AI The iron gates of Richmond Park had been locked hours ago, but Rory knew the gaps in the thorn hedges near the Queen’s Road. She walked with the steady, quiet pace of someone used to navigating London’s dark corners. But Richmond Park at two in the morning was a different breed of dark. Here, away from the sodium glow of the streetlights, the night was thick and heavy, smelling of wet bracken, decaying oak leaves, and the cold, clean scent of approaching winter.
She kept one hand buried deep in her trench coat pocket, her fingers curled around the tiny, hard weight of her phone. With her other hand, she adjusted the collar of her jumper, her thumb brushing against the crescent-shaped scar on her left wrist. It was a nervous, childhood habit, a physical anchor she returned to whenever her mind began to spiral. And tonight, it was spiraling .
Rory was not a person prone to flights of fancy. She was cool-headed, logical, a Cardiff-born pre-law student who had learned the hard way that the world ran on hard facts and bitter truths. But the Heartstone pendant resting against her collarbone defied every rule of logic she had ever mastered.
Right now, the thumbnail-sized crimson gem was warm. Not the ambient warmth of body heat, but a distinct, rhythmic throb , like a tiny, buried heart beating against her breastbone. It cast a faint, blood-red glow through the weave of her knitted jumper, a minuscule beacon in the sprawling dark of the park.
She was looking for the grove. The instructions had been vague, whispered of in backroom rumors at Silas’s bar, but the map in her mind was clear enough.
The transition was sudden. One moment she was navigating a muddy path between skeletal hawthorn bushes, and the next, the ground beneath her boots flattened. The air grew abruptly, inexplicably sweet.
Rory stopped. Before her stood the ancient oaks. They didn't grow like normal trees; they rose from the earth in a perfect , deliberate circle, their gnarled trunks twisted and scarred like ancient stone monoliths. They marked the boundary of the Fae Grove.
She stepped between two massive, moss-draped trunks.
Immediately, the ambient hum of London—the distant, comforting drone of the Heathrow flight path and the low rumble of the A307—evaporated. The silence that replaced it was absolute, heavy enough to press against her eardrums like deep water.
And then there were the flowers.
Rory looked down, her bright blue eyes widening. It was November, yet the floor of the clearing was a riot of color. Bluebells, wild primroses, and anemones carpeted the earth, their petals open and vibrant in the gloom . They shouldn't be here. They shouldn't be blooming in the frost. The scent was cloying , a suffocating mix of honey and jasmine, but underneath it lay a sharper, metallic tang that tasted like copper on the back of her tongue.
She pulled her phone from her pocket to check the time. The screen illuminated her face, casting sharp shadows across her straight, shoulder-length black hair. The digital clock read 02:14.
She stood frozen, waiting for the minute to change. She counted the seconds in her head. Sixty. Eighty. One hundred.
The screen still read 02:14. The tiny colon between the numbers didn't even flash. It was frozen, a static monument to a dead moment.
"Okay," Rory whispered, her voice sounding flat and alarmingly small in the vast quiet. "Time moves differently. You knew this."
She put the phone away. The pendant on her chest flared, its crimson light shifting from a faint glow to a sharp, pulsing glare. The warmth was turning into a dry, stinging heat. It felt like holding a hot mug of tea too close to bare skin.
She walked toward the center of the clearing, her boots leaving temporary depressions in the unnaturally springy turf. As she moved, she felt a creeping sensation crawl up the back of her neck—the unmistakable, prickling certainty of a gaze resting on her shoulders.
Rory stopped and spun around.
The grove was empty. The ancient oak standing stones loomed silent and still. But out of the corner of her eye, just at the periphery of her vision, a shadow seemed to slide behind the trunk of a massive oak. It wasn't the slow, casting shadow of a swaying branch. It was a fluid, deliberate movement, like a black ribbon being pulled into a drawer.
When she stared directly at the tree, there was nothing. Only the rough, gray bark and the climbing ivy.
"Who's there?" she called out.
No answer. The silence of the grove seemed to mock her, swallowing her voice before it could even echo .
She took a breath, trying to steady her racing pulse . She was Rory Carter. She had survived Cardiff, she had survived Evan, she was surviving London. She didn't scare easily. But the air in the grove was changing. It was growing colder, yet the wildflowers at her feet did not wither. Instead, they seemed to tilt.
