AI Aurora Carter had walked through Richmond Park at night before, but never this deep, never alone, and never with the moon looking as thin and sharp as a fishbone above the black lattice of the trees.
The sensible part of her mind had objected from the moment she left the road. It sounded like her father at his most barristerly: You are twenty-five years old, Aurora. You have no torch worth the name, no backup, no evidence that the message was genuine, and absolutely no business wandering into a royal park after midnight because an anonymous note told you to.
The less sensible part had answered with the warm pulse under her jumper.
The Heartstone pendant lay against her breastbone, its silver chain cold on the back of her neck, its small crimson gem giving off a faint, steady heat that did not belong to her body. It had started before she reached the park gates. A soft throb at first, easy to ignore. By the time she crossed the wet grass and found the narrow path veering away from the proper trails, it had warmed until it felt like a living thing tucked against her skin.
That had been the note’s promise.
When the Heartstone wakes, come to the oaks. Come alone.
No signature. No explanation. Just those two lines printed on cream paper and slipped beneath the door of the flat above Silas’s bar while she had been out delivering sweet-and-sour pork and sesame prawn toast for Yu-Fei Cheung.
She should have burned it. She should have taken it to Eva, or Silas, or anyone with more experience in the world’s new habit of turning impossible beneath her feet.
Instead she had put on her boots, tucked a kitchen knife into the inside pocket of her coat with a sense of shameful practicality, and told herself she was only going to look.
The path had vanished ten minutes ago.
Rory stopped.
Her breath came out white. The cold had sharpened as she walked, though it was late spring and the city behind her had been damp rather than freezing. Here, frost silvered the grass. It caught on the toes of her boots, on fallen leaves, on the low brambles that reached from the shadows with hooked fingers. The trees stood too close together for Richmond Park. Ancient oaks hunched on either side of her, their trunks swollen and ridged, bark twisted into grooves like old faces. Beyond them, the dark had depth. Not the ordinary dark of a park at night, stitched with distant traffic and the orange wash of London, but a packed, listening dark.
Rory turned and looked back.
The way she had come was gone .
Not obscured. Gone.
Behind her stood an arch of oak trunks she had never passed, their branches knitted overhead. Between them, the grass stretched pale beneath frost, unmarked by footprints.
Her mouth went dry.
“Brilliant,” she said, because silence had become unbearable. Her voice sounded small and badly placed, as if the air did not quite know what to do with it . “Absolutely top-tier decision-making, Carter.”
The pendant pulsed .
Once. Twice.
Not like a heartbeat. Like a warning tapped from the other side of a wall.
Rory slid a hand under her jumper and closed her fingers around the Heartstone. It was roughly the size of her thumbnail, smooth and hard, and warm enough now to ache against her palm. A faint inner glow seeped between her fingers, deep crimson, turning the lines of her skin the colour of old wine.
She remembered the grove from daylight.
Isolde’s grove, some had called it, though Rory had never met an Isolde and wasn’t yet sure whether the name belonged to a person, a ghost, a queen, or some Fae joke at human expense. Hidden in Richmond Park, marked by ancient oak standing stones, a pocket between Earth and somewhere else. Wildflowers blooming year-round. Time that misbehaved. A clearing that could hold an hour and return you days later, or swallow a night and spit out only minutes.
In the day, it had been unnerving but beautiful.
At night, beauty had curdled into something older.
She kept moving because standing still felt too much like offering herself up.
The frost thinned as she walked. The ground softened. A scent rose around her, rich and damp: crushed violets, wet bark, earth opened by rain. Wildflowers glimmered in the dark on either side of her, pale bells and star-shaped blossoms nodding despite the absence of wind. Some were spring flowers, some summer, some she did not recognise at all. They grew in impossible abundance, crowded over roots and stones, their petals luminous enough to show her the path that was not a path.
Rory followed the flowers.
She told herself she was calm. Cool-headed. That had always been her strength, hadn’t it? At university, when classmates panicked before mock trials, she had been the one with colour-coded notes and a spare pen. When Evan’s temper changed the air in a room, she had learned to track exits, keys, phone battery, the exact distance to the stairwell. When she’d finally left Cardiff for London with two bags and a bruised sense of self, she had done it by thinking three steps ahead and letting fear run behind her like a dog on a lead.
But fear had slipped its collar tonight.
Something moved to her left.
Rory froze.
The flowers swayed. That was all. A tremor passing through their stems as if a small animal had brushed them. She listened.
Nothing.
No traffic. No fox bark. No plane passing overhead. No city at all.
Then, from somewhere ahead, a child laughed.
The sound was light, delighted, and horribly close.
Rory’s heart kicked so hard she nearly dropped the pendant.
“Hello?” The word left her before she could stop it.
The laugh cut off.
