AI The air grew heavy, thick with the scent of damp earth and something acrid, metallic – the city’s forgotten breath. Detective Harlow Quinn pushed through a rusted service door, its hinges screaming a protest that echoed down the long, disused tunnel. The flicker of her industrial-grade torch carved out a path through oppressive darkness. Her boots crunched on loose gravel and shards of ceramic, evidence of a life gone stagnant. They had told her it was an abandoned Tube station beneath Camden, but the place hummed with an unnatural silence . Below the surface, the city’s pulse softened to a distant thrum, a vibration felt more than heard.
Harlow checked the worn leather watch on her left wrist. Just past midnight. Her fifty-nine-inch frame, always held with military precision, felt unusually tense. Eighteen years on the force had taught her that the places the city tried hardest to forget were often where its darkest secrets festered.
A pale, wavering glow ahead signaled the crime scene. She passed a knot of uniformed officers, their faces drawn in the sickly pallor of forensic lights. Their whispers were low, nervous. This was not a typical murder.
The tunnel opened into a vast, vaulted chamber, once a bustling platform, now a cavernous space where shadows clung to the high ceilings like ancient moss. Improvised stalls, crafted from scavenged metal and splintered wood, lined the skeletal remains of the tracks. Empty shelves showcased outlines of missing goods; some still held dusty, bizarre curiosities: shrunken heads no bigger than an apple, ornate daggers with obsidian blades, vials of murky, iridescent liquids. The Veil Market, the whisper went, a ghost black market that vanished with the full moon. It had stopped moving tonight.
A figure knelt by the body, meticulously cataloging items with practiced ease . Eva Kowalski, her curly red hair a vibrant splash against the gloom , pushed her round glasses up her freckled nose. She tucked a stray red curl behind her left ear – a nervous habit Harlow recognized – and scribbled furiously in a small notebook clutched in her gloved hand. Eva’s worn leather satchel, bulging with books despite the late hour, lay discarded a few feet away.
Harlow stalked towards her, each step deliberate. “Evening, Kowalski.” Her voice, always crisp, cut through the quiet.
Eva looked up, her green eyes wide behind the lenses, a flicker of surprise giving way to mild exasperation. “Detective Quinn. Didn’t expect to see you down here.”
“Called in . Body in a market that doesn’t exist, beneath a city that does. Sounded right up my alley.” Harlow’s gaze swept over the scene. The forensic team moved with a hesitant efficiency, their movements slow, almost reverent. She could already tell they were out of their depth.
The victim lay slumped against the base of a toppled stall, a man in his late thirties, judging by his slightly receding hairline and the fashionable, if now bloodstained, trench coat. No ID, not yet. But it wasn’t the lack of identification that snagged Harlow’s attention. It was the way he lay there, almost impossibly flat, as though a great weight had pressed down on him just before death.
“Cause of death?” Harlow asked, kneeling opposite Eva, her sharp jaw setting.
Eva sighed, pushing her glasses up again. “That’s… complicated. There’s no apparent trauma. No entry wounds, no defensive marks. But his internal organs are… pulped.”
Harlow frowned. “Pulped? Like he was hit by a train?”
“Or fell from a great height,” Eva offered, gesturing vaguely upwards. “Except there’s no great height, and no impact marks on the ground surrounding him. No debris. Nothing. It’s like his insides were… liquified without damaging the exterior.”
Harlow surveyed the scene again, seeing it with new eyes. The man’s trench coat was surprisingly intact, save for the bloodstains spreading from his chest. Yet, his posture, limbs splayed, suggested a collapse more than a fall. Her gaze dropped to his clenched right hand. It held a small, brass compass. Its casing had a patina of verdigris, and its face was etched with protective sigils. The needle, however, spun wildly, a blur of motion.
“What’s this?” Harlow asked, pointing with a gloved finger.
Eva leaned in . “A Veil Compass. Attuned to supernatural energy. Points toward the nearest rift or portal.” She paused, then added , “It was crafted by a Shade artisan. Very rare.”
Harlow studied the spinning needle. “So, it’s broken.”
“No,” Eva corrected softly, a touch of wonder in her voice . “It’s working. It’s detecting *something * very close. Something powerful.”
Harlow ignored the last part. She walked around the body, her keen eyes scanning every surface. The floor was rough concrete, littered with more gravel. A distinct lack of blood spatter was unsettling. If his internal organs were pulped, there should be more. The amount pooling beneath him seemed insufficient for the description . His clothes, though stained, weren’t torn in a way that suggested crushing impact.
“Any witnesses?” Harlow asked, looking at the silent stalls.
“The market was supposedly deserted by midnight,” Eva said. “Everyone clears out. It doesn’t usually stay in one place this long, but it’s been here for three days. Full moon was two nights ago.”
“And the bone token for entry?”
“Stashed in his wallet, along with a provisional driver’s license. Name’s Arthur Finch. From Croydon.” Eva paused, running a hand through her hair. “No visible signs of struggle. Nothing disturbed in a wide radius, except for this stall he’s leaning on.” She gestured to the crumpled metal. “Looks like something burst outwards , rather than collapsing inwards.”
Harlow knelt again, this time by the toppled stall. Twisted metal, splintered wood. Whatever product had been displayed here was gone . But more importantly, the base of the stall was scorched, and a fine, almost invisible dust coated the concrete just beyond it. She touched it with a gloved finger, bringing it close to her nose. It smelled vaguely of ozone and something sweet, like burnt sugar.
“This stall was a point of origin,” Harlow murmured, more to herself than Eva .
