AI The message had said midnight, but it was already ten past one by the time Rory locked her bike to the fence at the edge of Richmond Park.
She had come straight from her shift at Yu-Fei Cheung's Golden Empress, the insulated jacket with its little gold crown still smelling of chili oil and fried garlic. Under it, on its silver chain, the Heartstone Pendant pulsed a slow warmth against her sternum, the deep crimson stone glowing faintly, the size of a thumbnail, like a coal that refused to die.
The text had come tonight, from Eva's number, though Eva had been missing for three days.
Isolde's Grove. Midnight. Come alone. Please.
Rory had shown it to no one. Not Silas downstairs, not the police who had taken the missing-person report with bored, tired eyes. The last ping on Eva's phone had bounced off a mast near this part of the park, and the pendant had been growing warmer every hour since. She had fled Cardiff for London at Eva's urging, leaving behind an ex named Evan whose temper had taught her the exact weight of a closed fist. She had thought she knew what fear smelled like . She had thought she had learned to walk away from a threat before it knew her name.
Apparently, she had been wrong about that too.
The park gates stood open, though a sign declared they locked at dusk. Rory propped her bike against the fence and left it there, the chain looped through the frame. The tarmac path beyond was slick with a warmth that felt wrong for late November. The air hung heavy, almost summery, pressing against her skin like a hand. Her straight black hair, still tucked into the collar of her jacket, brushed her jaw as she turned her head, bright blue eyes scanning the dark.
Something was already off, and she had not even reached the trees.
There was no traffic. Richmond Park sat in the crook of the city, close enough to the roads that she should have heard the distant rush of the A3, the occasional groan of a night bus, the thin whine of a plane coming in to land. Instead, there was only a thick, padded silence , the kind that made her ears ring. She told herself it was the hour. She told herself a lot of things as she started walking, and none of them quite fit.
The path narrowed. Ancient oaks rose on either side, their branches interlaced overhead until the moonlight came through in slats. Then, ahead, she saw them.
The ancient oak standing stones marked the boundary of the Grove.
They were not rocks so much as petrified trunks, pale as bone in the moonlight, veined and gnarled, standing in a broken ring. Eva had filled notebooks with stories about this place, a pocket folded between the earth and the Fae, where time slipped and the wildflowers never knew winter. Rory had humored her, the way you humor someone you love. She had never believed a word of it.
She believed in it now.
She stepped between two of the stones.
The air changed at once. It thickened, warm and humid, carrying the scent of green stems and something cloying underneath, like lilies left too long in a funeral parlor. At her feet, wildflowers bloomed in a lush carpet despite the season: primrose, bluebell, vetch, their colors too saturated, too alive under the moon. She raised her left hand without realizing she had meant to, and touched the small crescent-shaped scar on her wrist, a childhood accident she had carried for twenty years. The scar throbbed faintly, as if it remembered something she did not.
The silence deepened. Then, somewhere beyond the trees, a swing creaked.
It was a slow, regular squeal of chain on metal, the sound of a playground where there was no playground. Rory froze. The creaking stopped. She waited, breath held, her pulse knocking against the base of her throat. A moment later, fainter and utterly impossible, came the tinny chime of an ice-cream van, playing a lullaby. The melody cut off mid-note, as though someone had snapped the wire.
Her mouth was dry. "Eva?" she called.
The word fell dead at her feet. It did not carry. The Grove swallowed sound the way the dark swallowed the path behind her.
She moved deeper into the clearing, and the Heartstone Pendant grew warmer against her chest, then hot enough that she hissed and pulled it free of her jacket. The silver chain slid through her fingers. The crimson stone had a faint inner glow, like something alive trapped inside glass. It always pulsed when a Hel portal was near. The card that had come with it—the only thing the unknown benefactor had left inside that plain black box—had said: Trust the warmth . It will show you the door.
Rory had assumed it meant a way out.
She had never dreamed the door might be a mouth.
She checked her phone. No signal. The time read 1:12. She was certain she had arrived at 1:10, and she had been walking for what felt like the better part of an hour; her legs ached with it, her breath came short. Yet the moon had not moved a finger's width. It hung low and fat and exactly the same as when she first stepped through the stones.
An hour inside could be minutes outside, or days. Eva had written that in her neat, looping handwriting. Rory had laughed at it. She was not laughing now.
