AI The last delivery had taken Rory to a house on the edge of Richmond Park, though calling it a house was generous. It was a slab of smoked glass behind iron gates, every room lit and empty-looking, as if somebody had built a showroom and then forgotten to put people in it.
The woman who answered had not ordered anything.
She stood barefoot on the pale stone threshold, holding the Golden Empress receipt beneath the porch light. Her eyes moved from the name to Rory’s face and stayed there too long.
“No,” she said. “There’s no Isolde here.”
Rory had checked the address twice before leaving the restaurant. She checked it again while the woman watched.
“This is the postcode.”
“It’s the right postcode.” The woman handed back the receipt without touching Rory’s fingers. “But that name belongs farther in.”
“Farther into what?”
The woman looked past her, toward the park.
Then she closed the door.
That should have been the end of it. Rory had dealt with wrong addresses, prank orders, and customers too drunk to remember ordering six portions of dumplings. She should have carried the food back to her scooter, rung Yu-Fei, and called it a night.
Instead, beneath her coat, the pendant had grown warm.
It lay against her breastbone, a thumbnail of deep crimson stone on a silver chain. Its faint inner glow showed through the weave of her jumper when she cupped a hand over it. Until then, the Heartstone had been little more than an unanswered question given physical weight . An unknown benefactor, an artifact from somewhere called Dymas, and vague warnings about portals to Hel were not facts Rory enjoyed arranging into a coherent worldview.
The warmth had made the decision for her.
Now, twenty minutes later, she stood alone between black trees with a cooling delivery bag in one hand and her phone in the other, wondering whether stubbornness was simply stupidity with better posture.
The path had vanished behind her.
Not gradually. One moment she had been following a pale ribbon of dirt through winter grass; the next she looked back and found only bracken, thorn, and the close-packed trunks of ancient oaks. Her phone showed no signal. The map app placed her blue location dot in the Thames.
“Brilliant,” she murmured.
Her own voice seemed to travel too far.
It slipped between the trees and came back thinly from several directions.
Brilliant.
Brill—
—iant.
Rory stopped breathing.
The echoes faded. Nothing followed them.
She lowered the phone and listened.
Richmond Park at night should not have been silent. There should have been traffic beyond the walls, aircraft grinding toward Heathrow, foxes barking, deer moving through the undergrowth. Instead, the dark pressed close and soundless, dense as felt.
The pendant gave one soft pulse of heat.
Ahead, between two trunks, a white flower nodded.
There was no wind.
Rory approached it cautiously . The bloom resembled an anemone, though its petals were broader, waxy and luminous in the phone’s torch. Around it, pushing through dead leaves silvered with frost, grew bluebells, red campion, foxgloves and tiny yellow stars she could not name. Flowers from different seasons crowded together in profusion, all fresh, all open to the cold.
The flower nearest her turned.
Not bent. Turned.
Its pale face angled toward her hand.
Rory drew back. The other blossoms moved a moment later, hundreds of stems inclining with a soft, dry whisper .
Toward her.
She switched off the torch.
Darkness swallowed them.
For several seconds she saw nothing. Then the pendant’s crimson glow emerged beneath her coat, weak as an ember under ash. It painted her fingers red when she pulled it free.
The warmth was stronger now.
She remembered the receipt in her pocket.
ISOLDE, it said in Yu-Fei’s blocky handwriting. NO MUSHROOMS. EAST GATE. CASH.
The order itself was ordinary: chow mein, dumplings, steamed sea bass, two portions of rice. Too much food for one person, not enough for a party. The telephone number had rung out when Rory tried it at the locked park gate.
Then the gate had opened on its own.
A branch cracked behind her.
Rory turned.
Nothing stood among the trees.
The delivery bag dragged at her shoulder, suddenly absurd. She unzipped it and took out the long kitchen knife Yu-Fei used for slicing roast duck. She had slipped it under the foil containers before leaving the restaurant, an impulse she had not bothered examining.
The handle was greasy despite the cloth wrapped around it.
“Isolde?” she called.
Her voice did not echo this time.
Something answered from far ahead.
