AI Aurora Carter hit the ground hard enough to bite her tongue, and the takeaway bag split open beneath her palm.
Hot sweet-and-sour sauce slicked the grass. Rice scattered in pale clumps across the roots of an oak that had no business standing in this part of Richmond Park, not according to any map on her phone, not according to any path she had taken, and not according to the dead black screen now reflecting her own startled face back at her.
“Brilliant.”
Her voice went nowhere.
No echo . No city murmur. No traffic beyond the trees. No distant bark from a dog walker. London had vanished as if someone had closed a thick door behind her.
Aurora pushed herself up, flexing the wrist she had landed on. The small crescent-shaped scar on her left wrist shone faintly in the strange dark, pale against skin smudged with mud and plum sauce. Her other hand went to the silver chain at her throat.
The Heartstone Pendant sat warm against her chest.
Warmer than before.
“Of course.” She drew it out from under her jacket.
The deep crimson gemstone, no larger than her thumbnail, held a faint inner glow. It pulsed once against her fingers. Not the quick flutter she had felt outside the closed Tube entrance. Not the steady warmth that had drawn her off the pavement, past the locked gate, and into the park despite every sensible part of her saying, Rory, this is how idiots end up in true crime podcasts.
This pulse felt eager.
The message had come through at 22:13, from a number that had not existed when she searched it.
Bring the Heartstone to the old oaks. Come alone. If the portal opens before you arrive, Hel will notice you first.
No name. No proof. No explanation.
Just that word.
Hel.
And the pendant had heated until it stung her skin.
Aurora crouched and salvaged what she could from the delivery. Two cartons had survived. One pork bao had rolled under a root like it had developed tactical instinct. She should have left the whole lot there, turned back, found a police officer, called Eva, called Silas, called anyone with more muscle than a 5'6" part-time delivery driver with a law degree she had not finished and a talent for making bad decisions under pressure.
But the path behind her had gone.
Not hidden. Gone.
Where the gravel track should have cut between bracken and trees, wildflowers spread in a thick silver-blue carpet. They bloomed as if spring had come to this one clearing and refused to leave. Their scent drifted around her, honeyed at first, then sharp underneath, like cut stems left too long in a vase.
Aurora stood slowly .
Ancient oak standing stones ringed the clearing.
At first, her mind rejected the phrase because oak and stone did not belong in the same object. Yet there they stood, twelve tall shapes with the girth and grain of old trunks, but the stillness of carved rock. Bark ran in ridges over them. Lichen filled the cracks. Their tops leaned inward, not enough to touch, enough to listen.
Beyond them, trees pressed close.
She turned in a slow circle, phone raised though it had no signal, no light, and no dignity left.
“Right. Hidden grove. Threatening text. Magic jewellery.” Her breath showed white and thin. “Mum would’ve preferred me to stick with Pre-Law.”
Something clicked behind her.
Aurora spun.
Nothing.
Only the torn takeaway bag, the spilled rice, the bao under the root.
Click.
This time to her left.
A small sound. Nail on glass. A bead dropped onto tile. It came from the nearest oak stone, or from behind it, or from inside it.
Aurora slipped the phone into her pocket and picked up the least ridiculous weapon available, a fallen branch half the length of her arm, knotted at one end and damp with moss.
“Who’s there?”
The question entered the grove and died.
The Heartstone pulsed again.
Heat spread across her collarbone, then tightened, as if the pendant had hooked itself into something far below the soil. Aurora gripped it, and a metallic taste filled her mouth.
A sound rose at the edge of hearing.
Tick-tock.
She held still.
Tick-tock.
Not a clock. Not quite. The rhythm came from several directions at once, soft and patient. It had a wet edge, like a tongue tapping behind teeth.
Aurora took one step towards the gap between two oak stones.
The wildflowers bent away from her boot.
Every single bloom inclined in the opposite direction, pale heads turning on thin stems. A ripple passed across the clearing, not from wind, but from awareness .
“Absolutely not.”
She stepped back.
The flowers lifted.
From somewhere deeper in the grove came a whisper .
“Rory.”
Her blood cooled.
