AI Aurora hit the ground hard enough to bite her tongue, and the torch skittered out of her hand into the ferns.
For one black second she heard only her own breath, sharp and wet in her throat. Then something laughed from between the oaks.
Not a person. Not quite.
She pushed herself up on one elbow, spat blood into the moss, and listened. The sound had come from ahead, past the ring of ancient oak standing stones that marked the hidden boundary of Isolde’s grove. She knew that because she had crossed this way twice before, once with Silas watching her back and once with Eva swearing at every twig that snapped beneath her boots.
Tonight she had come alone.
Clever, Rory. Top marks for judgement.
The torch lay face-down in a clump of wildflowers, its beam trapped under leaves. Bluebells, foxgloves, primroses, and pale little flowers she had never learned the names of crowded the earth as if seasons meant nothing here. They had no business blooming together. No business blooming at all. Their scent rose thick and sweet, honey over rot.
Aurora grabbed the torch and swept the beam across the clearing.
Oak trunks. Ferns. Stones. Nothing laughing.
The Heartstone Pendant warmed against her breastbone, a small deep crimson gemstone on a silver chain, no larger than her thumbnail. It had started pulsing ten minutes ago at the park gate, faint as a second heartbeat. By the time she found the old deer path and slipped between the first two boundary stones, the pulse had grown strong enough to make her teeth ache.
Near a Hel portal, the unknown benefactor had said in the note.
Find the warm place before it opens.
Helpful. Concise. Utterly punchable.
Aurora got to her feet and brushed damp soil from the knees of her jeans. Her left wrist stung where a thorn had caught the small crescent-shaped scar there, pulling a bead of blood to the surface. She wiped it on her jacket and kept the torch low.
“Right,” she said. Her voice sounded flat among the trees. “If this is someone’s idea of fae theatre, your lighting’s dreadful.”
The grove answered with a soft click-click-click.
Aurora froze.
The sound came from her right. Not footsteps . Not branches. It had a rhythm to it, crisp and careful, like fingernails tapping glass. Click-click. Pause. Click.
She turned the torch.
A rabbit sat under a holly bush.
Its white body trembled in the beam. Its ears stood high. Its eyes reflected red, then black, then red again.
“Go on, then.”
The rabbit did not move.
The click came again.
Its mouth opened.
Too wide.
Aurora took one slow step back. The rabbit’s jaw stretched with a dry little creak, wider than bone allowed, and a small black beetle crawled out over its lower teeth. Another followed. Then a third. The rabbit held still while they poured from its mouth in a glossy stream, tick-tick-ticking over its chin and into the flowers.
Aurora’s stomach clenched.
“Nope.”
She turned away before the beam could show her more and pushed deeper into the grove.
The hidden clearing lay where Richmond Park forgot itself. The city should have breathed nearby, low traffic, distant sirens, the restless grumble of London refusing sleep. Inside the Fae Grove, sound thinned. Her boots sank into moss that gave too much underfoot. The standing stones rose behind her in a loose ring, ancient oak shapes hardened into dark, twisted pillars. Their bark-grain faces watched without eyes.
Ahead, between the trees, a faint red glow pulsed in answer to the pendant.
Aurora gripped it through her jumper. Heat seeped into her palm.
“There you are.”
She had not meant to say it aloud.
The glow came from the far side of the clearing, beyond a shallow dip where wildflowers grew in dense, unnatural bands. Each band held one colour. White, then yellow, then violet, then red. Perfect circles. No wind stirred them, but their heads turned as she passed, each flower angling after her torch like a crowd tracking a stage magician.
Something moved at the edge of her vision.
Aurora swung the beam left.
Only ferns.
She held it there. Counted three breaths. Nothing.
The moment she looked forward, the movement came again, on the right this time. A pale flicker behind an oak. Tall. Slender. Gone.
Her skin tightened from scalp to spine.
“Silas, if you followed me, I’ll break your nose.”
Silence.
Then, from far behind her, in a voice like hers, “I’ll break your nose.”
Aurora did not turn.
Her hand slid into her jacket pocket and closed around the little iron nail Yu-Fei Cheung had pressed into her palm after she found the note. Old, blackened, bent near the tip.
“Restaurant charm ,” Yu-Fei had said.
“Against what?”
“Men who smile too much. Spirits who do not smile enough. Same nail.”
Aurora had laughed then. She did not laugh now.
The copied voice came again, closer.
“Silas, if you followed me…”
It got the words right. Not the breath. Not the shape of her. The voice sounded squeezed through wet cloth, each syllable dragged across a tongue that had learned English from an open mouth.
Aurora walked on.
