AI Rory’s knuckles struck bark where there should have been air.
She drew her hand back, skin stinging, and stared at the gap between the two ancient oaks. From three paces away it looked open, a narrow black seam leading into the hidden clearing. From one pace away, it refused her.
“Cute.”
Her voice fell flat among the trees.
She pressed her palm forward again. Nothing stopped her this time. Her fingers passed through cold resistance, not solid, not liquid, more like pushing into the skin on cooling custard. The Heartstone pendant warmed beneath her jumper, a steady pulse against her breastbone.
Once.
Twice.
Then it went hot enough to bite.
Rory hissed and yanked the silver chain out from under her collar. The deep crimson stone glowed with a faint inner light, no bigger than her thumbnail, yet it threw red across her knuckles like blood seen through water.
“Right. So this is definitely stupid.”
No one answered.
That bothered her more than it should have.
Richmond Park had noises even when people left it alone. Foxes. Cars beyond the roads. Drunks taking the scenic route into a bad decision. Somewhere, always, London muttered to itself.
Here, between the oaks, the city had shut its mouth.
Rory stepped through.
The Grove opened around her in a slow breath. Wildflowers crowded the ground despite the season, pale bells and yellow stars and violet cups that brushed her boots with wet little mouths. The standing stones, ancient oak trunks hardened into dark, upright shapes, circled the clearing like a jury that had reached its verdict before hearing the case. Their bark held old cuts, deep grooves packed with moss, and every groove seemed to lean towards her.
She kept one hand on the pendant and the other in the pocket of her coat, fingers wrapped around the small folding knife Yu-Fei insisted all delivery staff carry after the Bethnal Green incident.
A knife. Against whatever made portals to Hel.
Brilliant, Carter. Top marks.
The reason she had come sat in her other pocket, folded into quarters. A note. Cream paper. Black ink. No envelope.
If you want the truth about the Heartstone, enter Isolde’s grove alone. Bring no iron. Speak no bargains. Follow the sound of running water.
No signature.
The paper had appeared on the bar beneath her flat, tucked under a glass Silas swore had been empty. That alone made Rory dislike it. Silas noticed things. He noticed card counters, cheating spouses, spirits pretending to be old regulars, and men who wore aftershave to cover fear. If someone had slipped past him, they had done so with skill or magic.
Neither option cheered her.
She pulled out the note and looked at it again. The letters had not changed. They looked hand-written, neat and sharp, with a slight leftward slant. Barrister’s handwriting, her father would have said. Someone trained to make lies look patient.
A twig cracked behind her.
Rory turned fast, knife half out of her pocket.
The path between the oaks stood empty.
Beyond it, nothing. Not trees. Not park. Not London. Only a dense, pearly dark pressed against the boundary, as if the world outside the Grove had fogged over from the wrong side of the glass.
“Silas?”
She hated that she said his name.
The clearing gave it back to her, thin and wrong.
“Silas.”
Not an echo . The voice came from deeper in the Grove, where no one stood.
Rory slid the knife free.
The blade looked dull in the Heartstone’s red glow. She had sharpened it that afternoon at the kitchen table above the bar, much to Eva’s disgust. It had shaved a neat curl from a receipt. Here, the edge seemed tired.
She folded the note and pushed it back into her pocket.
“No bargains,” she murmured. “No iron. Follow the water.”
The knife had steel in it. Not iron, not exactly. Close enough for fae offence, perhaps. She thought of the note’s wording and smiled without humour.
“Nice try.”
She kept the knife.
The sound of water came after seven steps.
At first it hid under her own breathing, a soft liquid thread running somewhere beyond the standing stones. Then it strengthened, not louder, but more precise . A stream over stones. A cup filled in a sink. Blood through a vein.
Rory moved towards it.
The Grove deepened in ways that made no sense. From outside, the clearing had seemed no larger than a small garden, ringed by oaks. Inside, it stretched. Paths stitched themselves between clumps of foxglove and fern. Roots rose and dipped like the backs of sleeping animals. Blossoms turned their heads as she passed, not following her exactly, but adjusting, petal by petal, as if listening through colour .
Her boot sank into soft earth. She looked down.
The ground around her footprint held the shape for a moment. Then the mud pushed up from underneath and smoothed itself flat.
“Nope.”
She took two careful steps onto a patch of moss. It yielded with a faint sigh.
Something laughed.
Not close. Not far. A small child’s laugh, bubbling from the left, bright with the cruel delight of a game played by rules only one side knew.
Rory froze.
The laugh came again, on the right.
Then behind her.
She turned in a slow circle. The flowers stood still. The oaks stood still. Her own shadow lay broken in red pieces across the moss.
“Eva, if this is you, I’m moving out and taking the kettle.”
Silence.
The Heartstone pulsed against her fingers.
Once.
Twice.
Three times.
Ahead, beyond a curtain of hanging ivy, a red flicker answered.
Rory’s mouth dried.
The pendant warmed near Hel portals. That much she had learned the hard way. Warm meant near. Hot meant too near. Pulsing meant something on the other side had noticed.
