AI Rory caught the falling torch before it struck the stone, and the laugh that answered from the trees did not belong to any animal in Richmond Park.
Her fingers tightened around the metal grip. The beam jerked across the clearing, flashed over white wildflowers, black soil, the curved flank of an ancient oak standing stone, then vanished into a thicket of bracken as if the dark had swallowed the light whole.
“Not funny.”
No one answered.
She held still, one knee sunk into damp moss, one hand braced against the carved stone. The old mark in its face had scraped her palm when the torch slipped. Not a letter. Not quite a rune. A groove worn smooth by age, shaped like a hooked crescent with three short cuts beneath it.
The same shape she had found inked on the back of the delivery receipt.
The receipt had come from a customer who never opened the door.
Golden Empress order, paid in cash, flat 7B, Peabody estate near Whitechapel. Yu-Fei had frowned at the ticket before handing it over, tapping one glossy nail against the postcode.
“No dawdling with this one, Rory. Food’s already late, and the man on the phone sounded like he chewed glass.”
Rory had cycled through wet streets, climbed two flights in a building that smelled of bleach, old cabbage, and hot wires, then stood before a door with no number and no sound behind it. The bag had gone warm against her ribs. The receipt had slipped free when she checked the name.
Not a name. A drawing.
A crescent. Three cuts. Under it, two words in cramped block letters.
THE GROVE.
On the reverse, written in a different hand, sat a sentence that had not been there when she left the restaurant.
Bring the Heartstone before it learns your name.
She should have gone back to the Golden Empress. She should have rung Eva. She should have marched upstairs to Silas’ bar and asked why London had decided to turn into a bad folklore museum around her.
Instead, she had gripped the deep crimson pendant beneath her shirt until its heat stung her palm, and she had come to Richmond Park with a torch, a pocketknife, and the kind of anger that followed fear when fear failed to be useful.
Now the Heartstone pulsed against her chest.
Warm. Warmer than skin. Each throb pressed through the silver chain like a second pulse , wrong-footed against her own.
Rory rose slowly . Her straight shoulder-length black hair stuck to her cheek. She brushed it away and lifted the torch again.
The Fae Grove did not look like any place that belonged inside a London park. Ancient oak standing stones ringed the clearing, each one the height of a person, each twisted by growth and age until bark and stone seemed to have made a bargain neither quite understood. Wildflowers bloomed in thick banks around them, foxgloves, bluebells, poppies, white blooms she could not name, all open as if the season had lost an argument here. Their scent clung low and sweet, not floral so much as fermented, like fruit left too long in a locked cupboard.
Beyond the boundary, trees crowded close. Too close. Richmond Park had paths, bins, dog walkers, deer. This part had none of that. No distant traffic. No plane rumble. No fox bark. The air swallowed London and left only the soft drag of leaves rubbing together.
Except the leaves did not move.
Rory aimed the torch at the nearest standing stone. The beam caught fresh scratches beside the crescent mark. Newer. Pale wood showed beneath the bark.
Three letters.
R O R
The last stroke trailed away unfinished.
Her mouth dried.
“Cute.”
She hated the sound of her own voice. Too small. Too crisp. A lecturer’s daughter voice, the one that made people think she had everything in hand while her stomach folded itself into neat legal documents.
She shifted the torch to her left hand and drew the pocketknife with her right. The blade clicked open. A cheap thing from a corner shop near Camden, red plastic handle, not made for old magic or whatever this was. Still, metal made sense. Metal had weight . Metal did not whisper your almost-name from trees.
A twig snapped behind her.
Rory turned.
The clearing stood empty.
The torch beam washed over flowers. The flowers bent away from the light.
Not with wind. Not together. One by one, their delicate heads tilted, as if following something that moved just outside the beam .
Rory stepped back until the standing stone pressed between her shoulder blades. Its surface felt warmer than it should. Bark ridges dug through her jacket.
“Who’s there?”
A low knock came from the woods.
One sound. Hollow. Measured.
Then another.
Knock.
Knock.
Not on wood. In wood. Deep inside the trunks, something rapped its knuckles through the heart of the trees.
Rory kept the torch steady. The beam showed nothing but rough bark, nettles, and thin branches bent at angles that made them look jointed.
“Right. Brilliant. Haunted shrubbery.”
Knock-knock.
This time, from the standing stone behind her.
She sprang away, knife up, breath caught in her teeth. The stone gave a tiny creak. A slit opened in the bark where no slit had been, black and wet as a mouth.
A voice seeped out.
“Laila.”
Rory’s blood tightened.
No one called her that.
Not here.
Evan had used it at first like a pet name, soft as butter over a blade. Later, he had spat it when Aurora became too formal, Rory too independent, Carter too much like someone with a spine. Laila had belonged to locked bathroom doors, broken mugs, apologies with fingerprints around her arm.
The slit widened. Sap glistened at its edges.
“Laila,” it said again, closer to Evan’s voice now. “You made me come looking.”
