AI The bike lock clicked shut around the frame of her delivery bike, a small metallic sound swallowed instantly by the dark.
Rory straightened, tucked a strand of straight black hair behind her ear, and looked at the trees. Richmond Park at night was never truly silent, but here, past the last of the streetlamps, the city’s hum had thinned to a distant whisper . Ahead, the path she’d found on Eva’s old hand-drawn map disappeared into a stand of oaks that looked older than the park itself.
She was five-foot-six, no match for a man like Evan, and no match either for whatever had taken Eva. The thought came cool and unhurried, the way most of her thoughts did when she was afraid . She had left Cardiff and the ghost of that relationship behind, fled to London because Eva had begged her to, and taken the room above Silas’ bar and the part-time shifts delivering for Yu-Fei Cheung’s Golden Empress because normal life was supposed to keep her steady. The Golden Empress logo was stitched on the sleeve of her jacket, faded from too many washes. It felt absurdly far away now.
Two nights ago, Eva’s phone had gone straight to voicemail. The last message on Rory’s phone was a voice note, thin with static, Eva’s voice cutting out after a single sentence: *If I’m not back by Friday—* and then nothing. Rory had listened to it so many times she could hear the exact shape of the silence afterward.
Yesterday, a package had arrived at the bar with no return address. Inside, on black velvet , lay a silver chain with a deep crimson gemstone the size of a thumbnail. The stone had a faint inner glow, like a banked coal. Stamped inside the lid of the box was a single word she didn’t recognize: Dymas. A folded slip of paper had held one line, typed and unsigned.
*Near a Hel portal, it will warm.*
Rory hadn’t understood the word *Hel *. She had looked it up in the quiet hours before dawn, while the bar slept below her, and wished she hadn’t. Underworld. Realm of the dead. She had told herself Eva wouldn’t go near anything like that.
Then, an hour ago, as she’d cycled toward the park gates, the pendant in her pocket had begun to pulse with warmth against her thigh.
She took it out now and slid the chain over her head. The crimson stone settled against her collarbone, warm and faintly glowing, and the warmth increased as she stepped off the path and into the trees.
The standing stones rose out of the dark without warning.
They were not stones at all, not really . Ancient oak standing stones, Eva had called them in the margins of the map, and the name fit. They were petrified trunks, bark ridges frozen in gray-brown rock, moss soft along their flanks. They stood in a wide ring, marking the boundary of a place that did not appear on any official park map. Isolde’s grove. The Fae Grove. Rory had thought it was a story.
She stopped between two of them.
The moment she crossed the line, the world changed.
The distant traffic did not fade. It stopped, severed, as though a door had closed behind her. The air grew still and cold, and yet all around her, spread across the forest floor in impossible abundance, wildflowers bloomed year-round. Pale blooms caught the light of her phone torch, white and blue and a deep red that matched the stone at her throat. They should have carried a scent. They carried nothing. Not rot, not perfume, not green life. Only a faint metallic tang, like the smell of a battery touched to the tongue.
Rory checked her phone. 10:15 p.m. No signal. The GPS spinner turned and turned and found nothing.
She looked up. The moon hung low and swollen, but the stars around it were wrong—too dense, too bright, arranged in patterns she was certain did not belong to any sky she knew.
“Okay,” she murmured. Her voice sounded small and close, as if the clearing had pressed in to listen. “Okay, Eva. I’m here.”
She moved forward, boots crushing flowers that did not spring back. The petals were cold to the touch, and a thin rime of frost feathered their edges.
Frost, in a place where flowers bloomed in every season.
Rory’s left wrist gave a faint throb , old and familiar , and she rubbed the small crescent-shaped scar there without thinking. A childhood accident, her mother had called it. It always ached when she was cold or frightened, and right now she was both.
The pendant pulsed again, warmer now. She pulled it free of her jacket and held it cupped in her palm. The crimson gem gave off its faint inner glow, and the warmth was unmistakable, a slow rhythm like a second heartbeat.
Near a Hel portal, it will warm.
This was supposed to be a Fae grove. A pocket between worlds, Eva had written once, half-drunk on wine and folklore. Not a place for the dead.
The frost thickened as she walked. The trees closed around her, oaks grown too tall and too close, their branches knitted overhead so that the moonlight came through in strips. Wildflowers gave way to a clear space at the center, ringed by more of the ancient oak stones. And in the middle of that ring, the air was broken.
It was not a door. It was a seam, a vertical fissure about the height of a person, rimed with frost and giving off a pale gray light that cast no warmth . The cold rolled off it in waves. The flowers nearest to it were blackened and frozen, their petals like brittle glass.
Rory stopped, every muscle in her body going still.
The pendant burned warm against her palm.
A sound came from behind her. A footstep, dry and deliberate, pressing down on loam that should have been too soft to make that sound .
She turned, snapping her torch beam around. Nothing. Only flowers, and the oak stones, and the dark between them. The footstep did not repeat.
Then, from deeper among the trees, a voice said, “Rory.”
It was Eva’s voice. Not a echo , not a trick of the wind. Warm, amused, the exact cadence she had used when they were eleven and hiding from the rain in the garden shed. *Rory, you came .*
Rory’s breath stopped. She did not answer.
Eva had sent her to the stones. Eva would not lurk in the dark and call her deeper without showing herself. And the voice had said *you came *, not *you found me *. As if it had been waiting.
Something moved at the edge of her vision.
She turned her head sharply , torch beam cutting across the grove. A shape passed behind one of the oaks—tall, narrow, jointed wrong, moving with a boneless ease that made her stomach turn. She swept the light back.
