AI Aurora Carter told herself she was only out of breath because she’d run half the length of Richmond Park with a delivery bag still slung across her shoulder, as if that explained the prickling at the back of her neck or the way the night seemed to have tightened around her.
The trees had swallowed the path a long time ago. Behind her, London had become a rumor—traffic reduced to a distant hush, the city lights leached out by the dark canopy and the uneven ground. Ahead, the grove waited.
She stopped at the edge of it, one hand braced against her ribs. The silver chain of the pendant was cold against her throat, the little crimson stone tucked beneath her shirt like a drop of dried blood. She drew it out on instinct and held it between thumb and forefinger.
It was warm.
Not body-warm, not from being worn against her skin. Warm in the way a mug was warm after tea, or a stone left too long in the sun. The faint glow inside it deepened, a pulse no brighter than a breath but unmistakable. It answered something ahead.
Rory’s mouth went dry.
“Right,” she muttered to nobody, because saying it aloud made it feel less like a mistake. “Just a look. In and out.”
The standing stones rose from the dark in a rough circle, ancient oak trunks weathered into shapes that made them seem carved rather than grown. She knew they were the boundary. Isolde’s grove, the Fae-touched pocket hidden in Richmond Park, the place Eva had described with a voice that had tried very hard to sound casual and failed. A place where time misbehaved. A place with rules that were never quite explained all the way through.
A place where her pendant heated like a warning.
She stepped between the first pair of stones.
The air changed at once. It was the same night and not the same night, thinner somehow, as if she had walked into a room someone had just left. The scent of earth and damp leaves sharpened. Something floral drifted through it too, sweet and almost cloying, though nothing in the moonlit clearing should have been blooming in the cold. Rory looked down and saw wildflowers scattered through the grass in ridiculous profusion, white and purple and gold, nodding on stems that should have been brittle this time of year.
They were beautiful in a way that made her uneasy.
The pendant throbbed once against her fingers.
She swallowed and moved farther in.
Her trainers made almost no sound on the grass. That was wrong. There should have been the rustle of blades, the crunch of leaves, the small physical comfort of her own footsteps . Instead, the grove seemed to take her weight without complaint. The silence was thick enough to press against her ears. Rory listened anyway, every sense stretched taut.
A branch creaked overhead.
She froze and looked up.
Nothing moved.
The black shapes of the trees crowded the clearing, trunks bent in ways that suggested age or intention. Between them, moonlight pooled pale and uncertain on the ground. For a second she thought she saw someone standing beyond the far stones—a slender figure with hair like wet reeds, gone before she could focus on it. Her pulse leapt. She squinted into the dark.
Nothing.
She let out a breath she had been holding too long.
“Get a grip,” she whispered.
The words vanished almost before she heard them.
She had come because the pendant had started warming in her flat, because it had done that before whenever something was near. A Hel portal, according to the scraps of information and half-answers people liked to offer her when they assumed she’d stop asking if they kept things vague enough. She had followed the pulse like a compass needle and ended up here, in the middle of a grove that wasn’t supposed to be where it was, hoping it would lead to something useful and not just get her lost.
Useful would be ideal. Less useful but survivable would do.
The pendant burned a little hotter in her palm.
Rory lifted her gaze and frowned. Across the clearing, not ten yards away, stood another stone. Then another. No, not stones. The shadows between the trees were moving into shapes that repeated themselves at intervals, tall and narrow, like a second ring of boundary markers nested inside the first. She blinked hard.
When she opened her eyes, the shapes were trees again.
Her heartbeat kicked harder.
“Okay,” she said under her breath, the word flat with forced calm. “That’s… fine.”
It was not fine. She knew enough about fear to recognize when it was trying to be useful. Fear, at least, had a job. This was something else. This was the sensation of being measured .
The grove seemed to lean around her.
A laugh drifted through the trees.
Rory went still.
It was soft and far away, almost a child’s voice, but wrong in a way she couldn’t have explained if she’d wanted to. Not quite human. Not quite anything she trusted. The sound came again, closer this time, from behind her left shoulder.
She turned fast.
There was nothing there.
Her skin prickled under her jacket. She was suddenly aware of how exposed she was in the clearing, how open the moonlight made her. The standing stones at the boundary looked farther away than they had a moment ago. She had definitely not walked back the way she came. Had she? She glanced over her shoulder, searching for the opening through which she’d entered.
The grove had swallowed it.
No, not swallowed. Hidden.
She stood very still. A careful stillness. The kind she had learned in London, in doorways and on pavements and in the corridor outside her flat when she wasn’t sure whether Evan had really gone or was just standing out of sight waiting to startle her. The old fear and the new one had different faces, but the body remembered what it needed to do.
Don’t run. Don’t show the back. Don’t give it movement to follow.
She tightened her grip around the pendant until the chain bit into her palm.