Rory stepped away from the stone, boots crushing flowers. The petals released a sharp, green stink.
“No.”
The word left her flat and hard.
The bark mouth trembled . For one absurd second she expected teeth. Instead, the groove reshaped, puckered, and whispered in her mother’s Cardiff lilt .
“Aurora love, don’t be rude. You were raised better.”
Her grip faltered.
The torch flickered .
In the half-dark between one blink of light and the next, someone stood at the edge of the Grove.
Tall. Thin. Wearing Brendan Carter’s old brown coat.
The torch steadied.
No one stood there.
Rory forced air into her lungs through her nose. The smell of wildflowers thickened. Under it lay another scent. Cold iron. Wet ash. Something like hair singed over a gas hob .
She pressed her thumb against the crescent scar on her left wrist until pain sharpened the edges of the world.
Facts. Anchor to facts.
She had come here because the receipt named the Grove. The Heartstone had heated on the ride through Richmond until she had nearly thrown it into the road. A line of oak standing stones had appeared where her phone map showed open grass. Time in this place, if the pub rumours Silas collected had any truth in them, ran crooked. An hour here could spill days outside.
Fine.
None of that meant she had to answer a tree.
The pendant flared.
Heat lanced across her chest. Rory hissed and pulled it free. The deep crimson gemstone sat against her palm, roughly the size of a thumbnail, set on a silver chain. A faint inner glow stirred inside it, not steady, not like an LED or candle. More like something alive turning in sleep.
The glow brightened toward the far side of the clearing.
Toward a gap between two standing stones she had not noticed before.
Rory lifted the torch.
There should have been a tree there. Instead, a narrow path led out of the Grove, bordered by flowers with closed, pale faces. The darkness past the gap had texture. It folded in slow layers, black upon black, like cloth moved by hands.
The Heartstone beat harder.
Near a Hel portal, then.
She did not know how she knew the word, but it rose from the pendant into her bones. Hel. Not hell as priests sold it, not flames and pitchforks. Hel like cold beneath the roots. Hel like a cellar where the dead had learned patience.
A soft footstep sounded to her left.
Rory snapped the torch round.
A deer stood inside the ring of stones.
Its antlers scraped low branches that had not hung there a moment ago. Its coat looked patchy, dark with old mud, and its eyes reflected the torch in two flat white coins.
Rory did not move.
The deer’s jaw worked.
Something clicked between its teeth.
Not chewing. Counting.
Click. Click. Click.
A strip of paper slid from its mouth and dropped onto the flowers.
Rory knew better than to pick it up.
The deer dipped its head.
The paper had writing on it.
Of course it did.
The torch beam shook despite her best effort. The words appeared in thick black strokes, soaked through the paper as if written with ink that had not dried.
BRING IT CLOSER.
“No.”
The deer’s ears twitched. Its mouth split down the centre, lower jaw dividing in two clean halves. No blood. No gore. Just a neat parting, like peeled fruit. A woman’s voice came from the open seam.
“The door is hungry, Aurora Carter.”
Rory backed away.
The deer stepped with her.
Its hooves made no sound on the flowers.
“Who sent the pendant?”
“The one who regrets.”
“Specific. Love that in a death omen.”
“The one who regrets what they buried.”
Rory’s heel struck a root. She caught herself against another standing stone. The bark beneath her palm shifted like muscle.
Names scratched themselves across the wood in frantic bursts.
AURORA.
RORY.
CARTER.
LAILA.
MALPHORA.
The last name burned into the bark with a faint red shine.
The deer lowered its head. Its antlers cast long, branching shadows that did not match their shape.
“You have worn a heart that does not beat for you.”
The Heartstone seared her palm.
Rory yanked the chain over her head. The silver links snagged in her hair, then came free with a sting. She held the pendant out, not toward the deer, but away from her skin .
The glow inside the crimson gem leaned toward the path.
From the dark gap came a sound like a breath drawn through teeth.
The flowers nearest the gap flattened.
Rory’s mind moved fast now, the way it did when Evan had blocked the flat door, when a drunk had grabbed her delivery bag in Soho, when Cardiff tutorials had turned into debates she had no desire to lose.
Door hungry. Pendant warm near portal. Someone wanted it closer.
So do the opposite.
She swung the pendant by its chain and slammed it against the standing stone behind her.
The sound cracked through the Grove.
Not glass. Not metal. Bone.
Every flower snapped shut.
The deer screamed in a man’s voice.
The ground under Rory’s boots rippled. Roots burst from the soil in a twisting ring, thin and pale as fingers. They whipped around her ankles. One lashed her wrist, found the old crescent scar, and tightened.
Pain flashed white.
“Rory!”
The shout came from the trees.
A woman’s voice. Eva? Impossible. Too far away. Too real.
“Rory, don’t move!”
Rory froze.
The deer stopped screaming.
The roots kept tightening.
