AI Aurora Carter had never liked Richmond Park after dark.
By day it could pretend to be civilised: runners in bright trainers, prams bumping over gravel paths, tourists pointing phones at deer as if the animals had been placed there by the council for atmosphere. At night the park remembered what it was. Old land. Open land. Acres of black grass and thorn and ancient trees, all of it tucked inside London like a secret the city had failed to digest.
She slipped through a gap in the fence just after eleven, jacket zipped to her throat, torch held low in one hand. Her delivery bag was gone , her Golden Empress cap left on the hook beside the staff door, but the smell of fryer oil still clung faintly to her hair. It made her feel absurdly ordinary, which was almost comforting .
Almost.
The Heartstone pendant rested beneath her jumper on its silver chain, warm against her sternum.
That was why she had come.
It had started pulsing during the dinner rush, a slow, feverish throb that made her miss a step on the stairs and nearly spill two portions of mapo tofu over a solicitor from Mayfair. Yu-Fei had narrowed her eyes, noticed too much as always, and told Rory to take the last delivery to Mortlake and go home. Rory had nodded, lied, and cycled straight here instead.
She had told no one.
That was stupid. She knew it was stupid with the cold clarity she had once used to pick apart case law in Cardiff lecture halls, before her life had narrowed to Evan’s moods and escape routes and then widened again into London’s chaos. She should have called Eva. She should have called Silas. She should, at minimum, have left a note on the kitchen counter in the flat above the bar: Gone to investigate possibly cursed jewellery in creepy park, back by breakfast unless murdered by folklore.
Instead she had come alone, because the pendant had warmed with purpose for the first time in weeks, and because whatever had given it to her had known her name.
The path underfoot had vanished ten minutes ago.
Rory crossed a slope of long grass silvered by moonlight, her boots sinking into damp earth. A thin mist hung close to the ground, parting around her shins. Behind her, the city had already withdrawn. No traffic hum. No late buses. No distant sirens dragging their blue light through the night. Only the wet brush of grass against denim, the small click of her torch button beneath her thumb, and her own breathing, too loud in her ears.
The pendant pulsed .
Warm.
Warmer.
She stopped beside a hawthorn twisted into a shape like a hand clawing out of the soil. Ahead, at the base of a shallow rise, stood the oaks.
She had been here once before in daylight—or what had passed for daylight in the grove. Ancient oak standing stones, Isolde had called them, though they were not stones at all but petrified trunks, black-barked and half-living, arranged in a ring that no ordinary walker ever seemed to find. Their branches knitted overhead though the trees stood too far apart. Wildflowers grew at their roots in impossible colours, blooming year-round in defiance of weather, botany, and common sense.
Tonight the ring looked smaller.
No, Rory thought. Not smaller. Closer.
The oaks waited at the edge of the mist, each trunk thick as a cottage chimney, their bark ridged and dark and slick with recent rain. Moonlight pooled between them but did not pass beyond. It stopped at the boundary like water hitting glass.
Her torch flickered .
“Don’t,” she said to it .
The beam steadied, pale and narrow, catching a cluster of bluebells under one oak. The flowers trembled though there was no wind.
Rory swallowed. Her mouth tasted of tea gone cold.
She had come for a reason. Remember that. Purpose was a hook. Purpose kept the mind from running loose in the dark.
The pendant warmed against her skin, its deep crimson stone beating faintly like a second heart. Near a Hel portal, she had been told , it would do that. She had not enjoyed the phrasing. Near was vague. Portal was bad. Hel was worse.
She took one step toward the ring.
Something knocked softly from inside the grove.
Rory froze.
The sound came again. A hollow, patient tap. Wood on wood. Three beats, a pause, then three more.
It was the kind of sound an old house made at night, settling around its sleepers. But there were no houses here. No fences. No loose shutters. Only the oaks and the mist and the darkness pooled between them.
“Hello?” she called.
Her voice went nowhere. It fell dead at the ring’s edge.
The tapping stopped.
Rory gripped the torch harder. Her left wrist twinged where the small crescent scar crossed the skin, a pale hook from a childhood accident involving a broken mug and her mother’s panic. She rubbed it with her thumb, an old habit she hated.
“Brilliant,” she muttered. “Announce yourself. Very tactical.”
Silence answered.
Then, from behind her, a deer barked.
Rory flinched so hard the torch beam swung up into the trees. Two green eyes flashed between branches, vanished, and the sound came again—short, sharp, almost human in its outrage. She exhaled shakily.
“Deer. Just deer.”
Richmond Park had deer. Hundreds of them. Perfectly normal. Perfectly natural.
Except the bark had come from behind her, and the eyes had been at least eight feet off the ground.
She turned slowly .