“For what?” Eva wondered aloud. “A burst of energy? Some kind of alchemical reaction?”
Harlow remembered the market’s description: "banned alchemical substances." She got to her feet, moving systematically. The space felt colder around the stall, a pocket of chill in the already cool air. She scanned the wall behind the stall, looking for marks, scorches, anything. Nothing. The concrete was undisturbed.
But two feet to the left of where the victim lay, tucked partially under a discarded crate, she saw it. A dark stain on the concrete. Not blood. Too viscous, too shiny. It looked like oil, but it gleamed with an unnatural, sickly green hue under her torchlight. She pointed to it. “What’s that?”
Eva peered at it, her brow furrowing . “Plasma? No… looks like some kind of viscous ectoplasm. Or… ichor .”
Harlow’s brown eyes narrowed . “Ichor? As in , the blood of gods?” She allowed a hint of sarcasm to creep into her voice, a defense against the bizarre she felt bubbling up.
“In a manner of speaking,” Eva replied, completely serious. “Maybe something that consumes. Or secretes.”
Harlow ignored the rising panic within her, the phantom echo of DS Morris’s last, inexplicable moments. She pushed it down. *Focus, Harlow. Evidence.*
She knelt beside the stain, pulling out a small evidence collection kit. The stench of ozone and burnt sugar was stronger here, mingling with the unfamiliar, almost chemical tang of the green substance itself. She noticed faint drag marks leading from the stain, across the gravel, and directly towards the victim.
“The victim was moved,” Harlow stated, her voice quiet but firm .
Eva adjusted her glasses. “Moved? By who? There are no other footprints here besides ours and forensics. And the market supposedly cleared out.”
Harlow pointed to the drag marks. “These aren’t from feet. They’re narrow, uneven. Like something small and dense was pulled.” She followed the marks visually, from the strange green ichor to the soles of the victim’s shoes. One of his shoes, the right one, was lightly coated in a faint green residue.
“He was dragged from over there,” Harlow said, standing up and pointing back to the ichor stain. “And the stall… if it burst outwards , it means the force came from *inside * the stall, not outside. Something exploded out of it. And that something left this. The victim then ended up here, against the collapsed stall.”
Eva ran a hand through her hair again, a nervous habit. “So… what exploded? Not a bomb, there’s no crater. Not a chemical explosion, no pervasive fumes, just… ozone.”
“Consider this,” Harlow said slowly , her mind piecing together a puzzle far stranger than any she’d encountered. “The victim isn’t bleeding enough for his organs to be ‘pulped.’ The stall burst *outwards *. The Veil Compass is detecting something powerful, nearby, and it’s spinning wildly, not broken. And there’s *ichor * and faint drag marks leading from it to the victim.”
She paced around the scene, her eyes moving with restless energy. “The drag marks are too light for a human to have dragged a body of this size. But if the ‘explosion’ was a small, powerful entity… an entity that secretes this ichor … a creature perhaps? One that could also flatten a human from the inside out.”
Eva stared at her, her jaw slightly agape. “A creature? Detective, are you suggesting… a supernatural entity?”
Harlow turned, her brown eyes meeting Eva’s green ones. “I’m suggesting an explanation that fits all the evidence, not just the convenient bits. The victim was dragged, not walking. The green substance came from whatever hit him. Whatever hit him, it wasn’t from this world. Look at that compass. It's not broken, is it? It’s *pointing * at the residue. And if I had to guess, I’d say it’s also pointing at the remains of whatever was *in * that stall.”
She walked back to where the victim lay, her gaze still fixed on the spinning compass in his hand. “He wasn’t killed here, not exactly. The *attack * happened over there, by the ichor . The stall was concealing something —or someone. When it burst, it created the force that… pulped him. Then he was moved, probably by whatever was released, or by an accomplice, to make it look like he just keeled over.”
“But why pulp him? And why move him?” Eva asked, clearly struggling but following the thread of Harlow’s deduction.
“Maybe the pulping was a side effect,” Harlow mused aloud. "Perhaps an effect of whatever passed through him, or consumed him. Or maybe it was to destroy internal evidence. And they moved him because the initial interaction point was too obvious. The stall looked like it collapsed on him. But it was hiding a story.”
Harlow knelt again by the Veil Compass. Its needle continued its frantic dance . “This compass. He was holding it. Perhaps he was tracking something . That something was in that stall, waiting. Or perhaps he was part of the market, selling whatever was in the stall. And whatever was in there, didn’t want to be sold.”
She looked up at Eva, a new grim set to her sharp jaw. “Get forensics to bag this ichor . Every last drop. And have them sweep the entire area for any traces of this ozone smell or any other unusual residue. I want that compass handled with utmost care. And find me everything there is to know about Arthur Finch. What was he doing at a supernatural black market, clutching a shadow compass?”
Eva, for once, didn’t offer a supernatural interpretation. Her eyes held a new, dawning understanding. Harlow could see the gears turning in Eva’s brilliant, occult-researching mind. The pieces, however outlandish, were fitting.
Harlow stood, her gaze sweeping over the archaic chamber, the silent stalls, the lingering scent of ozone. The city had secrets, yes, but some secrets lived in places the city didn’t even acknowledge. And she, Detective Harlow Quinn, was beginning to understand that some of those secrets bled. And where there was blood, even green ichor , there was a case to crack. And a murderer, or something like one, to catch. She wouldn't rest until she found it, no matter how far beyond the realm of common sense it might lead her. Not after Morris. Never after Morris.