AI Aurora Carter cut the engine of her delivery scooter at the edge of Richmond Park and let the silence rush in. It was ten minutes past one in the morning, and the mist hung low over the tarmac, turning the streetlamps into blurred orange smears. She was still wearing her Golden Empress jacket, the crimson logo on the sleeve crusted with a week of London grime, and the insulated delivery bag was still strapped to the seat behind her, reeking faintly of five-spice and fried rice. The last order of the night had gone to a flat in Kew, and she had meant to go home, to the flat above Silas' bar, to sleep for eight hours and forget the ache in her shoulders. But then Eva's message had come through, two hours ago now. The message had read: Isolde's grove. Richmond Park. The old stones. I think I found it. And then nothing.
That was not like Eva. Eva, who had pulled her out of Cardiff and away from Evan with nothing but a train ticket and a fierce, stubborn loyalty. Eva, who had not answered her phone in two days.
Rory touched the small crescent-shaped scar on her left wrist, a souvenir from a childhood accident, the way she did when the world tilted sideways, and felt the weight of the Heartstone Pendant against her collarbone. The pendant was an artifact said to have come from Dymas, delivered to her six months ago by an unknown benefactor in a plain brown package with no note and no return address. It had been warm for the last hour, a steady, pulsing heat that had nothing to do with the November cold. She pulled the silver chain free from beneath her jacket. The gemstone was the size of her thumbnail, deep crimson, with a faint inner glow that seemed to breathe in the dark . It pulsed in time with her own heartbeat, or perhaps her heartbeat had learned to follow it. She knew what it meant. The pendant responded to Hel portals. She had tested it once, months ago, in a graveyard in Nunhead, and it had gone as cold and still as a stone. Here, in a place the old maps called Isolde's grove, it was hot enough to scald.
A Fae-touched clearing should not have smelled of Hel. That was the first wrongness, and Rory, who had spent a childhood listening to her father Brendan, an Irish barrister, dissect evidence and her mother Jennifer, a Welsh teacher, dissect motive, filed it away and kept walking. At twenty-five, five-foot-six and slight with it, she had learned long ago that she could not win through strength; she would win by thinking, or not at all.
She locked the scooter, left the delivery bag, and took out her phone. The flashlight beam cut a bright cone through the mist. A deer track wound away between the trees, and she followed it, her boots silent on the damp earth, her straight shoulder-length black hair tucked into her collar, her bright blue eyes scanning the dark. Behind her, the city was a distant murmur, a rumor of traffic and sirens. Ahead, there was only the grove, and the thing that had taken her friend.
The standing stones rose out of the mist like broken teeth. Ancient oak, not granite, blackened by centuries of rain and rot, they stood in a rough circle at the edge of a clearing. Wildflowers bloomed around their bases, impossible in late November, a drift of white and blue and bruised purple nodding in a wind that did not exist. This was the boundary. Rory stepped between two of the stones, and the world changed.
The mist vanished, as if sliced away by a knife. The cold deepened, but the scent of wildflowers grew thick enough to taste, green and sweet and cloying. She shone her light into the clearing; the beam seemed to stop a few feet ahead, swallowed by the dark. She checked her phone. No signal. The time read 01:14. She had left the scooter at 01:00. Fourteen minutes. It felt like an hour since she'd locked the scooter. She told herself it was adrenaline. She did not believe it.
"Eva?" she called, keeping her voice low. The name left her lips and died instantly, absorbed by the stillness. No answer.
She walked deeper into the grove. The wildflowers brushed against her boots, and when she glanced back, the pale stems had tangled together behind her, closing over her footprints as neatly as a zip. She stopped. Turned. The way she had come was gone , replaced by a wall of flowers and shadow. She raised the light, searching for the gap between the stones, and found only more oaks, more flowers, more dark.
The first sound came then: the creak of a swing, metal on metal, rusty and slow. Then a child's laugh, bright and clear, no more than twenty feet away.
Rory's breath caught in her throat. There were no playgrounds in this part of the park. The gates were locked at dusk; she'd had to climb the fence herself. The laugh came again, closer, muffled now, as if the child were pressing its face into a pillow. She swept the beam across the clearing. Nothing. Only the oak stones, standing like judges, and the endless nodding flowers.
Something moved at the edge of her vision.
She turned her head sharply , and for a heartbeat she saw it: a tall shape detaching itself from the shadow of a standing stone, slipping behind another with a fluid, boneless grace. She shone the light directly at the spot. Rough bark. A single white petal. Nothing else. Her pulse hammered against the crescent scar on her wrist. She forced herself to breathe, to think . She had run from a man who had taught her that panic was a luxury; she would not give it to this place.
