Run: 2026-02-20-01KHXPNZWM7KJ6YPNCJRNDJC29

Rain hammered the pavement, each drop exploding into tiny crowns of silver under the flickering streetlamps. Harlow Quinn didn’t flinch. Her breath came steady, measured, as she rounded the corner of Greek Street, boots splashing through puddles deep enough to swallow ankles. The suspect—tall, lanky, moving like a man who knew these streets better than his own reflection—ducked left, then right, weaving through the late-night stragglers with the ease of a rat in the walls. She’d been tailing him since the raid at *The Raven’s Nest*. Silly bastard had thought he could slip out the back with a satchel full of something that *clinked* like glass and hummed like a live wire. Harlow had seen that kind of cargo before. Three years ago, in Morris’s last case. The kind of thing that didn’t belong in human hands. A shout rose behind her—uniforms, slow on the uptake, still blundering through the alleyways. She ignored them. This was hers. The suspect glanced back, eyes wide and wild in the neon glow of a kebab shop. His coat flapped open, revealing the glint of a bone token swinging from his neck. Harlow’s fingers twitched. *That’s new.* He bolted across the road, tyres screeching as a black cab swerved, horn blaring. Harlow didn’t break stride. She vaulted the bonnet, landed hard, and kept running. The suspect was fast, but she had endurance. Eighteen years of chasing scum through London’s underbelly had honed her into something relentless. Then he vanished. Harlow skidded to a halt at the edge of the pavement, rain stinging her face. A wrought-iron grate lay upturned, the stench of damp earth and something older, something *wrong*, curling up from the darkness below. Boots scuffed against metal—he was descending. Her torch flickered to life, beam cutting through the gloom. Rust-eaten rungs led down into the black. No ladder. No safety net. Just the promise of whatever the hell waited beneath Camden’s bones. A voice crackled in her earpiece. *"Quinn, where the fuck are you?"* She yanked it out, let it dangle. The uniforms could catch up or piss off. The first rung groaned under her weight. The second held. By the third, the noise of the city muted, replaced by the drip-drip of water and the distant, rhythmic *thump* of something mechanical. The air thickened, heavy with the scent of burnt copper and herbs. Her torchlight caught symbols carved into the brickwork—warding marks, if the files she’d “borrowed” from Occult Crimes were anything to go by. Her boots hit solid ground. The tunnel stretched ahead, lit by flickering gas lamps that shouldn’t have been there. The suspect’s footsteps echoed, then stopped. She raised the torch higher. The tunnel opened into a cavern. And *God*, it was vast. Stalls lined the space, their wares glowing under the sickly light of lanterns filled with blue flame. Bottles of liquid that shifted colours like oil on water. Jars with things floating inside that *twitched*. A man with too many teeth grinned at her from behind a table of knives that whispered when they moved. The air hummed, a low vibration that set her molars on edge. The Veil Market. Morris had talked about this place in his last report. The one they’d laughed off as delirium before they’d found his body drained of blood, his eyes wide and *knowing*. Harlow’s hand rested on her sidearm. The suspect was nowhere in sight, but the market’s denizens had noticed her. A woman with silver hair and a dress made of ravens’ feathers tilted her head. A child—if it *was* a child—with eyes like polished coal pointed and giggled. She stepped forward. The crowd parted, not out of respect, but the way water parts around a stone. No one here feared the law. They feared something else. A hand clamped onto her shoulder. Harlow twisted, elbow raised, but the man behind her raised his palms in surrender. Tomás Herrera. His curly hair was plastered to his forehead, his medallion glinting against his damp shirt. "You shouldn’t be here, *detective*." She knocked his hand off. "Funny. I was about to say the same to you." His jaw tightened. "This isn’t your world." "Someone’s got to police it." She scanned the stalls again. "Where’d he go?" Tomás exhaled through his nose. "You don’t understand what you’re walking into." "Then enlighten me." Her voice dropped. "Or get the hell out of my way." He grabbed her arm, pulled her into the shadow of a stall selling what looked like preserved tongues. "That satchel he’s carrying? It’s not drugs. It’s *soulglass*." Harlow’s stomach twisted. Morris’s last case. The glass vials. The way his body had been *empty*. "You’re telling me he’s got a bottle of *people* in there?" "Not just people." Tomás’s grip tightened. "Things that were never people to begin with. And if he’s running, it’s because he stole it from someone worse." A scream cut through the market’s murmur. High, raw. Human. Harlow was moving before the sound faded. Tomás cursed, but she heard his footsteps behind her. The crowd thickened, bodies pressing in. A man with a face like melted wax blocked her path, hissing something in a language that made her teeth ache. She shoved him aside. The scream came again—closer this time, from a curtained-off alcove near the back. She tore the curtain aside. The suspect stood over a girl no older than sixteen, her wrist clamped in his grip. A vial of swirling black smoke pressed to her lips. The girl thrashed, but her movements were sluggish, like she was fighting through treacle. Harlow didn’t hesitate. Her gun came up. "Police. Let her go." The suspect’s laugh was a wet, rattling thing. "You don’t have jurisdiction here, *pig*." Tomás lunged, but the man was faster. He hurled the vial at the girl’s feet. It shattered. The smoke *unfolded*. Harlow’s finger tightened on the trigger. The smoke coalesced into *teeth*. Into a maw wide enough to swallow a man whole. The girl screamed again, but the sound was cut short as the thing *inhaled*, her body collapsing inward like a crushed can. Harlow fired. The bullet passed through the smoke, struck the brick wall behind. The suspect grinned, his teeth too sharp, too *many*. "Told you." Tomás grabbed Harlow’s arm, yanked her back as the smoke lashed out. It hit the wall where she’d stood, brick dissolving like sugar in water. The market erupted. Shouts. Running feet. The clatter of stalls overturning. Harlow’s breath came fast, but her voice was steel. "What the *fuck* was that?" Tomás dragged her behind an overturned cart, its contents—jars of eyeballs, a hand with too many fingers—spilling across the cobblestones. "A hunger spirit. And that bastard just fed it." The suspect was gone. Vanished into the chaos. Harlow holstered her gun, grabbed a fallen pipe from the ground. "Then we starve it." Tomás’s eyes widened. "You can’t—" She was already moving. The spirit writhed, a mass of smoke and snapping jaws, devouring anything that moved too slow. Harlow sprinted toward it, pipe raised. It turned, sensing her, and *lunged*. She swung. The pipe connected. The spirit shrieked, the sound like nails on glass. It recoiled, then surged forward again. Tomás tackled her to the ground. The spirit passed overhead, a shadow with a thousand teeth. Harlow rolled, shoving him off. "I had it." "You’d be *dead*." She ignored him, scanning the market. The suspect was nowhere. But the satchel—*there*. Half-hidden under a stall, its contents still intact. Tomás grabbed her wrist. "We need to go. *Now*." Harlow wrenched free. "Not without that." She lunged for the satchel. The market *shifted*. The gas lamps flickered out. The stalls vanished. The walls *breathed*. Tomás’s voice was a distant thing. "*Harlow*." She snatched the satchel, turned— And found herself staring into the abyss of a tunnel that hadn’t been there a second ago. The air smelled of wet fur and rust. Something *chittered* in the dark. Tomás was gone. The market was gone. Only the satchel in her hand, the weight of it *wrong*, and the knowledge, deep in her gut, that she’d just crossed a line. And there was no going back.