AI Aurora Carter should have turned back at the first sign of the trees thinning.
The drive out had been simple enough, if anything about slipping away from London after midnight could be called simple. Richmond Park was mostly shut up and dark, the city’s noise pared down to a distant, restless hush. She’d parked where she knew she shouldn’t have, cut the engine, and sat with both hands on the steering wheel while the low pulse against her sternum warmed and warmed beneath her shirt.
The Heartstone Pendant had gone from a cold, dead weight to something almost alive the closer she’d gotten.
Now it rested against the hollow of her throat, a thumbnail of deep crimson on a silver chain, faintly lit from within like a coal refusing to die. Every few seconds, a gentle heat spread from it into her skin, not quite painful, but insistent . A reminder . A tug.
Rory stood at the edge of a narrow deer path and stared into the trees.
The air was wrong.
Not cold, exactly. September had carried enough damp into the night to make her jacket feel heavier, but this was something else. A stillness with teeth. No breeze stirred the leaves. No insects sang. Even the distant city seemed muffled, as if someone had drawn thick curtains across the world.
She should have listened to the text she’d gotten three hours ago—no name, no number, just a location pinned over Richmond Park and a single line beneath it.
If it warms, go in alone.
That had been enough to make her come, because of course it had. She was exhausted, stubborn, and too curious for her own good. And the pendant—this impossible thing she’d never asked for, never understood—had already dragged her into more trouble than she cared to count.
Rory tightened her grip on the small torch in her hand and moved forward.
The path narrowed quickly, brush closing in from both sides. Wildflowers bloomed in defiance of the season, pale shapes in the dark, their petals catching her torch beam and flashing white before sinking back into shadow. They looked fresh. Impossible. She dragged her eyes away and kept walking.
The pendant warmed again.
A little warning flutter started under her ribs.
She stopped.
Ahead, the trees ended.
Not naturally. Not with the gradual thinning of a copse or the opening of a break in the canopy. They simply ceased, as if something had cut a clean line through the forest and left a space beyond it. Rory lowered the torch and let her eyes adjust.
A clearing lay ahead, silvered by moonlight.
Standing stones rose in a rough ring around it, ancient oak pillars split and darkened with age, their surfaces ridged like bark preserved in bone. They stood half-buried in the earth, marked by roots thick as ropes. Between them, wildflowers covered the ground in a soft, impossible carpet, blooming in a riot of pale yellows, blues, and ghost-white. In the center, the grass seemed almost luminous, as if the earth itself remembered how to glow.
The Fae Grove.
She knew it the way people knew a place from stories told too many times. A hidden clearing in a pocket between worlds. The sort of thing that sounded mad in daylight and horrifying at night.
Rory stepped out of the trees and felt the air change.
It pressed around her skin, warm and close, carrying a scent like wet bark and crushed flowers and something sweeter underneath that she couldn’t name. Her pendant pulsed once, a firm throb against her chest.
Hel portal.
Her mouth went dry. That was why she’d come. She still didn’t know who had sent the message, but the note from the pendant had been enough to make the risk feel necessary. The last time it had reacted like this, she’d nearly walked straight into a trap in a service alley behind the restaurant. This time she’d followed it out into the dark like a fool.
She crossed the boundary stones.
The moment she did, the world behind her seemed to go very far away.
Rory stopped and looked back over her shoulder.
The trees she’d come through were still there, but they’d changed. Not in shape, exactly. In certainty. They looked less like trees and more like a memory of trees, a suggestion drawn in charcoal. The path she’d followed was gone . In its place, a wall of darkness hung between trunks, dense enough to swallow the beam of her torch.
She snapped the light toward it. Nothing. No depth. No gleam of leaf or bark. Just black.
“Brilliant,” she muttered under her breath, because saying anything louder made the grove feel too aware of her.
The pendant’s warmth eased, just a little.
Rory forced herself to breathe evenly and turned back toward the clearing.
Something was off.
That thought came first as a prickling at the back of her neck, then as a more solid unease that settled into her stomach like cold lead. The grove was beautiful in the way old things can be beautiful, too still and too perfect for comfort. The flowers didn’t move. The grass didn’t bend. Even the branches overhead hung without a tremor.
She took another step, then another.
At the edge of her vision, something moved.
Rory stopped so abruptly her boot scuffed the grass.
The movement came again, low and quick between two standing stones. She swung the torch toward it. Light spilled over bark, flowers, and stone. Nothing more. No rustle. No retreating shape. She stood listening.
Silence.
Then, from somewhere above her left shoulder, a soft sound.
Tap.
Her whole body locked.
The sound had come from the nearest standing stone.
Rory looked up slowly .
At first she saw only the rough oak surface, split by age, dark with lichen. Then the torch beam caught on something pale near the top: a narrow line, like chalk or dried sap. No, not a line. A handprint.
Her pulse thudded hard once.
The print was too high for her to have reached without stretching. Fingers spread. Long. Delicate. Too many joints, maybe, or the impression of them. The shape looked almost made by heat rather than touch, as if something had pressed itself into the wood from the other side.
Her pendant flared warm.
Rory stepped backward.
Another tap sounded, this time from behind her.
She spun around so fast the torch beam skittered across the grass.
A figure stood at the far edge of the clearing.
For one heartbeat she saw only the outline of a person, tall and slim, half-hidden by the flowers. Then it shifted, and the shape broke apart into moonlight and shadow. Rory couldn’t tell if it had moved or if her eyes had simply failed to hold onto it. The figure was there one second and not there the next.
She stared until her eyes watered.
No sound. No footfall . No breath.
“Hello?” she called, immediately regretting how small her voice sounded.
The clearing gave her nothing back.
