AI The damp of the abandoned Tube station seeped through the soles of Harlow Quinn’s boots. The air tasted of rust, wet earth, and something else, a metallic tang that set her teeth on edge. The Veil Market, usually a riotous clutter of stalls and murmuring patrons, was a crime scene. Yellow tape, jarringly mundane, cordoned off a section where a vendor’s table of crystalline oddities now lay shattered . Uniformed officers moved with that careful, ponderous gait they reserved for locations that made them uneasy.
Quinn’s sharp jaw tightened as she scanned the scene. Her brown eyes missed nothing: the way the flickering witch-light in the sconces threw long, dancing shadows, the anxious glances the remaining Market denizens cast from beyond the tape, the peculiar, ozone-heavy stillness that had replaced the market’s usual hum.
Eva Kowalski stood just inside the tape line, clutching her worn leather satchel to her chest like a shield. Her round glasses reflected the eerie light, hiding her green eyes. She’d called it in. Of course she had. Quinn’s partner, DS Morris, had been sniffing around Eva’s kind—the bookish, fringe-dwelling researchers who knew too much about things they shouldn’t—three years ago. The memory was a cold stone in Quinn’s gut. Morris had ended up in the Thames with a look of perfect , uncomprehending terror frozen on his face. No weapon, no signs of a struggle the forensics team could quantify. Case closed, they’d said. Quinn had never closed it.
“Detective,” Eva said, her voice small . She tucked a strand of unruly red hair behind her left ear, a nervous habit Quinn had noted in their previous, tersely professional interactions.
“Kowalski.” Quinn’s tone was flat, a professional courtesy. She didn’t look at the younger woman, instead focusing on the tableau. The victim—a male Shade, according to Eva’s stammered report—was a crumpled heap of dark cloth and indistinct form behind the table. “Walk me through it. Again.”
Eva took a shaky breath. “I was here for research. The Market moves next week, and I needed to cross-reference some alchemical symbols with a reputable vendor. I heard a shout. A sort of… tearing sound. Then he just… fell. When I got closer, he was like this. I checked for a pulse . Nothing. So I used the emergency line you gave me.”
Quinn finally glanced at her. The freckles across Eva’s nose and cheeks stood out against her pallor. She was scared , but not, Quinn thought, surprised. Not entirely. “A tearing sound,” Quinn repeated, her voice devoid of inflection . She pulled a pair of nitrile gloves from her pocket with a snap.
She knelt by the body. Up close, the Shade’s form was less substantial, like smoke given temporary shape. Its edges bled into the shadows of the station floor. No visible wounds. No blood, or whatever passed for it among his kind. The stall was a disaster: delicate glass ampoules shattered , their contents—iridescent powders, viscous silver fluids—soaking into the grimy concrete. A ledger lay open, its pages blank. Quinn leaned closer. Not blank. Faint, heatless phosphorescence glowed from symbols that seemed to squirm if she stared too long . She looked away, a headache beginning to throb behind her eyes.
A uniformed sergeant, a young man named Peters with a permanently bewildered expression, approached. “Ma’am. No signs of forced entry that we can… well, that we can recognize. No projectile weapons. The witness says it was instantaneous.”
“The witness is an occult researcher in a black market for magical artifacts, Sergeant,” Quinn said, not unkindly . “Instantaneous covers a multitude of sins.” She rose, her knees protesting . The military precision of her bearing was a habit, a cage for the frustration boiling inside. Eighteen years, and she was still policing scenes that defied the manuals.
Her gaze swept the stall again. The shattered crystals. The spilled potions. The open, glowing ledger. And the body, utterly unmarked.
“It was a psychic blast,” Eva said from behind her, more confident now. She’d edged closer, her academic curiosity overcoming her fear. “You see the pattern of the crystal shards—radiating outward from a central point above the table, not from an impact on the table itself. And the victim’s ephemeral form is disrupted , see? It’s fraying at the edges. That’s a classic signature of a mental attack. Someone with strong telepathic or psychokinetic ability targeted him. Probably from a distance. An assassination.”
Quinn listened, checking the worn leather watch on her left wrist. It was a relic from Morris. *Keep your feet on the ground, Harlow *, he’d say. *The answer’s always in the dirt, not the stars *. She looked at the dirt here —the stained concrete.
Eva’s theory was neat. Logical, given the context. It fit the supernatural setting. It was what everyone here expected. A magical murder in a magical place.
That was precisely what bothered her.
