AI The taxi left Aurora Carter at the wrong gate.
That was what the driver claimed, at least.
Richmond Park hunched under a moonless sky, its railings black with rain, its locked gate glistening under the dead orange sputter of a streetlamp. The taxi’s brake lights smeared red across the wet road as it pulled away too fast, tyres hissing over puddles. Rory stood with her hood up, one hand inside her coat, fingers locked around the Heartstone Pendant through the thin fabric of her jumper.
It pulsed once.
Warm.
Then cold.
She watched the taxi vanish around the bend.
“Cheers, mate. Very normal place to abandon a woman at midnight.”
Her voice came out too loud against the empty road.
No answer came from the dark park beyond the railings.
Her phone showed no signal. The screen had displayed that since she stepped out of the cab, though it had worked ten seconds before. Eva’s last message sat frozen above the keyboard.
Don’t go in alone, Rory. If it’s the Grove, wait for me.
Rory looked at the chain looped around her fingers. The crimson stone gave off no light now, but it had burned against her chest all evening, hotter with every mile west from the Golden Empress, hot enough that Yu-Fei had narrowed her eyes at Rory over the pass and told her not to finish the delivery shift if she planned to get herself killed.
A portal, Silas had called it.
A Hel portal, if his face had meant what his voice had refused to say.
The Heartstone only warmed near one.
And the warmth had led her here.
Rory slipped her phone into her pocket and tested the gate. Locked. A chain bound it shut, fat links wound through bars slick with rain.
“Grand.”
She glanced up and down the road. No cars. No late joggers. No dog walkers pretending they had control of enormous damp Labradors. London had tucked itself away, and the park breathed through the bars like something in sleep.
A narrow gap ran between the gate and the stone post.
Rory stared at it.
“No.”
The pendant nudged heat into her palm.
“Oh, piss off.”
She squeezed through sideways, the iron biting her ribs, her backpack scraping with a wet rasp. For one awful second, the gate held her fast. Her breath caught. Rain slid beneath her collar. Then the strap gave with a snap, and she stumbled into Richmond Park.
The sound changed at once.
The road behind her dropped away. Not faded. Dropped. As if someone had shut a thick door between her and London. No tyres. No distant sirens. No aircraft dragging their bellies through clouds. Only rain ticking on leaves and the deep, black hush of open ground.
Rory turned back.
The gate stood two steps behind her.
Beyond it lay no road.
Only trees.
She blinked. Cold slid down her spine in slow fingers.
“Nope. Absolutely not.”
She reached for the bars. Iron met her palms. Beyond them, trunks crowded close together, their bark silver where rain touched them. The streetlamp had vanished. The pavement had vanished. The world she had entered from had folded itself up and taken the receipt.
Rory pressed her forehead to the gate, eyes shut.
“Fine. That’s fine. We’ve seen weird. We’ve catalogued weird. We have moved weird into a mental folder marked ‘London nonsense.’”
The Heartstone warmed again.
This time, it held the heat.
She pulled back and looked into the park.
The path ahead curved between low bracken and ancient oaks, its gravel washed pale by rain. Far off, deeper among the trees, something crimson flickered once, faint as a coal under ash.
The pendant answered with a soft pulse against her sternum.
Rory exhaled through her teeth.
“That had better not be a corpse.”
She started walking.
Her trainers sank into mud at the path’s edge where rainwater had chewed through the gravel. Each step made a small, intimate sound. Squish. Crack. Drip. The kind of noises that belonged close to the body, not out in the open. The park gave nothing back. No owl. No fox bark. No rustle of deer. Richmond Park always had deer; they treated humans like inconvenient furniture. Tonight, even they had cleared out.
The ancient oaks pressed in on both sides.
Their branches looked wrong.
Not dead. Not leafless. Wrong. Leaves hung too full for the season, dark and waxy, trembling though no wind moved. Wildflowers crowded beneath them in thick patches—bluebells, foxgloves, white anemones, tiny yellow cups Rory didn’t recognise—all blooming together under December rain. Their colours showed too bright in the dark, as if the night had failed to soak into them.
Rory crouched beside a cluster of white flowers. Their petals faced her.
All of them.
She shifted left.
The flowers turned.
Rory stood.
“Noted.”
Something clicked in the trees.
A small sound. Dry. Precise.
Like a fingernail tapping glass.
Rory went still.
The rain went on.
Click.
This time from behind her.
She turned with her keys clenched between her knuckles, though she had no idea what good Yale brass would do against anything that had eaten a street.
“Who’s there?”
The words thudded flat.
A branch swayed ten feet away.
