AI The vine snapped round Aurora’s ankle and yanked her off the path.
She hit the ground hard, palms skidding over soil that felt too warm, too soft, too much like flesh under moss. The Heartstone pendant thumped against her sternum, hot enough to sting through her shirt, while something in the trees gave a wet, delighted click-click-click.
“Rory!”
“Don’t cut it.”
Nyx’s voice slid out of the shade beneath a twisted oak, thin as smoke and sharp as a blade. Their violet eyes opened in the dark before the rest of them formed, a tall humanoid shape peeling itself from the shadow like ink drawn from water.
Aurora froze with the Fae-forged blade already half out of her boot.
The vine tightened.
“Brilliant,” she hissed. “Any reason I’m letting the murder plant have a think?”
“Because it has not decided whether you are food, guest, or insult.”
“Those are its only categories?”
“In places older than manners, yes.”
Isolde Varga stood beyond the boundary stones, silver hair falling to her waist, pale lavender eyes fixed on the vine round Aurora’s ankle. She had not stepped after them. Of course she hadn’t. The half-Fae seer had led them through a bramble arch in Richmond Park and then stopped as if an invisible hand rested against her throat.
The Fae Grove they had left behind had smelled of damp bark, wildflowers, and old rain. This place smelled of crushed mint, hot sugar, blood-warmed earth, and something roasted until its fat turned sweet.
Aurora lifted her head.
The world beyond the arch stretched wide and impossible.
Vast orchards climbed in tiers up floating black soil banks, their roots hanging into amber air like veined curtains. Vines as thick as ship ropes wound between leaning pillars carved with mouths, not faces, just mouths, laughing, eating, screaming. Far above, clusters of fruit glowed under skins of glass, each one pulsing with a slow inner light. Rivers of dark honey ran uphill through channels of white stone. On a distant ridge, copper towers rose from vineyards and breathed steam scented with cinnamon and marrow.
Dymas.
Gluttony.
Hel.
Aurora swallowed, then wished she hadn’t. The air tasted delicious. That made it worse.
“Isolde,” she called, keeping her voice level, “you coming in or being decorative?”
“The fox shows the gate, not the teeth beyond it.”
“Useful as ever.”
“The vine has tasted your fear.” Isolde’s bare feet hovered above the moss on the other side of the arch, leaving no mark. “Offer it something less honest.”
Aurora stared at the coil round her ankle. It had tiny translucent thorns, each one flexing in and out like a cat’s claw. A clear sap beaded along them and carried the smell of apple brandy.
“Nyx?”
“Do not bleed on it.”
“Wasn’t on my list.”
“Your lists lack imagination.”
The vine tugged again, gentler this time, almost coaxing. Aurora dragged one knee under herself and reached into the canvas delivery satchel across her body. Golden Empress containers clacked inside. Yu-Fei had packed them before Aurora left, face grim, hands swift, no questions wasted.
If you insist on walking into Hell, take dumplings. Everything eats.
At the time, Rory had laughed.
She wasn’t laughing now.
She pulled out a small paper box, thumbed it open, and released a curl of steam. Pork, ginger, sesame oil. The smell bloomed rich in the alien air.
Every vine in the nearest tree turned towards her.
“Oh, that’s not ominous.”
Nyx’s shadow-hand gripped the back of her jacket and held her steady as the vine uncoiled from her ankle. It rose, thorn tips quivering, then dipped one tendril into the box. A dumpling vanished with a soft pop.
The carved mouths on the pillars sighed.
The path opened.
Not moved. Opened. Moss peeled back from the ground in a long curve, revealing steps of green-black stone beneath, each step set with tiny embedded bones that clicked together as if adjusting their posture .
Aurora pushed herself up. Her left wrist burned where soil had scraped over the crescent scar from childhood. She wiped her palm on her jeans and slid the Fae blade back into its sheath.
“Right. Dumplings outrank fear. Good to know.”
