AI The standing stones had no business being in Richmond Park.
Aurora had passed this stretch of grass a dozen times on deliveries, sometimes in rain, sometimes under the hard white glare of summer, and the stones had never been there. They rose now from the fern-choked earth in a crooked ring, black and wet-looking despite the dry evening. Their surfaces crawled with pale veins that glimmered whenever she looked away.
Beyond them, the air shivered.
Rory touched the pendant at her throat. The thumbnail-sized crimson stone pulsed against her fingers, warm as a living thing. Its faint inner glow strengthened with every step she took toward the ring.
“Tell me again why we’re doing this,” she said.
Isolde Varga stood on the other side of the stones, silver hair spilling to her waist though there was no wind to move it. She wore a dark green dress that looked stitched from leaves and moonlight. Her pale lavender eyes rested on the pendant.
“Because the door has opened,” she said, “and doors dislike being left unattended.”
“That isn’t an answer.”
“It is the answer which has survived the journey.”
Rory sighed. “I hate your answers.”
“You hate the shape of them. The truth is rarely to blame for its clothing.”
Behind Rory, Nyx shifted in the deepening dusk. Their silhouette towered over her, a humanoid absence where the last light should have caught on a body. Violet eyes glimmered beneath the hoodlike darkness of their head.
“The rift is widening,” they whispered. Their voice seemed to come from the grass, the trees, the hollow beneath Rory’s ribs. “Something on the other side has noticed the Heartstone.”
Rory closed her hand around the pendant.
The crescent scar on her left wrist prickled. She had gotten it at eight years old, falling through a glass door while chasing a football. The mark had never hurt like this before.
Isolde looked toward the trees. “The feast has begun.”
“What feast?”
“The one that is hungry for guests.”
“Excellent. That clears everything up.”
She drew the Fae-forged blade from the sheath at her hip. The dagger was slender and leaf-shaped, forged from moonsilver so pale it seemed to hold its own winter. Cold leached through Rory’s glove when she accepted it. In the fading light, the edge gave off a faint blue gleam.
Isolde placed two fingers against the nearest standing stone.
The stone exhaled.
There was no other way to describe it. A long, subterranean breath rolled through the ring, lifting Rory’s hair and carrying the smell of wet soil, crushed grapes, and something sweet enough to make her teeth ache. The space between the stones folded inward. The park blurred, stretched, and peeled away like paint dissolving in rain.
Beyond it waited an amber sky.
Rory’s first thought was that London had caught fire.
The second was that fire did not usually hang overhead in a vast, unbroken vault, its light thick and honey-colored, with slow dark currents moving through it like storms beneath an ocean.
Isolde stepped through.
Her feet left no impression in the black soil on the other side.
Nyx followed, dissolving at the edges as they crossed the threshold. Rory stood alone between worlds, one boot on the damp earth of Richmond Park, the other on something warm and faintly yielding.
The pendant thudded against her sternum.
She stepped forward.
Heat closed around her. Not the dry blast of an oven, but a moist, perfumed warmth that settled over her skin like breath. The portal sealed behind her with a sound like a mouth clicking shut.
For several seconds she could hear nothing but her own breathing.
Then Dymas began to speak.
Vines rustled across hills that rose and fell in impossible terraces. Their leaves were broad as sails, veined with gold, and heavy with fruit. Orchards crowded the valley below, every tree bearing a different shape: translucent pears filled with blue sparks, red globes that beat slowly on their stems, clusters of black berries that whispered to one another in tiny voices.
Farther off, gardens climbed the slopes toward a city of pale towers. The towers leaned together like drunkards, connected by bridges that sagged beneath the weight of hanging gardens. Rivers of amber liquid cut through the land, steaming where they passed. Along their banks, statues of horned men and women held trays, goblets, and enormous spoons.
The air trembled with distant music.
Not a melody, exactly. More a chorus of clattering dishes, deep bells, laughter, and the occasional scream stretched thin enough to become part of the rhythm.
Rory tightened her grip on the dagger.
“What is this place?” she asked.
Isolde lifted her face to the amber sky. “A mouth with gardens for teeth.”
“Again, with the answers.”
Nyx turned toward the nearest orchard. Their shadow lengthened across the ground, though the light came from everywhere and nowhere. “Dymas.”
The name seemed to alter the landscape. The vines shuddered. Somewhere beneath the earth, something vast rolled over in its sleep.
Rory had expected Hel to be red. Fire, brimstone, iron gates. The sort of scenery designed by a churchman with a grudge.
Dymas was worse because it was beautiful.
Flowers bloomed in profusion among the vines—orchids with velvet throats, white lilies taller than Rory, tiny yellow blossoms that opened and closed in time with the distant music. Their scents layered over one another until her thoughts began to float. She caught herself staring at a tree whose fruit resembled polished human hearts.
“Don’t eat anything,” Isolde said.
“I wasn’t planning to.”
“Planning is a raft. Hunger is the tide.”
“I definitely hate your answers.”
They moved downhill.
The black soil gave slightly under Rory’s boots, warm as sunlit stone. It clung to the soles in glossy threads that tried to curl around her ankles. When she shook one loose, it recoiled into the ground.
Nyx walked beside her, solid now, though their outline rippled whenever the amber light struck. They kept glancing over their shoulder.
“Are we being followed?” Rory asked.
“Not yet.”
“Comforting.”
A bird called from the orchard. Its note began as a flute and ended as a child crying.
Rory looked up.