She should have left then.
She knew that with the same sharp certainty that told her when a door had been opened before she touched the handle, when a man at the bar had his hand around a broken bottle under the table, when Evan’s silence in the old flat had meant the storm had not passed, only crouched.
But the note had promised truth. And truth had become scarce since the Heartstone arrived in her life, delivered in a plain box with no return address and a smear of ash under the lid.
Rory pulled the ivy aside with the tip of her knife.
A narrow path sloped down beyond it. White stones lined both sides, each one carved with a shallow eye. Some human. Some animal. Some just circles with too many lashes. The water sounded clearer below, though no stream caught the red light.
She descended.
Halfway down, her phone buzzed.
The sound ripped through the Grove like an alarm.
Rory nearly dropped the knife. She dragged the phone from her pocket. No signal. No bars. No network name. The screen showed a call in progress from an unknown number.
It had already connected.
She held it away from her ear.
A breath rasped from the speaker.
Slow. Wet at the edges.
“Rory.”
Her thumb hovered over the end button.
No one called her Rory unless they knew her. Friends. Work. People who wanted her to soften before they asked for something.
“Who is this?”
The breath changed. Became a smile without lips.
“Laila.”
The name pierced the air.
She had never used it. Not aloud. Not to anyone who lived in London. Not since the brief, desperate fortnight after Evan, when she had booked a room under a false name, paid cash, and jumped every time footsteps paused outside her door. Laila was not a nickname. It was a lockpick she had thrown away.
Rory ended the call.
The phone screen went black.
In the reflection, behind her left shoulder, a woman stood among the eye-stones.
Rory spun.
Empty path.
Her heart slammed once, hard enough to hurt.
The woman had been pale, taller than Rory, with long hair hanging forward. Not Eva. Not Yu-Fei. Not anyone she knew. Yet the tilt of the head had carried a terrible interest, like a person choosing fruit by bruising it first.
The phone buzzed again.
Rory shut it off and shoved it into her pocket.
The water stopped.
All at once.
The absence left pressure in her ears.
She backed up one step. The white stones watched her. In the Heartstone’s glow, their carved pupils looked wet.
A whisper threaded through the ivy above.
“Wrong way.”
Rory looked up.
The ivy had sealed behind her. Leaves knitted tight across the path, overlapping in glossy layers, and the slope now ran only down.
“Of course it does.”
She gripped the knife until the crescent scar on her left wrist tightened and paled.
The path ended at a hollow.
Not a stream. Not a pool.
A basin of black stone sank into the earth, filled to the brim with still water. No ripple troubled its surface. No leaf floated on it. The surrounding earth had no footprints except her own, though she had not yet stepped into the hollow.
At the far side stood an arch.
It had not been there when she entered the Grove. It did not belong to wood or stone. The shape seemed cut out of the air itself, a tall, narrow wound rimmed in faint red light. Within it, darkness moved in layers, folding over itself like cloth stirred by hands.
The Heartstone burned.
Rory bit back a sound and dropped the pendant. It swung on its chain, striking her chest through the jumper. Heat spread through the fabric.
“Near a portal,” she whispered. “Yes. Thank you. Helpful.”
The basin water stirred.
One ring widened across the surface.
Then another.
A face rose beneath the black water.
It did not break through. It pressed upward from below, features flattened by the skin of the pool. Nose. Mouth. Closed eyes. A cheekbone stretched too long. Hair drifted around it in dark strands.
Rory took a step back.
The face opened its eyes.
Bright blue.
Her eyes.
The thing under the water smiled with her mouth.
“Absolutely not.”
She turned for the path.
The eye-stones had moved closer.
They lined the slope in tight rows now, shoulder to shoulder, as though they had crept while she looked elsewhere. Their carved eyes faced the basin. Faced her.
The child’s laugh returned, softer this time.
Something brushed the back of her coat.
Rory slashed behind her.
The knife met empty air.
The basin water slopped against stone.
“Carter.”
Her surname crawled from the arch.
The voice belonged to her father.
Not as he sounded now, measured and dry after years in courtrooms and family dinners where no one named the bruise on Rory’s jaw. This was Brendan Carter as she remembered him from childhood, younger, fuller, patient with bedtime stories and cross-examinations of monsters under the bed.
“Come here, love.”
Rory’s throat tightened before she could stop it.
“Cheap.”
“Come here.”
“Dad doesn’t call me love when he wants something. He says Aurora and pretends it’s not a warning.”
The arch flickered .
A new voice answered, brisk and warm and Welsh around the edges.
“Aurora, bach, don’t be contrary.”
Her mother.
Rory shut her eyes for half a second. Too long. When she opened them, the arch had widened.
Beyond it, shapes moved.
Not people. Too thin. Too tall. Limbs bending where joints had no business living. Their heads turned in small, sharp ticks, tick-tock, tick-tock, as if a clock hid in each skull and counted down to the same ending.
The Heartstone pulsed faster.
The thing in the basin rose higher. The water stretched over its face and shoulders without breaking, a clear black membrane. It had Rory’s black hair, straight and shoulder-length, floating around it. It had the same small scar on the left wrist where one hand pressed against the underside of the water.