Nyx bent, their form solid enough for long fingers to brush the ground. The moss shied from them, leaving a thumb-wide ring of bare stone.
“This path remembers trespassers.”
“Does it remember exits?”
“It remembers teeth.”
“I preferred you as a shadowy warning in London alleys.”
“You preferred not knowing what followed you.”
Isolde’s gaze flicked from Aurora’s pendant to the path. The crimson Heartstone pulsed against the silver chain, faint inner glow brightening with each beat. It had warmed near cracks in the Veil before, near those shimmering distortions only Wardens and things worse than Wardens seemed able to see . Here, it felt like a second heart trying to drag hers out through her ribs.
“The red seed knows its orchard,” Isolde murmured.
Aurora pinched the pendant between finger and thumb. “This came from here.”
“A gift is a hook wearing ribbon.”
“Who gave it to me?”
Isolde smiled with sorrow’s edge but no apology. “A mouth that has not yet opened.”
“Fantastic. That narrows it down in the land of actual mouth pillars.”
Nyx turned their head.
“Something approaches.”
The wet clicking came again, deeper in the grove of hanging roots. Closer.
Aurora glanced at the arch behind them. Through it, she still saw Isolde’s Richmond grove, ancient oak standing stones, wildflowers blooming out of season, and a misted green gap that led back to Earth. Safe-ish. Familiar-ish. London with monsters she could at least insult in the right postcode.
Then the arch flickered .
For one breath, the grove behind Isolde vanished. In its place stretched a banquet hall lit by blue flames, its long table piled with silver dishes, roasted beasts, sugared bones, and human hands arranged like pale lilies.
The arch snapped back to the Fae Grove.
Aurora’s mouth went dry.
“Time’s slipping,” Isolde said.
“Time does that around you.”
“Not mine.”
Nyx moved first, gliding down the revealed steps with no sound. Their body stretched and thinned when they crossed patches of light, then gathered again beneath the next hanging root.
Aurora followed because standing near a closing portal while something clicked its teeth at her felt like choosing the stupid death over the complicated one.
The steps led into a corridor formed by orchard trunks bent towards one another. Bark grew in twisting bands of plum, bronze, and deep green. Leaves brushed Aurora’s shoulders, cool at first, then warm, then damp as tongues. She ducked under a low branch heavy with pear-shaped fruit, each one carved by nature into a sleeping face. Their eyelids fluttered as she passed.
A whisper rose from the fruit.
Hungry.
Aurora stopped.
Nyx turned. “Do not answer.”
“I wasn’t planning a chat.”
Hungry, said another.
Empty.
Sweet girl.
The words pressed against the inside of her skull, not loud, but intimate . A voice too close to her ear in a crowded room. She gripped the strap of the satchel until the canvas cut into her palm.
“Yu-Fei’s dumplings are not for creepy tree babies.”
The nearest fruit opened one eye. The iris looked like melted gold .
Nyx made a low sound that wasn’t speech. The shadows under the roots thickened, drawing together in a dark tide. The fruit shut its eye.
“Keep moving.”
The corridor spat them out onto a terrace.
Aurora forgot to breathe.
Below them sprawled Dymas in impossible layers. Gardens nested inside gardens, each one folded into the next like lacquered boxes. Rivers of wine braided through fields of silver wheat. Glass bridges arched between black cliffs, carrying processions of masked figures in jewel-coloured robes. Some looked human. Some wore human shapes with small errors, backward knees, too many joints in their hands, mouths at the base of their throats.
Beyond the bridges, an amphitheatre had been carved into a hill of red stone. Chefs in white coats moved at long iron stations, knives flashing. Their audience filled tier upon tier, demons with lacquered horns, pale souls in chains of gold, bloated nobles whose laughter shook crumbs from their lips. At the centre, a man screamed as a chef painted symbols on his chest with sauce.
Then the crowd roared.
