AI Aurora Carter had never liked Richmond Park after dark.
By day it was all joggers and dogs and children with jam on their fingers, the deer standing aloof in the yellow grass like a committee of old judges. At night, the park remembered it was ancient. The paths lost their civic obedience. The trees gathered in knots. Every dip of ground became a hollow where something might be crouching.
She stood at the edge of the narrow footpath with her bicycle chained half a mile back to a railing she hoped existed in the same place when she returned, and checked her phone for the third time.
No signal.
Of course.
The message was still there, though, stark against the dim glow of the screen.
If the Heartstone warms again, go to the oaks in Richmond. Midnight. Come alone. Do not bring Silas. Do not tell Eva. If you value your name, do not ignore this.
No sender. No number. Just those words, waiting for her at 23:07 while she had been wiping soy sauce from the inside of a delivery bag behind the Golden Empress and pretending her hands weren’t shaking .
She should have ignored it.
That was the sane answer. That was the answer a cool-headed, intelligent woman with a pre-law education and a long, ugly history of ignoring red flags ought to have chosen. She should have gone upstairs to the flat above Silas’ bar, locked the door, made tea so strong it could strip paint, and waited until morning to decide how stupid she planned to be.
But the Heartstone had been hot enough to burn.
Even now, beneath her jumper and coat, it pulsed against her breastbone with a slow, sick warmth . The pendant was small, no bigger than her thumbnail, deep crimson on its silver chain. It had glowed faintly since she’d reached the park gate, a coal cupped under ash. Each beat of heat seemed to answer something ahead of her.
Rory closed her hand around it through the wool.
“Right,” she said under her breath . Her voice sounded too small, snatched away at once by the trees. “Midnight stroll. Perfectly normal. Very London.”
The park gave no reply.
She stepped off the path.
The grass was wet enough to soak through the seams of her boots. A low mist clung to the ground, silver where moonlight touched it, black where it gathered under the brambles. Somewhere far off, traffic moved along a road—soft, continuous, almost comforting . But with every step into the trees, that sound thinned. Not faded. Thinned, like someone drawing a curtain across it layer by layer.
By the time she saw the first of the old oaks, the city had gone silent.
They stood in a loose ring beyond a rise, their trunks too broad, their branches too heavy. Ancient oak standing stones, the stories called them, though they were not stones at all. Not entirely. Their bark had grown pale and ridged in places, hard as weathered granite, shaped into vertical slabs that jutted from the earth between root and trunk. Rory had seen photographs of Isolde’s grove once on Eva’s phone, taken in daylight and from a safe distance, all charming wildflowers and dappled green.
This was not that place.
At night, the Fae Grove looked like something pretending to be a clearing.
Wildflowers bloomed despite the cold, pale heads nodding in the dark. Bluebells. Foxgloves. Little white stars she didn’t know the names of. Their petals were open wide to the moon, too eager, too awake. The air smelled of wet leaves, crushed stems, and a sharp mineral tang, like blood on pennies though she told herself firmly that was nonsense.
The Heartstone burned hotter.
Rory stopped at the boundary. The oaks leaned inward. Between them, the clearing lay untouched by mist, a perfect circle of silver grass. The shadows there had depth. Not darkness—depth. Like water at night.
She took one step forward, then another.
The moment she crossed between the first two oaks, pressure popped in her ears. The world sucked in a breath and held it.
Rory staggered, one hand flying out to grip the nearest trunk. Bark bit her palm. For a second she smelled summer rain and smoke and roses gone rotten in a vase. Then it passed.
Behind her, Richmond Park remained where it should be, visible through the gap in the trees. A footpath. A slope. Mist. Moonlight.
But it seemed far away now, small and flat as a photograph .
“Brilliant,” she whispered. “Absolutely brilliant decision-making, Carter.”
She checked her watch .
11:58.
The second hand ticked once.
Then again.
Then stopped.
Rory stared at it until her eyes watered. The watch was a cheap thing she’d bought near Victoria Station because delivery work and phones didn’t always mix, but it had never stopped before. She tapped the face. Nothing. She pressed the crown. Nothing.
A soft crackle came from the flowers.
Rory looked up.
The clearing stood empty.
The sound came again, to her left this time: dry stems snapping under careful weight . She turned slowly . Nothing moved among the foxgloves. Moonlight glazed their bell-shaped mouths. For one absurd instant she thought of schoolchildren whispering secrets behind cupped hands.
“Hello?”
The word went nowhere. It entered the clearing and died there.
She waited.