Only one branch.
It dipped once, as if someone had stepped off it.
Rory listened.
Nothing moved. Nothing breathed.
Then, from far ahead, a voice called her name.
“Rory.”
Not loud. Not urgent. Familiar.
Eva.
Rory’s hand tightened around the pendant until the silver chain cut into her skin.
“Eva?”
Rain threaded between the leaves.
“Rory.”
It came from the same place as the red flicker .
Her feet moved before sense caught up. Two steps. Three. Then she stopped so hard her knees locked.
Eva had texted from Brixton twelve minutes ago.
Eva could not be in the middle of Richmond Park calling from inside a hidden Fae pocket unless she had stolen a helicopter and a death wish.
Rory’s throat dried.
“Say something only Eva would know.”
The trees listened.
A soft laugh drifted out between the trunks.
Not Eva’s laugh. Too careful. Built from memory, but missing the rough edge from years of cigarettes she swore she only had on bad nights.
“Rory.”
The voice had moved closer.
Rory backed away. The path behind her curved out of sight. The gate had vanished with the road; she knew that now without looking. The pendant burned hotter, a coal against her skin.
“Lazy. Very lazy. If you’re going to mimic my friends, put some work in.”
Something shifted at the edge of her vision.
Tall. Thin. Gone when she turned.
Her heartbeat climbed into her ears.
She walked on because standing still felt like agreeing to be hunted .
The path narrowed. Bracken brushed her shins, wet and cold as hands. The oaks thickened until their branches knotted overhead, cutting off the last smear of sky. Her breath smoked in front of her, though the rain had turned warm enough to bead on her cheeks like sweat.
The Heartstone began to glow.
Faint at first, crimson light leaking through her fingers. It painted the inside of her coat, her knuckles, the crescent scar on her left wrist. The scar looked deeper in that light, a pale little moon half-buried under skin.
A smell reached her.
Salt.
Not the Thames at low tide. Not the sea. This was older, heavier, wet stone and rusted iron and something mineral dragged up from deep under the world.
Rory swallowed.
“Hel portal. Brilliant. Because the Fae Grove wasn’t enough ambience.”
The path opened without warning.
She stepped into a clearing ringed by ancient oak standing stones.
They were not stones at all, not entirely. The trunks had grown into rough pillars, bark grey as old bone, roots sunk deep and exposed in places like knuckled hands. Runes scarred the wood in spirals. Wildflowers carpeted the ground beneath them, nodding in rain that did not fall inside the clearing.
Rory turned her face up.
Rain dropped beyond the ring, a silver curtain. Inside, the air hung dry and cold.
At the centre stood a hollow.
No, not a hollow.
An absence.
The grass dipped inward around a circle of black earth. Above it, the air bent. Rory’s eyes slid away each time she looked straight at it, refusing to hold the shape. The Heartstone pulsed against her chest in steady, painful beats.
Warm. Warm. Warm.
Something whispered from the black earth.
Rory did not understand the words.
Her body did.
Every muscle locked. Her skin prickled. The oldest part of her—the part that knew cliff edges, deep water, strangers in doorways—pressed both hands against the inside of her ribs and told her to run.
A twig snapped behind her.
Rory spun.
No one stood there.
The rain beyond the ring fell in perfect vertical lines. The flowers watched her. The oak stones leaned in by inches.
Then her phone buzzed.
She flinched so hard she nearly dropped it.
Signal: none.
A call filled the screen anyway.
MAM.
Rory stared.
The phone buzzed again, vibrating in her palm with a wet insect sound.
Her mother had gone to bed by ten every night since Rory could remember. Jennifer Carter did not phone past midnight. Jennifer Carter did not phone when there was no signal. Jennifer Carter did not know her daughter had slipped into a Fae-touched grove chasing a pendant from an unknown benefactor toward a portal that smelled like a drowned cellar .
The screen kept flashing.
MAM.
Rory pressed accept and lifted the phone halfway to her ear.
Static breathed through the speaker.
Then her mother’s voice came, small and muffled, as if from beneath blankets.
“Aurora, cariad, open the door.”
Rory’s mouth went numb.
“What door?”
A pause.
A knock sounded from the phone.
Three taps.
Wood on wood.
Then, from somewhere at the edge of the clearing, the same knock answered.
Three taps.
Rory turned inch by inch.
An oak standing stone to her left had split down its centre. A seam darkened the bark. Not wide. Barely enough to slide a letter through.
The phone crackled.
“It’s cold out here.”
Rory lowered the phone.
The seam widened.