The grove held its breath.
Rory cursed herself silently. Every horror film idiot in history said hello into the dark. She should have stayed quiet. She should have backed away. Except there was still no away, and the Heartstone was burning hotter, leading her on with each slow pulse .
A second sound followed the first: the creak of a swing.
Long. Slow. Rusted.
Creeeak.
Pause.
Creeeak.
There were no playgrounds here. No chains. No metal frame, no rubber matting, no mothers with takeaway coffees and toddlers in padded coats.
Creeeak.
Rory forced her feet forward.
The trees opened by degrees, revealing the standing stones.
They were not stones in any ordinary sense. By daylight, she had taken them for petrified oak trunks, ancient and weathered, their surfaces grey-brown and hard as granite. Now they stood around the clearing in a broken ring, each taller than she was, each carved by time into the suggestion of a bowed figure. Some leaned inward. Some twisted away. Moonlight pooled on their blunt crowns and slid down their sides like milk.
Within the ring, wildflowers bloomed thick as a carpet.
And at the centre, where no tree grew, the air shimmered .
Not a doorway. Not exactly.
A vertical wound of darkness hung over the flowers, taller than Rory and no wider than a wardrobe. Its edges trembled as if burned into the night. It gave off no light, yet she could see it clearly because everything around it seemed to lean away. The flowers nearest the shimmer bowed flat. Frost webbed their petals, black at the tips. The pendant in her hand thudded with sudden, painful heat.
A Hel portal, then.
The words arrived with a certainty she could not explain. Not knowledge she had earned, but knowledge the Heartstone pushed into her blood .
Rory stopped just outside the ring of stones.
“Well,” she whispered. “There you are.”
The shimmer did not answer.
Of course it didn’t. Portals, wounds in reality, whatever it was—these things did not converse like people. They simply existed and ruined your night.
She slipped the note from her pocket with her free hand. It had gone soft at the edges from damp and handling. When the Heartstone wakes, come to the oaks. Come alone.
Why? To see this? To close it? To be pushed through?
A branch cracked behind her.
Rory spun.
The trees stood empty. Thick trunks. Moonlit bark. Flowers glittering at their roots. No person. No animal.
Her hand found the knife inside her coat. The handle was cheap black plastic, familiar from the flat’s kitchen drawer. It had seemed laughable protection earlier . It seemed worse now. An insult. A prop.
She drew it anyway.
“Show yourself,” she said.
The command sounded firmer than she felt. She was proud of that, in a distant, useless way.
Silence answered.
Then something breathed in her ear.
Rory jerked forward with a sharp gasp, slashing behind her as she turned. The knife met nothing. Cold air kissed the side of her neck. Her pulse hammered there, exposed and frantic.
No one stood behind her.
But in the flowers at her feet, a shadow moved the wrong way.
The moon lay to her right. Her shadow should have fallen left, stretched dark across the pale blossoms. It did. But beneath it another shadow slid free, thin as spilled ink, curling around her boots before retreating toward the ring of stones.
Rory staggered back.
The second shadow paused.
It had no body casting it. No owner. It stretched itself over the flowers, long and narrow, then lifted at one end like a head.
Her grip tightened around the Heartstone. The gem seared her palm.
The shadow recoiled.
Not much. Enough.
Rory looked from it to the pendant, mind racing through scraps of half-understood lore and half-believed warnings. Deep crimson. Dymas. Unknown benefactor. Warm near Hel. The Heartstone had led her here, but perhaps it had not led only her.
The shadow sank into the ground and vanished.
The child laughed again, this time from inside the ring.
Rory turned slowly .
The portal had changed.
Within the dark shimmer, something pale hovered just out of sight. Not emerging. Watching. The shape suggested a face because her mind wanted a face, but every time she focused, it smoothed into nothing. A cheek that became a shoulder. An eye that became a hole. A mouth that might have been the gap between branches.
“Rory.”
Her name came in Eva’s voice.
For one bright, dreadful second, relief surged through her.
Then sense caught up and strangled it.
Eva was not here. Eva would not be inside a tear in the world at midnight, calling from a place that smelled suddenly of snow and burned hair.
“Rory, help me.”
The voice broke exactly the way Eva’s did when she was trying not to cry. It was intimate, familiar , unfair. Rory’s throat tightened.
“No,” she said.
The pale shape drifted closer to the surface of the shimmer.
“Please. It’s dark.”
Rory’s fingers ached around the knife. “No.”
“Don’t leave me here.”
Her mind served up Eva at nine years old, knees muddy, hair escaping its plaits, daring Rory to climb a wall behind the school. Eva at seventeen, lying on Rory’s bedroom floor in Cardiff and insisting London was the only place worth running toward. Eva’s texts still on Rory’s phone from earlier that evening, complaining about a terrible date and a worse cocktail.