Aurora’s stomach clenched.
“Culinary competition,” Nyx said.
“Don’t.”
“The loser often remains on the menu.”
“I said don’t.”
A warm breeze carried applause, roasting herbs, and the copper tang of pain. Aurora pressed the back of her hand to her nose. The place dazzled and sickened in the same breath, like a jewelled chalice full of rot.
The path curved along the terrace wall. Tiny brass plaques lined the stone, each one etched in a script that moved when Aurora looked straight at it. The Heartstone tugged towards them. She leaned closer.
Letters rearranged.
WELCOME, BELOVED DEBT.
Aurora stepped back.
“Nope.”
Nyx read over her shoulder. “It knows your pendant.”
“It called me debt.”
“In Hel, that passes for affection .”
“Do you ever bring good news?”
“I once told a dying bishop his god had declined the appointment.”
“Not helping.”
They moved on.
At the terrace’s end, the path narrowed into a bridge made of interlocked antlers. No rail. No mercy. Below, the drop fell into a pond the size of a square, its surface thick and black as treacle. Something pale drifted beneath it, turned, and revealed a human face stretched across the body of a fish.
Aurora fixed her gaze on Nyx’s back and stepped onto the bridge.
The antlers flexed under her boots.
Halfway across, music began.
Not from one place. From everywhere. A low cello hum in the trunks, flutes under the bridge, a woman’s voice pouring from the amber air without words. The melody slipped under Aurora’s ribs and plucked. For an instant, London seemed thin and distant . The flat above Silas’ bar. The smell of beer in the stairwell. The clatter of Golden Empress woks. Eva’s voice on the phone, telling her to get out, to come to London, to not look back.
The bridge tilted.
Nyx’s hand clamped around her wrist. Their touch felt cold, but not dead cold. Night cold. The kind that steadied a fever.
“Name three ugly things.”
Aurora blinked. “What?”
“Now.”
“Silas’ downstairs toilet. Evan’s aftershave. The kebab shop bin behind Mare Street.”
The music soured at the edges.
Nyx pulled her the last few steps across. “Beauty here hunts through appetite. Longing counts.”
Aurora sucked in a breath. “That was rude.”
“That was a kiss compared to what waits deeper.”
On the far side, the path entered a marketplace under a canopy of enormous crimson leaves. Stalls grew from the ground on root legs, shifting places when no one looked at them straight. Lanterns hung from curled branches, each one containing a small blue flame with wings. The crowd parted around Nyx, not from respect, Aurora guessed, but recognition . Shadows knew shadows.
A vendor with four delicate arms and a face hidden behind a porcelain pig mask leaned over a counter of sugared beetles.
“Little mortal, bright mortal, first bite free.”
“No, thanks.”
“Second bite costs memory. Third bite costs name. Fourth bite, oh, fourth bite tastes of revenge.”
Aurora kept walking.
Another stall displayed bottled laughter. Another sold teeth sorted by childhood, betrayal, and royal blood. A woman in a green silk gown stirred a copper pot of soup with a femur and smiled at Aurora through lips sewn with gold thread.
“Carter,” the woman sang.
Aurora stopped so fast Nyx passed through her shoulder as shadow before turning solid again.
The woman’s smile widened against the stitches.
“You know me?”
The vendor lifted one long finger and pointed at the Heartstone. “It knows you. We hear what it beats.”
Nyx slid between them. “Old market law. No naming without trade.”
The woman’s eyes flicked violet-white. “Shade. Threadbare thing. You smell of failed circles and priest holes.”
Nyx’s outline rippled.
Aurora touched the Fae blade at her boot. The moonsilver hilt chilled her fingertips through the leather.
“What does the pendant want?”
The vendor laughed, and the gold stitches chimed. “Want? Little mortal, hunger does not want. Hunger is.”
“Then who sent it?”
“A prince has many hands. A kitchen has many knives. A debt has many doors.”