A flicker of yellow moved at the corner of her eye—Eva's raincoat, the one she had worn the last time they stood in this park together. Rory turned fast.
Nothing. Only wildflowers nodding, though no wind had risen to move them.
She took a step toward the place where the yellow had been, and stopped. The blossoms there were crushed in a body-shaped depression, the stems flattened and bruised, the color already bleeding to black. She knelt and pressed her fingers to the ruined flowers. They were warm. Not the sunless warmth of the earth, but the lingering heat of something that had been lying there only moments before, wearing Eva's shape.
No footprints led away.
Rory straightened slowly , the pendant burning in her fist. She had not been brought here to find Eva. The warmth in her hand was not a beacon pointing to her friend; it was a homing signal, and she was the one being drawn in. She understood that with a cold, clear click in her mind, the way she understood a lock giving way under the right pick.
Between two of the standing stones, the air had torn open.
A vertical seam of crimson light hung in the dark, the exact shade of the Heartstone, its edges shimmering like heat on tarmac. Frost rimed the wildflowers at its base, though the air was warm enough to make her skin prickle with sweat. The portal pulsed in time with the stone, a slow, hunger-like beat, and from it came the sound of breathing.
Not hers.
Soft, moist inhalation, like something sniffing the air of the clearing.
Then the voices began.
They came from the seam, layered over one another, too many mouths shaping the same name. "Rory." A pause. "Aurora." Another, closer. "Laila."
Rory flinched so hard her teeth clicked. No one had called her Laila since she was a child in Cardiff, before the accident that had left the crescent scar on her wrist. Mother's old pet name, buried with a hundred other things she had left behind. The scar burned as if the name had touched it.
At the corners of her vision, things moved.
They were tall and far too thin, with limbs that bent the wrong way, staying just outside the range of direct sight. Whenever she turned her head, they were gone , replaced by the sway of blossoms and the shudder of shadow. But she could feel them circling, patient as spiders.
The yellow raincoat stood at the far side of the clearing.
It was Eva, and it was not. She wore the yellow dress she had loved in summer, bare arms pale in the moonlight, dark hair loose. But the wildflowers had already begun to grow around her ankles and calves, twining up her shins as if the Grove were slowly reclaiming the shape it had lent. She raised a hand and beckoned. The fingers had too many joints.
Rory backed toward the gap she had entered by, her mind cool and quick despite the terror crawling up her spine. Fight was useless. Flight was impossible. She needed—
The oaks had closed behind her.
Where the path had been, branches now interlaced like fingers, a wall of bark and thorn and leaf. No way out. The ring of standing stones stood complete, and in its center, the thing wearing Eva's face glided forward.
"You came," it said, in Eva's warm, familiar voice. "I told them you would."
Rory's throat worked. "Where's Eva?"
The head tilted, birdlike. The smile was too wide, the mouth a dark oval in the moonlight. "She's here," it said. "She's always here. You're the one who was late."
The wildflowers rustled, growing higher around the figure's waist. Behind Rory, the portal breathed again, and the warmth of it pressed against her back like a furnace door left open. She thought of Evan, of the men who took what they wanted, of the flat above Silas' bar with its locked doors and its thin walls. She had run all the way to London thinking she had outrun that kind of hunger. This was older than Evan. It did not shout. It did not hit. It simply waited, and it had been waiting a very long time.
The thin shapes circled closer. The yellow dress drifted near enough that Rory could see the wildflowers growing through the fabric, roots threading the hem, and beneath the hem, no feet at all—only more blossoms, crushed and warm.
The breathing came again, close.
It was right behind her left ear.
Rory had not heard it approach. She did not need to turn to know there was no empty space there, that the dark behind her had filled up with something that had walked beside her since the gate, matching her step for step, silent as a second shadow.
The voices layered together into one, Eva's and strangers' and her own, a chorus whispered against the shell of her ear.
"We've been walking with you since the gate, Laila."
The Heartstone pulsed faster in her fist, a second heartbeat that was not her own. Rory closed her bright blue eyes, feeling the heat of the portal at her back, the warmth of the stone in her hand, the old scar throbbing on her wrist, and knew with a cold, perfect clarity that she was not alone. She had not been alone for a single step of the way.
The Grove leaned in.
"Mine," the darkness breathed.