Run: 2026-02-20-01KHY95772EA0SEXJXSBGAV2NY

The iron stairwell to the abandoned Camden Tube station reeked of mildew and burnt sage, the drip of stagnant water ringing like a faulty timer in Harlow’s ears. She descended two at a time, boot heels striking damp concrete with the sharp, rhythmic precision of her old military drills—18 years on the force hadn’t dulled the habit, nor the tight clench of suspicion in her gut. At the landing, she fumbled in her coat pocket for the bone token: a yellowed fragment of rib, scored with faint notches she’d yet to decode, seized from a street vendor who’d tried to sell her a cursed amulet three nights prior. The entry requirement for the Veil Market, she’d learned the hard way—without it, the rusted turnstile before her would remain locked, a silent guard to the supernatural black market hidden beneath London’s skin. She jammed the token into a crack in the turnstile’s frame. A low hum vibrated up her arm, and the metal groaned open, revealing a platform where the air thickened with the tang of iron and crushed starflower. The market had moved on—its schedule dictated a shift every full moon, and last night’s glowing orb had dragged it to some new forgotten cellar or tunnel—but the remnants of its trade littered the space like discarded secrets. Overturned wooden stalls spilled enchanted trinkets: a glass vial that pulsed with faint blue light (banned alchemical healing potion, Eva would later tell her), a rabbit fur pelt that twitched as if still attached to a living creature (a shape-shifter’s discarded cloak), a stack of parchment scrolls bound with silver wire that hissed when she stepped too close (cursed prophecies). At the far end, slumped against a tile pillar crisscrossed with chipped blue paint, was the reason she’d braved the descent: a man in a tattered velvet coat, his throat slit clean through, his eyes wide and glassy. Harlow’s sharp jaw tightened. She checked her worn leather watch—left wrist, its strap frayed at the edges from 18 years of grasping it during stakesout waits, its face scratched from the night her partner died—7:14 a.m. The sun would be painting Camden’s rooftops gold by now, but down here, the only light came from a single broken lantern that cast dancing shadows over the corpse. The lantern’s glass was etched with the same protective sigils as the tool she’d later find, a detail she’d file away for later. “Show yourself,” she called, her voice carrying with the military crispness that had made rookies flinch and criminals spill their guts. She’d known Eva was here before she saw her—she’d tracked the occult researcher’s phone to the Tube station’s entrance, her surveillance skills honed over 18 years paying off. Eva’s background check had told her everything: 26, Oxford master’s in Ancient History, research assistant at the British Museum’s restricted archives, Aurora’s childhood friend, and the only person in London who could translate the supernatural sigils Harlow had been stumbling across since DS Morris’s death. A figure emerged from behind a stall stacked with rotting herbs, curly red hair tumbling over round glasses, a worn leather satchel bulging with books slung over one shoulder. Eva Kowalski—5’4”, freckles dusting her nose, the occult researcher Harlow had blackmailed into meeting her. Harlow had left a note on Eva’s desk the night before: Come to the abandoned Camden Tube station at 7 a.m. Bring your research on warding sigils. If you don’t, I’ll expose your unapproved access to the museum’s cursed text collection to your supervisor. Eva’s nervous habit kicked in immediately—she tucked a strand of hair behind her left ear, her fingers fumbling with the satchel’s strap. “You shouldn’t be here,” Eva said, her voice quiet but firm. “The market’s enforcers leave stragglers for dead. This man—he was a vendor named Kael, sold banned alchemical potions that induce temporary immortality. I saw him arguing with a Shade artisan three nights ago, yelling about a stolen tool. The Shade’s kind crafts the Veil Compasses, you know—they’re the only ones with the skill to etch the protective sigils into brass without breaking them.” Harlow stepped toward the corpse, her boots crunching on a crushed starflower. She knelt, her knees pressing into the damp concrete, and tilted Kael’s chin up. The slit in his throat was clean, surgical, but there was no blood—no pool beneath him, no smudge on his coat, no trace of red anywhere. That was the first thing that didn’t add up. Human murderers left blood. Even the most careful ones slipped up, even if it was just a single drop on their shoe or a smudge on a doorknob. Harlow had seen it a hundred times. “Gang violence,” Harlow said, standing. “He owed someone money. They staged a supernatural scene to throw me off—crushed starflower, a twitching pelt, a sigil carved into a pillar. Easy enough to fake if you’ve got a book of cheap occult tricks.” Eva scoffed, unzipping her satchel and pulling out a leather-bound book titled Ancient Occult Warding Sigils of the British Isles—her Oxford master’s thesis, Harlow had learned from her background check. The book’s cover was scuffed, its pages marked with neon post-its and marginalia in Eva’s looping handwriting. She flipped to a marked page and pointed to the pillar behind the corpse, where a faint, twisted sigil was etched into the tile. “That’s a siphoning ward. It drains all blood from a victim within ten feet to fuel its power. No human could carve that—you need access to enchanted chisels, and knowledge of the old scripts that haven’t been translated in 500 years. I study these in the archives—last month, I found a 16th-century manuscript that details how the Veil Market’s enforcers use these wards to cover up their killings. This isn’t gang violence. This is supernatural retribution.” Harlow’s chest tightened. Three years ago, Morris had been found dead in a similar abandoned space—a forgotten bomb shelter in East London. No blood, no obvious cause of death, a strange brass object clenched in his hand that Harlow had dismissed as a tourist trinket. She’d spent the years since chasing human leads, refusing to acknowledge the supernatural whispers that had circled the case. Her captain had told her to drop it, to call