She began to walk again, counting the stones as she passed. One. Two. Three. The oak was cold and slick under her palm. She reached twelve, and stepped into the center of the grove, where the earth dipped into a shallow bowl. She looked back the way she had come and counted again.
Thirteen.
She blinked. Twelve. The extra stone stood where the path should have been, and then it was gone , and her mouth was dry as dust. The grove was rearranging itself, or her eyes were lying . Either way, she was not alone with her own footsteps anymore.
The pendant burned against her chest. She pulled it out again, wrapping her fingers around the silver chain, and the crimson gem flared, casting long, bloody shadows across the wildflowers. Warmth flooded her palm. It was not just reacting now; it was insistent, a steady throb like a finger tapping against glass. A Hel portal. Here. In a Fae grove. Eva had been researching portals for months, chasing rumors of thin places between worlds. Rory had laughed at her, gently . Now the pendant's heat was a scream she could not ignore.
She checked her phone. The screen flickered . 03:47.
That was impossible. She had been inside for half an hour, perhaps forty minutes at the outside. The battery, which had read eighty percent when she left the scooter, now showed twelve. The air felt heavier, charged like the moment before lightning strikes, or before a door opens onto something that has been waiting a very long time. An hour inside could be minutes or days outside, the old stories said. She was beginning to understand how true that was.
Footsteps whispered behind her.
They matched her pace exactly. She stopped. They stopped. She did not turn around. Instead, she counted to three in her head, the way her father had taught her to count before delivering a closing argument, and then she spun, light raised.
Empty path. Crushed flowers. The mist, or the lack of it, pressing close. But the back of her neck was warm, and the warmth smelled of copper and old leaves, and she knew, with a cold certainty that settled in her stomach like a stone, that something was standing directly behind her, breathing softly .
She stepped away, fast, and turned. Nothing.
"Eva?" she called, and her voice was steady, because she would not give this place the satisfaction of hearing it break . "If you're here, say something. Please."
For a long moment, the grove held its breath. And then, from the center of the bowl, Eva's voice answered.
"Rory, come here. It's beautiful. You have to see."
Rory went still. Eva never called her Rory to her face. Only in texts, and always with a joke, a stupid nickname, a laugh written into the spelling. This voice was flat, bright and empty as a glass eye. It was Eva's voice, and it was not Eva.
Slowly, she turned toward the center of the grove. Between two of the oak stones, a figure stood.
It was tall, too tall, its limbs long and jointed wrong, arms hanging past its knees. Its skin was the pale grey of a drowned thing, its face a smooth oval without feature until she looked directly at it, and then there were eyes like cracks in ice, and they were fixed on her with a patience that made her skin crawl. She shone the phone light at it. The beam passed through empty air. The figure was gone . But the afterimage burned on her retina, and the silence that followed was worse than any scream.
She was being circled . She could feel it, a pressure in the dark, footsteps padding just beyond the reach of her light. From somewhere among the stones, the child's laugh rang out again, high and clear, and cut off abruptly, as if a hand had clamped over a mouth.
Rory's mind, cool and quick even now, sorted through the pieces. The grove was a pocket between worlds; time moved differently here. The exit was gone , or moving. The pendant insisted a Hel portal was open, or opening. And something in the dark was herding her, using Eva's voice as bait, waiting for her to run blindly into the center.
She thought of her flat above Silas' bar, of Yu-Fei Cheung shouting orders in the kitchen of the Golden Empress, of the long flight from Cardiff and the longer shadow Evan had cast. She thought of Eva's hand closing around hers at Victoria Station, dragging her onto the train, saving her life without ever saying a word about it.
She would not leave without her.
Rory lifted the pendant, holding it up like a weapon, the crimson gemstone flaring until the wildflowers recoiled from its light. "I'm not going anywhere," she said. "Where is she?"
The whisper came from everywhere at once, a hundred voices layered into one. Here.
And then the air at the center of the grove tore open.
It was not a sound, not really . It was the absence of sound, a seam of absolute darkness splitting the night, rimmed with the same deep, pulsing crimson as the stone at her throat. The wildflowers turned toward it, every pale face straining. The oak stones seemed to lean inward, ancient and hungry. And from the other side of that impossible seam, Rory heard it: a single, choked sob, and Eva's voice, raw and terrified and real.
"Rory, run."
But Rory Carter had spent her whole life running. She took a step toward the darkness instead, and then another, the pendant burning cold and hot all at once against her palm. The figure moved with her at the edge of her vision, and the grove closed behind her like a held breath, and she did not look back to see if the way out was still there.
She already knew it wasn't.