Run: 2026-02-17-01KHMQMC4JPDB28YSWH2M7DSMW

The air in the abandoned Tube station was thick enough to chew. It tasted of damp earth, rust, and something else—a faint, acrid tang that clung to the back of the throat like static. Detective Harlow Quinn descended the concrete steps, her boots making a sound like dull thunder in the cavernous space. She hated the Underground. Hated the feeling of being buried, the press of history in the tiled walls, the ghosts of a million commutes echoing in the dark. This place was worse. It was a tomb that still breathed. A constable, young and pale enough to be mistaken for a ghost himself, stood by a makeshift barrier of police tape. He nodded at her, his eyes wide. “Down here, Detective. On the platform.” Harlow followed the direction of his gaze. The emergency lighting cast long, dancing shadows, turning the curved ceiling into the maw of some great beast. And there, in the center of the platform, was the reason for the call. But it wasn't the body that made her stop. It was the woman standing over it. Eva Kowalski. Of course. The Metropolitan Police’s pet occult expert, a researcher from the British Museum who’d gotten herself tangled in Harlow’s last two cases involving the city’s stranger underbelly. Harlow’s jaw tightened. She preferred her crime scenes free of amateurs, especially ones who saw demons in every shadow. Eva looked up, her round glasses magnifying the concern in her green eyes. A frizzy cloud of red hair was already escaping its pins, and she automatically tucked a strand behind her ear, a nervous gesture Harlow had catalogued months ago. “Detective Quinn. Thank you for coming.” “I was on my way home, Eva. This had better be more than a frightened junkie having a bad trip.” Harlow’s gaze swept past her, to the body. A man, late fifties, dressed in a tailored but rumpled suit. He was sprawled on his back, one arm thrown out as if in supplication. There was no blood. No visible wound. His skin, however, was a mottled, unhealthy grey, the texture of cracked porcelain. His mouth was open in a silent scream, his eyes wide and filmed with a milky cataract. “What am I looking at?” Harlow asked, her voice flat. She crouched, the worn leather of her watch strap pressing against her wrist as she rested her hands on her knees. “That’s Arthur Finch. He… he procures things. For the Market.” Harlow’s eyes flicked to Eva. “The Market. You mean this urban legend, the Veil Market?” “It’s not a legend, Harlow,” Eva said, her voice dropping. “It’s real. It moves, every full moon. This month, it’s here. Or it was. Tonight’s the full moon.” Harlow grunted, a non-committal sound. She’d heard the whispers. A hidden black market for the magically inclined, selling cursed artifacts and forbidden knowledge. It was the kind of nonsense that kept people like Eva in business and gave real police officers headaches. She leaned closer, sniffing. The air around the body had that same strange, chemical smell she’d noticed on the stairs. Not blood. Not decay. Something like burnt sugar and ozone. “No obvious cause of death,” Harlow murmured, more to herself than to Eva. “No signs of a struggle. His wallet is still in his pocket.” She gestured with her chin. “Robbery’s out. So is a simple assault.” “That’s what I’m trying to tell you,” Eva said, stepping closer. Her worn leather satchel, full of books and God knew what else, bumped against her hip. “It wasn’t a simple anything. Look.” She pointed a trembling finger at the victim’s chest, resting on his sternum. There, nestled in the fine wool of his suit, was a small brass compass. It was no bigger than a coin, its casing clouded with a greenish patina. The face was etched with strange, spidery markings that looked nothing like N, S, E, or W. The needle, a sliver of what looked like obsidian, wasn’t pointing north. It was spinning slowly, erratically, like a dying fly. “And?” Harlow asked, unimpressed. “It’s a Veil Compass,” Eva explained, her earnestness almost palpable. “They’re made in the Market. They don’t point to magnetic north. They point to the nearest supernatural rift. A tear in the Veil between worlds.” Harlow straightened up, brushing dust from her trousers. “A novelty. A trinket. You can buy anything on the internet, Eva.” “Not this you can’t,” Eva insisted. “The sigils on the casing are protective. The needle is attuned to raw energy. Look at it. It’s going haywire. There must have been a massive energy surge here. A rift must have opened right on top of him.” A memory, sharp and unwelcome, pricked at the back of Harlow’s mind. DS Morris, three years ago, his body found in a warehouse, his skin just as grey, his eyes just as milky. The official report cited a chemical exposure of unknown origin. The file was closed. Unsolved. Harlow had pushed the memory down, buried it under a mountain of other cases, but it always surfaced at times like this. She shook it off. Coincidence. “So your theory is that a magical doorway opened up and… what? Fried him?” Harlow’s tone was laced with professional scorn. “I don’t know how it works, exactly! But the evidence is there,” Eva pleaded, gesturing around them. “The location, the victim, the Compass. It all fits. This is what happens when you play with forces you don’t understand.” Harlow ignored her. Her focus had narrowed. She wasn’t looking for magic. She was looking for the lie. She walked a slow circle around the body, her eyes scanning every inch of the ground, the walls, the victim’s clothes. Eva saw a story. Harlow saw a crime scene. And this crime scene was too clean. A man doesn’t just stand there while a cosmic event vaporizes him. He runs. He fights. He screams. She stopped. Crouched again. Something was wrong with Finch’s right hand. It was clenched into a loose fist. Not the rigor of death, but a purposeful clench. Gently, using the edge of a pen from her pocket, Harlow pried the fingers open. There was nothing in his palm. But on the pads of his index finger and thumb was a faint, greasy residue. She brought the pen close, sniffing the tip. It smelled of the air around the body. That burnt sugar, ozone smell. But there was something else underneath it. A faint, sharp note. “Eva,” she said, her voice quiet but sharp as glass. “You said Finch procures things.” “Yes. Rare items. Information.” “Would he be familiar with industrial solvents? Specifically, something like trichloroethylene?” Eva blinked, taken aback by the sudden shift in topic. “I… I don’t know. Maybe. Why?” “Because this man wasn’t killed by a rift,” Harlow said, standing up. She looked down at the body, at the spinning compass, at the wide, terrified eyes. For the first time, she saw it. Not the magic Eva saw, but the cold, calculated precision of a killer. “He was poisoned. A fast-acting, aerosolized neurotoxin. It would cause paralysis, respiratory failure. It would leave the skin looking exactly like this. It would even smell a bit like ozone as it breaks down.” She pointed to the residue on the pen tip. “Our killer didn’t want him to run. So they got close. Offered him something. A drink, maybe. Sprayed this in his face. He’d have a few seconds to realize what was happening. Just enough time to grab the one thing he thought could save him.” Her gaze fell on the Veil Compass. “He didn’t die because a portal opened, Eva. He died because someone wanted him to think a portal was opening. They used this—” she nudged the compass with her pen “—as stage dressing. They knew what it was. They knew what it would do. They probably even triggered it with some harmless electrical device to make it spin. They used his own world, his own beliefs, to murder him. They created a supernatural crime scene to cover up a perfectly mundane one.” Eva stared from Harlow’s hard, certain face to the body and back again. The freckles on her cheeks seemed to stand out against her suddenly pale skin. “But… who would do that?” “Someone who knows this world,” Harlow said, her mind already racing, filing away the new pieces of the puzzle. “Someone who belongs here. Someone who knew Finch, knew his fears, knew he’d carry this trinket. Not a monster from beyond the Veil, Eva. A person. A person who is smart, methodical, and ruthless enough to use magic as a weapon.” She turned and walked away, the sound of her boots receding into the oppressive silence of the station. She didn’t look back. She had a killer to find. And for the first time in three years, she felt the cold, familiar comfort of a case that made perfect, horrible sense.