Not here. Not this voice. Not this thing.
“You picked the wrong person,” Rory said, though her lips felt numb . “I know what bait sounds like.”
For a moment, the grove went utterly still.
Then the voice changed.
“Do you?”
Evan’s voice.
Not loud. Not angry. That would have been easier. This was the soft voice, the one that came before apology and after damage. The one that had taught her to doubt the evidence of her own skin.
“You always were dramatic, Laila.”
The old pet name struck with the precision of a thrown stone.
Rory’s stomach clenched.
Nobody here should know that. Not the Fae, not whatever pressed against the portal, not the anonymous sender of the note. Laila had been Evan’s private invention, a name he used when he wanted to turn her into someone smaller and more pliant than Aurora Carter, someone he could coax back into the room after he had frightened her out of it.
The shimmer rippled.
The pale almost-face smiled with too many suggestions of teeth.
“You run and run,” Evan’s voice murmured. “But you always answer when called.”
Rory’s breath sawed in her chest.
For several seconds, she was not in Richmond Park. She was in a Cardiff flat with rain on the windows, counting the steps between sofa and door. She was holding her phone with a cracked screen, wondering if leaving would make things worse. She was learning that fear could be domestic, could sit beside you at breakfast, could use your name tenderly .
Then heat flared against her palm.
The Heartstone pulsed hard enough to hurt.
Rory came back to herself in a rush: black hair damp against her cheeks, boots planted in the strange flowers, knife in one hand, pendant in the other. The grove. The portal. The thing that wore voices like coats.
Her left wrist prickled.
She looked down. The small crescent-shaped scar there, a pale childhood mark usually half-forgotten, gleamed faintly red. Not bleeding. Lit from beneath, as if the Heartstone had called to it.
The sight steadied her in a way she did not understand. That scar was hers. Not dramatic. Not bait. A stupid accident from years ago involving broken glass and a refusal to let her mother fuss. Proof of a life before Evan. Before London. Before monsters with borrowed voices.
Rory tucked the note into her fist with the pendant.
“Here’s the thing,” she said. Her voice trembled , but it held. “I didn’t come because I was called. I came because I wanted answers.”
The portal shivered.
The pale shape pressed closer. The air between the stones groaned like ice under weight .
“And did you find them, Aurora?”
Her full name now. Her mother’s voice.
Rory almost laughed. It came out as a breath instead.
“No,” she said. “But I found you.”
She did not know what to do next. There was no instruction manual for closing a Hel portal in the glove compartment of her life. No spell memorised, no ancient blade, no wise mentor whispering conveniently from the trees.
Only a pendant that burned near the thing, a note that had drawn her here, and the growing certainty that something on the other side had expected her to step inside the ring.
So she did the opposite.
Rory backed away from the standing stones.
The portal snapped taut.
A wind burst outward, though the flowers did not move. It struck her face with the smell of iron-cold stone and old ashes. The child laughed again, no longer delighted but sharp, petulant.
“Don’t,” said Eva.
“Stay,” said Evan.
“Daughter,” said her father, stern and afraid.
“Rory,” whispered Yu-Fei Cheung, of all people, with such weary disappointment that a hysterical bubble rose in Rory’s chest.
The voices overlapped, braided, tugged. Each one caught a different hook in her. Love. Shame. Obligation. Fear. They filled the clearing until the stones themselves seemed to hum.
Rory kept backing up.
Her heel struck a root. She flailed, caught herself against one of the oak standing stones, and the cold of it punched through her sleeve. Not stone. Wood. Dead and alive at once. Beneath her palm, something stirred.
The standing stone breathed.
Rory snatched her hand away.
A slit opened in the trunk where her fingers had rested. Not an eye, she told herself, because an eye implied anatomy, biology, rules. This was a wet black seam in the petrified oak, glossy under moonlight. It widened slowly , regarding her.
Another opened on the next stone. And the next.
All around the ring, the oaks woke.
The voices from the portal ceased.
Rory stood just outside the circle, knife raised uselessly, pendant blazing red between her fingers, while the ancient markers turned their attention from the wound at the centre to her.
A sound moved through the grove.
Not speech. Not wind.
Roots shifting under soil.
The flowers nearest her boots bent flat in a widening path, though nothing visible passed over them. Something circled behind her, low and slow. She heard the whisper of stems crushed under weight , the faint drag of something through damp earth.
Do not run, she thought.
Every animal part of her disagreed.
She turned her head a fraction, enough to catch movement at the edge of vision: a tall shape between the trees, antlered perhaps, or crowned in branches. When she looked straight at it, there was only an oak trunk and a spill of white flowers.
At the edge again: movement.
Closer.
Rory’s breathing thinned.
