AI The biting chill hit Harlow Quinn first, a living thing that clung to the damp air and gnawed at the exposed skin above her collar. It wasn't the usual clammy cold of London’s abandoned subterranean spaces; this was a colder, lonelier kind of chill , a prickle beneath the skin that whispered of unquiet things.
She stepped off the temporary wooden ramp, the soles of her regulation boots crunching on something gritty and uneven. Above, the distant thrum of Camden still bled through the reinforced concrete, a muted, constant hum, but down here, it might as well have been another city entirely. The air tasted of ozone and damp earth, faint notes of something metallic and cloying underneath.
“Mind your footing, Detective,” a uniformed officer murmured, his breath pluming white.
Harlow nodded, her gaze already sweeping the cavernous space. This wasn’t just an abandoned Tube station. Ribbons of crime scene tape, stark yellow against the grimy brickwork, crisscrossed a sprawling, chaotic scene. It looked like an exploded curiosity shop, but one where the curiosities whispered of rituals and dark arts rather than forgotten histories. Stalls, some mere planks on trestles, others more elaborate carved affairs, lay overturned. Glass shards glittered under the harsh glare of tactical lights. She saw glinting metal, strange, dried herbs, vials filled with iridescent liquids, and objects she couldn't begin to identify – jagged bone talismans, intricate clockwork mechanisms that seemed to pulse faintly, masks carved from what looked suspiciously like petrified wood .
This was the Veil Market. Her intel had been frustratingly vague, hinting at an ‘unconventional’ scene. That was a woeful understatement.
Her sharp jaw tightened. Eighteen years on the force, and Harlow Quinn prided herself on seeing patterns, on the meticulous logic of police work. But three years ago, logic had failed her. DS Morris, gone. A gap in the world that no police report could fill. A ghost in her periphery, forever making her second-guess everything she thought she knew.
She pushed the memory down, a familiar , unwelcome guest. Focus.
The blue strobes of forensic lights pulsed near the centre of the mess, throwing long, dancing shadows that made the scattered artifacts seem to writhe. A cluster of officers and technicians worked with grim efficiency around a central point, their hushed voices barely carrying above the low drone of portable generators.
Harlow moved with military precision, her 5'9" frame cutting a path through the debris. Her salt-and-pepper hair, closely cropped, felt cold against her scalp. She checked the worn leather watch on her left wrist. Just before midnight.
“Detective Quinn.”
Her head snapped up. Eva Kowalski stood beyond the preliminary tape, not with the forensics team, but off to the side, already examining a chalk diagram scrawled on the concrete floor. Her fiery red curls, usually a vibrant contrast to the urban grey, seemed muted under the harsh lights . Round glasses perched on her freckled nose, and a worn leather satchel full of books was slung over her shoulder. She looked, as always, both entirely out of place and perfectly at ease.
“Kowalski,” Harlow acknowledged, her voice clipped . "What the hell is this?"
Eva pushed her glasses up her nose, her green eyes wide. “Isn’t it obvious? It’s a market. Or what’s left of one. And,” she gestured vaguely towards the activity, “very possibly, a ritual.”
Harlow skirted an overturned table laden with strange, segmented spheres. “A ritual gone wrong, I assume.”
Eva considered this, tucking a strand of red hair behind her left ear – a nervous habit Harlow had observed countless times. “Or perhaps, Detective, a ritual gone *right * and then interrupted.”
Harlow simply grunted. She walked past Eva, her gaze fixed on the body. He lay splayed on the concrete, a man in his late thirties, dressed in unremarkable jeans and a hooded top. His eyes were wide open, glazed with a terror so profound it seemed etched into the very fibres of his being . Not a scratch on him. No blood. No visible trauma. But the expression… the raw, visceral fear visible on that pale face made Harlow’s stomach clench. It was a look she’d seen too many times. A look burned into her memory from her last case with Morris.
“Uniforms reported him, what? Two hours ago?” Harlow asked, kneeling carefully , always a cop, assessing.
“A commuter, they think,” Eva supplied, her voice soft . “Found him when he stumbled through an access tunnel, thought it was a shortcut. Didn’t expect… this.”
Harlow ignored the comment, focusing on the basics. She donned latex gloves. His skin was cold, waxy. No pulse . Rigor mortis hadn’t fully set in yet. She checked his hands. No defensive wounds. No signs of struggle. His clothes were clean, uncreased. He hadn’t fought. He hadn’t even fallen gracefully. He looked like he’d been dropped .
“Forensics find anything?”
“Trace elements, mostly,” Eva replied, moving closer. “Ozone, a faint coppery tang, not blood. And some… very peculiar electromagnetic fluctuations. Not natural. Not man-made, not precisely .”
Harlow didn't need Eva to tell her about the cold spots that seemed to drift like unseen currents, or the way the hair on her arms prickled, hinting at an unseen charge in the air . This wasn't a normal crime scene, but she wouldn’t let Eva’s occult lingo distract her from the facts.
“Show me the ritual,” Harlow said, rising.
Eva pointed to the chalk sigils on the ground. An elaborate circle, intricate lines, symbols that looked both ancient and utterly alien. Within the circle, a small, dark stain, like dried oil, and a scattering of petrified flowers.
“A containment circle, perhaps,” Eva theorized. “Or a summoning array. See the resonance ? It suggests a strong energetic discharge.” She gestured to the surrounding debris. “The market was clearly active. Then this. Whoever was here… they were prepared for something significant.”