No one in London used that tone with her. Eva used Rory like a thrown cushion. Yu-Fei barked it across the Golden Empress kitchen when orders stacked up. Silas dragged it out when he wanted rent and sympathy in equal measure.
This voice knew the childhood shape of it.
Soft. Welsh vowels rounded by memory.
“Rory.”
Aurora’s grip tightened around the branch until bark bit her palm.
“Nice trick.”
The whisper slid between the trees.
“Left your coat in the rain again, cariad.”
Her mother’s voice.
Not close. Not clear. More like sound pressed through old plaster, filtered through rooms she had not entered in years. Jennifer Carter on a Sunday afternoon. Chalk dust on her sleeves. Tea cooling beside a pile of exercise books. That fond bite in the words when Aurora had come in soaked because she hated umbrellas and liked being told off by someone who loved her.
The grove waited for her to move.
Aurora did not.
“My mother calls me Aurora when she’s cross.”
A pause.
Then the voice, closer.
“Aurora.”
The word grazed the back of her neck.
She struck out with the branch before she turned. It hit empty air, but something recoiled through the flowers. Stems snapped in a thin, brittle line. A dark shape folded itself behind one of the oak stones, too fast for her to see more than a long joint, a pale curve, a suggestion of fingers where there should have been bark.
Aurora backed towards the centre of the clearing.
The pendant’s glow brightened. Crimson light seeped between her fingers and painted the wildflowers the colour of raw meat.
“Come alone, they said. Very clear on that bit.” Her voice shook at the edges, so she sharpened it. “If you’re the unknown benefactor, your customer service is appalling.”
A laugh answered.
Not her mother this time.
A man’s laugh, low and familiar enough to turn her stomach .
Evan.
“No,” she said.
The laugh came again from behind the standing stones.
“You always did talk when you were scared.”
Aurora moved before the rest of the voice could form. She crossed the clearing at an angle, aiming for the widest space between two oak stones. Her boots crushed flowers that released a bitter green stink. The tick-tock sound quickened around her.
At the boundary, the air hardened.
She hit it shoulder first and bounced back. Pain sparked down her arm. The invisible barrier rippled, and for half a second she saw beyond it, not Richmond Park, not trees, but a vast black slope under a lidless grey sky . Something enormous moved there, dragging chains through ash.
Then the view snapped shut.
Aurora stumbled, caught herself against an oak stone, and snatched her hand back.
The bark-stone felt warm.
A pulse beat inside it.
Not sap. Not water.
A heart.
The Heartstone answered against her chest, stronger now, thud for thud.
She swallowed, tasting copper. “Portal. Right.”
The pendant warmed near Hel portals. That was what she knew. The unknown benefactor had given it to her with no instruction manual, no warranty, and no explanation beyond survival depending on it. If it pulsed here, then the grove did not matter. The flowers did not matter. The voices did not matter.
Somewhere inside the ring, a door had begun to open.
Aurora scanned the clearing.
The twelve oak stones leaned in. Wildflowers carpeted the ground. Roots twisted over roots, thick as sleeping serpents. At the centre, where the flowers grew densest, a bare patch of earth formed a perfect circle no wider than a dinner plate.
It had not been there when she fell.
The soil inside it sank a fraction.
Tick-tock.
A grain of dirt slid into the depression.
Tick-tock.
Another.
Aurora approached it with the branch raised.
The air above the bare circle trembled . Not much. Enough to distort the flowers behind it. The smell changed, honey and cut stems giving way to cold iron, old smoke, and something mineral, like a cellar flooded for years.
“Rory.”
Evan’s voice again, at her right.
“Don’t walk away from me.”
She kept her eyes on the sinking earth.
“Had a lot of practice.”
“You think London hid you?”
The words stroked the side of her face.
“You think a new flat over a bar and a little delivery job made you difficult to find?”
A shape moved between two oak stones.
Aurora saw a shoulder first. Then the side of a head. Human height. Human posture. Evan’s outline in the jacket he used to wear when he wanted strangers to think him gentle. He stood half in shadow, face lowered.
She hated that her body remembered him before her mind finished refusing him.