it an unsolved gang hit, but Harlow’s military precision had driven her to track every possible lead except the one that scared her. Now, Eva’s words pricked at that denial, but she pushed them away, her sharp jaw tightening further. “Prove it,” Harlow said, nodding at the sigil. “If this ward is real, show me something I can’t dismiss as a trick.” Eva stepped closer, her glasses slipping down her nose. She tucked another strand of hair behind her left ear and traced the sigil with a finger—her skin flinched as if burned, a faint red mark blooming on her knuckle. “The ward’s powered by starflower. Look—crushed petals everywhere. That’s the catalyst. Without it, the ward can’t activate. And if you check his pockets, you’ll find a broken bone token. He tried to leave before the market moved, but someone broke his entry token so he couldn’t get out. The Veil Market’s entry requirement is non-negotiable—no bone token, no way in or out.” Harlow knelt again and plunged her hand into Kael’s coat pocket. She pulled out a broken bone token—same notches as the one she’d used to get in, but split down the middle, its edge scored with a faint sigil that matched the one on the pillar. Her gaze darted to the ground at Kael’s feet, where a small brass object lay half-buried in the concrete dust. She picked it up, and a faint tingle vibrated up her arm. It was the Veil Compass—brass, its casing covered in a patina of verdigris, its face etched with protective sigils, crafted by a Shade artisan, as Eva had said. Its needle spun wildly, not pointing to any rift or portal, as if it had lost its purpose. Eva’s eyes widened. “That’s a Veil Compass. It points to the nearest supernatural rift—places where the boundary between Earth and the spirit realm is thin. But its sigil is broken—look at the edge, where the brass is dented. Someone hammered it with an enchanted tool, rendering the compass useless. Kael was trying to use it to find a rift to escape the market’s move, but the compass was tampered with. Then they slit his throat and activated the siphoning ward to cover up the evidence.” Harlow turned the compass over in her hand, her fingers brushing the dented sigil. She compared it to the broken edge of the bone token in her other hand—there, the same dented sigil, carved into the bone with a sharp tool. That was the connection she’d been missing. Kael had teamed up with someone to get the Veil Compass, but that someone had betrayed him—broken the compass’s sigil, split his bone token, left him trapped. The siphoning ward had covered up the murder’s supernatural traces, but the broken sigil on both the compass and the token was a clue no one else would have noticed. It was a signature, of sorts. She thought of Morris’s brass trinket—she’d stored it in her desk drawer, forgotten for three years, its surface dented in the same place as the Veil Compass. Was it a tampered Veil Compass too? Had Morris been trying to find a supernatural rift when someone betrayed him, just like Kael? Had the same sigil been carved into a broken bone token that Morris had been carrying? Harlow couldn’t remember—she’d thrown the trinket into her desk drawer and never looked at it again, too scared to face the possibility that Morris’s death had been anything other than a human crime. Harlow’s military bearing wavered for a split second—her shoulders slumped, her grip on the compass tightening until her knuckles turned white. Then she recovered, slipping the compass and the broken bone token into her coat pocket. She checked her watch again—7:28 a.m. The market’s enforcers could return at any time; their schedule was tied to the full moon’s afterglow, and last night’s moon had set only an hour before. “Come with me to the British Museum archives,” she said to Eva. “I need you to research this sigil. Find out who would have the skill to tamper with a Shade artisan’s compass and carve the same sigil into a bone token. Find out if this signature is tied to any other killings—specifically, a man named DS Morris who died three years ago in East London.” Eva hesitated, her fingers brushing the spine of her book. “You’ll stop threatening my job? And you’ll let me see the brass trinket your partner had? I’ve been researching Veil Compass tampering for six months—there’s a serial killer targeting supernatural vendors who try to sell their tools to humans. I think they’re trying to close all the rifts between Earth and the spirit realm.” Harlow’s eyes narrowed. She’d had no idea Eva was already researching the same subject. That was a detail she’d missed in her background check—her focus had been on Eva’s access to the archives, not her personal research. “I’ll let you see the trinket if you help me. And I’ll call off the blackmail—for now. But if you lie to me, if you hold back any information, I’ll expose every secret you’ve ever dug up in those archives. You’ll lose your job, your access to the archives, and your reputation as an occult researcher. Do we have a deal?” Eva nodded, zipping her satchel and slinging it over her shoulder. She tucked another strand of hair behind her left ear, her eyes darting to the turnstile. “We have to leave quickly. The enforcers can smell human curiosity—they’ll track us down if we stay any longer. And if they find that Veil Compass in your pocket, they’ll kill you on sight. It’s stolen property, you know—Shade artisans don’t let their tools fall into human hands.” Harlow turned toward the turnstile, the compass burning a hole in her coat pocket. For the first time in three years, she allowed herself to consider the possibility that Morris’s death hadn’t been a human crime. That the supernatural world Eva studied was real, and it had been hunting her this entire time. She thought of the broken sigil on the compass and the bone token, of the siphoning ward, of the twitching rabbit pelt, and she realized that she’d been blind for too long. Her military precision had made her focus on the obvious, but the clues she’d been missing were the ones that weren’t human. She stepped through the turnstile, the bone token still jammed in its crack, and began the ascent back to the surface—where the sun was bright, but the shadows beneath Camden’s streets held secrets she was finally ready to uncover.