Run: 2026-02-17-01KHMRBS45RZXCG1PV7K721F45

Rain was coming down in ropes, turning Soho’s pavement into a black mirror that reflected the city’s neon guts in smeared streaks of red and green. Detective Harlow Quinn stood in the mouth of an alley opposite The Raven’s Nest, her shoulders pressed against wet brick, watching the green neon sign above the bar flicker like a failing heartbeat. She’d been there three hours, ignoring the ache in her knees and the steady seep of cold through her coat, waiting for one of the clique to surface. When Tomás Herrera emerged, she almost missed him. He moved differently than he had in the surveillance photos—lower center of gravity, head tucked, the short curly dark brown hair plastered flat by the downpour. But the olive skin was unmistakable, and when he turned to check the street, the streetlamp caught the silver glint of the Saint Christopher medallion against his chest. The scar running along his left forearm peeked from beneath his rolled sleeve, pale and jagged. Quinn pushed off the wall. She didn’t shout. Eighteen years of decorated service had taught her that announcing yourself only gave them a head start, and Herrera had already proven skittish. She closed the distance with the efficient stride that had earned her a reputation for military precision, her boots striking the pavement in a rhythm that matched the slap of the worn leather watch against her left wrist. He saw her at fifteen yards. Those warm brown eyes widened, recognizing the bearing if not the face. Then he ran. Quinn gave chase. The rain lashed sideways as they hit Wardour Street. Herrera was fast for a former paramedic—faster than his file suggested, certainly faster than a man with a knife scar should be. He cut west, dodging between midnight revelers huddled under awnings, splashing through gutters that ran like rivers. Quinn kept pace, her salt-and-pepper hair slicked to her sharp jaw, her breath coming hard and steady through her nose. She was forty-one, fit, but she could feel the years in her hips as she pivoted around a stumbling tourist, her hand hovering near the holster at her ribs. He wasn’t just fleeing. He was navigating. They left Soho behind, the green neon bleeding away into the rearview of the chase. Herrera led her north toward Camden, past the silent lock of Regent’s Canal, where the water lay black and undisturbed except for the machine-gun patter of rain. He ducked beneath railway arches where the darkness pooled thick enough to drink, his silhouette dissolving into the industrial shadow. Quinn followed, her fingers brushing the damp brick to guide her. The air here tasted of iron and old soot. When she emerged, he was climbing the fence surrounding an abandoned construction site. She caught the flash of his medallion as he hauled himself over, the saint’s face turned toward the storm as if offering protection. Quinn scaled after him, her boots finding purchase on wet stone, the leather watch band cutting into her wrist. On the other side, she dropped into a crouch, her hand finally closing around the grip of her sidearm. Not drawn, but ready. “Herrera!” Her voice cut through the rain. “Metropolitan Police. Stop.” He paused at the mouth of what looked like a ventilation shaft set into the embankment. For a moment, the tableau held: the pursued and the pursuer, separated by twenty feet of mud and rain. Then he reached into his pocket and withdrew something that gleamed dully in the darkness—not metal, but organic, curved like a crescent moon. A bone. He pressed it against the rusted iron grate sealing the shaft. The lock, which should have been frozen with decades of disuse, clicked open with a wet sound, like a joint popping. The grate swung inward on silent hinges. “Don’t,” Quinn called, but he was already vanishing into the earth. She reached the entrance as the grate began to swing shut. Through the gap, she saw stone steps descending into a breath of air that carried the scent of copper and myrrh, of ozone and vegetation growing without light. Somewhere below, voices murmured in commerce—a market, but one that whispered in registers that made her teeth ache. The grate clanged closed. Quinn stood alone in the rain. Her chest heaved, her uniform soaked through to the skin. She checked her watch—Morris’s watch, though she never let herself think of it that way. The face was cracked, the hands stopped at 3:17, the time her partner had died three years ago in a warehouse south of the river. They’d found him without a mark, his eyes open, his mouth shaped around a word he’d never finished. Supernatural origins, the coroner had suggested, then recanted, then retired. She’d kept the watch. She kept it wound, though it never ran. The iron grate trembled. Not locked, then. Waiting. She looked back at the city above—the familiar topography of streetlamps and surveillance cameras, of protocols and backup calls and the eighteen years of procedure that had defined her existence. Then she looked down, into the dark where Herrera had fled, where the bone token had granted passage to something that moved with the full moon and traded in goods that didn’t exist in any catalog she knew. Her fingers found the evidence bag in her inner pocket. Inside, wrapped in plastic, lay a fragment she’d found clutched in Morris’s hand three years ago—a small, curved piece of ivory that the lab couldn’t identify. It had always felt warm against her palm, even in the cold case locker. Even now. Quinn drew her weapon. The weight was familiar, but the darkness below was not. She thought of Morris’s eyes, wide and sightless. She thought of the clique she’d been hunting, the unexplained circumstances, the way the world seemed to fold in on itself whenever she got close to the truth. She pushed the grate open. It offered no resistance, as if it had been expecting her all along. The stairs descended into a Victorian Tube station abandoned since the Blitz, its platform supposedly flooded and forgotten. But as Quinn’s eyes adjusted, she saw light flickering from farther down—bioluminescent or chemical, she couldn’t tell—and smelled the distinct scent of alchemical smoke, sweet and acrid. The Veil Market. The bone token in her pocket grew warmer with each step she took into the earth. At the bottom of the stairs, she paused. The platform opened into a cavernous space where stalls huddled beneath the curve of tiled walls, vendors hooded in shadows exchanging currency that glowed and whispered. And there, at the edge of the crowd, stood Herrera, watching her with those warm brown eyes, neither surprised nor afraid, as if he’d known she would follow. Quinn descended the final step, her boots ringing against the tile. The grate above swung shut with a final, irrevocable click. She was underground now, in unfamiliar territory, with no backup and no warrant and no understanding of the laws that governed this place. She raised her weapon, not aimed at Herrera, but ready. “Stay where you are,” she said. Her voice echoed against the tiles, small but steady. Herrera raised his hands, the scar on his forearm visible, the medallion catching the strange light. Around them, the market continued its business, unhurried, ancient, and indifferent to the Metropolitan Police. Quinn stepped forward, into the dark.