AI Aurora hit the ground hard enough to bite her tongue, and the first thing she tasted in Hel was her own blood.
Something roared behind her, not close, not far, too vast for either word to fit. The sound rolled through her ribs and rattled the silver chain at her throat. The Heartstone pendant flared hot against her skin.
“Rory!”
She twisted onto her back. Nyx stood between her and a slit in the air that bled amber light, their tall shadow-body stretched thin at the edges as if the portal wanted to pull them apart thread by thread. Violet eyes burned in the dark of their face.
Beyond Nyx, the tear in the Veil snapped and folded. London vanished in a violent blink.
Silence followed.
Not true silence . Never silence . The world around them breathed.
Aurora pushed herself up on one elbow. Her palm sank into soil that felt like warm cake crumb . It gave beneath her fingers, rich and dark, and when she lifted her hand, tiny gold roots curled away from her skin.
“Please tell me Richmond Park has always had a cannibal vineyard and I’ve just missed that bit on the signs.”
Nyx turned slowly .
“You have not.”
“Good. Hate to think I’d been unobservant.”
The place stretched around them in impossible layers. A path of pale stone wound down through sloping gardens heavy with fruit. The trees did not grow in tidy rows. They spiralled, braided, leaned towards one another like guests sharing secrets over too much wine. Great purple figs split open on silver branches. Pears shaped like lanterns swung with slow inner flame. Vines climbed black marble columns, their leaves glossy and veined red, and each grape bunch shimmered like a cluster of little eyes.
Above, the sky glowed a warm amber, not flat like any sky she knew, but deep and full, as if someone had poured honey over glass and lit a furnace behind it.
Aurora got to her feet. Her knees complained. Her delivery jacket had torn at the cuff, and grit stuck to the crescent-shaped scar on her left wrist.
The Heartstone cooled, then pulsed again.
“Dymas,” Nyx whispered.
Aurora looked at them.
“That sounded less like a guess and more like a diagnosis.”
“Gluttony’s realm. Prince Belphegor’s table. Every appetite has a door here. Most have teeth.”
“Fantastic. Anything else I should know before the welcome drinks arrive?”
Nyx’s head tilted.
“Do not eat. Do not drink. Do not accept praise from anyone wearing red silk .”
Aurora stared.
“That’s oddly specific.”
“I dislike repeating old mistakes.”
“Noted.”
She wiped her bloodied lip with the back of her hand and scanned the slope below. The path descended towards a vast estate of orchards, terraces, steaming glasshouses, and pavilions with roofs shaped like folded leaves. Farther off, beyond the cultivated land, rose a city of domes and towers, all amber glass and ivory stone, sitting in a valley cupped by low red hills. Smoke drifted from a hundred chimneys. Bells chimed, then cut short, as if someone had clapped a hand over them.
A sweet smell drifted up from below. Roasted spices. Butter. Charred sugar. Meat glazed with something sharp enough to sting the nose. Her stomach clenched before her brain could object.
“No eating,” she muttered.
The path under her boots clicked softly . Each pale stone bore carvings, forks, mouths, wheat stalks, bowls, curling tongues, all worn smooth by centuries of passage. Ancient, then. Or ancient-looking. In Hel, perhaps places came into being already old, already hungry.
Nyx moved beside her without footfall . Their shadow slid over the stones, yet the stones drank no darkness from them.
“You can take us back?”
“When the Veil offers a seam.”
“Which means?”
“Not now.”
“Short answer. Hate it.”
A faint sound rose ahead. Music, perhaps. Not human music. A thin, glassy trill, layered with deeper drumbeats that pulsed in the soil. The nearest trees shivered in time. Fruit turned on their stems to follow Aurora as she passed.
She stopped under a low arch made of two intertwined trunks. The bark looked like polished bone . Between the roots lay a small copper plaque with words cut into it in a script she did not know. The letters shifted while she looked, curves bending into familiar shapes, then away again.
“Can you read that?”
Nyx leaned close. Their outline blurred at the edges.
“Enter empty. Leave less so.”
“Cheery.”
“The old gates spoke plainly.”
Aurora crouched and touched the plaque with one finger. Cold. The only cold thing in this warm, scented place. The metal trembled under her touch. For a heartbeat, she heard a knife on a chopping board. Chop, chop, chop. Fast. Wet.
She snatched her hand back.
Nyx watched her.
“It noticed you.”
“I noticed it right back.”
She stepped through the arch before she could decide not to.
The garden changed.
