AI The rain in Camden smelled of wet asphalt, spilled beer, and stale electricity.
Harlow Quinn wiped a cold bead of water from her sharp jaw, her brown eyes locked on the figure darting through the rusted market stalls ahead. She kept her breathing even, inhaling through her nose, exhaling through her mouth. It was a rhythm born of military precision and eighteen years holding a Metropolitan Police badge. She was forty-one years old, but her legs pumped like heavily oiled pistons, closing the distance between herself and her suspect.
Ahead of her, Tomás Herrera scrambled over a pile of discarded shipping pallets, his boots slipping on the slick wood. A streetlamp caught him in a wash of sodium-orange light. His short, curly dark brown hair was plastered to his forehead. He threw a terrified glance over his shoulder, his warm brown eyes wide with the realization that she was not backing down. As he twisted, his heavy canvas jacket flared open, revealing the dull silver gleam of a Saint Christopher medallion bouncing fiercely against his collarbone.
Harlow vaulted the pallets with a fluid economy of motion. She landed cleanly, the damp hem of her trench coat slapping against her knees. She glanced at the worn leather watch on her left wrist. Nearly one in the morning. They had been running for six blocks, but the pursuit had really begun hours ago, miles south in Soho.
She had staked out The Raven's Nest since dusk. The dimly lit bar was an anchor in her ongoing investigation into the clique. She had sat in an unmarked saloon across the street, watching the establishment's distinctive green neon sign bleed into the puddles, reflecting off the damp cobblestones. She knew what went on inside. Informants had whispered about the walls covered in old maps and black-and-white photographs, but more importantly, they had whispered about the hidden back room. Accessible only through a structural bookshelf, it was the nerve center for their clandestine meetings.
Tomás had emerged from the green glow just before midnight, looking over his shoulder like a man anticipating a knife in the dark. Harlow had followed him onto the Northern Line, trailing him all the way to Camden Town. He had walked fast, clutching a heavy leather medical bag to his chest. He was twenty-nine, an exile from his own noble profession. Born in Seville, Spain, he had come to London to heal people under the NHS banner. Instead, he had been unceremoniously stripped of his medical license. The official board records cited unauthorized treatments and gross misconduct. Harlow's unredacted case files told an entirely different story. They spoke of missing blood bags, bizarre triage protocols, and patients who officially did not exist. Patients of a supernatural nature.
Tomás took a hard left into a narrow, unlit alley squeezed between two Victorian brick facades. Harlow did not hesitate. She took the corner tight, her hand instinctively resting on the grip of her telescopic baton. The rain was torrential now, beating a frantic drum rhythm on the corrugated tin roofs of the lockups around them.
Up ahead, Tomás hit a dead end, a towering chain-link fence topped with rusted razor wire. He swore loudly, the Spanish curse echoing off the wet brick. He dropped his medical bag over the fence, backed up two sweeping steps, and leaped. His hands gripped the wire mesh. Harlow closed the gap rapidly, her boots splashing through deep puddles, completely disregarding the cold water soaking into her socks.
Tomás scrambled upward. As he reached the top, his left sleeve snagged on a stray barb. The fabric tore open, and as a bolt of sheet lightning bruised the sky overhead, Harlow clearly saw the thick, raised scar running along his left forearm, the gruesome souvenir of a knife attack he had barely survived a year ago. He wrenched his arm free, tumbled blindly over the top wire, and crashed into the overgrown lot on the other side.
Harlow reached the fence just as he picked himself up. She did not attempt to climb. She saw the rusted padlock securing the swinging gate, drew her baton with a sharp flick of her wrist, and brought the hardened steel tip down on the locking mechanism with the full, pivoting force of her shoulder. The old padlock shattered . She kicked the gate open and stepped through.
Tomás was already twenty yards ahead, sprinting toward a brutalist concrete archway partially swallowed by dying ivy and aerosol graffiti. It was an entrance to a long-abandoned section of the Tube, closed off since the Blitz. Black iron grates were supposed to seal it, but one of the heavy panels had been peeled back by something immensely strong.
Harlow paused at the threshold. The air emanating from the dark tunnel felt wrong. It was unseasonably cold, thick with the scent of damp earth, ozone, and something cloying and metallic that reminded her inexplicably of dried roses. She swallowed hard, the sharp line of her jaw tightening.
This was the precipice.