No answer. No footsteps . No rustle of fabric, no breath.
The Heartstone gave another pulse , sudden and sharp. Heat spread across her collarbone.
She drew it out from under her coat. The crimson gem glowed faintly from within, not bright enough to cast light, only enough to make the silver chain flash between her fingers. Its surface looked wet. Rory turned it over, searching for some crack or mark that had not been there before, but the pendant remained smooth.
“What are you trying to tell me?” she murmured.
A voice behind her said, “Rory.”
She spun so fast the chain cut into her neck.
No one stood there.
The boundary oaks watched in their ring. Beyond them, the park had changed.
The path was no longer visible. Neither was the slope. The gap between the trunks opened onto a dense wall of black trees she did not recognize. Too many trunks, too close together. Branches knitted overhead, hiding the sky. For a moment her mind refused the sight. She had just come through there. The route back should have been plain, even in the dark.
She blinked hard.
The park returned.
Footpath. Slope. Mist.
Her breath had gone shallow. She forced it deeper, in through her nose, out through her mouth. Panic made people stupid. She knew that. Evan had taught her that in a dozen different ways, wearing a dozen different smiles. Panic narrowed the world until the only choices seemed to be freeze or surrender. Rory had spent too long learning how not to do either.
“Not real,” she said. “Or not permanent. Either way, unhelpful.”
Her voice steadied her, a little.
She turned back toward the centre of the grove. If someone had lured her here, they wanted her frightened. That did not mean there was no danger. It meant fear was part of the mechanism.
The grass whispered around her boots though there was no wind. As she moved deeper into the clearing, she noticed the flowers all faced her. Every bloom tilted on its stem. The foxgloves seemed most obvious, their purple throats dark and speckled, but even the tiny white stars angled toward her passage.
A laugh sounded somewhere above.
Rory froze.
It was a child’s laugh, high and breathy, trailing into a hiccup. It came from the branches overhead. Not from a bird. Not a fox. Human, or close enough to pull at something old and protective in her chest.
“Who’s there?” she called, hating herself for it even as she did.
Leaves shifted. A twig dropped near her shoulder. She flinched as it struck the grass.
The laugh came again, farther away now, at the opposite edge of the grove.
Then another laugh answered it from behind her.
Then both cut off at once.
The silence after was worse.
Rory slid one hand into her coat pocket and closed her fingers around her keys. The largest key jutted between her knuckles, a pathetic weapon against whatever haunted pocket clearings between Earth and the Fae realm, but the cold metal helped. She had delivered noodles to drunken men twice her size and smiled when they called her sweetheart. She knew the usefulness of keys.
At the centre of the clearing, the grass grew shorter, flattened in a near-perfect circle around a shallow depression. The earth there was dark and bare. No flowers crossed it. No roots. No moss. It looked scorched, except it held no smell of ash. It smelled cold.
The Heartstone’s warmth became almost unbearable.
Rory let out a hiss and dropped the pendant. It fell against her jumper, still hanging from the chain, and continued to pulse .
A Hel portal.
The thought arrived with a certainty that did not feel like her own.
She swallowed. Her mouth had gone dry.
That was why she had come. That was why the message mattered. The Heartstone warmed near a Hel portal, and whatever had begun dragging its attention across London had led her here, to a hidden grove where time slipped its leash and flowers bloomed in December. She needed answers before answers came hunting her at home. That had been her rationale. It seemed thinner now. Paper held over a candle.
At the edge of the scorched circle, she crouched.
The ground was smooth. Too smooth. Not mud, not clay, but something like dark glass covered by a thin skin of soil . She reached toward it, then stopped an inch above the surface.
Beneath the earth, something knocked.
Once.
Rory’s hand jerked back.
The knock came again.
Three measured taps, directly under her boots.
She rose so quickly she nearly lost her balance. Her heel skidded on damp grass. The clearing tilted. For one second the ring of oaks seemed to stretch upward, taller and taller, their branches knitting into ribs, the moon caught between them like a blind eye.
Then the vision snapped back.
Tap.
Tap.
Tap.
This time the sound came from the nearest oak.
Rory turned.
The pale slab of bark embedded in its trunk had split from top to bottom. Not open, not fully, but cracked wide enough to reveal darkness inside . Something moved behind the fissure. A pale suggestion of fingers pressed against the gap from within, long and thin, each joint wrong by half an inch.
Rory did not breathe.
The fingers withdrew.
The crack sealed without a sound.
“Nope,” she said.
It was not brave. It was not elegant. It was the only word her brain provided.
