AI Rory’s boot snagged on a buried root, pitching her forward between two massive ancient oak standing stones. She caught her balance on one knee, clutching the warm paper bag from the Golden Empress against her ribs to save the containers inside from bursting.
Her mobile buzzed inside her jacket pocket, sharp and insistent. She fished it out and thumbed the green icon.
"You still in the park?"
"Just crossed the boundary."
"Leave the food at the main gate, Rory. Customer paid triple, fine, nobody eats dim sum in the middle of Richmond Park at midnight."
"The note specified the clearing, Yu-Fei. Easy fifty quid tip."
"Wait. What is that scraping sound?"
"What sound? Nothing is moving out here."
"Right behind you. Like gravel."
Rory spun around, sweeping her eyes across the dark gap between the timber monoliths. Empty turf stretched back toward the main bridleway.
"Line is bad, Yu-Fei. Nobody is here."
"Ge-e-et... o-o-out..."
Yu-Fei’s voice stretched into a low, mechanical groan, like a cassette tape tangling inside a broken player. The pitch dropped an octave, vibrating against Rory’s eardrum before the call cut dead.
Her screen flashed *No Service *. Then the digital clock at the top corner jumped from 00:14 to 03:49, flickered back to 00:14, and went black. The battery had drained from eighty percent to zero in a heartbeat.
Rory slid the dead brick back into her pocket and clicked on her heavy black aluminium torch.
Ten paces behind her lay ordinary London parkland, all muddy gravel paths, wet bracken, and the orange smear of streetlamps bleeding over from Roehampton Gate. Usually, stepping across the boundary into the Fae Grove felt like walking into a warm greenhouse. Wildflowers bloomed year-round inside this hidden pocket, thick with lazy bumblebees and the scent of crushed clover, untouched by Earth’s seasons. Time bent strange ways here, turning an hour into five minutes or three days, yet the air always hummed with life.
Tonight, the clearing stood paralysed.
Knee-high poppies, bluebells, and white campion crowded the turf in dense, colourful carpets, yet not a single petal trembled . No wind reached them. No crickets chirped in the grass. Rory inhaled through her nose and grimaced. Beneath the thick floral sweetness hung a sharp, metallic tang, like old pennies soaked in stagnant pond water.
She tucked a loose lock of straight black hair behind her ear, letting the rest brush her shoulders, and checked the paper slip stapled to the takeaway bag. *Leave on the centre stone. Do not linger.* No name, paid for via an envelope of crisp fifties pushed through the restaurant’s letterbox an hour before closing. Isolde had sent weird requests before, though the Fae patron usually met Rory at the oaks with a dry joke and a silver coin.
Rory rubbed her right thumb across the small crescent-shaped scar on her left wrist. Her skin prickled. Two years with Evan back in Cardiff had taught her the difference between an empty room and a room holding its breath. You learned to read the air pressure before a fist flew. You noticed how floorboards settled when weight shifted behind a closed hallway door.
The Grove had its breath held.
She started forward, cutting a slow zig-zag path through the rigid wildflowers toward the flat altar rock at the clearing’s heart. Her wrist brushed her jacket sleeve, bringing the faint *tick-tock, tick-tock * of her analogue watch to her ears. Loud. Too loud in the dead air.
*Tick.*
Three seconds dragged past.
*Tock.*
The second hand stuttered, dragged backward a notch, and froze. Rory lowered her arm and walked faster. Her damp trainers crushed the flower stems, each step breaking the quiet with a wet snap. Wait. Not wet. Brittle. She shone the torch down at her heels. Where her soles had pressed the vibrant bluebells, the crushed petals had turned black and flaky, crumbling like burnt newspaper.
*Snap, swish.*
*Snap, swish, crunch.*
Rory stopped mid-stride.
That third step had come half a second late, echoing from the right perimeter near the standing stones.
She whipped her torch toward the noise. The bright white beam sliced through low mist, illuminating grooved oak bark and tangled roots. Empty. Her bright blue eyes narrowed , scanning the edges of the light cone where shadows pooled thickest.
At the far rim of the beam, the fourth standing stone looked wider than its neighbours. While Rory stared, the left side of the silhouette detached from the timber and slid smoothly behind the trunk.