Blackness filled it. Not shadow. Shadow belonged to light. This swallowed the crimson glow from the Heartstone and gave nothing back. The flowers nearest the oak drooped, petals folding shut one by one.
“Nice touch,” Rory managed. Her voice scraped. “Mum never called me Aurora unless I’d done something expensive.”
The phone hissed.
Jennifer Carter’s voice changed.
It flattened. Stretched.
“Open.”
The word entered the clearing and pressed against the oak stones. Bark creaked. Runes along the trunks glimmered dull green, then faded.
The seam widened another inch.
Rory stepped back toward the centre before she realised what she was doing . Heat stabbed through the pendant. She gasped and tore it out from under her jumper.
The crimson stone shone like a living ember.
The black earth at the clearing’s centre answered.
Something under it moved.
Not rose. Not pushed. Moved, as if a vast body shifted in sleep beneath a thin blanket.
Rory backed away from both the split oak and the central absence, trapped between invitations she had not made.
“Right. Nobody open anything. New rule.”
A sound came from the rain beyond the ring.
Footsteps.
Slow.
Wet grass compressed under weight .
Rory held still, eyes fixed on the curtain of rain.
The figure appeared between two oak stones.
At first it looked like a man in a dark coat .
Tall. Shoulders narrow. Head bowed under the rain.
Then it lifted its face.
It had no face.
Only a pale oval of skin, smooth from hairline to chin, rain running over where eyes and mouth should have been. It stood just outside the dry circle. One hand hung at its side. The other held a takeaway bag from the Golden Empress, paper darkened by rain, handles stretched tight around fingers too long for any human hand.
Rory’s breath left her in one hard pull.
The bag had her delivery number written across it in Yu-Fei’s blocky pen.
Order 47.
The order she had never delivered. The address that had appeared on the app with no postcode, no name, only coordinates that matched the park.
The faceless thing tilted its head.
From inside the bag came a muffled voice.
“Delivery for Malphora.”
Rory’s blood went cold beneath the heat of the pendant.
No one in London called her that.
No one human.
She forced her feet apart, grounding herself in the damp flowers, in the smell of salt and black earth, in the cold air against her teeth.
“Order’s cancelled.”
The faceless thing lifted the bag.
The paper bulged from within.
Something inside pressed outward, forming the shape of fingers against the soaked paper. Small fingers. Many of them. They scrabbled without tearing through, tapping the same dry rhythm she had heard in the woods.
Click.
Click.
Click.
The split oak behind her groaned open another inch.
Her phone, still in her hand, lit up again.
This time the caller ID read BRENDAN CARTER.
Dad.
Then EVAN.
Then EVA.
Then SILAS.
Names flashed one after another, faster, filling the screen, stacking over each other until the letters smeared into black lines.
The speaker crackled with a dozen voices layered together.
“Rory.”
“Open.”
“Come here.”
“Take it.”
“Laila.”
“Malphora.”
“Delivery for—”
Rory hurled the phone at the faceless thing.
It struck the invisible boundary at the edge of the ring and stopped in mid-air.
For one second, the phone hung there, spinning, screen blazing white.
Then something on the other side plucked it out of the air.
Not the faceless figure. Its hands had not moved.
Another hand had appeared from behind the curtain of rain.
Long. Grey. Jointed in too many places.
It withdrew with Rory’s phone, and the rain closed around it.
The faceless thing stepped closer to the boundary.
The runes on the oak stones flared.
It stopped.
The takeaway bag twitched.
Rory looked from the faceless thing to the split oak, then to the black earth at the clearing’s centre. Three doors. Three hungers. One idiot delivery driver with a magic necklace and no phone.
The Heartstone pulsed hard enough to hurt.
She looked down.
The crimson glow threw her shadow across the black earth.
Her shadow did not match her.
It stood taller. Its head angled toward the split oak. Its arms hung too long, fingers almost touching the ground.
Rory raised her right hand.
The shadow did not move.
Its head turned.
Not with her.
Toward her.
The clearing went silent.
Even the rain stopped making sound.
Rory’s lungs refused to fill.
The shadow lifted one long arm and pointed at the pendant.
The faceless thing outside the ring tapped the paper bag with one finger.
Click.
The split oak whispered in Jennifer Carter’s stolen voice.
“Aurora.”
Rory unclasped the silver chain from around her neck.
The Heartstone’s heat vanished the moment the pendant left her skin.
Cold flooded the clearing, sharp enough to bite.
Every flower folded shut.
The faceless thing leaned forward.
The black earth rippled.
The shadow at Rory’s feet reached up from the ground, its long fingers peeling away from the grass, rising toward the crimson stone dangling from her hand.