She looked down and felt a cold spike of dread drive into her stomach .
The flowers were turning . Slowly, almost imperceptibly, their delicate heads were rotating on their stems. They weren't tracking the moon, which was obscured by thick clouds. They were tracking her. Hundreds of tiny, pale faces, swiveling in perfect unison as she took a tentative step to the left.
A sound broke the quiet.
It wasn't a growl or a footstep. It was a domestic, horribly familiar sound. The soft, rhythmic dragging of a heavy broom sweeping over dry concrete. *Shhhk. Shhhk. Shhhk.*
It was the sound she made every Sunday night, sweeping the kitchen of the Golden Empress after the last deliveries were done. But there was no concrete here. There were no brooms.
The dragging sound seemed to come from everywhere and nowhere at once, bouncing off the inner circle of the oaks.
*Shhhk. Shhhk.*
Beneath her clothes, the Heartstone pendant was now scalding. Rory gasped, clutching her hand over her jumper to pull the metal away from her skin. The silver chain was hot enough to burn, and the crimson gemstone was flashing frantically, casting long, jerky shadows across the clearing.
Near a Hel portal, it pulses.
The realization hit her like a physical blow. The pendant wasn't warning her of a danger she had stumbled into. It was reacting to something that was actively opening .
In the very center of the grove, the air began to warp.
The starlight distorted, bending around an invisible point like water swirling down a drain. A thin, vertical line appeared in the empty air, no thicker than a pencil lead. It bled a profound , absolute darkness—a cold so intense that the cloying perfume of the wildflowers was instantly replaced by the smell of stagnant water and old, dead earth.
The dragging sound stopped.
Rory took a step back, her mind screaming at her to run. But when she looked behind her, the gap between the two oaks she had entered through was gone . The trees had drawn closer together, their branches lacing into an impenetrable wall of thorns and ancient wood. The perimeter had sealed.
The vertical line in the air widened. It didn't open like a door; it peeled back, like a tear in wet paper.
Something was on the other side.
Rory couldn't see it, but she could see the shape of its pressure against the boundary of the realm. A bulge appeared in the empty space, a smooth, rounded indentation that looked terrifyingly like a face pressing against a sheet of thin plastic.
"Rory..."
The whisper didn't come from the tear. It came from the trees. It was her own voice, but pitched slightly lower, warped and stretched out.
"Rory, let us in."
She gripped her left wrist, her fingernails digging into the crescent scar until she felt the sharp prick of pain. The pain grounded her. It was real. The scar was real. She was real.
She looked at the blazing crimson stone on her chest. The heat was agony, but she forced her hand over it, wrapping her fingers tightly around the burning gemstone.
"No," she whispered.
The white-hot pain of the silver chain burning into her palm sheared through the illusion of the grove. The whispering voices turned into a collective, frustrated sigh that rustled the canopy above.
She didn't try to climb the thorn wall. Rory used her brain. If the space inside the grove was a pocket, the boundaries weren't physical—they were conceptual. The trees wanted her to think she was trapped.
She closed her eyes, shutting out the sight of the bulging tear in the air, the turning flowers, and the shifting shadows. She focused entirely on the pain in her hand, the smell of the damp London November outside the bubble, and the solid, heavy reality of her own boots.
She took three steps backward, ignoring the way the spongy ground seemed to pull at her heels, trying to drag her down.
She braced for impact, expecting her spine to hit the rough bark of the oak barrier.
Instead, she fell.
The air rushed past her, suddenly cold and wet. Her back hit the hard, muddy slope of a ditch, and she tumbled upward, her hands scraping against dead bracken and sharp twigs.
Rory lay there for a second, her chest heaving, staring up at the sky.
The clouds had parted. High above, the steady flashing lights of a commercial airliner blinked as it drifted toward Heathrow. In the distance, the low, comforting hum of the A307 drifted through the damp air.
She looked down at her hand.
The Heartstone pendant was cold again, resting quietly against her chest, its crimson light faded to a dull, dormant glow. But when she unfolded her fingers, a perfect , circular red burn sat in the center of her palm.
Rory stood up slowly , her legs shaking under her coat. She didn't look back at the oaks. She turned her collar up against the wind, tucked her injured hand into her pocket, and began the long walk back to the road.