AI By the time Rory found the first oak stone, the torch on her phone had begun to dim.
It stood shoulder-high among the bracken, pale beneath a skin of lichen, though it had never been stone. The grain showed through where rain had stripped the moss away: wood greyed and hardened with such age that it might have been dug from a grave . No branches. No roots. Just a narrow oak pillar sunk upright in the earth.
Rory stopped three paces from it.
Behind her, Richmond Park lay drowned in mist. The path had vanished almost as soon as she left it. She could still smell wet tarmac somewhere beneath the richer scents of soil and leaf mould, but the city itself had disappeared. No lamps. No traffic. No aircraft passing overhead. London had not grown quiet; it had ceased to exist.
Her phone showed 11:47.
No signal.
The message that had brought her here remained open on the screen.
COME ALONE. RICHMOND GROVE. BEFORE MIDNIGHT.
Beneath it was a photograph of the pendant she wore under her coat, laid against a square of black velvet . The photograph had arrived at eight that evening from an unknown number. There had been no reply when she called, and her messages had remained undelivered.
She had nearly ignored it. Any sensible woman would have. Any woman who had learned the price of following cryptic orders from people who hid their names would have deleted the message and locked the door.
But the photograph had shown a detail she had never noticed: three minute scratches on the Heartstone’s silver setting, like claw marks. When she checked, they were there.
Now the pendant rested against her breastbone, warm enough to feel through her jumper.
Rory tucked the phone into her pocket and looked around. “I’m here.”
Her voice travelled only a few feet before the mist swallowed it.
Nothing answered.
She moved past the pillar.
The mist thinned abruptly. One step took her from dripping bracken into a moonlit clearing that could not possibly have fit among the trees she had crossed.
Wildflowers rose to her knees.
Bluebells, poppies, foxgloves and snowdrops crowded together in impossible bloom, their colours muted under the moon. A ring of ancient oak pillars enclosed them. Beyond the ring stood a forest of black trunks, close-packed and perfectly still.
The moon hung enormous above the clearing.
Rory looked back.
The way she had entered was gone .
Oak pillars curved behind her in an unbroken boundary, each one leaning slightly inward. Between them, thorn bushes braided themselves into a wall. Wet leaves shone like lacquer.
“All right,” she murmured. “That’s inconvenient.”
She forced herself not to reach for the thorns. Panic liked action, even stupid action. It would have her tearing her hands open on brambles just to prove there was something she could touch.
Instead, she counted the pillars.
Thirteen.
She counted again.
Fourteen.
Rory lowered her phone.
The flowers stirred around her boots.
There was no wind.
The motion began near the boundary and passed through the clearing in a widening curve, stems bending one after another as though something low and broad moved beneath them. It circled her once. The snowdrops nearest her dipped their white heads.
Then everything went still.
The Heartstone pulsed .
Not brightly. Its faint glow did not escape her coat. But warmth spread over her skin in a slow beat, paused, then came again.
A heartbeat.
Rory drew the pendant out by its silver chain. The crimson gemstone was roughly the size of her thumbnail, its depths lit by a dull inner spark.
“You got me into this,” she whispered.
The stone warmed again.
From the trees came the sound of a child laughing.
Rory’s fingers closed around the pendant.
It was a small laugh, breathless with the effort of trying not to be heard. The kind that slipped out during hide-and-seek when hiding had become unbearable.
It came from her left.
She turned slowly, sweeping her phone’s torch across the boundary. Light struck oak, thorns and glossy leaves. Nothing moved.
“Hello?”
The laugh came again behind her.
Closer.
Rory pivoted.
The flowers nodded in a straight line from her feet to the far side of the clearing.
There, between two pillars, stood a woman.
She was too distant for Rory to see her face. Black hair fell to her shoulders. Her dark coat hung open. One arm rested at her side while the other bent across her chest, fist closed around something at her throat.
Rory did not move.
The woman did not move.
They were the same height.
A pulse of warmth struck Rory’s palm.
“Who are you?”
The woman tilted her head.
Rory’s torch flickered . Darkness swallowed the clearing for half a second, and when the light steadied, the gap between the pillars was empty.