She backed away from the centre, keeping the oak in sight. Her boot caught on something soft. She looked down.
A delivery receipt lay in the grass.
For half a second she thought her own pocket had torn, that some scrap from the Golden Empress had followed her here. But the paper was dry despite the wet ground. Crisp. White. The printed text faced upward.
Order 4412. Name: LAILA. Delivery address: THE GROVE.
Rory stared at the name.
Laila.
The alias had belonged to a bad week and a worse decision. A name she had used once when she had needed not to be found, when Eva had taken her in and Rory had jumped every time a man raised his voice in the street. Almost no one knew it. Silas, maybe. Eva, certainly. Not the world. Not whatever waited in a tree.
The receipt trembled though the air was still.
Letters crawled across the bottom, black ink spreading like mould.
RUNNING LATE, AURORA?
Her skin tightened from scalp to wrist. The small crescent-shaped scar on her left wrist tingled, the old childhood mark suddenly vivid as if pressed by a thumbnail.
“Who sent the message?” she demanded.
The grove listened.
“Was it you?”
A gust of wind circled the clearing. Only the flowers moved, all bowing in a wave that began behind her and swept toward the cracked oak. Their stems bent low. Not to the wind. To something passing among them.
Rory saw it only at the edge of vision: a tall, narrow absence slipping between trunks. When she turned, it was gone . Her eyes found an ordinary shadow, then another, then too many. Every gap between the oaks seemed occupied until she looked directly at it .
The receipt at her feet folded itself in half.
Then in half again.
Then it stood on its pointed end like a tiny white figure.
Rory stepped on it.
Paper flattened under her boot. A small satisfaction, stupid and fierce, flared through her terror.
Something exhaled in her ear.
It was intimate. Warm. Almost amused.
Rory did not turn at once. Every instinct screamed at her to run, but another instinct, colder and more useful, warned that the thing wanted movement. Wanted the startle, the blind flight, the animal part of her taking over.
Slowly, she lifted her chin.
The grove ahead had changed again.
Beyond the oaks, the park was gone . In its place stood a narrow hallway with yellowing wallpaper and a single bare bulb. Cardiff. Her parents’ old house. No, not exactly—the proportions were wrong, the hallway too long, the carpet stained black where shadows pooled. At the far end, a door stood ajar.
From behind it came the sound of her mother crying.
Rory’s chest clenched.
“Cheap,” she whispered, but her voice broke on the word .
The crying continued, soft and muffled. Then her father’s voice, low and urgent, too indistinct to make out. Then a thud.
Rory took one step toward the boundary before she knew she’d moved.
The Heartstone seared her skin.
Pain snapped the thread. She gasped and clutched the pendant through her coat. The false hallway flickered . For an instant she saw the park beyond, then the hallway again, then neither—only black trunks and mist.
“Stop it,” she said.
The crying stopped.
All around the clearing, voices began to speak her name.
Rory.
Aurora.
Carter.
Laila.
Rory.
They whispered from the flowers, from the cracks in the bark, from under the dark glass earth. Some voices she recognized. Eva, breathless with fear. Silas, rough with warning. Yu-Fei Cheung, calling from the kitchen in her precise, no-nonsense cadence. Brendan Carter arguing in court. Jennifer Carter reading a line of poetry. Evan, soft as poison.
Rory.
That one slid under her skin.
Not because it was loud. Because it sounded exactly like him on the nights he apologised. Warm. Regretful. So wounded by his own cruelty that she had once found herself comforting him for it.
Rory, sweetheart. You always do this. You always make things difficult.
Her hand closed harder around her keys.
“Get his voice out of your mouth,” she said.
The whispering ceased.
The clearing darkened by degrees. Moonlight withdrew from the grass as if being reeled upward. The flowers lost their colour, becoming pale open mouths. The oaks stood black against a sky now empty of stars.
At the centre of the scorched circle, the ground bulged.
Not much. An inch, perhaps two. Smooth dark earth swelling as something underneath pressed upward with patient strength.
The Heartstone no longer pulsed . It beat. Fast, frantic, a second heart against her own.
Rory stepped back. The grass behind her wrapped around her ankle.
She looked down and saw stems twined over her bootlaces, delicate as threads, tightening. Another tendril brushed her other foot. A bluebell curled around the hem of her jeans.
“Oh, you little bastards.”
She crouched and slashed with her keys. The stems parted, leaking clear sap that smelled sharply of iron. More flowers bent toward her wrists. One brushed the crescent scar on her left wrist, and cold shot up her arm so violently she nearly dropped the keys.