Three years ago, her partner, Detective Sergeant Morris, had vanished into a subterranean tunnel much like this one. They had been chasing a suspect who moved too fast, hit impossibly hard, and bled a color that looked wrong under the harsh glare of tactical flashlights. Harlow had been trapped above ground by a collapsing stairwell. She had stood helpless, listening to Morris scream on the radio. When the recovery teams finally dug him out, the coroner ruled it a wild animal attack. Harlow knew better. She knew the tearing wounds had supernatural origins.
Since that night, she had worn her closely cropped salt-and-pepper hair like a badge of penance, stripping away everything soft in her life to focus solely on the truth. She did not understand the monsters that lingered in the shadows of her city, but she was entirely determined to cage them. Tomás Herrera provided off-the-books medical care for those monsters. He patched up the things that went bump in the night. If Harlow dragged Tomás into the light, she dragged the entire clique with him.
She stepped through the broken grate and began her descent.
The primary stairwell was pitched in absolute darkness, but faint, flickering illumination pulsed from far below. Harlow moved softly , planting the outside edge of her boots first to silence her footsteps . A howling draft rushed up from the deep earth, masking her approach. She descended three long flights, the temperature dropping with every step, until the narrow staircase opened onto a massive, vaulted concourse.
Harlow stopped behind a crumbling tiled pillar, pressing her back against the cold ceramic wall of the old station. She peered carefully around the edge.
The abandoned platform was entirely transformed. Iron braziers burned with pale violet fire, casting long, twisting shadows across the cracked concrete floor. Tarps of heavy waxed canvas formed erratic merchant stalls stretching down the length of the platform. Men, women, and things that severely defied the structural anatomy of either moved through the subterranean marketplace in a hushed, chaotic murmur.
This was the Veil Market. She recognized the precise operational details from the delirious confessions of a drug dealer she had squeezed last winter. A hidden, underground black market that sold everything illegal under the sun, and everything impossible beneath the moon. Banned alchemical substances glowing in glass vials, stolen enchanted goods laid out on silk cloths, and information traded in blood. The dealer claimed the market vanished and reappeared in a new buried location across London every full moon. Tomorrow night was the waxing gibbous. They were operating on borrowed time.
At the far end of the platform, past a dense cluster of cloaked patrons, Harlow suddenly spotted Tomás. He was standing before a heavy iron turnstile guarded by a towering figure draped in thick, mottled leathers. The guard was significantly too broad across the shoulders to be perfectly human, its breath pluming like dragon smoke in the violet light.
Harlow watched intently. The guard held up a massive, gauntleted hand, blocking Tomás from passing deeper into the warren of service tunnels where the real premium heart of the market seemed to operate. Tomás was physically shaking. His olive skin looked pallid, drained of all its natural warmth . He set his medical bag down, reached frantically into the breast pocket of his torn jacket, and withdrew an object.
Even from sixty feet away, Harlow could clearly see the distinct shape and unsettling ivory hue of the item. It was a bone token. A carved sliver of a human femur, polished smooth and etched with jagged, angular runes. The mandatory entry requirement for the inner sanctum.
Tomás pressed the piece of bone into the guard's outstretched palm. The massive sentinel inspected it, issued a low, guttural grunt that vibrated the dust off the ceiling tiles above, and stepped aside. It gestured to the dark tunnel beyond the turnstile. Tomás snatched up his heavy bag, shoved past the cold iron bars, and hurried into the gloom , disappearing completely from view.
Harlow pulled back behind the pillar. The violet light danced wildly against the opposite wall. Her heart hammered against her ribs, entirely out of tempo with her practiced calm.
She had no tactical backup. Her police radio was nothing but dead static down here in the deep earth. She possessed no bone token to pay the toll, and she heavily doubted her Metropolitan Police badge would grant her safe passage among creatures that bought and sold alchemical poison. If she stepped out from behind this pillar, she would be wholly exposed in an underground haven for the very things that had torn Morris apart.
She ran her thumb over the worn leather strap of her watch . Three years of dead ends. Three years of waking up in cold sweats, remembering the wet, tearing sounds echoing over a handheld radio. Tomás Herrera was the single vital thread connecting her daylight world to the nightmare beneath it. He was slipping away into the dark. If she let him go now, the Veil Market would move with the coming moon. She would lose the disgraced paramedic, lose the clique, and lose the justice she severely owed a dead man.
Harlow Quinn set her sharp jaw, an expression of sheer military resolve settling over her features. Let the monsters have their magic and their bone tokens. She had eighteen years of righteous fury and a hardened steel baton.
She stepped out from the shadows of the pillar and walked directly toward the violet fire.