Behind the arch, the slope opened into a long sunken avenue lined with statues of chefs. Not demons with horns and theatrical sneers. Humans. Men and women in aprons, coats, simple shirts, old-fashioned gowns, sleeves rolled, hands marked by work. Each statue held a kitchen tool: ladle, cleaver, whisk, skewer, pestle. Their stone faces showed no grand pride. Only concentration. A few looked exhausted. One wept.
Aurora slowed by a statue of a woman with braided hair and a narrow face. The carving caught every tendon in her hands as she gripped a rolling pin. At her feet, someone had left a plate of fresh pastries. Steam rose from them.
“Helbound souls,” Nyx said.
Aurora looked at the plate.
“Contracted from Earth?”
“Yes. Some sign for wealth. Some for fame. Some for one more meal with the dead.”
“That last one feels unfair.”
“Most bargains do, to the side that pays.”
A pastry on the plate cracked open. Dark jam oozed out. It smelled of blackberry and smoke and childhood kitchens. For one stupid second, Cardiff flickered in the scent, her mother’s old blue mixing bowl, flour on the counter, rain ticking against the window.
Aurora stepped away.
“No eating,” she said again .
“Wise.”
“Don’t sound surprised.”
“I sounded relieved.”
The avenue ended at a circular pool. Water, if it was water, lay black and still. Steam drifted above it, carrying flecks of gold. In the centre rose a narrow island where an ancient tree grew from a cracked stone basin. Its trunk twisted upon itself in loops, and from each branch hung keys, hundreds of them, silver, iron, bone, glass, some as small as teeth, others long as swords. They chimed without wind.
Aurora’s breath caught.
“What is that?”
Nyx did not answer at once.
The keys sang. Not loudly. Not in any tune she could hum. Yet the sound tugged at the back of her skull, coaxing images loose. A red door in an alley. A lift button marked with no number. The walk-in freezer at Golden Empress, where the air always smelled of ginger, raw fish, and industrial cleaner. Her own flat above Silas’ bar, with its stubborn window latch and the floorboard that creaked even when no one stood on it.
Every entrance she knew. Every exit she had needed.
Nyx reached for her wrist before she took a step.
“Do not.”
“I wasn’t.”
“You were.”
Aurora looked down. Her boot hung over the first dark step leading into the pool. She had not seen it before. A staircase descended beneath the black surface, each submerged tread lit from within by a dull crimson glow.
She backed away, pulse hammering.
The water rippled.
A face rose beneath the surface.
Aurora froze.
It looked almost human, round-cheeked, pale-eyed, mouth too wide. Then a second face pressed up beside it. A third. Dozens. They slid under the black skin of the pool like fish under ice, all watching her with patient hunger.
One mouthed a word.
Rory.
Her stomach turned.
Nyx’s hand, cool and weightless, tightened on her sleeve.
“Names are hooks here.”
“That one already has mine.”
“Then guard the rest.”
Aurora swallowed. The pendant warmed again. Not a warning pulse this time, more like a heartbeat that did not belong to her.
From the far side of the pool, steps climbed towards a terrace of white stone. Tables stood there beneath canopies of red leaves. Each table held dishes beyond reason: towers of sugared glass, bowls of black noodles that writhed like eels, roast birds with jewel-bright plumage, soups that reflected faces not seated at the table. Empty chairs waited, high-backed and carved with open mouths.
No guests. No servants.
Still, cutlery moved.
Forks lifted. Knives sliced. Spoons dipped and rose. An unseen feast consumed itself in polite, measured motions.
Aurora’s skin prickled.
“Dymas throws dinner parties for ghosts?”
“For hunger. Ghosts have more manners.”
A napkin unfolded on the nearest table. It hung in the air , then twisted itself into the shape of a hand. One finger beckoned.
Aurora drew the Fae-Forged Blade from inside her jacket.
Moonsilver gleamed, slender and leaf-shaped, cold searing her palm. The dagger’s light did not match the amber world. It carried a clean, pale shine, sharp as frost on glass. The nearest knives fell still.
“Interesting,” Nyx whispered.
“Good interesting?”
“Expensive interesting.”
“That is never good.”
The napkin-hand recoiled. Its cloth browned at the edges, then burst into blue flame. The tableware scattered with a clatter. A bowl overturned, spilling thick green soup that hissed when it touched the terrace.
Something beneath the tables hissed back.
Aurora raised the blade.
“Please tell me that was normal table behaviour.”
“No.”
“Lovely.”
The terrace shook.
Chairs scraped away from the tables one by one. Not pushed. Fleeing. A line of cracks raced across the white stone in a perfect circle around Aurora and Nyx. The feasting pavilion, the pool, the statues, even the chime of keys seemed to hold their breath.
Then the floor opened like a mouth.