The slope lay empty. Mist. Grass. The black skeletons of trees lower down. The gap in the fence was gone from sight, swallowed by dark and distance. Nothing moved.
At the edge of her vision, to the left, a shape slipped behind a tree.
Rory snapped the torch toward it.
Bare bark. Ivy. Nothing.
Her heart began to do irritating, unhelpful things.
She looked back at the oak ring. The pendant’s warmth deepened until it was almost uncomfortable. The silver chain prickled at the back of her neck.
Whatever was wrong was inside.
Or underneath.
Or watching from behind her and waiting for her to run.
Rory drew a slow breath through her nose, counted four, released it. Panic was a liar. Evan had taught her that without meaning to, in the way all cruel people taught useful lessons by accident. Panic said every door was locked. Panic said there was no air. Panic said stand still and be small and hope the thing deciding your fate got bored.
She had survived by learning to move anyway.
She stepped between the oaks.
The air changed at once.
It grew warmer, but not pleasantly. The warmth had a cellar quality, stale and close, like breath held too long. The smell of wet grass faded. In its place came iron, old ashes, and something sweet enough to turn her stomach .
The grove opened before her.
In daylight it had been uncanny , yes, but beautiful. A hidden clearing tucked between worlds, carpeted in flowers that had no business blooming together: primrose and foxglove, snowdrops and poppies, violets bright as bruises. A stream had whispered somewhere beyond the trees. Light had fallen in green shafts. Time had felt soft there, folded at the edges.
Tonight the flowers were shut.
Every bloom in the clearing had closed tight, petals clenched into fists . Their stems leaned away from the centre as if from heat. The grass lay flattened in a wide circle, pressed down by something heavy that was no longer there.
Rory raised the torch.
The beam passed over the clearing and snagged on a shape at the far side.
Her stomach tightened.
A coat hung from a low branch.
For half a second her mind made it into a person: shoulders slumped, head bowed, arms hanging limp. Then the beam steadied and the illusion broke. Only a coat. Dark wool. Too long for her. Old-fashioned brass buttons green with tarnish.
It swayed gently .
No wind touched her face.
Rory did not move.
The coat swayed again, sleeve lifting a fraction as if someone inside it had shifted their weight .
“Who’s there?” she asked, quieter this time.
The grove held its breath.
A sound came from the closed flowers near her boot.
Whispering.
Not words at first. Just a dry friction, like paper rubbed between fingers. Rory looked down. The nearest cluster of snowdrops trembled . Their white heads nodded together, tightly sealed, brushing one another with soft insect clicks.
Then the whisper shaped itself.
Rory.
Her name moved through the flowers in her mother’s voice.
Rory’s throat closed.
No.
Again, softer. Rory, love.
She stepped back and nearly stumbled over a root. The pendant flared hot enough to make her gasp. She yanked it out from beneath her jumper. The crimson gemstone glowed faintly, a coal under glass, no larger than her thumbnail but suddenly heavy in her palm.
The whispering stopped.
The coat at the far side of the clearing went still.
Rory stared at the pendant. Its inner glow pulsed once, twice, in time with the warmth spreading through her fingers. It did not point; it gave no convenient arrow, no line of light. Artifacts, in her limited experience, were frustratingly committed to being dramatic rather than useful.
A twig snapped behind her.
She spun.
The entrance between the oaks was still there. Beyond it, the park seemed very far away, the mist a pale wall . Nothing stood between the trunks. Nothing crouched in the grass.
And yet the grove had altered.
There were more trees than before.
Rory was certain of it. The boundary ring had held perhaps twelve oaks when she entered. Now the gaps between them had narrowed, filled by trunks she did not remember, each black and ridged and slick. Their branches interlocked overhead, shutting away the sky. The moon had become a blurred coin glimpsed through bars.
“Absolutely not,” Rory said.
Her voice shook at the edges. She hated that. She hated that there was no one to hear it except whatever the grove had grown teeth for.
She strode back toward the opening.
The grass resisted her.
Not tangled, not caught—resisted. Each step sank deeper than it should. Damp earth clung to the soles of her boots with a sucking pull. The closed flowers turned as she passed, following the heat of the pendant.
Five steps from the boundary, the tapping began again.
Three knocks. Pause. Three knocks.
This time it came from the oak directly ahead.
Rory stopped.
The trunk filled the gap where the path out had been.
She lifted the torch. Bark. Old knots. A split down the centre dark as a mouth.
“No,” she said, with more force. “That was open.”
The split in the bark widened.
Not much. Just enough to suggest depth. The torch beam touched it and seemed to bend inward, swallowed by black. From inside came the faintest sound of breathing.
Rory backed away.
Behind her, the coat fell from its branch.
It landed without a sound.
