AI The map on Aurora’s phone gave up half a mile before the trees changed.
One moment Richmond Park lay around them in its ordinary winter bones—wet grass, bracken gone copper-brown, oaks standing black against a low white sky—and the next, the path under her boots thinned to a ribbon of pale moss that hadn’t been there when she’d looked down two steps earlier. Her screen flashed, spun, then displayed a cheerful blue dot adrift in the Thames.
“Helpful,” Rory muttered, and shoved it into her coat pocket.
Beside her, Nyx slid between the trunks like spilled ink learning to walk. In the dim morning, they looked almost solid: a tall humanoid shape cut from night, edges feathering whenever the wind moved through them. Their violet eyes glowed faintly beneath the suggestion of a brow.
“The old ways dislike being measured ,” they whispered.
Their voice never seemed to come from one place. It brushed Rory’s left ear, then curled through the dead leaves at her feet. She had mostly stopped flinching when they spoke. Mostly.
“Could’ve put that on a sign,” she said.
“A sign would have been eaten.”
Rory glanced at them.
Nyx’s shadow-mouth did not smile, exactly. The darkness simply deepened where one might have been.
She kept walking.
The Heartstone pendant warmed against her sternum.
It had been doing that since they crossed the cattle grid, a slow pulse beneath her jumper, patient as a second heartbeat. Rory slipped two fingers under her collar and touched the stone through the fabric. It was no bigger than her thumbnail, but its heat had weight . The crimson glow seeped between her fingers, faint and stubborn.
Not good, then.
Or useful.
She still hadn’t decided which category most magic belonged to.
The ordinary trees thinned. Ahead, mist gathered in low white ropes between the oaks, though the air behind them remained clear. The moss path curved into it. Rory tasted rain and something sweeter underneath—honey, crushed stems, the green bite of apples not yet ripe.
“This is it?” she asked.
“The edge,” Nyx said. “The Grove does not begin all at once.”
“Of course it doesn’t.”
Rory flexed her left hand, thumb brushing the small crescent scar at her wrist. Childhood accident, her mother had always said, as if a falling glass and a kitchen floor explained why the mark sometimes ached before trouble found her. Today it prickled like a warning pressed under the skin.
They stepped into the mist.
Sound vanished.
Not softened. Not muffled. Gone.
No distant traffic. No birds. No wind worrying the branches. Even the wet suck of Rory’s boots on earth disappeared, leaving her with the uncomfortable sense that she had walked out of the world and forgotten to bring her body with her.
She stopped. Her breath smoked white in front of her face, then hung there, unmoving.
“Nyx?”
The word fell flat from her mouth. For a heartbeat, no answer came.
Then a hand—not a hand, a cool shape of pressure—touched her shoulder.
“Do not turn back yet.”
Rory swallowed. “Wasn’t planning to.”
A lie, but not one the Fae could prosecute.
She moved forward.
The mist broke.
The Grove opened around them like a secret inhaling.
Ancient oaks stood in a ring ahead, their trunks vast and twisted, bark ridged like old knuckles. But they were not trees. Not only trees. Stones had grown through them—or they had grown through stone—gray monoliths fused with living wood, roots coiling around carved faces worn nearly smooth by centuries. Some stones leaned inward. Others thrust straight up, taller than houses, their crowns lost in a canopy that shimmered silver-green despite the winter beyond.
Wildflowers carpeted the clearing.
Rory stopped dead.
Bluebells, foxgloves, primroses, snowdrops, poppies red as fresh blood—impossible blooms tangled together beneath the oaks, each one perfect , each one dewed with light. Their fragrance rose in layers so thick she could nearly see it: lavender, damp earth, sharp mint, roses opening in heat. Bees drifted among them, fat and gold, though there had been frost on the grass outside the park.
Above, the sky was wrong.
Not night. Not day. A deep pearl twilight stretched overhead, veined with faint threads of green and violet, as if an aurora had been trapped beneath glass. Through gaps in the leaves, Rory glimpsed shapes that might have been stars, except they moved lazily in schools.
She stared until her eyes watered.
“Okay,” she said quietly . “That’s new.”