A woman, perhaps. One word, too blurred by distance to understand.
Rory waited.
The voice came again, closer.
“Rory.”
Cold tightened across her scalp.
No one connected with the order knew that name . The receipt said A. Carter beneath the restaurant details. Yu-Fei called her Aurora when she was annoyed and Miss Carter when she was furious . Strangers saw the name on her delivery badge and chose Aurora, Carter, or nothing at all.
“Who’s there?”
The trees gave no answer.
Then, behind her left shoulder, someone whispered, “Rory.”
She spun, knife raised.
A black shape slipped behind an oak.
Human height. Human speed. Gone before her eyes found its edges.
Rory backed away, keeping the knife forward. Her pulse hammered against the pendant. The stone answered with slow, measured warmth , a beat that did not match her own.
One.
Two.
Pause.
One.
Two.
Pause.
Like a second heart listening from beneath her skin.
She forced herself to think. Panic narrowed choices; Evan had taught her that much, though not on purpose. He had liked corners, doorframes, the cramped spaces beside furniture where there was no clean route past him. Rory had learned to look at knees, hands, exits. Not faces. Faces lied.
There. To the right, the trees thinned. Beyond them lay a paler darkness, perhaps open ground.
She moved toward it without turning her back on the oak.
Something paced her on the other side of the trunks.
She did not see it directly. A shoulder appeared at the edge of her vision, then vanished when she looked. A hand hung between two branches, fingers long and white, but proved to be strips of birch bark. Once she caught the shine of eyes at waist height. They blinked sideways and disappeared.
The delivery bag knocked against her hip.
From inside came a faint tap.
Rory froze.
Another tap.
Then three quick knocks from beneath the zipped lid.
She stared at the bag.
Steam no longer rose through its seams. The fabric had gone damp and cold, the red nylon darkened as though soaked from within.
Tap.
Tap.
The sound came from the bottom now.
She set the bag down carefully and stepped away.
The lid bulged upward.
Not much. An inch, perhaps. Then it settled. Something slid along the inside with the deliberate pressure of a fingertip tracing the zip.
Rory tightened her grip on the knife.
The zipper pull began to move.
Its metal teeth separated one by one.
She kicked the bag.
It struck a root, overturned, and burst open. Foil cartons tumbled across the leaves. Rice scattered in white clumps. A container split, releasing dark noodles that uncoiled in the red light.
Nothing else emerged.
Rory watched the food steam in the cold.
No. Not steam.
The grey wisps sank instead of rising. They poured over the cartons and curled along the ground, seeking hollows between roots.
A dumpling rolled toward her boot.
It stopped.
From the trees came a wet intake of breath.
All around her, something began to eat.
The sounds were quiet at first: a lipless smacking, a scrape of teeth on foil, the soft suction of mouths closing over food. Yet nothing touched the cartons. Rice vanished grain by grain. Noodles lifted at one end and slid into the leaves. The whole fish shuddered inside its broken container as neat bites appeared along its flank.
Rory did not wait to understand.
She ran.
Branches clawed at her coat. The phone torch bounced wildly, flashing trunks, flowers, patches of open dark. Behind her, the feeding stopped.
For one dreadful second there was silence .
Then the forest ran with her.
Footsteps thudded on both sides, too many to count. Leaves churned beneath invisible weight . Something crashed through bracken close enough to shower her with icy droplets. A voice laughed breathlessly behind her, using Eva’s laugh. Another called her name in her father’s courtroom baritone.
“Aurora.”
“Rory, wait.”
“Laila.”
That name struck like a hand between her shoulders. She stumbled, caught herself against an oak, and felt the small crescent scar on her left wrist burn where bark scraped it.
Nobody here should know that one.
Nobody in London knew all of them.
The pendant flared hot enough to sting. Crimson light leaked between her fingers and washed across the trunk.
It was not a tree.
For an instant she saw grey skin pulled taut over a tall, jointed shape. The ridged surface beneath her palm shifted like muscle. Far above, branches curled inward, hooked at their ends. A vertical seam opened in the trunk at eye level.
