AI The stench hit Detective Harlow Quinn before she even saw the body. A cloying, metallic tang, too sweet for blood, too acrid for decay. It clung to the stale air of the abandoned escalotor shaft, a phantom perfume of something profoundly wrong. Water dripped somewhere in the echoing darkness, a steady, metronomic *plink * that did nothing to soothe the prickle of unease crawling up her spine. Eighteen years on the force, and she’d thought she’d smelled it all, from the charnel house tang of a long-unclaimed corpse to the antiseptic bite of a meticulously cleaned murder scene. This was new. And that meant trouble.
Detective Davies, a man whose enthusiasm for the job could best be described as a damp sponge, stood hunched over something near the overturned handrail, his face a mask of mild concern. "Harlow. Glad you could make it. Bit of a mess."
Quinn descended the rusted metal stairs with the controlled, economical movements of her military training. Each bootfall resonated in the void. "Bit of a mess" was an understatement. The space was a disaster zone. Graffiti, crude shapes daubed in garish colours, covered the curved walls of the shaft. Discarded junk, mostly rotting cardboard and shredded plastic, littered the floor. And in the centre, sprawled unnaturally, was a body.
"Who is it?" Quinn asked, her voice low, cutting through the dripping water and Davies’s wheezing breaths.
"No ID on him. Male, mid-thirties, maybe. Looked like he fell. A good fifty feet, by the looks of it." Davies gestured vaguely upwards with a latex-gloved hand. "Landed right on his head."
Quinn knelt, ignoring the grit that abraded her knees through the fabric of her trousers. The body lay on its front, limbs splayed at awkward angles. The back of the victim's skull was a ruined landscape of bone and gore, confirming Davies’s assessment of the fall. But something was off. The uniform precision of the trauma, the sheer *completeness * of the destruction, felt… theatrical. Almost too neat, despite the carnage.
"He was coming from behind," Quinn murmured, tracing the line of the victim's spine with a gloved finger. "Or going to. Hard to tell with this much damage." She looked around the immediate vicinity of the body. A scattering of loose rubble, not enough to suggest a significant tumble. It looked more like someone had dropped a sack of rocks. *But that didn't make sense.*
"The preliminary forensic sweep found nothing significant," Davies offered, ever the helpful assistant. "No weapons, no signs of struggle. Just… gravity. Nasty business, gravity." He gave a short, humourless chuckle.
Quinn stood, her sharp jaw set. "Gravity doesn't usually leave the floor pristine , Davies. And it rarely carries a scent like this." She inhaled deeply, trying to isolate the offensive odour. It was a layered thing, underneath the metallic tang, she detected something else… a faint, earthy musk, like damp soil mixed with… ozone? "What's that smell to you?"
Davies sniffed the air, a look of mild confusion clouding his features. "Smells like a derelict underground station, Harlow. Grime, damp, a bit of old sewage. Nothing your fancy nose shouldn't be used to by now."
"No," Quinn insisted. "There's something else. Something… sharp. Like after a lightning strike, but wrong." She took a few steps away from the body, her eyes scanning every inch of the grimy concrete and rusted metal. The graffiti was juvenile, nonsensical tags and crude symbols. Nothing that screamed ‘cult’ or ‘gang’ or any of the usual suspects for bizarre underworld deaths.
"You think it wasn't gravity?" Davies asked, his brow furrowed deeper. "Someone pushed him?"
"Perhaps," Quinn conceded. "But if they pushed him from fifty feet up, you'd expect more disruption on the floor. Footprints, scuff marks, debris kicked up. This is too clean. And that smell…" She paused, her gaze falling on a patch of wall to her left. Some of the graffiti there seemed different, more elaborate than the childish scrawls elsewhere. A series of interlocking circles and sharp, angular lines. It wasn't art; it was deliberate.
"What are you looking at?" Davies shuffled closer.
"This," Quinn said, pointing. "This isn't random tagging. These symbols… they're meant to mean something." She ran her finger over the cool, rough surface. They felt almost imprinted into the concrete, as if etched long ago. "And look at the dust," she added, her eyes narrowing . "Or the lack of it."
Davies squinted. "Dust? What dust?"
"Exactly," Quinn replied, a slow build of recognition dawning in her mind. "The dust on the floor, the dust on the walls. It's minimal. For a place this abandoned, this derelict, it should be thick. Like a shroud. But here, especially around these symbols, it’s… disturbed. But not in a way that suggests recent activity. More like… it's been *cleared *."
She pulled out her phone, the screen a stark white rectangle in the gloom , and snapped a few photos of the symbols. The flash momentarily illuminated a section of the shaft floor that she hadn't paid much attention to before. A faint, almost imperceptible shimmer caught her eye.
"Davies, get me the forensics kit. I want samples of this dust. All of it. And a luminol test, just in case." She approached the shimmering patch, her worn leather watch catching the dim light. It was on this patch that the dust seemed thinnest, almost blown away.
"Luminol? For a fall?" Davies scoffed, but he was already fumbling with his evidence bag.
"For a scent that doesn't belong," Quinn said, her mind racing . The Veil Market. The description of it: "an abandoned Tube station." This place wasn't just abandoned; it had the feel of a place that had been *used *. And then discarded . The entry requirement: a bone token. The schedule: moves locations every full moon. What if this wasn't just an abandoned station? What if it was a *former * location? And what if the victim hadn't fallen, but had been… *discarded * there? And that smell… was it residual enchantment?
She looked back at the body, then at the strange symbols on the wall. The symbols on the Veil Compass, the ones etched onto the brass casing to ward off unwanted attention. Some of them had a similar, sharp angularity. The compass needle pointed towards supernatural rifts, portals. What if this dust, this peculiar scent, was the residue of something that had been at this location, something that had left via one of those rifts?
"This victim," Quinn said, her voice firm, definitive . "He didn't fall. He was thrown. From somewhere else. And whatever he was involved with left a residue. A calling card." She met Davies's bewildered gaze . "This isn't just a crime scene, Davies. This is a dumping ground. For something that doesn't belong here."
Suddenly, a high-pitched whine echoed from further down the shaft, a sound that made Quinn's teeth ache. It was a distressed, electronic shriek, unlike anything she'd ever heard. Davies flinched.
"What the devil is that?" he stammered.
Quinn ignored him, her eyes fixed on the patch of floor. The shimmering was more pronounced now. And the faint ozone smell was intensifying , mingling with the cloying sweetness of the unknown. Then, with a sickening *snap *, the air around the patch distorted, like looking through heated glass. A crackle of unseen energy filled the void, and the metallic tang of the body’s blood suddenly seemed to dim, as if being consumed .
"Get back, Davies!" Quinn roared, shoving him roughly.
The shimmering coalesced, a jagged tear forming in the space directly above the disturbed dust. It glowed with an unearthly violet light, and the whine escalated into a piercing scream. And then, something began to emerge from the tear. Not a hand, not a foot, but a segment of glistening, iridescent exoskeleton, clicking and scraping against the air. The scent of ozone and damp earth surged, overpowering everything else. This was no fall. This was an arrival. And the victim was just the first course.