The warmth had become a pulse . Faint, steady, directional.
Ahead.
She looked where it pointed and saw, at the center of the grove, a narrow rise in the ground half-hidden by flowers. On it stood a shape she had not noticed before, a slit in the dark as fine as a seam in black cloth. A doorway, perhaps. Or the suggestion of one. The air around it trembled , making the moonlight waver.
Rory’s stomach turned.
That had to be it.
She took one careful step toward it.
The laugh came again, this time from directly beside her ear.
She jerked and spun, heart slamming hard enough to hurt. The clearing was empty, but not empty enough. She could feel the presence of something in the brush of the night, the pressure of eyes where there were no eyes, the certainty of attention with no body attached to it. Her breathing had gone shallow. She forced in a slow mouthful of air.
“Not funny,” she said to the dark, because saying it to the dark was safer than admitting she might be speaking to something that heard her.
A pause.
Then, from somewhere low in the grass, a rustle answered her.
Rory’s eyes dropped.
A fox should have been there. A rabbit. Something ordinary and skittish. Instead, just beyond the reach of moonlight, flowers bent as if under unseen fingers. One by one, their heads turned toward her. Not all at once. Not dramatically. In a patient, dreadful sequence, as if the grove itself had decided to look.
She took a step back before she could stop herself.
The pendant flared hot in her hand.
Every flower in the clearing shivered.
Rory’s breath caught. The stone in the pendant glowed deep red through her fingers, a tiny beating ember. The seam in the dark ahead widened by a fraction, enough to show not a doorway but depth —an impossible thickness, a place where the night did not quite belong to night .
She knew, with sudden sick certainty, that if she went closer she would find something waiting on the other side.
Not necessarily something with teeth. That would have been easier. Something older, perhaps. Something curious. Something that had noticed her the moment she crossed the stones and had been patient enough to let her notice herself.
The hairs on her arms rose.
A sound came from behind her.
Footsteps.
Not hers.
Rory turned so fast her shoulder twinged.
There was no one in the clearing. But now she was absolutely certain the empty space between two trees had just shifted, as if someone tall and thin had stepped back behind the trunk. Her mind supplied a shape a moment too late, the impression of a pale hand vanishing around bark, and she nearly made the mistake of chasing it with her eyes. Instead she stared straight ahead, trying not to let the panic climb any higher.
“Hello?” she called, immediately hating the way her voice trembled on the second syllable.
The grove gave no answer.
Then, from very far off, a woman’s voice said, “Rory.”
Her whole body locked.
It sounded like Eva.
For one awful instant she nearly believed it, nearly turned toward the sound with a rush of hope so sharp it hurt. Then the voice came again, perfectly pitched, perfectly familiar , and utterly wrong in the shape of the silence around it.
“Rory.”
The second time was closer.
Too close.
Her throat closed. Eva had not followed her into a Fae-touched grove at midnight. Eva had not slipped through the trees without a sound. This was imitation. It had to be.
Rory’s nails dug into her palm around the pendant. The warmth surged hard enough to sting.
“No,” she said, more firmly this time. “No, that’s not—”
The voice stopped.
The silence that followed was worse.
Something breathed in the dark behind her.
Not close enough to touch. Close enough to know.
Rory did not turn. She looked at the seam of black light ahead, the only fixed thing in the grove, and she understood suddenly that the portal—if that was what it was—wasn’t the danger.
It was the lure.
The real danger had already found her.
The flowers around her feet bent inward, all at once, though there was no wind. A pressure gathered at the edges of her sight, a suggestion of movement circling the clearing. She could not see it directly. Every time she tried, her vision snagged on moonlight or tree bark or the pale blur of a bloom. But the sense of being ringed in tightened with each second.
Rory thought of the flat above Silas’ bar, of the familiar noise and cheap light and the safety of objects that stayed where they were put. She thought of Yu-Fei’s restaurant, the clatter of plates, the smell of ginger and oil and fried garlic. Normal things. Useful things. Things with edges and names.
This was none of those.
Her pulse hammered in her throat.
She could leave. She should leave. The smart thing, the living thing, would be to turn and run for the boundary stones and not stop until she hit the park paths and another human face and lights and noise and all the brutal, ordinary proof of the world. But the pendant was still warm, still pointing, and she hated the thought of coming all this way for a warning and retreating without understanding it.
Worse, she hated the idea of whatever was in the grove learning that fear could move her.
Rory set her jaw.
Then she took one step toward the seam in the dark.
The breathing behind her ceased.
The grove held perfectly still.
At the center of the clearing, the black slit seemed to widen by a hair, as if in welcome. Or in hunger. The flowers at its base trembled . Rory could feel the pendant pounding in her hand now, a frantic little heartbeat that did not belong to her.
She took another step.
And from just behind her left shoulder, something very gently said, “There you are.”