A soft pressure touched Rory’s left wrist.
She recoiled so hard the chain bit into her neck. Nothing stood beside her. Only a foxglove brushed her sleeve, its bells trembling.
Her crescent-shaped scar tingled.
Rory rubbed it with her thumb and listened.
At first she heard nothing. Then, below the faint rasp of her own breathing, came another breath.
In.
Out.
Measured. Patient.
She held her breath.
The other breathing continued.
It came from among the flowers behind her.
Rory kept her face forward. Her body wanted to turn; every muscle tightened for it. She resisted. If someone crouched there, she would hear cloth shift or stems break. If it was not someone, turning would not improve matters.
The breath drew nearer.
In.
Out.
Flowers whispered against something passing through them.
Rory slipped her free hand into her coat pocket. Her fingers found her keys. She threaded one between her knuckles, aware of how pathetic it was. Brass against whatever ruled this place.
The whisper stopped.
A voice spoke directly behind her.
“Rory.”
It was Eva’s voice.
For one terrible instant, relief loosened something inside her. The reaction came before thought, warm and instinctive.
Then sense returned.
Eva had never called her name like that. She clipped the first syllable when she was annoyed , stretched it when amused. The voice behind Rory had produced a perfect sound without knowing how it lived in a mouth.
“Turn around,” it said.
Rory stared at the nearest pillar. Knots twisted across its surface in shapes almost like shut eyes.
“Eva doesn’t know I’m here.”
A pause.
“She will.”
The voice changed on the last word. It deepened, then split into two tones speaking at once.
Rory ran.
She did not aim for the place where she had entered. The boundary was a trap, and the thing behind her wanted her looking backward. She cut across the clearing instead, driving through waist-high flowers toward the opposite side.
Nothing chased her.
That frightened her more.
Her boots crushed petals. Poppies slapped against her thighs. The phone beam bounced wildly, showing flashes of white stems and black earth. The far pillars seemed no closer.
She looked down to choose her footing and saw no soil beneath the flowers.
They grew from darkness.
Not shadow. Not earth. An absolute black lay between the stems, depthless as a night sky without stars. Her boot struck something solid, but when she lifted it, pale fingers withdrew beneath the blossoms.
Rory stumbled, caught herself, and kept moving.
The moon had shifted. It hung in front of her now, low between the pillars, though she had been running in a straight line.
Her phone vibrated .
The shock almost made her drop it.
A call lit the screen.
MUM.
Signal bars remained empty.
Rory’s pace faltered. The phone kept ringing. Her mother’s photograph smiled up from the display, taken in the Cardiff garden last summer, cheeks pink from wine and wind.
She declined the call.
It rang again at once.
MUM.
The flowers around her bent inward.
Rory stopped.
The ringing cut off.
A voicemail notification appeared.
She did not touch it. The message began playing anyway.
Static hissed through the speaker. Then came her mother’s voice, small and shaking.
“Aurora? Where are you?”
Rory’s throat tightened.
“Don’t listen,” she told herself.
“There’s someone at the door.”
A knock sounded on the voicemail.
Three slow blows.
The same three blows came from the oak pillar directly ahead of Rory.
The wood shuddered with each one.
Her mother whispered, “He says he knows you.”
Rory switched off the phone.
Darkness closed around her.
For several seconds she saw only the Heartstone, crimson light leaking between her fingers. Its warmth had become painful, each pulse a bite against her palm.
Something knocked from inside the pillar.
Once.
Twice.
Three times.
Then all the pillars answered.
The clearing filled with hollow blows, circling her in a ragged rhythm. Thirteen. Fourteen. Twenty. Too many to count. The ground trembled under her boots.
Rory pulled the chain over her head and held the pendant in front of her. Its glow strengthened, painting the nearest flowers red.
The knocking stopped.
In the silence that followed, she heard footsteps .
They approached from the dark beyond the boundary.
Crunch. Drag.
Crunch. Drag.
Not on leaves. On gravel, perhaps, though there was no gravel here.
Rory turned with the sound, keeping the pendant raised. A shape moved between the trunks outside the clearing, tall enough that its head should have caught the moonlight. It did not. Darkness clung to it like wet cloth.