A memory burst in her head—not recalled, imposed.
A kitchen floor. Broken glass. Her own child-hand bleeding while her mother shouted for a towel. The cut shaped like a moon. The sense, impossible and vivid, that something on the other side of the window had seen the blood and smiled.
Rory ripped her hand away. The flower came with it, roots dangling like white worms. She flung it into the dark.
The bulge in the centre split.
No gore. No eruption. Just a hairline crack in the skin of earth, blacker than the ground around it. Air flowed from the opening, colder than winter, carrying a smell of damp stone and old smoke. The whispering resumed, not around her now but below, far below . A crowd speaking from the bottom of a well.
The pendant tugged forward on its chain.
Rory grabbed it with one hand and pulled back. The silver bit into the nape of her neck. The gem strained toward the crack, glowing red enough now to stain her fingers.
This was the reason. Not a meeting. Not answers.
Bait.
The message had not wanted her to find the portal. The portal had wanted her to bring the Heartstone.
“Not happening,” she said through her teeth.
The crack widened by a fraction.
Something knocked from beneath it.
Tap.
Tap.
Tap.
The sound was polite. Almost formal.
At the boundary, all the oak trunks split at once.
Thin black seams opened from root to branch. No fingers emerged this time. Only eyes. Dozens of them, deep-set in the darkness behind the bark. Not shining. Not animal. Watchful, patient, arranged at different heights as if a congregation stood inside the trees, peering through keyholes.
Rory’s stomach turned to ice.
She could run.
The thought came clear and brutal. Run now, and perhaps she would make the boundary before the flowers anchored her, before the thing under the earth opened fully, before the watching trees remembered they had hands. Run, and risk the false paths, the time slip, the hallway that wasn’t there. Run, and leave the portal with whatever victory it could scrape from her fear.
Or think.
Out-of-the-box thinking, Eva always said, usually when Rory had turned a takeaway mishap into three free meals and an apology from a man who had started the conversation shouting.
The Heartstone wanted the crack. The crack wanted the Heartstone.
Near a Hel portal, it warmed. But it was from Dymas, not Hel. Given by an unknown benefactor, for reasons no one had bothered to explain because apparently ancient artifacts came with less paperwork than a parking permit.
If it reacted to the portal, maybe it could do more than react.
Rory stopped pulling away.
The pendant lurched forward. She let it, just enough to give slack, and stepped toward the cracked ground.
The eyes in the trees did not blink.
The flowers released her ankles. That frightened her more than the grip had. The grove approved of her direction.
“Yeah,” she murmured. “That’s what I thought.”
She walked to the edge of the scorched circle. Cold air licked her face, numbing her lips. The crack below seemed impossibly deep now, a narrow absence splitting the earth . The whispers rose, eager.
Rory held the Heartstone over it.
The crimson glow brightened. Heat crawled up the chain, burning her fingers. Her eyes watered. The pendant pulled hard enough to draw blood where the chain rubbed her neck.
“Come on, then,” she whispered.
Below, something answered in a language that made her teeth ache.
Rory smiled without humour.
Then she swung the pendant sideways and slapped it against the pale stone-bark of the nearest oak.
The effect was immediate.
The tree screamed.
Not aloud, not exactly. The sound tore through the grove without passing through the air, a pressure behind her eyes, a shriek in the roots of her teeth. The crack in the ground shuddered. The eyes in the trees vanished, every seam snapping shut except the one she had struck. The Heartstone flared white-red against the oak’s ancient boundary mark.
Rory held it there with both hands despite the pain.
The bark smoked, but did not burn. Lines appeared under the pale surface, branching like veins . They lit crimson, then silver, racing around the trunk and into the roots. The nearest oak groaned. Across the clearing, another answered. Then another.
The boundary.
Not stones. Not just trees. A ring. A lock.
Rory pressed harder.
“Close,” she said, though she did not know to whom she spoke. “Close, damn you.”
The ground at the centre convulsed. The crack widened suddenly , and the cold became a hand around her throat. The voices from below rose into a single tone, hungry and furious. Something pushed upward. She saw no shape, only a darkness denser than dark, a vertical suggestion behind the slit in the world.
The oak under her palms trembled .
For one awful second, she was certain she had miscalculated. That she had not activated a lock but rung a dinner bell. The flowers flattened outward. The mist beyond the grove swirled counterclockwise. Her watch , dead on her wrist, began ticking wildly, the hands spinning through minutes, hours, whole days.