Only the trunk. Scarred bark, ridged and gray.
But as she watched, the scar pattern resolved into the shape of handprints. Too many of them, pressed into the wood at impossible heights, as though something very tall had leaned there again and again.
Rory backed away, one slow step at a time, forcing her breathing to stay even. She was good at this. She was good at keeping her head while everything else screamed. She had done it in Cardiff, in the flat with the door locked and Evan’s voice slurring on the other side, and she could do it here.
She tore a strip of reflective tape from the pocket of her delivery bag and tied it around the branch of a sapling, marking her path. Then she walked ten paces, looked back, and the tape was no longer behind her.
It was ahead of her, tied to a branch she had not yet reached, glinting faintly in the moonlight.
The grove had rearranged itself.
Her phone clock read 10:15. It flickered to 2:48. It flickered back to 10:15, and then to 3:00, and then settled on 10:15 again, the numbers swimming. Time moved differently here; an hour inside could be minutes or days outside. She had known that from Eva’s notes. Knowing it and standing inside it were two different things.
“Okay,” she said again, aloud, because the silence was too big. “Okay. Think.”
She walked toward the center, toward the seam of gray light, because the pendant was warmest there and because the fastest way out was often through the thing you feared. The frost crunched under her boots. The cold deepened until her breath came in visible clouds.
Step.
Step.
A third step, not hers, sounded a half-beat behind.
She stopped. The footsteps continued—one, two, three—and then stopped as well, as if whatever walked behind her had forgotten to mimic her stillness.
Rory closed her fingers around the pendant. The stone pulsed , warm and alive, and she did not look back.
“Rory,” the voice said, nearer now, right behind her left ear. “Help me.”
It was Eva’s voice. It was wrong. The tone was perfect , the warmth was perfect , but the breath behind it was not. There was no breath. There was only cold, and the faint smell of wet stone and old copper.
Rory’s eyes burned. She kept her face forward.
A figure stepped out from behind one of the oak stones.
It was roughly the shape of a person, but too tall, its limbs too long, its head tilted as though listening to something far away . Its face was a smooth pale oval, featureless except for a thin dark line where a mouth should be. It wore the shape of a body the way a hand wears a glove, badly, the joints bending in directions that made her teeth ache.
It raised one hand. Too many knuckles. It beckoned.
Two quick curls of the fingers.
Eva’s gesture. Exactly Eva’s gesture, the one she used when she wanted Rory to follow her into some stupid, wonderful trouble.
Rory’s mind rebelled. She dropped to her knees, ignoring the cold soaking through her jeans, and pressed her palm to the earth. She needed a trail, a direction, anything real. The loam was freezing , the frosted flowers brittle under her hand.
And there, beside her own crushed footprints, was a second set.
Bare feet. Narrow. Following in her exact steps, overlapping them, as though whatever walked with her had been inside her shadow the entire time. The frost around those prints had melted into perfect little pools, as if something burning had stood there.
She looked up.
The figure was closer now, the gray light of the seam limning its edges. It tilted its head the other way, and the thin line of its mouth opened.
“Rory,” it said, in her own voice this time. “Rory, turn around.”
She did not turn around. She did not scream. She got to her feet and ran.
Not toward the seam, not toward the figure or the voice or anything that wore Eva’s face. She turned her back on the gray light and ran toward the place where the pendant’s warmth was weakest, trusting the stone the way the card had told her to trust it more than her eyes.
The oaks blurred past. The frost thinned. Wildflowers gave way to ordinary grass, and the air grew suddenly , blessedly mild. She burst between two ancient oak standing stones and stumbled out onto the park path.
The world rushed back in.
Traffic hissed along the A3 in the distance. A fox barked, sharp and real. Wind stirred the branches above her with a normal, ragged sound. Rory fell to her hands and knees on the wet asphalt, gasping, her whole body shaking.
She was out.
For a long moment she stayed there, forehead pressed to the cold ground, the pendant lying against her collarbone. It was cold now. The crimson stone was dark, its glow extinguished. She laughed once, a short, ragged sound that was almost a sob.
Then she pushed herself up and checked her phone.
3:12 a.m.
The date beneath the time had skipped forward three days.
Rory stared at it, the breath hitching in her throat. She had been inside for twenty minutes. Maybe less. Outside, Friday had become Monday.
Her bike was gone . The lock was still fastened to the rack at the edge of the trees, empty, the frame long since taken by whoever had found it standing there for three days.
She got to her feet. Her legs held. She brushed crushed petals from her knees, her fingers catching on the crescent scar at her left wrist, and started walking toward the park gate and the streetlights beyond it, toward the all-night bus and Silas’ bar and the flat above it with a lock on the door.
She had left the grove. She was alive. It was enough.
She reached the gate, the streetlamp above her buzzing and flickering, and the crimson stone at her throat gave a single, faint pulse of warmth .
Rory stopped walking.
She told herself it was residual heat. The gem had been near a Hel portal; it was simply slow to cool. She told herself that, and she almost believed it, and then the warmth came again. Slow. Deliberate. Like a heartbeat syncing itself to her own.
From the shadows of the trees behind her, not Eva’s voice this time and not her own, something whispered her name.
“Rory.”
She did not look back. She started walking faster, the empty lane opening before her, the streetlights stretching her shadow long and thin across the pavement. The pendant glowed faintly beneath her jacket, warm against her skin, and the certainty settled cold and absolute in her gut.
She had left the grove.
She had not left alone.