The creature perched on a branch above them, if creature was the word for it. It had a fox’s narrow face, a peacock’s fan of eyes, and six folded wings like black umbrellas. Its beak opened. Inside were rows of tiny human teeth.
It watched them pass.
At the edge of the orchard, they found a road paved with sugar-white bones.
Rory stopped.
Some were animal. Some weren’t.
The bones had been polished and fitted together with meticulous care, vertebrae forming gutters on either side. Between them, red flowers pushed through the gaps. Their petals bore the impression of fingerprints.
Isolde stepped onto the road without hesitation.
Rory remained where she was. “Are those—”
“Roads remember the feet that make them,” Isolde said.
“That wasn’t what I asked.”
“No. It was what the road asked.”
The pendant flared.
A pulse of warmth spread over Rory’s chest, and somewhere ahead, beyond the orchard, a low horn sounded. The road seemed to tilt toward the city.
Nyx’s hand closed around Rory’s arm. Their fingers were colder than the blade.
“Something has opened a second gate.”
“Where?”
They pointed past the trees.
At first Rory saw only a hill crowned by a ruined pavilion. Then the air beneath the pavilion rippled, revealing a vertical wound of darkness. Amber light bled around its edges. Through the opening came the wet, choking sound of hundreds of people trying to swallow at once.
The wound widened.
A gust rolled over them, carrying the smells of roasting meat, old wine, and human sweat.
Rory’s stomach clenched.
A shape moved inside the gate.
Isolde’s expression did not change, but her hand rose toward the moonsilver dagger. “We must reach the palace before the invitation is delivered.”
“What invitation?”
The flowers along the roadside turned their faces toward Rory.
All of them had eyes at their centers.
Isolde looked at her. “You.”
The gate snapped open.
Figures spilled from it—not running, because running implied panic, and these things had none. They came in a slow, confident procession. Men and women in stained finery, their mouths covered by silver masks shaped like goblets. Their limbs were too long. Their hands dragged along the ground, leaving trails of steaming liquid.
Behind them lumbered something enormous in a butcher’s apron.
Rory had time to see its three heads, each crowned with curling horns, before Nyx pulled her into the orchard.
“Down.”
They dropped behind a hedge of thorned vines. The thorns turned toward Rory, eager and pale.
“Don’t move,” Nyx whispered.
The procession passed twenty feet away.
One masked figure stopped.
Its head turned toward the hedge.
Rory could hear liquid sloshing behind its silver face. The scent of sweet wine thickened until her tongue felt numb. She pressed the dagger against her thigh, willing her fingers to stay still.
The figure took one step toward them.
Isolde’s hand appeared between the leaves. She held a single blue flower, its petals trembling.
“Look there,” she murmured.
The masked creature tilted its head.
The flower opened.
Inside it was a tiny doorway, and beyond the doorway a moonlit sea. The creature leaned closer. Its mask split with a delicate metallic chime. It reached for the bloom.
The flower swallowed its hand.
The thing recoiled. The vines surged up around its wrist, then its elbow, then its throat. It made no sound, but the other figures halted. The butchered giant raised one of its heads and sniffed.
“Now,” Isolde said.
They ran.
Rory sprinted through the orchard, branches whipping her face, the blade bright in her hand. Fruit burst beneath her boots, spilling hot violet juice that smoked against the soil. Behind them, the creatures began to move again. The ground shook beneath the butcher’s stride.
Ahead, the ruined pavilion waited at the top of the hill.
Its columns were made from stacked plates, each one cracked and stained. A roof of enormous copper leaves sagged overhead. At the center stood the second gate, its darkness pulsing like a heart.
The pendant burned against Rory’s skin.
“There!” Nyx pointed.
A narrow archway had appeared in the pavilion wall. It was sealed by a web of red light, thick as veins.
Rory understood without being told .
She drove the Fae blade into the ward.
Cold exploded up her arm. The red web shrieked. Lines of light snapped one by one, spraying sparks that smelled like cinnamon and blood . The dagger cut through the last strand.
The archway opened onto darkness.
Behind them, the orchard erupted.
Vines tore from the ground. The masked figures surged over the hill, silver goblets gleaming . The three-headed butcher lifted a cleaver the size of a door.
Rory stumbled through the arch.
Nyx followed, dragging Isolde by the wrist.
The darkness swallowed them.
For one breath, Rory felt nothing—no ground, no heat, no body. She floated inside a space that pressed close from every direction, filled with distant breathing and the murmur of voices speaking her name in languages she did not know.
Then stone struck her knees.
She landed in a vast underground hall.
The walls rose beyond the reach of sight, carved with scenes of feasts, harvests, and kneeling figures offering their hearts on silver platters. Golden roots pierced the ceiling. Between them hung chandeliers made from thousands of tiny glass jars, each holding a flickering flame.
At the far end of the hall stood a pair of black doors.
They were carved in the shape of open mouths.
The gate behind Rory vanished.
For a moment, no one spoke.
Then, from beyond the doors, something knocked.
Once.
Twice.
Three times.
The sound traveled through the ancient stone and settled in Rory’s bones.
The Heartstone gave one slow, answering pulse .
Nyx’s violet eyes fixed on the doors. Isolde raised her silver hair from where it had caught beneath her collar and looked toward the dark.
“The palace has tasted the living,” she said.
Rory got to her feet, blade still cold in her hand.
“And what does it want?”
Isolde smiled without warmth .
“A second course.”