Aurora jumped back as a long, jointed limb punched through the stone where her foot had been. It ended not in a claw, but in a cluster of silver forks, each tine slick with green soup.
Another limb broke through. Then another.
Nyx dissolved into smoke and re-formed on the far side of the widening crack.
“Carter. Move.”
“Already a fan of that plan.”
The creature hauled itself out of the terrace, shedding broken stone. It had the body of a vast crab made from polished serving dishes, tureens, platters, cracked porcelain , and tarnished cutlery. Its shell showed painted pastoral scenes that shifted as it moved, sheep becoming wolves, picnics becoming butcheries. Where its head should have sat, a silver cloche quivered .
The cloche lifted.
Underneath, a wet red mouth opened across a mass of pale flesh. No eyes. Too many tongues.
“Guest,” it gurgled.
Aurora sliced at the nearest fork-limb. The Fae blade passed through the metal with a ringing note. Forks spun across the terrace. One stuck point-first in a roast bird, which shrieked and flapped despite lacking a head.
The creature recoiled.
Nyx surged across the ground, a black wave with violet sparks buried inside it. They wrapped around two limbs and pulled. Porcelain cracked. A platter snapped in half, spilling hot gravy that steamed into the shape of screaming faces.
“Guest,” the thing said again, louder .
“Delivery only.”
Aurora ducked beneath a swipe, drove her shoulder into a table, and sent it crashing into the creature’s side. Dishes exploded. Something like pink custard splattered her sleeve and began chewing through the fabric.
“Absolutely not.”
She shrugged out of the jacket and kicked it away. The custard kept eating, content with polyester.
The creature lunged. Its mouth stretched wide enough to take her arm to the shoulder.
Aurora stepped in instead of back.
The move surprised them both.
She jammed the Fae blade up beneath the lifted cloche, into the soft root of that obscene mouth. Cold moonsilver met demon flesh. The creature screamed, not with pain alone, but outrage, like a host insulted at their own table .
The terrace answered.
Every empty chair turned towards her.
Nyx appeared at her side, solid enough to seize her by the waist. Shadows snapped around them. The world folded sideways. For one breath, Aurora saw through the cracks between things: black corridors full of whispers, doors made of eyelids, the thin silver shimmer of the Veil stretched impossibly far above.
Then they slammed onto the far side of the pool.
Aurora rolled, lost the blade, grabbed it by reflex before it slid into the dark water. A pale hand shot up from beneath the surface and caught her wrist.
The grip burned cold.
A face rose from the pool, its mouth open around her name. Not Rory this time.
“Aurora Carter.”
The full name struck like a nail through the air.
Nyx hissed. Their form split and sharpened, shadow rising like a blade behind them.
Aurora gritted her teeth and pulled. The thing in the water pulled harder. Her boots slid on wet stone. The Heartstone pendant flared crimson, hot enough to make her cry out.
The pool erupted.
Hands burst from the black surface, dozens of them, fingers long and white, nails like fish bones. They clutched at the stones, at Nyx’s shadow, at Aurora’s boots. The key-tree chimed in wild alarm. Keys tore loose from the branches and spun overhead like a flock of metal birds.
One key, a small deep crimson glass key, dropped straight towards Aurora’s chest.
The Heartstone answered with a pulse that lit the pool red.
The hand around her wrist loosened.
Aurora slashed down. The Fae blade cut through pale fingers. They fell soundlessly into the pool and became steam.
Nyx dragged her back from the edge.
“Your pendant called something.”
“Everything here calls something.”
“Not like that.”
The crimson key hovered before her, point aimed at the Heartstone. It trembled , eager as a compass needle. Along its shaft, tiny letters burned into view in English.
FIRST COURSE.
Aurora stared.
“No. No, I hate that.”
The crab-thing shrieked from the terrace. It had not died. It had changed. The broken dishes of its body rearranged themselves into a taller shape, too human in outline, with cutlery ribs and a cloche for a crown. Behind it, between the empty tables, figures appeared one by one.
Chefs in stained whites.
Diners in red silk .
Children with jam-dark mouths.
All stood still.
All faced Aurora.
Nyx drew closer, their voice thinning to a wind-whisper .
“Carter.”
“I see them.”
“No. Behind you.”
The keys above the tree stopped chiming.
A door had appeared in the air over the black pool, tall, narrow, and made of living meat. Its frame pulsed . Its brass handle turned by itself.
The Heartstone pendant blazed.
From behind the door came a polite knock. Three measured taps.
Then a voice, rich as cream poured over a knife, spoke through the flesh.
“Miss Aurora Carter. Prince Belphegor requests the pleasure of your appetite.”