Nyx emerged from the mist beside her. For once, even they seemed changed by what they saw . The shadows composing them drew close, denser, as though the Grove pressed at their edges and they had to remember their shape.
“Older than London,” they whispered. “Older than the name of the river.”
Rory stepped over the boundary.
Warmth rolled over her skin. Not heat, exactly. A presence. It slid beneath her coat, brushed the back of her neck, threaded through her hair. The Grove noticed her. The knowledge arrived without words and rooted in her stomach .
Every flower tilted toward her.
Rory froze again.
“Nyx.”
“I see .”
“That’s comforting .”
“It should not be.”
The flowers slowly turned away, as if satisfied she wasn’t going to bite.
Rory let out a breath she hadn’t realized she was holding . “Right. Lovely. Sentient garden. Why not?”
The moss path continued between the standing stones. It was softer here, luminous at the edges, and when she placed her boot on it, tiny sparks shivered away through the green. She followed it because every instinct said leaving the path would be a mistake, and because she had not survived Evan, London rent, and a delivery shift in freezing rain to get murdered by decorative foliage.
The Heartstone pulsed warmer.
Nyx drifted close. “The pendant knows a door.”
“To Hel?”
“Perhaps.”
“Perhaps is doing a lot of heavy lifting.”
“Doors rarely introduce themselves honestly.”
They passed between two oak-stones. As Rory drew level with them, carvings stirred in the bark: antlered figures chasing wolves, women with hair like rivers, a man with no face holding a crown of thorns. The images moved only when she didn’t look straight at them. At the edge of her vision, they danced, fought, bowed, bled. When she turned her head, they became grooves and shadow.
A laugh rang out.
Rory spun, hand diving beneath her coat.
The Fae blade met her palm like a shard of winter.
Its moonsilver hilt numbed her fingers at once. She drew the dagger just enough that the leaf-shaped blade caught the Grove’s strange twilight and answered with a pale glow.
Nyx dissolved halfway into smoke.
The laugh came again, high and bright, from a cluster of foxgloves. A small face peered between the purple bells—too thin, too sharp, its eyes black as blackberry seeds. It grinned with far too many teeth, then vanished in a shiver of petals.
Rory kept the blade out.
“Was that a child?”
“No,” Nyx said.
“Good. Great. Hate that more.”
Something rustled behind them. Rory turned again, blade raised.
A white hart stepped from between the oaks.
It was enormous, its shoulders level with Rory’s head, its coat luminous as moonlit milk. Branching antlers swept back over its skull, hung with strands of ivy and small silver bells that made no sound. Its eyes were pale lavender.
No. Not its eyes.
The hart bowed its head. Its body unraveled into ribbons of light.
Isolde Varga stood where it had been, barefoot among the flowers.
She looked less like a person than a memory the world had agreed to preserve. Silver hair fell to her waist, straight as rain. Her face held no age Aurora could name, beautiful in the remote, unsettling way of frost patterns on glass. Her pale lavender eyes fixed on Rory, then on the blade, then on the pendant beneath her jumper.
She left no footprints in the flowers.
“A borrowed fang in a mortal hand,” Isolde said. Her voice was soft, but every oak seemed to lean toward it. “The moon remembers who shaped it.”
Rory tightened her grip before making herself lower the dagger. “You gave it to me.”
“I gave you a question sharpened to an edge.” Isolde’s gaze flicked to Nyx. “And you bring a night that was once a man.”
The shadows around Nyx rippled. “Seer.”
“Lost one.”
Rory looked between them. “Do you two know each other?”
“All shadows have crossed all thresholds,” Isolde said.
“That’s not an answer.”
“It is several.”
Rory sighed through her nose. Her father, barrister that he was, would have loved taking a witness statement from the Fae. He’d have lasted six minutes before chewing his pen in half.
She sheathed the blade carefully , though she kept her hand near it. “You told me to come when the Heartstone woke.”
“I told you to come when hunger found the heart.”
“No, you sent a fox made of smoke to scratch that into my kitchen window at three in the morning.”
Isolde smiled. “Did you come?”
Rory opened her mouth, shut it again. “Fine.”