No rustle of leaves accompanied the movement. No snapped twigs. Just a tall, narrow wedge of darkness folding itself out of sight like paper sliding under a door.
Heat flared against Rory’s collarbone.
She gasped, dropping the paper bag onto the grass, and hooked two fingers inside her shirt collar. She yanked the silver chain free. Resting in her palm, the thumbnail-sized deep crimson gemstone pulsed with a steady, feverish warmth . A faint inner glow bled through its facets, staining her pale knuckles red.
Her stomach plummeted. Her unknown benefactor had left one clear warning with the Heartstone Pendant: the artifact slept near Fae magic, waking only in the presence of a Hel portal.
Isolde hadn't ordered the food. Something else had wedged a foot in the door between realms, and Rory had just walked straight into the parlour.
Panic clawed at her throat, hot and suffocating. Rory forced her jaw shut and breathed slowly through her nose. Panic got you cornered. Thinking got you out.
She backed away from the centre rock, counting her paces toward the gap in the ancient oak standing stones where she had entered. Five steps. Ten. Fifteen. The boundary oaks should have brushed her shoulder blades by now.
Her heel struck flat turf instead. She glanced over her shoulder. Endless carpets of frozen wildflowers stretched into the dark, bordered by unfamiliar, jagged silhouettes twenty metres further back. The pocket realm had stretched, swallowing the exit.
From the blackness beyond the left treeline came a sharp, two-tone vibration.
*Bzz-bzz.*
Rory’s hand slapped her pocket. Her dead mobile sat cold and still against her hip.
*Bzz-bzz.*
The sound came from the bushes thirty yards away, mimicking the exact rattle of her phone against a wooden table. Then a voice spoke from the dark between two oak pillars. Crisp, calm, tinged with a faint Cardiff lilt .
"Just crossed the boundary."
Ice flooded Rory’s veins. It was her own voice.
She gripped the aluminium torch like a baton, knuckles whitening. Something shifted in the mist ahead, circling anti-clockwise around the clearing’s edge. Criss-cross shadows danced between the monoliths as the unseen thing moved with a wet, rhythmic clicking, like dislocated knuckles popping into place.
"What sound? Nothing is moving out here."
Her stolen words emerged flat and hollow, stripped of human breath, recited by a throat that didn't understand syllables. A pale, elongated shape dipped beneath a low oak bough. It didn't crouch like a person; its spine hinged backward at an acute angle, long grey limbs jerking in a stiff flip-flop cadence over the roots.
Light drew eyes. Standing behind a bright beam made her a target in a shooting gallery.
Rory dropped to a crouch, unscrewed the keyring loop at the base of her torch, and wedged the heavy cylinder into a cleft of turf, angling the beam straight toward the takeaway bag ten feet to her right. A decoy. Next, she wrapped her fist around the silver chain, holding the glowing crimson Heartstone out in front of her like a dowsing rod, and slipped sideways into the dark.
Simple logic: if the gemstone heated near a Hel breach, moving toward cooler air meant moving away from the rift.
She crept three paces north. The pendant grew hotter, stinging her palm.
She pivoted east, ducking low through the brittle poppies. Scorching heat radiated through her fingers, raising red welts across her skin. She hissed through her teeth and darted south, back toward the phantom boundary.
The Heartstone burned like live iron from a forge, blinding crimson light spilling between her clenched fingers.
Rory froze, staring down at the motionless wildflowers around her boots. North, east, south, the heat hadn't shifted lateral direction at all. It had intensified every time she crouched closer to the ground.
The portal wasn't among the trees.
Right on cue, the decoy torch beam flickered . Twenty feet away, a towering, skinless grey figure unfolded itself over the Golden Empress bag, its jaw unhinging past its collarbone as Yu-Fei’s warped voice poured from its gullet.
"Ge-e-et... o-o-out..."
Beneath Rory’s trainers, the turf split open with the wet rip of butchered meat. Black frost exploded upward from a jagged crimson fissure, shattering the frozen flowers like glass, and three multi-jointed, skeletal hands shot from the steaming earth and clamped around both her ankles.