Crunch. Drag.
It passed one gap.
Then the next.
It was circling , testing the boundary.
The Heartstone pulsed faster. Not a heartbeat now. A warning.
Rory watched the shape disappear behind an oak pillar and waited for it to emerge on the other side.
It did not.
Something touched the back of her coat.
She spun and slashed with the key.
Empty air.
Her phone lay among the flowers three feet away, though she had been holding it a moment before. Its screen glowed.
11:47.
The time had not changed.
Beside the phone, the flowers had been pressed flat in the shape of a body. Head, shoulders, arms. The impression lay as if someone invisible rested there, face turned toward her.
A dent formed where its mouth would be.
“Malphora,” it whispered.
The name moved through the grove.
Leaves repeated it. Bark creaked it. The flowers brushed the syllables against one another.
Rory stepped back. “That isn’t my name.”
The body-shaped hollow sat up.
Flowers slid from invisible shoulders. The air warped, revealing an outline by absence: a crouched figure, narrow and long-limbed.
“Laila,” it said.
“No.”
It rose.
“Aurora.”
That one landed differently. Not because it was hers, but because of the way the thing spoke it—with possession, as though naming were a hand closing around her throat.
Rory lifted the pendant higher.
The figure recoiled.
At once, she understood.
It did not fear the stone. It feared what the stone meant. The heat, the pulse , the crimson light—near a portal. Somewhere in this grove, Hel pressed close enough to make the Heartstone burn.
And if there was a door, there might be a way out.
Rory turned slowly , watching the pendant. Its glow remained steady when she faced the pillars. Dimmed toward the trees. Brightened when she aimed it down.
Beneath the flowers.
The invisible figure shifted beside her.
“You came alone,” it said.
Rory crouched and swept the blossoms apart. The stems resisted, twining around her wrists, but she tore them free. Beneath them lay black earth after all, hard and cold.
A thin red line shone through it.
She dug with the key. Soil packed beneath her nails. The line widened into a crack no thicker than thread, glowing with the same deep crimson as the pendant.
The figure stepped closer. Flowers flattened under its feet.
“You were asked to come alone.”
“Not by you.”
The soil around the crack quivered . Heat rose from it, carrying a smell of iron, winter air and something ancient sealed underground.
Rory pressed the Heartstone against the line.
The grove screamed.
Not one voice. Hundreds. Children, women, animals, timber splitting in fire. The sound struck her skull and drove her to one knee. Oak pillars bent inward. Faces swelled beneath their bark, mouths open, eyes rolling under the grain.
The invisible thing lunged.
Rory saw it only because crimson light poured through it. For an instant it became transparent flesh wrapped around a hollow shaped like a person. It had no organs, no bones. Only teeth suspended where its chest should have been.
She thrust the pendant into the crack.
The earth opened.
Cold erupted beneath her, wrenching the breath from her lungs. The flowers folded into the widening seam. The thing seized her left wrist.
Its grip felt almost human.
The crescent scar blazed.
Rory drove the key into the place where its hand should be. There was no resistance, but the outline jerked. Its grip loosened just enough.
She tore free and threw herself toward the opening.
For one suspended moment she saw what lay below: a red-lit passage descending between walls of black ice, too narrow for comfort, too deep for reason. Shadows moved far beneath, slow as bodies under frozen water.
Not safety.
But not the grove.
Rory grabbed the pendant and rolled across the crack as the earth convulsed. Cold swallowed her. Behind her, the thing shrieked her names in voices stolen from everyone she loved.
Then she struck wet ground.
Her phone landed beside her with a soft thump.
Mist drifted through bracken. Somewhere far off, traffic murmured. Rory lay gasping beneath the first oak pillar, one hand clenched around the hot pendant.
The screen showed 11:46.
A minute before she had arrived.
Rory pushed herself upright.
Her wrist bore a ring of dark impressions, five long fingers laid over the crescent scar.
From the other side of the oak pillar came the sound of quiet breathing.
In.
Out.
Rory froze.
Her phone vibrated .
A new message filled the screen.
YOU DIDN’T COME ALONE.