AI Aurora found the first standing stone by walking into it.
Not hard enough to hurt. Her shoulder struck cold oak with a dull, fleshy thump, and she stumbled back into the wet grass, one hand clapped over her mouth to keep in the sharp sound that rose there.
For a second she stood perfectly still beneath the trees, listening.
Richmond Park at night had its own vocabulary. Wind worrying leaves. Distant traffic on the A3, softened to a constant low rush. The occasional crack of a branch settling under the weight of rainwater. A deer’s quick, delicate movement in the brush.
This was none of those.
Something had made a sound just after she hit the stone: a slow exhale from somewhere close behind her.
Aurora turned.
Her phone torch cut a narrow white wound through the dark. Bracken shone wetly. The trunks of the surrounding oaks stood close together, black and silver with rain. Nothing moved between them.
“Great,” she muttered.
Her voice came back differently.
Not an echo . Echoes had shape. They returned diminished, recognisable. This came back from the trees in a soft scatter of syllables, like several mouths trying and failing to say the word at once.
Great.
Aurora lowered the phone.
She had been in the Grove once before, in daylight, with a headache and a distinct sense that she was being watched by every flower in the clearing. In daylight it had been beautiful in the wrong way. Too green. Too vivid. Bluebells and foxgloves flowering beside winter-bare ferns, buttercups opening beneath the shadow of old branches. The air had smelled of honey and river mud.
Tonight, the narrow opening between the stones looked like a gap in a graveyard .
She should not have come alone.
The thought arrived with the flat certainty of a fact already entered into evidence. She had considered calling Eva. Considered waking Silas, or at least leaving him a note downstairs at the bar. But the Heartstone had begun warming against her chest shortly after midnight, its deep crimson centre brightening beneath her shirt. Not a hot-water-bottle warmth . Not anything comforting . It had felt like the palm of a fevered hand pressing steadily against her sternum.
She knew what that meant.
A Hel portal was close.
And she knew, with the instinctive dread of someone who had spent too long learning that impossible things were real, that a portal opening near London was not the sort of information best left until breakfast.
Aurora tucked her phone beneath her chin and pulled the Heartstone from under her collar. It hung on its silver chain, roughly the size of her thumbnail, dark red at first glance. But the colour moved under its surface. A dim ember throbbed somewhere inside the stone.
Warmth radiated into her fingertips.
“Fine,” she whispered. “You wanted to come here. We’re here.”
The pendant pulsed once.
Ahead, beyond the standing stone she had walked into, lay the Grove.
Aurora drew a breath and stepped through.
The change was so slight that she almost missed it.
The rain stopped touching her.
She heard it still, falling behind her in a steady patter, but the air inside the clearing had gone dry and close. Her trainers sank into moss instead of mud. The smell changed too. No wet pavement, no deer, no London. Only flowers, crushed leaves, and something metallic beneath it all.
The clearing opened around her.
Wildflowers carpeted the ground in impossible abundance. Pale anemones shivered beside crimson poppies. White blossoms crowded the roots of twisted oaks. Their colours showed clearly under no light Aurora could name. Above, the sky was a sealed black bowl without stars.
She turned to look back.
The standing stones were there, but the gap between them was gone .
Where the park should have been, there stood a wall of black thorn tangled thick as wire. Rain whispered beyond it, far away.
Aurora’s grip tightened around her phone.
“All right,” she said, because silence made her want to fill it. “That’s not ideal.”
The Grove did not answer.
She forced herself to think rather than panic. The boundary moved. That was established. The place existed between worlds, or beside them, or however one chose to describe something that did not care about being described . The stones would still be there. She only had to find them again.
First things first.
She checked her phone.
No signal. The battery, which had been at sixty-three percent when she left the flat above Silas’s bar, read eighty-one.
Aurora stared at it.
Then the number flickered .
79.
81.
79.
The screen went black.
Her reflection looked back at her for half a second: pale face, bright blue eyes wide in the dark, straight black hair damp around her jaw. Behind her reflection, something tall passed between two trees.
Aurora swung the phone around.
Nothing.
The torch came back on of its own accord, but the beam had weakened to a jaundiced smear. It reached the nearest flowers and no farther.
She slipped the phone into her pocket before she could watch it do anything else.
The Heartstone gave another pulse . Stronger this time.
It tugged at her attention, not physically, but with a pressure under her ribs . She turned slowly , following it. The warmth intensified when she faced the centre of the clearing.
A narrow path lay there.
She did not remember seeing it before. It wound between flowerbeds and under low branches, its surface made of flat, pale stones. No grass grew over them. No petals rested there.
The path looked swept.
Aurora stayed where she was.
Her father had once told her that bad legal arguments often depended on making people feel that a choice had already been made . The best response, he said, was to identify the false assumption.
The path wanted her to think she had to follow it.
She did not.
Instead, Aurora moved left, keeping the path in sight while circling the edge of the clearing. The pendant’s heat sharpened immediately, enough to make her suck in a breath. Beneath the flowers, a few yards ahead, something glowed red.
She stopped.
At first she thought it was another blossom. Then it blinked.
Not blinked. Closed.
An eye lay half-buried in the moss.
It was no larger than a coin, with a dark red iris and a milk-pale lid. Aurora watched it in stunned silence as the lid opened again. The eye rolled toward her. Its pupil widened.
A second eye opened beside it.
Then a third.
The moss shifted.
Aurora backed away so quickly her heel caught on a root. She windmilled her arms, recovered, and nearly laughed from the shock of it. The eyes did not rise. They simply watched from the ground, appearing one by one among the flowers.