The pendant throbbed hard enough to hurt.
Rory winced and pulled it free. The crimson gemstone glowed brighter in the Grove’s twilight, light turning thick inside it like wine held before a candle. Its silver chain trembled against her fingers, tugging—not outward, but deeper, toward the far side of the clearing where the oaks grew closer together.
Isolde watched it with an expression Rory couldn’t read. Sadness, perhaps. Or amusement. With Fae, those seemed dangerously interchangeable .
“Dymas dreams with its mouth open,” the Seer said. “Crumbs fall through the Veil. Something has scented yours.”
Nyx’s head turned sharply . “A rift?”
“A tear. A taste. A promise.” Isolde stepped aside, gesturing to the path beyond her. “Walk where the flowers refuse to bloom.”
Only then did Rory see it.
Beyond the riot of color, a narrow corridor cut through the Grove. No moss grew there. No flowers. The earth lay dark and glossy, as if soaked in oil. The trees lining it bent away from the path, branches twisted back upon themselves. In the pearled air above it shimmered a distortion, faint but undeniable, like heat haze over tarmac.
The Veil.
Rory had seen it once before in the reflection of a restaurant freezer door while delivering noodles to a man who’d paid in coins minted with a dead king’s face. That shimmer had been a thin scratch. This looked wider. Hungrier.
Her mouth went dry.
“Is that safe?” she asked.
Isolde tilted her head. “No path worth asking after is safe.”
“Again, not an answer.”
“Again, it is true.”
Nyx moved first, gliding to the edge of the dead corridor. Their shadow-foot touched the black earth and recoiled; their form flickered , revealing for an instant a taller darkness inside the darkness, ragged and old.
Rory’s anger flared before her fear could smother it. “What did it do?”
“Remembered me,” Nyx whispered.
The words settled cold in her chest.
She looked down the corridor. The air smelled different there: roasted meat, overripe fruit, wine spilled on hot stone, sugar burning at the bottom of a pan. Under it all lay rot. Not strong, not yet, but present . The sweetness of things kept too long.
Dymas.
She had never seen Hel. She had spent weeks hearing its names spoken like diagnoses—Dymas, Belphegor, gluttony, contracts, kitchens full of dead men cooking for demons—and some stubborn part of her had kept it filed beside nightmares and legal loopholes. Possible. Awful. Distant.
Now its breath warmed her face.
The Heartstone pulled harder.
Rory curled her fingers around it. “If something’s coming through, can we close it?”
Isolde’s lavender eyes gleamed. “A blade may cut a knot. A heart may bait a snare. A shadow may pass where flesh is devoured.”
Rory stared at her. “I’m going to start charging you by the riddle.”
“You have no currency I desire .”
“I’ve got a Costa loyalty card and unresolved trauma.”
For the first time, Isolde’s smile looked almost human.
Nyx turned from the dead path. “We should see how deep the tear runs before deciding.”
“Of course we should,” Rory said. “Because walking toward the demon pantry is the sensible option.”
But she moved anyway.
The moment her boot touched the black earth, the Grove changed behind her.
The flowers dimmed. The humming bees fell silent. The pearl sky overhead deepened toward amber, not fully, but enough that gold stained the edges of the oak leaves. The air thickened. Each breath tasted like cream and smoke .
The corridor sloped downward though the ground ahead looked level. Rory felt it in her knees, in the subtle tug of gravity, as if the world had tilted toward an unseen table set for a feast.
They walked single file: Nyx first, because shadows feared less than skin; Rory second, because the pendant dragged her onward; Isolde last, silent and barefoot, leaving no sign she had passed.
The trees on either side grew stranger as they went. Bark smoothed into something like polished bone . Leaves broadened, dark and glossy, veined red. Fruit hung from high branches—pears shaped like hearts, plums translucent enough to show tiny curled shadows within, grapes clustered in obscene abundance. One low bough sagged over the path, offering apples gold as coins.
Rory’s stomach cramped with sudden hunger.
She had eaten toast before leaving. Burned toast, admittedly, because the toaster in the flat above Silas’ bar had two settings, raw and cremation, but still. Now hunger opened in her like a trapdoor.