Aurora’s pulse kicked. “Belphegor?”
Every stall in the market went still.
Even the winged flames paused mid-flutter.
The sewn-lipped woman leaned back. The soup in her pot boiled once, hard enough to spit a fleck of broth onto the counter, where it burned a smoking hole through the wood.
“No free bites for that name.”
Nyx spoke without turning. “Walk.”
Aurora walked.
The market resumed behind them in a rush of haggling, clinking bottles, and tiny insect screams. She did not look back, though her neck prickled as if a hundred tongues tasted the air where she had stood.
They ducked beneath a curtain of hanging roots and entered a quieter place.
Here the wonders changed their teeth.
An avenue of ancient statues flanked a shallow canal of pale green liquid. The figures had no faces, but each held a bowl in both hands. Some bowls overflowed with jewels. Some with worms. Some with small beating hearts no larger than plums. The canal gave off a clean, sharp scent like cut grass and lightning.
Aurora slowed.
The stone beneath her boots bore thousands of scratches. Marks from claws, nails, blades. Words in languages she didn’t know. One phrase appeared in English, carved deep enough to crack the paving.
DO NOT ACCEPT THE SEVENTH COURSE.
“Noted,” she murmured.
Nyx hovered near the canal, their lower half dissolving into smoke. “This was not built by Belphegor.”
Aurora studied the faceless statues. Age clung to them in layers deeper than dust. Moss had tried to grow on their shoulders and calcified into glass. “Who, then?”
“The first hungry things. Before princes. Before courts gave sins a crown.”
A drop of green liquid leapt from the canal into the nearest statue’s bowl. The bowl’s contents shifted from worms to pomegranate seeds.
Aurora’s pendant heated.
At the far end of the avenue, a door stood alone.
No wall. No building. Just a tall old round red door framed in bone-white stone, set with a brass knocker shaped like a tongue. Symbols crawled over its surface. The Heartstone pulled towards it so hard the chain bit the back of Aurora’s neck.
Behind her, Isolde’s voice drifted through the root curtain, faint and strained.
“Rory.”
Aurora spun.
The arch back to the Fae Grove should have been far behind them, beyond market, bridge, terrace, steps. Instead, Isolde stood just beyond the curtain of roots as if only a room separated them. The half-Fae’s silver hair stirred in a wind that did not touch Dymas. Her lavender eyes looked darker now, bruised by vision.
“You said you couldn’t enter.”
“I have not.”
The roots between them twitched, marking the line. Isolde remained on the other side, and yet the other side no longer looked like Richmond . Behind her, the standing stones leaned at sick angles. Wildflowers shed petals that turned black before they touched the ground.
“What’s happening?”
“The gate has begun to chew.”
Nyx snapped into sharper focus. “How long outside?”
Isolde’s mouth tightened. “Long enough for hunters to smell the wound.”
“Wardens?” Aurora asked.
“Worse.”
The red door groaned.
The brass tongue knocker lifted itself and struck once.
Boom.
The faceless statues turned their heads towards Aurora.
She drew the Fae-forged blade.
Its moonsilver surface drank the amber light and answered with a cold glow. Every statue’s bowl tipped, spilling offerings onto the paving. Jewels cracked. Worms writhed. Tiny hearts bounced wetly, still beating.
Nyx spread into a wall of shadow beside her. “Do not open that door.”
“I wasn’t planning to.”
The Heartstone flared crimson.
The chain snapped.
The pendant tore itself from Aurora’s neck and flew towards the old red door. She lunged, caught the silver chain in her fist, and pain burst across her palm as if she had grabbed a live coal.
The brass tongue struck again.
Boom.
From beyond the door came a voice rich with laughter, hunger, and polished manners.
“Aurora Carter. Late, little debt. But still warm.”
The root curtain behind them ripped apart, and Isolde screamed as something antlered and skinless stepped through from the dying grove.