The grove had not been empty before she arrived. That was the stupid human assumption, wasn’t it? Strange place, isolated, night pressing in, and she had thought the only threat was the obvious hole in the air. But the grove had its own inhabitants. Its own attention. The ring of stones was not decoration. It was a boundary. A prison. A mouth.
The Heartstone pulsed three times in quick succession.
The portal answered.
The darkness at its centre bulged outward. The voices returned, but now they spoke in unison, a hundred borrowed throats flattened into one.
“Open.”
Rory’s hand tightened around the pendant.
The note crumpled against the gem.
Heat flashed.
The paper caught fire.
She yelped and nearly dropped it, but the flame was crimson, not orange, and it did not burn her skin. It raced over the cream paper, devouring the ink first. The words blackened, curled, vanished. When the last corner burned away, the Heartstone’s glow surged between her fingers.
The standing stones groaned.
Rory stared at the ash fluttering from her hand.
The note had been a key.
Or a leash.
And she had just burned it.
The portal convulsed.
The pale shape slammed against the inner surface of the shimmer. This time Rory saw enough to wish she hadn’t: an impression of hands too long, a head tilted at an angle no neck should manage, a mouth opening vertically through the suggestion of a face. No blood, no gore, nothing as mercifully physical as that. Just wrongness given intention.
The ring of oak stones answered.
Roots erupted from the ground.
They did not burst dramatically; they slid up with awful patience, thick and dark, shedding soil in soft clumps. One coiled around the base of the portal. Another followed, then another, weaving through the flowers without breaking a single stem beyond the blackened patch nearest the tear. The air shrieked. Or perhaps the thing inside did. The sound went straight through Rory’s teeth.
She clapped her hands over her ears, pendant and knife awkwardly pressed against her skull.
The roots tightened.
The shimmer narrowed.
A voice forced itself through the closing gap, stripped now of disguise.
“Malphora.”
Rory went cold despite the Heartstone’s heat.
The name meant nothing to her. And yet the grove seemed to know it. Every black eye in the oak stones fixed on her. The antlered shape at the edge of vision stilled.
“Malphora,” the thing whispered again, with hunger, with recognition, with a promise older than language.
Then the roots snapped shut.
Silence crashed down.
The portal was gone .
At the centre of the clearing, the flowers lay bowed beneath a web of dark roots. Frost melted from their petals. The air no longer shimmered . No voices called. No child laughed. The pendant cooled in Rory’s hand until its warmth became only that of a stone held too long.
For several breaths, she did not move.
Her ears rang. Her knees wanted to fold. The knife trembled in her grip, reflecting a sliver of moonlight. She lowered it slowly .
The eyes in the standing stones remained open.
Watching.
Rory swallowed. “Thank you,” she said, because manners were absurd and therefore human, and she badly needed to be human just then.
The nearest oak stone blinked.
A path opened behind her.
It did not appear all at once. The flowers leaned aside, revealing a narrow trail through the trees, dark earth bare beneath the moon. At its far end, impossibly distant and impossibly near, she saw the faint orange smear of London’s light. Traffic murmured like a remembered dream.
Rory did not wait for a second invitation.
She backed away first, unwilling to turn her spine to the ring, then forced herself to pivot and walk. Not run. Running belonged to prey. Running belonged to panic. She walked quickly , boots sinking into soft earth, cold air burning her lungs, pendant tucked beneath her jumper again.
Behind her, the grove rustled.
Once, halfway down the path, she heard the swing.
Creeeak.
Pause.
Creeeak.
She did not look back.
The trees thinned. The frost retreated. Ordinary mud replaced the black earth. Somewhere ahead, a car hissed over wet tarmac. Her phone buzzed in her pocket so suddenly she flinched and almost drew the knife again.
She fumbled it out.
No signal, then one bar, then three. The screen read 00:17.
Impossible. She had entered the park after midnight. She had been in the grove long enough for terror to alter the shape of her bones, long enough for a portal to open and close, long enough for old trees to wake and judge her by a name she did not know.
Seventeen minutes past midnight.
A message banner appeared.
Eva: You alive? Date was a crime against humanity. Need chips.
Rory stared at it until the words blurred.
Then another message slid beneath it.
Unknown Number: You burned the summons. Clever girl.
The cold returned, precise as a fingertip at the back of her neck.
Rory turned.
Behind her, Richmond Park spread quiet and empty under the moon. No path of wildflowers. No standing stones. No hidden clearing. Only grass, trees, and darkness pooled where darkness ought to be.
At the edge of her sight, something tall moved between the oaks.
When she looked, it was gone .
The phone buzzed again.
Unknown Number: Next time, do not come alone.
The Heartstone gave one faint pulse against her chest.
Not warm.
Afraid.