The apple nearest her gleamed.
Its skin beaded with dew. The smell of it was childhood orchards and Christmas spice and every dessert menu she had ever delivered but not been able to afford. Her hand lifted before she told it to.
Nyx caught her wrist.
Cold flooded through the crescent scar.
Rory jerked back. “I wasn’t—”
“Yes,” Nyx said, gentle as wind over a grave . “You were.”
She stared at the apple. A small mouth split its golden skin. Not a bruise. A mouth. It smiled.
Rory stepped away so fast she bumped into Isolde.
The Seer steadied her with fingers light as leaves. “Dymas feeds first on wanting.”
“Then Dymas can get in the queue,” Rory said, voice shakier than she liked .
They moved on.
The corridor widened. The dead earth gave way to flagstones the color of old honey, each one carved with curling vines and open mouths. The shimmer of the Veil hovered just ahead now, stretched between two fused oak-stones like a curtain of heated glass. Beyond it, Rory saw another sky.
Amber.
Not sunset amber. Not London-through-pollution amber. This was warm and endless, a sky like light passing through brandy. Beneath it rolled vineyards in impossible terraces, green upon green, spilling over hills that seemed too round, too soft, like loaves rising in an oven. Orchards bloomed and fruited at once. Rivers of dark red wine cut through fields of silver wheat. In the distance, towers rose—kitchen spires, Rory thought absurdly—venting fragrant steam into the glowing air.
Music drifted through the tear.
Strings, drums, laughter, the clatter of cutlery. A roar of applause. Somewhere, thousands of voices cheered as if a championship had just been won , or an execution had just been plated .
Wonder hit Rory so hard it stole the fear from her lungs.
It was beautiful.
That was the worst part. Not the mouths in the fruit, not the rot under the sugar, not the thought of helbound souls sweating over demon stoves. The worst part was that Dymas shone. It unfurled beyond the Veil in abundance so lush her eyes wanted to drink it. Every color looked richer than Earth allowed. Every sound promised welcome. Every scent reached for some hollow place in her and offered to fill it.
She understood, suddenly , how people signed contracts.
Not because they were stupid. Not because they were evil.
Because hunger had many names, and Hel knew them all.
The Heartstone burned in her palm.
A figure moved beyond the shimmer.
Rory’s hand went to the Fae blade.
At first she thought it was a chef in a white coat, walking between the vineyard rows with a basket hooked over one arm. Then the figure turned. It had too many elbows. Its face was hidden behind a porcelain mask painted with red lips, but its tongue slid out from beneath the mask and tasted the air.
The tongue pointed toward Rory.
Nyx hissed. Their body spread wide, shadows lashing across the flagstones.
The thing beyond the Veil lifted one long hand and waved.
Not a threat. Not quite.
An invitation.
Rory’s heart hammered. “Can it see us?”
Isolde’s silver hair stirred though there was no wind. “The hungry always see the lit window.”
The demon pressed its palm against the far side of the shimmer.
The Veil dented inward.
Rory drew the moonsilver dagger fully. Cold bit her hand, clean and bracing, cutting through the honeyed fog in her head. The blade glowed pale beneath the amber leak of Dymas.
The demon’s painted lips widened.
Behind it, across the vineyards, bells began to ring.
Not silver bells. Not church bells.
Dinner bells.
The sound rolled through the tear, deep and joyous, and the distant cheers swelled.
Rory planted her feet on the honey-colored stones and tightened her grip on the pendant until its heat stung her skin.
“Right,” she said, because if she didn’t speak she might scream, and if she screamed something might answer. “We’ve seen how deep it runs.”
Nyx gathered beside her, violet eyes burning brighter.
Isolde stood at her back, unreadable as prophecy.
Beyond the Veil, the masked thing leaned close enough that Rory could see her own reflection warped in its porcelain face: black hair wind-tossed, bright blue eyes too wide, a mortal woman holding a Fae blade at the edge of Hell.
The demon tapped once on the shimmering barrier.
The sound was soft as a fingernail on glass.
Rory raised the blade.
“And now,” she said, “we cut.”