Every hair on her arms rose.
She did not turn at once. Some primitive part of her understood that seeing would make it real, and another, more practical part countered that not seeing was how idiots died in films. She turned.
The coat lay in the flattened grass.
Empty.
Then the sleeve twitched.
Rory’s hand went to her pocket for the small folding knife she carried on deliveries. Her fingers closed around cold metal. The blade was legal, barely, and had once made her feel better cycling through certain parts of South London after midnight. Here it felt ridiculous. Like threatening a storm with a biro.
The sleeve twitched again, dragging the coat an inch toward her.
She unfolded the knife anyway.
“Stay there.”
The coat paused.
From the trees around her, something laughed.
It was not loud. That made it worse. A small, pleased sound, almost swallowed. It came from one side, then another, then overhead. Not many voices. One voice moving too quickly .
Rory turned in place, torch cutting frantic slices through bark and closed flowers. The laugh faded into a wet clicking, then into silence .
Her pulse hammered. The pendant burned.
Near a Hel portal.
She forced herself to look at the centre of the clearing.
The flattened circle of grass was not empty.
At first she saw only a darker patch, a place where the torch beam thinned. Then her eyes adjusted, and the shape resolved : a seam in the ground, long and narrow, running through the grass like a crack in ice. No wider than her hand. Black vapour seeped from it in delicate threads. They curled upward, vanished, returned.
The sweet smell strengthened.
Rory gagged and covered her mouth with her sleeve. Beneath the sweetness lay rot, not of flesh but of old water trapped under stone, of flowers left too long in a vase. The pendant’s glow brightened until red light seeped between her fingers.
“That’s the portal, then,” she whispered.
The seam answered with her father’s voice.
Aurora.
Her full name. Not Rory. Not Carter. Aurora, spoken in Brendan Carter’s courtroom cadence, grave and disappointed and impossible to ignore.
She had not heard his voice in months. She had let calls go unanswered, texts sit unread, because she could not bear the careful questions, the worry hidden under legal precision. Are you safe? Do you require assistance? Should I come to London? As if safety were a document that could be drafted and signed.
Aurora, come here.
“No,” she said.
The seam widened by a finger.
Red light from the pendant shimmered across its edges. Something moved in the black below—not rising, not yet. A pale suggestion, gone before her mind could shape it.
The coat began dragging itself again.
Rory saw it from the corner of her eye. Slow, patient, sleeve over sleeve, bunching and flattening in the grass. Empty wool animated by purpose.
She backed toward the nearest oak, knife in one hand, pendant in the other. Think. Think, damn you. She had no spell, no weapon worth naming, no understanding of Fae geometry beyond the increasingly relevant fact that exits were optional.
The grove liked names. It had used hers. Her mother’s voice. Her father’s. It wanted her closer to the crack.
Why?
The pendant had been given to her by an unknown benefactor. Dymas, she had been told , though whether that meant person, place, or ancient cosmic bureaucracy remained annoyingly unclear. It reacted near a Hel portal. Perhaps it was a warning.
Or a key.
The coat reached the edge of the flattened circle and stopped. Its collar lifted, hollow neck gaping toward her.
Rory’s skin crawled.
“No,” she said again, because it was the only word that had held shape.
The flowers whispered in reply. Not in her mother’s voice now. In many voices, layered and papery.
Laila.
That name struck differently.
She had heard it before, attached to shadows and half-truths, to a version of herself other people seemed to know better than she did. Laila. Aurora. Malphora. Names like coats hung on branches, waiting for her to put them on.
The grove rustled.
Laila, the flowers said. Laila, Laila, Laila.
“Shut up.”
Her voice cracked across the clearing.
For one clean second, everything obeyed.
The tapping stopped. The flowers stilled. The coat collapsed flat.
Rory stood breathing hard, startled by her own anger. It burned steadier than fear. Fear scattered her. Anger gathered her back into herself.
She looked at the pendant. The crimson stone pulsed , warm but not scorching now, its glow steady.
“If you’re a warning,” she said under her breath, “warn. If you’re a key, lock.”
Nothing happened.
“Of course.”
The seam in the ground widened another inch.
A hand appeared at the edge.
Rory did not scream. The sound died before it reached her mouth.
It was not bloody. That would have been easier. It was pale and dry and too long in the fingers, each joint bent as delicately as a spider’s leg. It curled over the grass and pressed down, testing weight . Another hand followed beside it.
The darkness below exhaled.
Aurora, said her father’s voice from the crack. Help me.
That did it.
Not because she believed it. Because she almost wanted to.
For one weak, devastating instant she imagined Brendan Carter trapped under the earth in his neat suit, confused and calling for the daughter who had stopped answering. The image slipped past her defences with cruel precision. Her feet shifted forward before she caught herself.