At the edge of the torchlight, between two trees, Eva’s shape appeared. Copper hair. Black coat. One hand braced against a trunk. Her face pale, mouth open, eyes fixed not on Rory but on the pendant .
“Drop it, babes.”
Rory’s laugh came out rough.
“Nice trick.”
Eva’s face pinched, exactly as it did whenever Rory called a bluff over drinks.
“Silas said you’d do that. He also said if I found you alive, I should tell you he’s charging double rent for supernatural nonsense after midnight.”
Rory’s pulse kicked.
The deer tilted its head.
Eva’s shape flickered .
Too sharp at the edges. No breath misting. No shadow on the flowers.
Rory looked at the roots around her ankles, then at the figure.
“What did I steal from your room when we were fourteen?”
Eva’s mouth smiled.
The wrong smile. Too many teeth, too patient.
“Your mother’s cigarettes.”
“Eva never smoked. I did.”
The figure’s face sagged. Not melted. Slipped. Features sliding down like wet paper on glass. Copper hair darkened to black, then grey, then strands of moss. The coat lengthened into a shroud of leaves.
The thing inside the shape opened eyes in its cheeks.
“Laila,” it said.
Rory drove the pocketknife into the root around her wrist.
The blade stuck halfway.
The root jerked. Her scar split open, not deep, but enough for blood to bead along the crescent . The Heartstone flared in answer.
The gap between the standing stones widened.
Cold rolled into the Grove.
It had a taste. Pennies, dust, hospital corridors after visiting hours. Rory’s teeth ached. The flowers nearest the opening blackened from the edges inward, folding into themselves without a sound.
Something stood beyond the gap.
Not fully in the world. A tall absence wrapped in the idea of a cloak. Where its face should have been, darkness pressed forward, dented by shapes beneath it. Hands, perhaps. Or faces from the other side.
The deer bowed.
The false Eva bowed.
The bark mouths opened around the ring of stones, all of them whispering at once.
“Malphora.”
The name tugged at her skin.
The Heartstone leapt in her grip, chain snapping taut as if something beyond the gap had hooked it. Rory planted her boots and wrapped the silver links round her fist. Roots climbed her legs. One slid under her jacket, cold and searching.
The tall absence raised one long arm.
The pendant pulled harder.
Rory’s shoulder screamed.
The pocketknife remained lodged in the root around her wrist. She could not reach it without losing the pendant. The torch lay on the ground, beam tilted upward, lighting the underside of the deer’s split jaw and the slick black hollows in the standing stones.
“Bring it,” the bark mouths breathed. “Bring the heart. Bring the borrowed name. Bring the girl who ran.”
Rory bared her teeth.
“I didn’t run.”
She twisted the pendant chain around the knife handle.
For one second, nothing happened.
Then the Heartstone’s heat surged down the silver chain into the cheap little blade. Red light crawled along the metal. The root around her wrist shrivelled with a hiss like fat in a pan. Rory ripped her hand free. Blood streaked the silver links.
The tall absence lurched forward.
The gap opened wider.
Inside it, something vast shifted in the dark. The world beyond the stones was not a path now. It was a throat.
Rory seized the torch from the ground and hurled it at the deer’s face.
The beam spun end over end. The deer reared. Light struck its white coin eyes. It burst into a storm of leaves, bones clicking together as they fell, but the bones became twigs before they hit the soil.
The roots at Rory’s ankles loosened.
She ran for the opposite side of the ring.
Not the gap. Not the hungry door. The stones behind her had stood close together when she entered, but fear had taught her to count exits. There had been a narrow break beside a crooked oak with a hollow at its base.
She saw it.
Three strides away.
Two.
A bark mouth opened on the crooked oak.
Her father’s voice came from it, tired and stern.
“Aurora, enough of this nonsense.”
She did not stop.
A branch whipped across her path and caught her throat.
Rory hit the ground hard. Air punched from her lungs. The Heartstone flew from her hand, chain skittering over moss.
The pendant slid toward the open gap.
No.
Rory lunged.
Her fingers closed around the silver chain as something cold closed around her ankle.
The tall absence had crossed the boundary.
Not all the way. One arm stretched from the gap, thin as a shadow cast by a gallows. Its fingers had too many joints. They encircled her boot without pressure, yet her foot went numb at once.
The Heartstone blazed between them.
For the first time, the thing spoke with its own voice.
It sounded like soil dropping onto a coffin lid.
“Malphora returns what was taken.”
Rory dug her nails into the moss. Her crescent scar bled onto the chain. The standing stones shook. The wildflowers turned their closed faces toward her, hundreds of small pale witnesses.
From somewhere beyond the trees came the faintest human sound.
A bicycle bell.
Once.
Twice.
Then a man swore in Cantonese, loud, furious, and far too close.
Yu-Fei’s nephew? One of the kitchen boys? Impossible. Wonderful. Catastrophic.
The tall absence tightened its hold.
The Heartstone split with a sharp red flash.
And every bark mouth in the Grove began to scream Rory’s name.