presence like a held breath. The grove waited with patient cruelty, letting her look and find only emptiness. Her mind filled the gap with movement that wasn’t there.
Her vision caught a flicker at knee height—something shifting between two wildflower clusters, too close to ignore. Rory’s eyes tracked it.
A shape crouched low where no crouching should’ve been possible. It wasn’t fully formed; it looked like a sketch drawn in shadow, edges smudged by the mist.
Her stomach lurched . She couldn’t tell if it had eyes. When she tried to focus, the shape dissolved into negative space.
It moved.
Not by stepping. It folded itself through the gap between attention and sight. One moment it occupied that knee -height space; the next it stood a half-second away, closer than her peripheral sense wanted to handle.
Rory jerked back, hitting the bark of an oak with her shoulder. The impact jarred her bones. The tree didn’t hold her weight . It stayed solid. That comfort didn’t last.
The Heartstone burned against her throat in a slow swell, like a warning that didn’t care if she understood.
Her left wrist pulsed under the scar. The crescent line felt warmer, the old injury waking up.
Rory’s voice came out rough. “You’re not taking me.”
The grey figure’s whisper came again, now threaded with something that sounded almost like amusement. “Then stop pretending you didn’t come.”
“I came for help,” Rory said, forcing each word through clenched teeth. “For proof.”
The seam in the ground knocked harder. The crack shivered. Crimson light licked upward along the edges of soil like a drawn line being rewritten .
Rory pressed her fingers to her pendant through her collar. The silver chain felt slick under her touch, as if it had warmed to body temperature. The Heartstone pulsed hard enough to make her fingers ache.
The grey figure drifted forward one pace. The air thickened. The mist curled around her hair and then slid away. It didn’t touch her skin. It hovered just out of contact, like it wanted her to feel it without giving her the satisfaction of proof.
Rory’s breath came in short pulls.
She looked at the crack again.
In the seam’s darkness, movement curled in a loop. Something inside shifted position, and the silhouette formed for a moment—a torso, a shape of shoulders, and hands held too close to the edges of the light. The hands didn’t reach for her. They waited.
Waiting felt worse than reaching.
A new sound rose from the grove: soft dragging along wood, like something heavy moved its weight across bark. The sound came from above the standing stones, somewhere behind her. The pace matched the pendant’s pulse .
Rory’s thoughts raced , but she kept her movements controlled. She lowered her chin, stared at the crack, and refused to whirl again. If she spun, she’d give the grove more angles to play with.
“Tell me,” she said. The words landed flat. “Who gave me the pendant.”
The grey figure’s head tilted. The whisper slowed, stretching like thread.
“Benefactor.”
Rory’s jaw tightened. “Who?”
The seam knocked three times in quick succession. The hum peaked until it filled her skull.
The whisper answered with a phrase that sounded like a name spoken through water . It wasn’t a clear person-name. It came out like two syllables colliding.
The delayed shadow at the edge of her vision shifted. This time it leaned nearer, and Rory felt its presence along her skin even before her eyes tried to catch it.
Her pendant pulsed so hard it made her gasp.
Then the grey figure spoke again, and this time the words landed like a hand on her chest without touching.
“Offer what you carry.”
Rory stared at the crack. Crimson light trembled . The seam widened another fraction.
Her scar throbbed under her wrist. She could feel the crescent like a bruise waking.
She didn’t step forward. She didn’t reach into the seam.
Instead, she pulled the pendant from her throat and held it out between herself and the crack. The Heartstone’s warmth surged, and crimson light bled out around it more clearly, outlining the small oval shape like a heartbeat caught in glass.
The grove tightened its breath.
The grey figure’s outline sharpened and then blurred, as if it had to blink without eyes. The mist curled harder toward the offered pendant.
Rory held it steady. Her hands didn’t stop shaking this time.
“What did you take?” she asked, voice strained but grounded . “From me.”
Silence answered. Then, at her side—closer than before—a sound like paper tearing in slow motion.
Rory’s gaze snapped to her right.
The wildflowers there bent without wind. The air in that corner thickened until it looked like something had folded reality and left a seam of its own. A dark opening flickered into view, no bigger than a dinner plate, rimmed with faint crimson light.
Something leaned out from it. Not a body. A suggestion of a face hovering at the rim, as if it had learned what shapes made people panic.
Rory couldn’t see eyes. She saw the absence where eyes should have been, the way darkness avoids your attention until you can’t look away.
The pendant flared brighter in her hand, heat flaring up her arm.
Rory swallowed and kept the pendant out, breath held tight enough that her ribs ached. She spoke again, and her voice carried the same stubborn bite she used at work when someone tried to short her on tips.
“You don’t get to take more.”
The opening at her side quivered . The suggested face tilted toward her wrist, toward the crescent scar that warmed in response.
The crack in the earth knocked again, a long single thump that made the wildflowers shiver.
Rory stood her ground, pendant held out, staring between the seam and the flickering side-opening, aware of the third presence somewhere behind her that waited without being seen .
She didn’t look back.
She forced her eyes to stay on the grove’s wrong geometry, on the way the darkness wanted to align into a mouth.
The Heartstone’s pulse synced with the tapping at her back.
Rory’s voice dropped low. “If you wanted an offer, you should’ve asked.”