“An assassination,” Quinn echoed . She stepped over the tape and moved to the perimeter of the stall, opposite the body. She ignored the palpable discomfort of the uniforms, the whispering from the shadowy arches. Her eyes tracked over the ground.
There. A scuff mark on the concrete, faint. Not from a boot. It was a drag mark, ending at the leg of the vendor’s table. She followed an invisible line from that mark to the body. Then she looked at the table’s surface. Among the glittering debris was a small, cleared space. A perfect square of dust-free wood.
“Kowalski. You handle artifacts. What sits on a vendor’s table, about… four inches square?”
Eva blinked, thrown by the question. “Uh, lots of things. Small ritual boxes, enchanted stones, payment scales…”
“Something a regular customer might expect to see. Something that belongs.”
Eva’s green eyes widened behind her glasses. “A display stand. For a particularly valuable item.”
Quinn nodded once, a sharp movement. She walked back to the body and, ignoring Peters’ muted gasp, carefully rolled the Shade’s insubstantial form. It was like pushing against cold fog. Beneath it, on the ground, was not a pool of blood, but a single, mundane item .
A small brass compass.
Quinn picked it up. It was cold. The casing was etched with fine, protective sigils, now familiar to her from other confiscated items. A patina of verdigris coated the brass. The needle didn’t point north. It spun lazily , then quivered , pointing insistently towards a bricked-up archway at the far end of the station platform.
“A Veil Compass,” Eva breathed, coming to her side. “It points to supernatural rifts. Very rare. Very expensive. Crafted by Shade artisans.” She looked from the compass to the empty space on the table. “So… the assassin took it? But why leave it under the body?”
“They didn’t,” Quinn said, her voice low . She held the compass up. “This wasn’t the display piece. This is the victim’s. His personal property. Probably kept in a pocket or a pouch. When he fell, it spilled out.”
“Then what was on the stand?”
“The item he was killed for.” Quinn’s mind was racing , the pieces clicking into a different, darker configuration. “Your psychic blast theory is good, Kowalski. It fits the aesthetic. But it’s wrong.”
“How can you be sure?”
“Because the blast, if it was a blast, came from *here *.” Quinn pointed to the cleared square on the table. “The epicenter was the item itself. Not from the arches, not from a distance. The crystals radiate out from that spot. The victim was standing right in front of it. He wasn’t assassinated by a rival. He was demonstrating a product to a customer. A product that malfunctioned. Catastrophically.”
The silence that followed was thicker than the station’s damp. Eva stared, her scholarly reassurances crumbling. Peters looked utterly lost.
“A customer…” Eva whispered.
“Who panicked,” Quinn continued, the scene reconstructing itself in her mind with cold, brutal clarity. “They saw the vendor struck down. They saw the lethal item, maybe still unstable, sitting there. In their panic, they grabbed the closest thing of value to cover their tracks—the displayed item, the real target of the theft—and fled. They didn’t search the body. They didn’t see this compass fall. They just ran.”
She turned the compass over in her gloved hand. The needle still pointed to the bricked arch. A rift. An escape route.
“But the tearing sound I heard…” Eva protested weakly.
“Could have been the sound of the item activating. Or the sound of the rift being opened by the thief to get away.” Quinn looked at Eva, her brown eyes hard. “This wasn’t a premeditated magical hit. This was a botched transaction. Theft turned to manslaughter. The killer isn’t a powerful psychic. They’re a desperate amateur who bought—or tried to steal—something they couldn’t control.”
The pieces settled. The wrongness she’d felt was the dissonance between the sophisticated, otherworldly method everyone assumed and the clumsy, avaricious, all-too-human reality. It was a flavor of tragedy she knew intimately. It was the kind of thing that left a detective dead in the Thames with terror in his eyes, over a case everyone else wanted to call unsolvable.
She slipped the Veil Compass into an evidence bag. The needle quivered , trapped in plastic, still pointing the way. “Sergeant Peters, seal this area. Everything gets bagged, especially the ledger. Kowalski, you’re with me. You’re going to tell me everything about who manufactures unstable high-grade artifacts, and who’s been shopping for them lately.”
Eva nodded, her earlier fear replaced by a dawning, grim understanding. Quinn turned her back on the shimmering, impossible crime scene, her boots echoing on the wet concrete. The answer was in the dirt. And the dirt here , for all the magic, smelled of greed, fear, and human error. It was a scent she knew well. It was the only thing, in eighteen years, that had ever made sense.