Then the ring of oaks ignited in silver lines.
The light raced trunk to trunk, root to root, forming a circle around the clearing. It was not warm light. It was old and pitiless, the colour of moonlit blades. The crack in the centre snapped shut with a sound like a book being slammed .
Silence dropped.
Rory staggered back from the oak and fell hard onto the grass.
For a moment she could only sit there, breathing in ragged pulls, both hands curled protectively around the Heartstone. The pendant had dimmed to its usual faint inner glow. Warm, not burning. Her fingers ached. When she looked down, the chain had left a red line across her throat.
The grove looked almost ordinary again.
Moonlight lay over the flowers. The oaks stood whole. The scorched circle remained bare but unbroken. Beyond the boundary, Richmond Park sloped away in familiar darkness. Far off, a car passed. The sound was faint, but real.
Rory laughed once, too sharply . It came out almost like a sob.
Her watch ticked normally.
12:01.
She stared at it.
Three minutes.
She had no idea what that meant outside. Three minutes in the grove could be minutes or days. She might return to find dawn, or police tape, or Silas grey-haired and furious behind the bar. The thought nearly undid her.
A rustle came from the nearest oak.
Rory went still.
A strip of bark peeled away from the pale standing-stone face. Slowly, delicately, it curled outward and dropped to the grass at her feet.
Not bark.
Paper.
She did not want to touch it. Every sensible part of her rebelled. But she had not come this far to let a haunted tree pass notes uncollected.
Rory picked it up between two fingers.
The paper was thick, fibrous, and cold. One sentence had been written across it in dark red ink.
Next time, bring the key willingly, Malphora.
The name struck her like a hand.
Not Aurora. Not Rory. Not Laila.
Malphora.
She had never heard it before. She knew that with the clean certainty of truth. And yet the Heartstone gave one soft pulse against her palm, almost in recognition.
At the far edge of the clearing, between two oaks, a figure stood.
Rory saw it only because it moved against the mist. Tall. Slight. Hooded, perhaps, or antlered, or crowned in branches—the outline refused to settle. It remained just outside the boundary, in the park and not in the park, its face turned toward her.
She rose slowly .
“Did you send the message?”
The figure did not answer.
“Did you help me or bait me?”
Still nothing.
Anger flared, sudden and useful, burning through the residue of fear. Rory took one step toward it. “I am very tired of being moved around by people who think mysterious counts as charming.”
The figure inclined its head.
The mist thickened.
“Wait,” she said.
It stepped backward and was gone .
Not vanished in a flash. Not swallowed by darkness. Simply absent between one breath and the next, leaving only wet grass and the black combs of the trees beyond.
Rory stood there until her legs began to shake.
Then she folded the paper and shoved it deep into her coat pocket. Her hands would not stop trembling, so she clenched them into fists. The crescent scar on her left wrist had faded back to its usual pale mark, but she could still feel the flower’s cold touch. She rubbed it once, hard.
The path out waited between the oaks.
It looked like the path she had taken in . That meant nothing. The grove had already worn too many faces to trust any of them. But the Heartstone had cooled, and the boundary no longer pressed against her skin like a held breath.
Rory walked toward the gap.
Halfway there, a child laughed overhead.
She did not look up.
Another laugh answered from behind the cracked earth. Softer. Farther away.
Rory kept walking.
At the boundary, pressure gathered around her ears again. She stepped between the ancient oaks and braced herself. The world lurched , stretched thin, then released her.
Sound returned all at once.
Traffic on the road. Wind through ordinary leaves. A fox barking somewhere in the distance. The vast indifferent hum of London at night.
Rory turned back.
The clearing was gone .
Only trees stood there, close together, dark and wet, with no wildflowers beneath them and no ring of pale stone-bark visible in the moonlight. If she had not held the Heartstone in her fist, if her throat had not burned where the chain had bitten, if the paper in her pocket had not seemed to pulse faintly against her thigh, she might have convinced herself she had wandered, panicked, invented the rest.
She knew better.
Her phone buzzed.
Rory flinched so hard she nearly dropped it. Signal had returned. The screen lit with a single notification.
No sender.
One message.
Thank you for closing it.
A second appeared beneath it before she could breathe .
You were not supposed to survive.
Rory stared at the words until the screen dimmed.
Behind her, very far away or very deep beneath the ground, something knocked three times.
Tap.
Tap.
Tap.
She put the phone in her pocket, gripped the Heartstone until its edges bit her palm, and started walking back toward the place where she had left her bicycle, refusing with every step to run.