The pendant burned hotter.
The red glow ahead sharpened between the trees. It lit the underside of leaves and made them look fleshy. The air changed as she approached, not colder, not warmer, but crowded . Pressure pressed against her ears. She swallowed and tasted pennies.
A twig snapped behind her.
Aurora stopped.
Another snap. Soft. Measured.
She raised the torch without turning it on whatever stood behind her. Instead she angled the beam toward the ground ahead, catching shadows thrown by anything at her back.
One shadow stretched beside hers.
Longer. Bent wrong at the shoulders.
It leaned when she leaned.
Aurora forced her fingers loose. Panic made hands stupid.
“Who sent you?”
The shadow tilted its head.
No reply.
“Was it Dymas?” She hated how little she knew of that name, only that the Heartstone came from there, only that everyone who recognised it went pale. “Because if he wanted me dead, he could have saved the postage.”
The shadow shivered.
A smell reached her, old pond water and opened cupboards.
“Rory.”
Her mother’s voice.
Aurora’s chest locked.
Jennifer Carter had never been to Richmond Park in her life, and she had certainly never stood behind her daughter in a fae-touched grove calling her by the childhood name she used when burning toast or finding contraband cigarettes in school bags.
“Rory, cariad, turn round.”
The voice had the soft Welsh lilt . The warm vowels. The faint reproach.
Aurora stared at the shadow on the moss.
“Nice trick.”
“Your father’s worried sick.”
That landed where it meant to.
She pressed the iron nail into her palm until pain cut through the pull of the voice. Brendan Carter worried in long silences and carefully worded texts. He did not send messages through monsters in the trees.
“Wrong parent for manipulation.”
The thing behind her inhaled. The sound went on too long.
“Evan said you always did make things difficult.”
Aurora turned then.
The torch beam caught a man-shaped absence beside an oak. Not a body, not a ghost. A hole in the grove with the idea of limbs. Its outline rippled, borrowing pieces from whatever her mind offered and discarding them when they failed. A slant of Evan’s jaw. Her mother’s hands. Silas’s height. Eva’s red scarf. Its face remained unfinished, a thumb-smudged blank with a mouth cut too low.
It smiled with someone else’s teeth.
Aurora threw the iron nail.
The creature shrieked before the nail touched it. The sound sliced through the grove, high and metallic, and the trees snapped open their leaves all at once as if a thousand hands had clapped.
The nail struck the thing’s chest.
For a heartbeat, it took shape.
Grey skin. Too many ribs. Long fingers ending in black crescents. Its mouth split down to the sternum, packed with small square teeth that chattered click-click-click.
Then it burst apart into moths.
Aurora ducked as they swarmed past her face. Their wings brushed her cheeks, soft as ash, and each carried a tiny human eye in the pattern on its back. They streamed into the branches and vanished.
“Absolutely not staying for the encore.”
She ran toward the red glow.
The grove resisted. Roots rose where her boots landed. Vines snagged her ankles. Branches bent into her path, not whipping, not grabbing, just placing themselves where they would hurt most. A twig scored her cheek. Ferns slapped wet across her knees. The wildflowers leaned away now, opening a narrow black trail through their colour-banded ranks.
At the bottom of the shallow dip, she found the source of the glow.
A crack hung in the air between two low stones.
It had no width she could trust. One moment it looked thin as a knife cut, the next wide enough for a door. Red light leaked from it in slow pulses, and the pendant answered each pulse against her chest. Beyond the crack, something vast breathed. Aurora felt it in her teeth.
The ground around the portal had blackened in a perfect circle. Grass curled inward. Flowers closest to it had turned translucent, each petal veined with red threads that twitched like worms under skin.
She crouched near the edge, careful not to touch the scorched ring.
The note had said find it before it opens.
It had not said what to do next.
“Lovely. Brilliant. Gold star for operational detail.”
The pendant flared.
Aurora hissed and yanked it away from her skin. The crimson stone glowed from within, brighter than the crack, and its silver chain vibrated against her fingers.
A whisper seeped from the portal.
Not in English. Not in any language she knew. It still reached for meaning, sliding through her ears and down into the soft parts of memory. It offered warm kitchens. Cardiff rain on windows. Eva’s laugh from the top of a staircase. Clean sheets. Locked doors. Evan’s hand on her arm, then not Evan’s hand, then her own hand closing on a kitchen knife she had never used.
Aurora shoved the pendant under her jacket to dull the light.
“Out.”
The whisper stopped.
The crack widened.
A wet red seam split the air with a sound like cloth tearing in a butcher’s shop. Heat rolled out, thick with sulphur and damp stone. The scorched circle spread an inch. Then another.