The silver chain at her throat grew hot.
She looked down.
The Heartstone’s inner glow had changed. Thin crimson light leaked from a crack in the earth at the edge of the path.
There. That was the portal.
Or the beginning of one.
The crack was only a handspan long, almost invisible beneath a drift of white petals. Yet no ordinary darkness lay inside it. Aurora could see depth where there should have been soil. A grey landscape stretched below, veiled in fog. Something like a ruined arch stood at an impossible distance. She heard wind from the fissure, although the air in the Grove remained utterly still.
The flowers nearest the crack had gone black at the edges.
Aurora crouched, keeping well clear.
The pendant was burning now. She lifted it in one hand, and the crimson stone answered the glow below. A thread of red light extended from the Heartstone toward the fissure, thin as a vein beneath skin.
Her mouth went dry.
What exactly was she supposed to do with it?
An unknown benefactor had given her the pendant. No instructions. No helpful leaflet. No number to call in case of interdimensional rupture. Typical.
Behind her, someone said, “Rory?”
She froze.
The voice was Eva’s.
Not quite Eva’s voice. Close enough to reach straight through Aurora’s chest, but too careful around the edges. It held the shape of concern without any of its warmth .
“Rory,” it said again, softly . “Don’t touch it.”
Aurora did not turn.
Every muscle in her shoulders locked. The voice had come from the path.
“Eva?” she asked.
The clearing held still.
Then Eva laughed.
It was a good laugh. Bright, unguarded, familiar . Aurora had heard it in crowded pubs and on late-night calls and once, hysterically, after the two of them got locked in a university library archive cupboard for forty minutes.
But it ended wrong.
The sound kept going after the breath that made it should have run out. It thinned into a dry, scraping chatter.
Aurora stared into the crack in the ground.
“I know you’re not Eva.”
“Oh.” The voice sounded hurt. “That’s cruel.”
The flowers behind her rustled.
No wind moved them.
Aurora took the Heartstone off over her head. The silver chain snagged briefly in her hair. Her fingers trembled , though she made them work. The pendant hung above the fissure, its glow bright enough now to stain her skin red.
“What do you want?” she said.
The answer came from beneath her.
A whisper rose out of the crack, many voices layered together so tightly that she could not separate the words at first. Then they clarified.
“Home.”
The ground gave a small, sickening shudder.
The fissure widened by an inch.
Grey cold spilled across Aurora’s shoes. Frost crept over the moss in delicate white threads. Every eye in the flowerbed snapped toward the opening.
Aurora stood.
The thing beyond the crack wanted her afraid. It wanted her to turn around, to look at whatever wore Eva’s voice, to run blindly into a place that could fold the exit away from her forever.
Fine.
She was afraid .
Fear did not get to make decisions.
She looked at the Heartstone and thought of its warmth at the portal, the way it had led her here. A key, perhaps. Or a warning. Either way, it was connected .
The crack widened again.
This time, something pushed upward from the grey dark. Not a hand. It had too many joints, too many knuckles bending in the wrong places beneath a skin that looked like old paper soaked in water .
Aurora dropped the pendant into the fissure.
The reaction was immediate.
Crimson light erupted from the ground without sound. The pale hand recoiled. For one impossible instant, the Heartstone hung suspended in the red glare, spinning gently on its chain. Then the fissure pulled at it.
Aurora grabbed the chain.
Pain snapped up her arm. The portal tugged with a strength that yanked her forward onto one knee. Cold swallowed her hand to the wrist. In the red-lit depths below, the ruined arch loomed closer.
And figures stood beneath it.
Hundreds of them.
Waiting.
“Let go,” Eva’s voice said behind her.
Aurora clenched her teeth. Her left wrist burned where the silver chain cut across the small crescent scar from childhood. She dug her free hand into the moss and pulled.
Nothing.
The portal pulled back.
Her shoulder jerked toward the crack. The ground split another inch, and a smell rolled out: snow, ash, and something sweetly rotten.
Think.
Not strength. Leverage.
Aurora twisted, hooking the chain around the exposed root of the nearest oak. The bark was black and ridged, broad as a thigh. She looped it once, twice, then braced both feet against the earth and hauled down with all her weight .
The tree groaned.
Not wood. A deep, waking sound.
The entire Grove seemed to inhale.
The branches above shivered. Petals rained down—not gently, but in a sudden white torrent . They struck the fissure in spirals, caught in the red light, and vanished one by one. The eyes in the moss closed.
The hand emerged farther.
Aurora pulled harder.
The chain bit into the oak root. The pendant flashed.
A crack like thunder split the clearing.
The red light vanished.
Aurora fell backward into the flowers, clutching the chain against her chest.
For a moment she could not breathe.
Then rain struck her face.
Real rain. Cold, hard, unmistakable.
She opened her eyes.
The Grove had gone dark.
Not vanished. The standing stones still ringed the clearing, and the year-round flowers still spilled over the grass, but the strange colour had drained from them. Her phone lay beside her, its torch shining clean and white. Beyond the stones, Richmond Park waited in its ordinary midnight wetness.
The fissure was gone .
Only a dark scar remained in the soil.
Aurora pushed herself upright. Her knees shook. Mud streaked her palms. The Heartstone hung from the chain in her fist, no longer warm.
Behind her, from the far side of the clearing, Eva’s voice said very quietly, “Rory?”
Aurora did not look back.
She got to her feet and walked toward the standing stones. She walked faster when the voice called her name again. By the time she reached the boundary, it had begun using her mother’s voice instead.
The rain swallowed it before she made it to the road.