Rory looked at the scar.
Then at her own wrist.
The crescent mark prickled.
The thing mouthed words from inside the basin.
She could not hear them. She did not need to. Her lips shaped them every morning in the mirror after bad dreams.
Let me out.
Rory stepped towards the basin before she knew she had moved.
The water bulged.
The arch breathed.
The figures beyond it crowded closer, all long fingers and patient hunger.
Her boot struck one of the white stones. Pain snapped up her shin. Good. Pain cleared the fog.
She lifted the knife and pressed the blade to the Heartstone’s chain.
“No bargains,” she said.
The voices stopped.
Every flower in the hollow turned towards her.
Rory saw the trick at last, not all of it, never all of it, but enough . The pendant wanted the portal. The portal wanted the pendant. The note had wanted her hands empty, her courage polished, her grief available.
She hooked a finger under the silver chain and pulled it taut.
“Unknown benefactor, my arse.”
She cut.
The blade scraped once, sparked red, and snapped.
The broken tip vanished into the moss.
The chain held.
A low sound rolled from the arch. Not anger. Amusement.
Rory stared at the ruined knife in her hand.
“Well. That’s embarrassing.”
The basin burst.
Black water surged upward without spilling outward, rising in the shape of a woman. Rory’s face tore free of the membrane, wrong only in its calm. Its bright blue eyes held no whites. Just blue, edge to edge, endless and shining.
“Rory.”
It spoke in her voice, but cleaner. Smoother. The voice she used when she lied well.
Rory backed towards the eye-stones.
The double climbed from the basin. Water clung to it like a second skin, drawing itself into the shape of clothes Rory wore, black jeans, scuffed boots, dark coat, silver chain, crimson pendant.
Its own Heartstone glowed.
The real one against Rory’s chest answered with a searing pulse .
The arch widened another inch.
The figures beyond it unfolded. One hand slipped through, long and grey, fingers tipped with nails like chips of old bone. The air around the hand hissed, and the wildflowers nearest the portal bent away.
“Give it to us.”
The double smiled.
Rory held up the broken knife.
“I’m going to assume you mean the necklace.”
“Give it to us, and we leave the soft parts.”
“There’s the sales pitch. Needs work.”
The double’s smile deepened, but the skin at its cheeks did not crease.
“Laila ran. Aurora obeyed. Rory hides above a bar and carries noodles through alleys for rent money. Which one of you keeps the stone?”
Rory’s fingers tightened around the useless handle.
The old impulse rose, sharp and familiar , a flash of strategy under pressure. Courts had rules. Abusers had patterns. Fae had wording. Monsters loved a gap because they never believed humans would see it before bleeding.
She looked past the double, to the arch, to the hand clawing its way into the Grove.
“Speak no bargains,” Rory said. “The note said that.”
The double tilted its head.
“But it didn’t say I couldn’t ask questions.”
The carved eye-stones trembled .
Rory took one measured step sideways. The double matched her.
“Who sent the note?”
The Grove held still.
The double’s mouth opened.
No sound came out.
Rory smiled then, small and sharp.
“Ah. There we go.”
The grey hand shoved further through the portal. An arm followed, then the edge of a shoulder, stretched too long beneath clinging darkness. The red rim of the arch flared. Heat rolled over the hollow with the stink of burnt hair and old coins.
The double lunged.
Rory threw the broken knife at its face.
It flinched.
That was enough.
She ran for the basin.
The double caught her coat from behind. Fabric tore at the shoulder. Rory twisted out of one sleeve, stumbled, then slammed both hands into the black stone rim of the pool.
The basin had refilled.
Her reflection stared up from the water, not the double, not the thing beneath, but her own face, pale, breathing hard, black hair stuck to her cheek, eyes too bright in the red glow.
Behind that reflection, something vast moved under the surface.
Rory grabbed the Heartstone.
The pendant scorched her palm. Skin sizzled. She sucked in air through her teeth and wrapped the silver chain around her fist, once, twice, using pain as an anchor.
The double shrieked.
Not because Rory hurt it.
Because it understood.
Rory plunged the pendant into the basin.
The water went white.
Every eye-stone cracked open.
From each carved pupil, a real eye blinked awake, slick and furious. The Grove erupted in whispers, dozens, hundreds, layered on top of each other until the words became a hive.
Thief.
Door.
Blood.
Malphora.
The last name struck the hollow like a bell.
The arch screamed.
The grey thing forced its head through at last. It had no face, only a vertical mouth packed with small human teeth, and it wore a crown of finger bones threaded into its scalp. Its neck bent sideways to fit the world.
Rory pulled the pendant from the basin.
The crimson stone no longer glowed.
It opened.
A seam split down its centre, and inside the Heartstone, something looked back. Not an eye. Not anything so kind. A small, red depth, alive with turning shapes.
The double seized Rory’s wrist.
Its touch burned cold.
“Too late.”
The portal tore wide, and every standing stone in the Grove turned its eyes towards her at once.