The coat lunged.
It rose from the grass in a single empty billow, arms spread wide. Rory slashed with the knife on instinct. The blade passed through wool and struck nothing, but the pendant flared in her other hand, a hard pulse of red light.
The coat collapsed midair.
A scream burst from the fabric—not loud, not human, more the shriek of a kettle boiling dry. The wool hit the ground smoking faintly, brass buttons twitching like beetles.
The hands at the seam recoiled.
Rory stared at the pendant.
“Oh,” she breathed. “Right.”
The grove surged.
Every closed flower turned toward her. The oaks groaned, deep wood complaining under pressure. The gaps between trunks vanished one by one as bark flowed, knitting the boundary shut. The tapping became a drumbeat all around her—three knocks, three knocks, three knocks—until the air shook with it.
The thing below the ground pulled itself higher.
Rory did not wait to see its face.
She ran for the nearest oak.
Not the vanished entrance. The tree itself.
The split down its trunk gaped like a wound, breathing cold now instead of warmth . Darkness filled it, but beyond that darkness she saw, impossibly, a smear of mist and open grass. The park. Or a lie wearing the park’s shape.
Better a lie with room to run.
The ground clutched at her boots. Flowers snapped against her jeans with tiny teeth she felt but did not look down to see. Branches lowered, thin twigs scraping her hair, catching at the shoulders of her jacket. She tucked the pendant in her fist and drove forward.
A voice spoke directly behind her ear.
Rory.
Evan.
She stumbled.
The old reflex hit like a hand around the throat. Not fear of monsters. Fear of the key in the lock at the wrong time, of footsteps measured down a hall, of a voice made soft before it became dangerous.
Where do you think you’re going?
Her vision narrowed. The grove tilted.
No, she thought.
She dug her thumb into the crescent scar on her left wrist until pain flashed bright and real. Evan was not here. Evan did not get to haunt enchanted bloody forests. He had taken enough square footage inside her head already.
Rory turned her face toward the voice and smiled with all her teeth.
“Away from you.”
She thrust the pendant backward without looking.
Red light flooded the clearing.
The voice cut off. The branches recoiled. The tapping broke apart into a chaos of knocks, like fists trapped inside walls.
Rory plunged into the split oak.
Cold swallowed her.
For a moment she was nowhere.
Not darkness, exactly. Darkness had texture. This was absence: no air, no ground, no sound except the frantic beat of the Heartstone in her fist and the thud of her own heart answering it. Something brushed her cheek—soft as a petal, cold as a dead hand. Fingers grazed the back of her neck, searching for the chain.
She clamped the pendant to her chest and kicked forward.
Grass hit her knees.
She fell hard, palms skidding over wet earth. The torch flew from her hand and rolled, its beam spinning wildly across mist, bracken, a distant tree, then coming to rest on open parkland.
Open.
Rory sucked in air. It burned her lungs with the ordinary stink of mud and deer and London rain. Behind her, the oak ring stood silent at the base of the rise. The gaps between the trunks were open again. Moonlight passed through them. No coat hung from the branch. No flowers whispered. No seam split the ground.
The pendant cooled by degrees against her palm.
She remained on all fours, shaking, listening.
Far away, a car moved along a road. A plane muttered beyond the clouds. The city had returned, indifferent and blessedly noisy.
Rory sat back on her heels.
Her jeans were muddy. One sleeve of her jacket had torn at the elbow. Tiny pale petals clung to her boots, closed tight, though she did not remember stepping on any near the exit. She brushed them off with the knife blade rather than her fingers.
The park around her looked unchanged.
That was almost the worst part.
She found her torch and pushed herself upright. Her legs felt unreliable. The Heartstone lay dull and crimson in her palm, innocent as a sweet. She considered tearing it from her neck and hurling it into the dark.
Instead she tucked it beneath her jumper, because she was not an idiot and because whatever waited under the grove had flinched from it.
A sound drifted from the oaks.
One soft knock.
Rory went still.
Another followed.
Not three this time. Just two.
Then a pause.
From inside the grove, very faintly, her own voice called out.
“Hello?”
Rory’s blood turned slow.
The voice came again, smaller, frightened, perfectly pitched.
“Is someone there? Please. I’m lost.”
She backed away, one step, then another.
The grove remained motionless. The oaks stood in their ancient ring. Wildflowers bloomed at their roots, open now, bright faces turned to the moon.
Her own voice began to cry.
Rory turned and walked fast through the mist, refusing to run until the trees hid the grove behind her. Then she ran anyway, down the long black slope toward where the city should be, one hand clamped over the cooling pendant, the other still holding the useless little knife.
Behind her, the crying faded.
The knocking did not.