Behind it gleamed rows of small, wet lights.
Rory tore her hand away.
The oak was an oak again, bark solid beneath the red glow.
But every tree around her had turned slightly .
Their branches angled toward the path ahead.
Showing her the way, she thought.
Or herding her.
The footsteps had stopped. The thing using familiar voices spoke from directly behind her.
“Don’t run.”
It sounded like Rory.
She ran.
The trees fell away so abruptly she pitched onto her knees. The knife flew from her hand and landed among flowers.
She had reached a clearing.
Wildflowers covered it in thick, impossible colour: poppies, primroses, lavender, heather, white roses without thorns. Frost glittered between them. At the clearing’s boundary stood a ring of ancient oak stones—no, standing stones shaped like splintered trunks, their surfaces grooved and knotted as if wood had petrified in agony.
The air inside the ring smelled of rain and something sweetly rotten.
At its centre stood a woman in a white dress.
Her back was to Rory. Long hair hung to her waist, pale enough to shine under the moon. She was barefoot among the flowers.
Beside her sat a low table laid for two.
Plates. Silverware. Two empty cups.
“Isolde?” Rory said.
The woman tilted her head.
“You’re late.”
Her voice held no accent Rory could place. It seemed to come from the standing stones as well as the figure, each word arriving in a faint chorus.
Rory pushed herself upright. Blood beaded on one palm. “You ordered from the Golden Empress?”
“I invited you.”
The pendant throbbed with heat.
Beyond the woman, the air wavered . Rory had mistaken it for a bank of shadow at first, but now she saw a vertical darkness between two stones, narrow as a door ajar. No moonlight touched it. No stars appeared through it.
Something moved on the other side.
Not closer. Vastly far away, and yet aware.
The Heartstone’s glow strengthened until the flowers around Rory cast tiny red shadows.
The woman turned.
Her face was beautiful in the way a wax saint was beautiful: symmetrical, serene, and untouched by life. Her eyes were closed. Fine roots threaded beneath the translucent skin of her cheeks.
“You brought the Heartstone,” she said.
Rory bent slowly and retrieved the knife.
The woman smiled.
Her eyelids opened.
There were no eyes beneath them. Only dark hollows crowded with the same small, wet lights Rory had glimpsed inside the tree.
Behind Rory, footsteps entered the clearing.
One set. Then another. Then dozens, placing themselves carefully among the flowers.
She did not look back.
“How long have I been here?” Rory asked.
It was the only question that mattered enough to keep her voice steady.
Isolde’s smile widened a fraction. “That depends where you mean.”
In Rory’s pocket, her phone vibrated .
The sound startled the whole clearing.
Every flower snapped toward her. The footsteps halted. Isolde’s empty gaze dropped to Rory’s coat.
The phone vibrated again.
Signal, then.
Perhaps a call. Perhaps an alarm. Perhaps days of missed messages arriving at once.
Rory reached into her pocket without taking her eyes off Isolde.
The screen showed 3:17 a.m.
The date was six days later.
A message appeared from Eva.
POLICE FOUND YOUR SCOOTER. WHERE ARE YOU?
Then another, sent five days ago.
RORY PLEASE.
The screen flickered . The date changed again.
Three weeks.
Four months.
The battery indicator drained from eighty percent to one, then filled, then vanished. Photographs bloomed across the screen without her touching it: her flat above Silas’ bar covered in dust; Yu-Fei locking the Golden Empress; her mother older, weeping at a kitchen table in Cardiff; a headstone bearing AURORA JENNIFER CARTER.
The final image showed the clearing.
Rory stood in it with her back to the camera.
Something tall leaned over her shoulder.
The phone went black.
Warm breath touched the nape of her neck.
Rory kept her eyes on Isolde. She curled her bleeding palm around the Heartstone and felt its hard edge bite into the crescent scar at her wrist.
The dark doorway between the stones widened.
From within came a distant sound like iron dragged across frozen earth.
Isolde extended one hand toward the table.
“Sit,” she said. “Your food is getting cold.”
Behind Rory, in her own voice, the thing whispered, “And we have been waiting so long.”