Aurora stepped back, eyes watering.
Something struck the boundary stones behind her.
Boom.
The grove shuddered.
Boom.
A low animal call answered from beyond the trees. Then another. Not wolves. Not foxes. Nothing that belonged in Richmond Park.
Aurora glanced over her shoulder.
Between the oaks, pale figures gathered at the edge of the clearing. Five, seven, more. They stood half-hidden behind trunks, tall and thin, with heads bowed as if listening to music through the soil . Their faces pointed toward the portal.
Toward her.
The rabbit appeared near her boot .
Its mouth still hung open. Beetles crawled over its tongue. It looked up with red-black eyes and spoke in Eva’s voice.
“Rory, you daft cow, move.”
Aurora kicked it on instinct. Her boot met no resistance. The rabbit folded inward like paper and collapsed into a heap of black beetles that scattered across the scorched grass.
“Noted.”
She searched the ground. Stones, roots, flowers, ash. Nothing useful. The Heartstone pulsed hard enough to tug her forward, not toward the portal, but toward one of the low stones beside it . She dropped to her knees and dragged the torch beam across the stone’s face.
Marks covered it.
Not moss. Not cracks. Lines carved deep into the old oak-stone, curved and hooked. Some looked like letters half-remembered from a dream. Others resembled teeth. The pendant’s glow flowed over them, and one symbol near the base brightened.
Aurora touched it with the iron-reddened tip of her bleeding wrist.
The stone drank the blood.
The symbol opened like an eye.
Every flower in the grove snapped its head toward her.
“Oh, come on.”
The portal contracted.
Only a little, but enough.
Aurora pressed her wrist harder to the stone. Pain flared. The crescent scar on her left wrist burned as if it had woken after years under skin. More symbols lit, one by one, crawling up the stone in red lines.
Behind her, the pale figures began to walk.
No rush. No drama. They moved with the calm of things that knew the path belonged to them.
Aurora looked at the second low stone. More marks. Same height. Same age. Same hunger.
“Of course there’s a matching set.”
She tore the sleeve of her jacket with her teeth and wrapped the cloth round her wrist, then stopped. Wrong. The stone needed blood. She hated how fast that thought settled. Hated the clean little logic of it.
The portal breathed again.
This time, a hand pushed through.
It was not grey like the creature’s. It was red and black, as if someone had skinned it and dipped the bones in tar. Long fingers spread through the crack, gripping the air from the other side. Claws scraped nothing and made sparks.
Aurora lunged to the second stone and slapped her bleeding wrist onto the lowest symbol.
The hand in the portal clenched.
The crack shrank around it.
A howl tore out of the seam, deep enough to rattle her ribs. The pale figures broke into a run.
Aurora’s blood streaked the carvings. Symbols burst awake under her palm. The pendant blazed through her jacket, a red star against her heart. The two low stones hummed together, and the standing stones around the grove answered, each ancient oak pillar vibrating with a sound like a throat clearing after centuries of silence .
The portal narrowed.
The clawed hand thrashed, trapped at the wrist. Black fluid splashed onto the grass and hissed. Where droplets fell, tiny mouths opened in the soil and screamed.
Aurora pressed harder.
“Close.”
The pendant burned.
“Close, you bastard thing.”
The seam snapped down another inch. The trapped hand buckled. Bone, if it had bone, cracked with a grinding pop.
The pale figures reached the ring of scorched grass.
Aurora snatched the torch and swung it at the nearest one. The beam struck its face.
It wore Brendan Carter’s eyes.
Her father’s kind, tired, brown eyes sat in a skull too narrow for them. The thing smiled without lips.
“Laila,” it said.
Aurora staggered.
No one here should know that name .
The figure stepped over the scorched line and reached for the pendant at her throat.
A second figure came from the left, wearing Yu-Fei’s neat black hair and a mouth full of needles. Another crawled low through the flowers, its spine bending like a centipede. More gathered behind them, their borrowed faces sliding and changing, friends, strangers, a barrister, a teacher, a girl from Cardiff who had once shared Aurora’s umbrella and later forgot her name.
The portal gave one final, furious pulse .
The trapped hand tore free at the wrist.
The severed thing landed on the grass beside Aurora and dug its claws into the earth, dragging itself toward her like a spider.
Aurora grabbed the Heartstone Pendant, ripped the silver chain from her neck, and slammed the deep crimson gemstone against the open eye carved in the second stone.
The grove went silent.
Every pale figure stopped.
The severed hand stopped.
The portal stopped breathing.
Then the stone cracked from top to bottom, and something on the other side of the red seam opened an enormous eye.