The branch dipped.
He lifted his head.
The face had no eyes.
Smooth skin stretched from brow to cheek. His mouth smiled wider than any mouth should, cutting towards the ears in a dark seam.
Aurora threw the branch.
It struck his chest and sank in as if into wet clay.
The thing wearing Evan’s shape looked down at the branch sticking from it. Its smile twitched.
“Temper.”
Aurora grabbed the nearest takeaway carton from the split bag at her feet and hurled it next. Black bean sauce burst across its face.
The creature shrieked.
Not pain, outrage. The sound scraped over the oak stones and sent the wildflowers thrashing. Where the sauce clung, the borrowed skin blistered and ran, revealing grey fibres beneath, tight as fungus under bark.
Aurora stared at the ruined carton in her hand.
“Yu-Fei’s going to put this on my payslip.”
The bare circle of earth collapsed inward with a soft gulp.
Cold rushed out.
The pendant flared. Crimson light flashed across the grove, and every oak stone cast a shadow in the wrong direction. Inside the small hole, darkness rotated. It looked thick. Oiled. Far too deep for the few inches of soil beneath it.
The thing in Evan’s shape tore the branch from its chest. No blood came. It dropped the wood and stepped into the clearing.
At the edge of Aurora’s sight, more shapes gathered.
Her mother’s height near the left stone.
A child beside the right, head cocked, hair hanging over its face.
A tall thin figure crouched among the flowers behind her, too many elbows folded against its ribs.
The grove had not been empty.
It had been polite.
Aurora crouched and seized the remaining delivery carton. Her fingers slipped on sauce. The pork bao still sat under the root. The phone in her pocket remained dead. The Heartstone burned hot enough to hurt.
“Come on, then.”
Evan’s mouth opened.
Her father’s voice came out.
“Argue your way out, counsel.”
That did it.
Aurora lunged, not at the creature, but at the bare circle . She ripped the pendant from around her neck. The silver chain snapped and stung the back of her neck. The Heartstone sat in her palm, a deep crimson eye, hot and bright and furious.
The hole widened.
Something breathed beneath the earth.
The exhale rose through the clearing and touched every flower at once. Petals blackened at their tips. Frost crept over the spilled rice. The oak stones gave a low wooden groan, bending further inward, as if bowing to whatever climbed towards them from below .
Aurora held the pendant over the hole.
All the shapes stopped.
Evan’s empty face tilted.
“Careful.”
Now the voice had no disguise. Dry leaves and old teeth. A thing that had learned speech by listening at graves.
“If that falls, little Carter, it calls what waits.”
Aurora’s fingers trembled around the Heartstone.
“Good to know.”
The creature took one smooth step.
“Give it here.”
“Convince me.”
“We wore the soft voices. We can wear the soft skins.”
Her mother’s shape smiled from the left.
“We know the doors into your rooms. The bar. The restaurant. The woman with red hair who says your name like a dare.”
Eva.
Aurora’s hand clenched.
The Heartstone’s heat bit into her palm, but she did not move it away from the hole.
The creature noticed.
Its smile thinned.
“Ah. There you are.”
The cold from the pit climbed her wrist. The crescent scar on her left wrist shone white, then red, then black at the edges, as if ink had entered the old wound. She sucked in a breath. Pain needled up her arm and settled behind her bright blue eyes.
The pendant pulsed .
The hole answered.
Below it, something knocked.
Once.
Every creature in the grove bowed its head.
A second knock followed.
Closer.
The oak stones cracked from base to crown, and pale light bled through the splits.
Aurora stepped back, but the soil under her boots softened. Flowers wrapped around her ankles. Thin stems, stronger than wire. She kicked one free, then another. More coiled up her calves.
Evan’s shape advanced, black sauce still burning through its false face.
“Last chance.”
Aurora looked at the takeaway bag, the broken branch, the ring of listening stones, the impossible hole opening at her feet.
Then she smiled with her teeth.
“You picked the wrong delivery girl.”
She dropped the Heartstone into the dark.
The grove inhaled.
For one perfect second, nothing happened.
Then a hand came out of the hole and caught her by the wrist.