Run: 2026-02-17-01KHNEYXEJCNY978P24ASWC89Y

The air in the abandoned Camden Town Tube station was cold enough to taste, a metallic chill that settled on the tongue and at the back of the throat. It didn’t smell of damp and decay, as it should have. Instead, Detective Harlow Quinn caught the faint, incongruous scent of ozone and old parchment, undercut by something sharper, coppery. Blood. Her polished Oxfords clicked against the grimy tile with military precision, the sound echoing in the vast, dark hollow of the ticket hall. Yellow police tape was a garish splash of colour cordoning off the old ticket kiosk. Two uniformed officers stood sentry, their faces pale under the harsh glare of the portable floodlights that had been set up, chasing shadows into the archways of defunct gate lines. The shadows seemed thicker here, somehow. More substantive. “Detective Quinn.” The voice came from her left, quieter than the echoes. Eva Kowalski stood just outside the ring of light, looking for all the world like a student who’d taken a wrong turn. Her curly red hair was a chaotic halo, her round glasses reflecting the floodlights so her green eyes were obscured. She clutched the strap of her worn leather satchel with both hands, her freckled face tight with anxiety. She gave a small, quick wave, then tucked a stray coil of hair behind her left ear. “Kowalski,” Quinn acknowledged, her voice flat. She hadn’t requested a research assistant from the Museum, but the call had mentioned “esoteric elements,” and someone upstairs had decided Eva was the closest thing to a consultant they had. Quinn found the whole idea dubious. “Walk me through it. Your version.” Eva flinched slightly at the tone but nodded, falling into step beside Quinn as they approached the tape. “The call came in as a suspected homicide. Anonymous tip. When the first responders arrived, they found… this.” Quinn ducked under the tape. The scene was contained within the shell of the old wooden kiosk. A man, mid-fifties, dressed in an expensive but now-ruined charcoal grey suit, lay sprawled on his back. The cause of death seemed immediately obvious: a single, precise stab wound to the heart. The surrounding fabric was a dark, wet crimson. No visible murder weapon. Standard, almost textbook. Except. Quinn’s sharp brown eyes scanned the area. No signs of a struggle. The victim’s posture was almost peaceful, arms slightly splayed. His face was relaxed, eyes closed. It looked staged. Her gaze travelled upward. Above the kiosk, where the station’s old maps would have been, the wall was scrawled with symbols. They weren’t spray paint. They looked burned into the plaster, a deep, charred black. They meant nothing to Quinn – looping, interlocking lines and angular shapes that hurt the eyes if you stared too long. “The symbols,” Eva said quietly, hovering at Quinn’s elbow. “They’re a form of binding script. Not to keep something in, but… to keep something out. A ward. A powerful one.” “Graffiti,” Quinn stated, pulling a small notebook and pen from her coat pocket. She didn’t write anything down. “It’s not.” Eva’s voice gained a sliver of strength. “It’s etched with a thermal energy I can’t explain. The plaster isn’t just scorched, it’s… reconstituted. And look at the blood.” Quinn had already seen it. That was the thing that didn’t add up. The pool around the victim was contained, too contained. It hadn’t seeped into the cracks in the old floorboards. It hadn’t spattered. It lay in a near-perfect circle, the edges slightly raised, as if it had been poured into a mould and had set. She crouched, careful not to touch, and peered at the victim’s wound. The edges of the slit in his suit jacket and shirt were crisp, not torn. The blood there was tacky, but the pool beneath him had a strange, gel-like cohesion. “Time of death?” Quinn asked one of the forensics techs. “Rough estimate? Between two and four this morning, Detective.” Quinn looked at her worn leather watch. 10:17 AM. She looked back at the blood. In a damp, cool environment, it should still be mostly liquid, especially a volume that large. This had the consistency of cold gravy. “Your colleagues think it’s a drug deal gone wrong,” Eva murmured, her satchel of books seeming to pull her off balance. “This place is known for that. They think the symbols are gang tags.” Quinn didn’t answer. She stood, her height giving her a vantage over the kiosk counter. There, almost hidden in the shadow where a ticket roller might have once been, was a small, metallic gleam. She snapped on a pair of latex gloves and reached for it. It was a compass. Small, brass, its casing mottled with a greenish patina. It was cold, far colder than the ambient air. On its face, beneath a crystal that was perfectly clear, were minute, intricate etchings – not the standard points of the compass, but tiny, spidery sigils. She shook it gently. The needle didn’t spin freely; it quivered, then jerked stubbornly to point not north, but directly at the scrawled symbols on the wall behind her, holding its position with an unnatural steadiness. “That’s a Veil Compass,” Eva breathed, her scholarly curiosity momentarily overriding her nerves. “They’re… rare. It doesn’t point north. It points to sources of supernatural resonance. Rifts. Portals. Active workings.” She pointed at the needle, aimed at the wall. “Like that.” Quinn’s jaw tightened. Supernatural resonance. The words felt absurd in this setting of police procedure and floodlights. Yet… the evidence was absurd. The perfect blood pool. The peaceful corpse with a fatal wound. The burned-in symbols. The compass pointing at a wall. Her mind, trained on patterns and contradictions, scrabbled for purchase. A drug deal wouldn’t leave this. A gang killing wouldn’t involve this level of theatrical, inexplicable staging. She thought of Morris, her old partner. The case three years ago that had ended with him gone, his body never found, the official report a masterpiece of obfuscation. The scene had felt wrong, too. A lingering smell of ozone. A strange, staticky distortion in the CCTV footage that was never explained. “He’s not the victim,” Quinn said suddenly, the words quiet but absolute. Eva blinked. “What?” “He’s the *source*.” Quinn turned the cold compass over in her palm. “Look at him. No defensive wounds. No struggle. Expensive suit, but no wallet, no phone. He was brought here. He was placed here. This wasn’t a fight. It was a… a ritual. A termination.” The clinical word felt right. “The blood isn’t behaving like blood because it’s not just blood anymore. It’s part of the working. The compass isn’t pointing at the symbols on the wall.” She turned, following the line the needle indicated. It went through the wall. “It’s pointing at what’s *through* the wall. Or what was. This kiosk, this spot, is the epicenter.” Eva was staring at her, round glasses glinting. “You’re saying the ward on the wall was to contain the energy released by his death? To keep it from spreading?” “I’m saying the knife that killed him wasn’t steel,” Quinn said, her voice low. “It was something else. And the reason there’s no murder weapon is because it was never *here* in the conventional sense. It was used from somewhere else. Through something else.” She held up the Veil Compass. “This was his. He had it. He knew he was walking into a place of… resonance. He was measuring it. And someone killed him for it, using the very thing he was studying.” The two uniformed officers by the tape shuffled their feet, bored. To them, it was a body in a weird place. To the forensics tech, it was a collection of samples. To Eva, it was an occult puzzle. But to Harlow Quinn, it was a crack in the world. A crack that had swallowed Morris, and now had left this strange, impossible crime scene like a calling card. The evidence didn’t add up because it wasn’t meant to add up in a mortal ledger. It was evidence for a different kind of court. She slipped the Veil Compass into an evidence bag, the brass already fogging the plastic from its unnatural cold. The needle, trapped inside, remained fixed, pointing relentlessly at the charred symbols, a silent arrow accusing a reality Quinn was only beginning to perceive. She didn’t believe in ghosts, or portals, or magic. But she believed in evidence. And the evidence on the grimy floor of the abandoned Camden Town station was screaming that she was looking at the wrong world entirely.