Her torch beam trembled , and she clenched her jaw and forced her hand steady. This was what happened when fear got a foothold. Every shadow became a threat. Every crease in the dark became a face. She knew that. She knew it in the same practical, hard-earned way she knew how to spot a lie in a witness statement or an ex’s mood before a fight. But knowledge didn’t stop her skin from crawling.
The smell changed.
Something sharp and metallic threaded through the sweet floral air.
Rory’s gaze dropped to the ground. For a moment she thought she saw wetness glinting between the flowers near her boots. She crouched, moving slowly , and saw only dew. Clear. Harmless. She exhaled through her nose, annoyed with herself.
Then the torch beam passed over the petals and they seemed to shiver.
Not from wind. From attention.
The flowers were all facing her.
A cold pulse ran through her chest, down the length of the pendant. It warmed in one concentrated burst, almost burning.
She straightened too fast, heart hammering.
The standing stones around her were no longer evenly spaced.
Rory frowned and turned in a full circle, trying to make sense of it. The grove hadn’t changed size, but the ring felt closer somehow, the gaps between the stones narrower than they had been a minute ago. She stared hard at one on her right, then another behind her. Their positions didn’t line up with the ones she remembered. Maybe she’d misjudged the distance. Maybe the dark was playing tricks. Maybe.
A whisper brushed past her ear.
Rory flinched so violently she nearly dropped the torch.
No one stood beside her. Nothing moved in the grass. But she had heard it clearly: a breath of sound, dry and intimate, as if someone had leaned close enough to touch her hair and spoken without voice.
She stood rigid, every muscle turned to wire.
Another whisper , this one from the opposite side.
Not words. Just the shape of speech.
“Stop it,” she said, louder than before, and hated the tremor in her own voice.
The torch beam flicked wildly over the clearing. Her breathing had gone shallow, useless. She forced it deeper, swallowing panic until it sat hard behind her sternum. Think. Look. Don’t let the place set the rhythm.
She lifted her eyes to the stones and found the handprint again.
It had grown.
Or she had been mistaken before. The pale mark now stretched farther down the oak, fingers long enough to span half the width of the stone. No, not fingers. Shadows of fingers. There was a suggestion of joints where there shouldn’t be joints, and beneath them, another mark, lower down, as if a second hand had been placed atop the first.
Rory’s skin prickled.
The pendant throbbed with warmth against her throat, steady now, as though something nearby had answered its call.
Hel portal, the note had said.
But she was beginning to suspect the pendant hadn’t brought her here to find a doorway.
It had brought her here to be found.
A sound snapped from the far side of the grove.
Not a whisper . A twig breaking.
Rory turned, torch up, and this time she saw the movement clearly.
Between two stones, just beyond the ring, something crossed the gap. Fast. Low to the ground. Too quick to identify, yet not quick enough to be dismissed. She caught the pale flash of what might have been a face or the underside of a hand, and then it was gone . The flowers bent in its wake, then slowly rose.
Her breath caught.
The path behind her was still black, still impassable. The grove ahead had deepened into layers of shadow. She was in the center of it now, ringed by stone and silence and the sense of being measured .
Measured by what, she didn’t want to think.
Rory backed toward the nearest standing stone, keeping her eyes moving. The air had gone cooler. The sweet smell had thickened until it was almost cloying . Somewhere to her left, something scraped against bark with a slow, deliberate sound.
She swung the torch toward it.
A face looked back.
It was gone before she could make sense of it, but the impression stayed. White and narrow, framed by something like long hair or trailing moss . The eyes were the worst part. Not glowing. Not empty. Just focused. Patient. As though it had all the time in the world to let her understand she’d been seen .
Rory stumbled backward and hit the stone behind her.
The impact knocked the air out of her. She sucked in a sharp breath and the pendant went hot against her skin, a sudden fierce burn. She grabbed it through her shirt, shocked, and felt the stone thrum beneath her fingers.
There.
A sensation rippled through it, not warmth now but direction . A pull so slight it might have been imagined , tugging low and to her right.
Rory glanced that way .
For the first time, she saw it.
A seam of darkness between two standing stones, thin as a knife cut, not black like the surrounding night but deeper than black, edged with a faint crimson shimmer that matched the pendant at her throat. The air around it trembled . The flowers nearest the gap leaned away as if repelled.
A portal.
Her throat tightened.
Something moved behind her.
Rory didn’t wait to see what it was. She lunged toward the seam, torch clutched in one hand, pendant burning in the other. The grove reacted instantly. A sound rose from the flowers, a dry rustling hiss like a thousand small mouths opening at once. She heard footsteps then, if they were footsteps —soft, light, circling, never quite coming from the same place twice.
The seam widened by a fraction as she approached.
The pendant pulsed hard against her palm, and for one wild second the red glow around the cut in the air brightened enough to show what waited beyond: no landscape, no path, just another dark space yawning open and breathing slow.
Rory skidded to a stop.
The whisper came again, clear this time and right at her shoulder.
Don’t look back.
Her blood turned to ice.
She looked anyway.
The clearing was full of figures.
They had not been there a moment before, or else she had simply failed to see them. Tall shapes stood between the stones, half-hidden by the flowers, their outlines wavering as if made of water and moonlight. Some had faces, or the suggestion of faces, long and still and intent. Some did not. All of them were watching her.
Rory’s lungs locked.
The one nearest the boundary stone took a single step forward, and the flowers bent flat around its feet without sound.
Her pendant burned like a brand.
With a sharp, desperate movement, Rory threw herself toward the seam in the air. The darkness swallowed the torchlight first, then her hand, then the cold scream of the night as the grove reached for her from all sides.
And just before the black closed over her, she heard, very close and very softly , a voice speak her name.