Harlow circled the sigils, her gaze sweeping every detail. “The chalk is too clean,” she observed, her brown eyes narrowing . “No smudging. No dust disturbed in the immediate vicinity of the lines.” She knelt again, running a gloved finger along the pristine edge of one symbol. “If there was a struggle, if something was powerful enough to overturn all this,” she gestured to the scattered stalls, “then why are these lines perfect ?”
Eva paused, her brow furrowed . “Perhaps the incident occurred *within * the circle, or around it, but the chalk was laid afterwards? As a… marking?”
“Or,” Harlow countered, her voice low, “the chalk was laid, the ritual performed, and then everything else happened. But the victim isn’t *in * the circle. He’s outside it. And these aren’t *his * marks. No signs he wrote them, or interacted with them.” She pointed to a faint shimmer in the air near the chalk. “This cold is stronger here, but it doesn’t feel like it originated *from * here.”
She looked at the victim again. The terror. The absence of wounds. It clicked with something in her memory, a fragment of a conversation she’d overheard years ago, dismissed as urban legend. People could die of fear. Not from a heart attack, but from pure, unadulterated terror, a shock to the system so profound it simply… stopped.
Harlow scanned the clutter on the ground. Broken earthenware, desiccated roots, shiny baubles. Her gaze snagged on something partially obscured by an overturned alchemical retort. A small, brass object. It had a strange verdigris patina, almost like ancient rust, and the casing was etched with tiny, precise sigils. It glinted dully under the forensic lights.
She picked it up carefully , the metal surprisingly heavy in her hand. It was a compass. But the needle wasn’t pointing north. Instead, it quivered slightly , twitching with an almost magnetic pull, always settling on a specific, dark corner of the tunnel, just beyond one of the chalk sigils, where the light faded into blackness. An untouched section of the old platform, swallowed by shadow.
“What’s this?” Harlow asked, holding it out to Eva.
Eva’s eyes lit up, a spark of professional interest overriding her earlier theories. “Oh! A Veil Compass. Rare. Crafted by a Shade artisan, I believe. They’re attuned to supernatural energy. Points toward the nearest supernatural rift or portal, or significant nexus of such. I’ve only read about them.”
Harlow looked from the compass to the dark corner it indicated, then back to the victim. “So it points toward supernatural convergence.”
“That’s the theory,” Eva confirmed, adjusting her glasses. “Though I’ve never seen one in action before.”
“It’s pointing *there *,” Harlow repeated, gesturing with the compass toward the inky blackness. “Not at the body. Not at these — whatever you called them — containment or summoning sigils. It’s pointing away. Into the dark.”
A new interpretation began to form, tightening the loose threads of the scene. The chill . The smell. The lack of struggle. The perfect sigils, seemingly untouched by the chaos. The compass.
“The victim wasn’t involved in the ritual, Eva,” Harlow stated, her voice taking on a harder edge . “He wasn’t the target, and he wasn’t the one doing the summoning. Look at him. Ordinary. Nothing about him screams ‘occult practitioner’. He’s a civilian. A commuter, you said.”
Eva frowned, her earlier confidence wavering . “So, an accident?”
“No,” Harlow said, shaking her head. “This wasn’t an accident. This was a consequence. The clean sigils – they *worked *. Whatever they were meant to hold, they held it. For a time.” She looked at the compass, its needle still steadfastly pointing into the darkness. “But whatever was summoned , or whatever ritual was performed… it wasn't here. Not where he died. It was *there *,” she gestured to the shadowy tunnel entrance. “The compass points to a convergence point. A rift. A portal. Or, in this case, a successful summoning.”
She walked slowly towards the indicated spot, Eva trailing behind her. The cold intensified with every step. The air grew heavy, like static electricity before a storm. In the gloom , the tunnel wall looked scorched, as if by something that had ripped through it. There was a faint, almost invisible residue clinging to its surface, like powdered charcoal, but it hummed with an unnatural energy.
“This is where something *came through *,” Harlow said, her voice barely a whisper . “Or perhaps where it *left *. And the victim…” She turned back, her gaze sweeping the entire scene, piecing it together. “He wandered in . A shortcut. He saw it. He wasn’t involved in the ritual. He was a witness. He saw whatever it was burst out of there , moving quickly . Something profoundly… terrifying.”
The overturned stalls, the shattered goods – not from a struggle with the victim, but from the uncontrolled passage of something else . Something large, fast, and powerful. Something that moved and left behind a wake of psychic dread and physical disruption.
“The sigils,” Harlow continued, gesturing back to the chalk lines, “they were to *contain * whatever was summoned . But it broke free. Or it was let free. And whatever it was, it didn’t inflict physical wounds. It just… scared him to death.” Her gaze found Eva’s. “He looked into its face, Eva. And his heart simply stopped.”
Eva looked from the scorched wall to the compass, then back to the deceased. Her green eyes were wide, suddenly seeing with new understanding. “A spectral assault,” she breathed, but this time with a grim certainty. “Not a failed ritual, but a successful summoning… and an escape. The ghost echo I sensed. It wasn't lingering . It was passing through. Moving too quickly .”
Harlow nodded, the grim puzzle clicking into place. The inconsistencies made a new kind of sense, a terrible, supernatural sense. The crime wasn’t just a homicide; it was a consequence, an aftermath . Whatever had been summoned , whatever had caused such terror, was no longer in the market. It was out there in London, and its trail was fresh. Just like Morris and the unexplained three years ago. The familiar chill had nothing to do with the subterranean air.