AI The rain had turned the cobbled yard of the derelict warehouse into a shallow, oily mirror. Detective Harlow Quinn stood under the crime scene tape, the worn leather watch on her left wrist tight against her skin. Her breath plumed in the cold air, each exhale a sharp punctuation mark. The warehouse wasn’t the scene; it was the decoy. The real locus was the rusted service hatch yawning open beside a stack of crumbling pallets, leading down into the abandoned Tube station beneath Camden.
She ducked under the tape, her movements crisp with military precision. The uniformed officer at the hatch nodded, his face pale under the stark glow of the portable lights. “It’s down there , Detective.”
The air that rose from the hatch was a different temperature—warmer, carrying a scent of damp earth, ozone, and something else, something metallic and sharp, like lightning-struck stone. The narrow, tiled stairwell was lit by battery-powered lanterns, their light casting long, dancing shadows on the vintage subway posters peeling from the walls.
At the bottom, the platform opened up into a cavernous, echoing dark. The crime scene team’s lights carved out a pool of artificial day around a single, incongruous spot. A body lay sprawled near the edge of the platform, a man in a dark coat. But it was the other figure that caught Quinn’s eye first.
Eva Kowalski stood a few respectful meters back from the tape, her hands buried deep in the pockets of a long, dun-colored coat. Her curly red hair was damp, plastered in tendrils against her freckled neck. She was tucking a strand anxiously behind her left ear as she stared at the scene, her round glasses reflecting the scene lights, making her eyes unreadable .
“Miss Kowalski,” Quinn said, her voice flat . “Fancy meeting you in a place like this.”
Eva jumped, whirling around. The worn leather satchel at her hip swung heavily, full of books. “Detective. They… they called me in. As a consultant. The body… there were items on it. They thought the Museum might have some insight.”
“Items.” Quinn moved past her, her sharp jaw set. She approached the body, nodding to the Scene of Crime Officer who was photographing the area. The victim was male, late thirties, his face frozen in an expression of profound shock, not fear. His coat was open, and on the concrete beside his outstretched hand lay a small, ornate object.
A compass.
Quinn crouched, careful not to touch. The casing was brass, tarnished with a patina of verdigris. The face was etched with intricate , swirling sigils that seemed to shift in the uneven light . It was the Veil Compass from the file, the one her own sources had whispered about. The needle, she noted, wasn’t pointing north. It was quivering, pointing insistently at a section of the grimy tiled wall twenty feet away .
“Cause of death?” she asked the SOC officer without looking up.
“Initial assessment is cardiac arrest. No obvious wounds, no signs of a struggle. We found that,” he gestured with his chin at the compass, “clutched in his hand. Prints are smudged, probably just his. Wallet says his name is Alistair Finch. No criminal record. Works—worked—as a low-level archivist at the National Archives.”
Cardiac arrest. In a disused Tube station. With a supernatural compass in his hand. Quinn’s mind ticked through the facts, each one a gear that didn’t mesh with the next.
“He was looking for something,” Eva’s voice came from just behind her shoulder. Quinn hadn’t heard her approach. “Or someone. The compass… it’s a tracker. It doesn’t point to cardinal directions. It points to sources of concentrated supernatural energy. Rifts. Portals.”
“A portal. Here.” Quinn stood, brushing imaginary dirt from her trousers. She scanned the wall the needle indicated. It was blank, identical to every other section of stained, cracked Edwardian tile.
“The Veil Market,” Eva said, her voice dropping to a whisper , as if the very name was dangerous. “It’s scheduled to move locations tonight. It exists in interstitial spaces—abandoned stations, closed libraries, forgotten crypts. It moves every full moon. This station… it’s a documented former location. He must have been trying to find the new entrance. You need a bone token to get in. Did you find one on him?”
The SOC officer shook his head. “No token. Just the compass, his wallet, keys, and a train ticket from earlier today.”
“So he didn’t get in,” Quinn reasoned. “He came down here, compass led him to a wall, and his heart gave out. Case closed. Fright, or excitement, or a pre-existing condition.” The words tasted like ash in her mouth . They were the official words, the words that would get the file stamped and sent down to Records. The same kind of words that had been written about her partner, DS Morris, three years ago. *Unexplained circumstances.*
“But the compass is still active,” Eva pointed out, her green eyes intense behind her glasses . She hadn’t moved to tuck her hair back; she was focused entirely on the artifact. “If the Market had already moved on, if this was just a dead location, the needle would have settled. Or pointed somewhere else. It’s still seeking. It’s quivering because what it’s seeking is… close. But not *there *.” She gestured at the blank wall.
Quinn looked from Eva’s earnest, freckled face to the compass, then back to the wall. She walked away from the body, her footsteps echoing in the vast space. She stopped a few feet from the indicated section and turned, looking back at the scene.
From this angle, the lighting was different. The portable lights cast the body and the platform into high relief, but the wall opposite was in deeper shadow. And there , she saw it. Not on the wall the compass pointed to, but on the platform edge directly opposite it . A subtle scuff mark on the grime, a place where the dust had been recently disturbed in a perfect , small circle.
She walked back, her mind working. She looked at the body’s position, the direction he was facing , the outflung arm. He hadn’t been looking at the wall. He had been facing *away * from it. He had been standing right where that scuff mark was.
“He wasn’t trying to get in,” Quinn said, her voice low . “He was already out.”
Eva frowned. “What?”
“Look at him. He’s facing the stairs. The exit. The compass is in his hand, but he dropped it. He was running. Or staggering.” She pointed to the scuff mark. “He was standing right there . And then he collapsed.”
“So he came out of the Market…”
“And something came out with him,” Quinn finished. She turned to the blank wall. The compass needle quivered . “The portal isn’t on the wall. The compass isn’t pointing *at * the wall. It’s pointing *through * it. The Market entrance is on the other side of this platform. He used it, came back out, and whatever followed him… it didn’t need a bone token.”
The SOC officer stared between the two women. “You’re saying he was chased by something that… came out of a wall?”
“I’m saying the evidence doesn’t add up to a simple cardiac arrest,” Quinn said, her tone leaving no room for debate . “No token on the body means he either lost it, or never had one to begin with. But he had the compass, which means he knew what he was looking for. He found it. And then he died the moment he left.” She thought of Morris, his face in her memory, the last radio transmission full of static and a sound like breaking glass. *Unexplained circumstances.* “It wasn’t his heart that killed him. It was whatever crossed over with him. Something that leaves no physical mark.”
Eva’s hand went to her satchel strap, gripping it tightly . “A psychic shock. A soul-drain. There are… entities in the lore that feed on life force, not blood. They can’t cross certain thresholds unless invited or anchored to a living host. He could have been the anchor, just long enough to get clear.”
Quinn met her gaze. The archivist’s theory fit the cold, illogical facts. No wound, no struggle, just terror and a stopped heart. An invisible killer that walked out of a hidden market. She looked back at the scuff mark on the platform, then at the compass, its needle still trembling, pointing at nothing and everything.
“Bag the compass as evidence,” she told the SOC officer, her voice devoid of inflection. “Full toxicology panel. I want every inch of this platform swept, especially that section.” She pointed to the scuff mark. “And I want a canvas of every occult shop, every New Age bookstore, every damn fortune teller within five miles. This man was an archivist. He didn’t just wake up and decide to find a supernatural black market. Someone pointed him here.”
The officer nodded, already turning to give orders. Eva was still staring at the wall, her face pale.
“It’s still here, isn’t it?” Eva whispered. “The Market. It didn’t move. It’s right on the other side of that.”
The needle of the compass, now being placed carefully into an evidence bag, gave one last, violent shudder before lying still.