AI The metallic tang of ozone clashed with the stale, earthy breath of centuries-old brickwork. Detective Harlow Quinn pushed through the pulsing crowd, each step precise, measured . Her gaze, sharp and brown, cut through the gloom of the abandoned Tube station, registering the impossible. Stalls draped in obscuring cloths lined once-active platforms, their wares glowing with unsettling internal light. Figures in shadow peddled bottled fog and whispered charms. The Veil Market, they called it. A myth, until a call came in from CID, a frantic voice rattling off impossible details.
She smoothed the front of her jacket, a reflex. She was 41, 5'9", with closely cropped salt-and-pepper hair that framed a sharp jaw. A worn leather watch on her left wrist ticked a steady rhythm against the cacophony . Eighteen years on the force, all of them spent chasing the undeniable, the tangible . Her partner, Morris, had disappeared three years ago into something unexplainable, and ever since, Harlow had pushed harder against anything that dared to defy logic. This place grated on her nerves, a constant affront to everything she knew.
Yellow police tape, glaringly out of place, strung crudely between an ornate iron lamp post and a stall hawking "Bottled Nightmares," marked the crime scene. Uniforms stood awkwardly, their faces pale in the flickering emergency lights that seemed barely strong enough to pierce the gloom . A heavy scent hung in the air : scorched wool, cheap incense, and something else, something acrid and sickly sweet she couldn’t place.
Beyond the tape, a huddle of crime scene investigators moved like bewildered ghosts around a body. Harlow stepped over a coil of thick, black-furred rope, ignoring the unsettling twitch she thought she saw in its fibers. Her focus narrowed on the victim. A man, middle-aged, dressed in robes of shimmering, iridescent fabric she’d never seen before. He lay sprawled near a stall overflowing with antique brass instruments, his hands splayed wide, fingers curled as if in a last, desperate grasp.
And then she saw the colleague. Eva Kowalski, her fiery red curls a stark bloom against the muted tones of the station. She was bent over the victim, her round glasses perched on her freckled nose, a worn leather satchel full of books slung over her shoulder. She spoke animatedly to a uniformed officer, her slender fingers tracing an invisible line in the dust. Eva, Harlow knew, was Aurora’s childhood friend – Aurora, whose 'clique' Harlow suspected had more than a little to do with exactly this sort of criminal activity. Eva, the occult researcher from the British Museum. Of course.
“—a standard Hex-strike,” Eva was saying, her voice clear despite the market’s low hum. She tucked a strand of curly red hair behind her left ear, a tell-tale sign of nerves. “You see the scorch pattern? Concentrated energy, but dissipates rapidly. No exit wound , but the internal trauma would be immense. Probably targeted the heart chakra.”
The uniformed officer, PC Miller, looked utterly lost. “A… hex-strike, Dr. Kowalski?”
Harlow moved past him, her boots crunching on something gritty. A shower of tiny glass shards, she noted, glinted under a loose tile. Her military precision kicked in. She knelt beside the body, not touching, but observing .
The victim’s chest was indeed scorched. A perfectly circular burn, perhaps four inches in diameter, centered on his sternum. The fabric of his strange robes had been vaporized in that spot, leaving a dark, cauterized hole in his skin. No blood, no charring around the edges, just a clean, impossible-looking crater.
“Chakra?” Harlow’s voice was flat, cutting through Eva’s explanation.
Eva straightened, startled. Her green eyes widened behind her glasses when she saw Harlow. A brief flicker of something – surprise? Annoyance? – crossed her face. “Detective Quinn. I wasn’t expecting you.”
“I’m sure you weren’t.” Harlow’s gaze swept over the victim, then to the stall. A small brass compass, etched with protective sigils and green verdigris, lay half-hidden beneath a dusty astrolabe. A Veil Compass. She cataloged it without comment. “You were explaining how a man received a perfectly circular burn that left no residual charring.”
Eva cleared her throat. “It’s esoteric, Detective. A Hex-strike isn't a conventional burn. It's a magical assault. Raw energy. Think of it as a directed surge of pure arcane force. It vaporizes on impact. The body undergoes instantaneous localized necrosis, calcifying the tissue within the affected area.” She gestured with a precise hand. “See how the skin is almost porcelain -like on the inside edges? That’s characteristic.”
Harlow studied the wound . It *did * look like porcelain inside. “And the lack of an exit wound ?”
“The energy expends itself within the target,” Eva explained patiently, as if talking to a particularly slow child . “Like hitting a wall with a focused sonic wave. The impact point takes all the force. Internal organs would be pulverized, yes, but no breach of the posterior integument.”
Harlow stood, moving to circle the body slowly . Her eyes scanned the floor, the walls, the items in the stall. The air felt heavy, damp, with a pervasive, artificial chill . Something was wrong. Her gut, trained by years of gritty urban crime, screamed it.
“And the cause of death?” she posed.
“Immediate cardiac arrest, brought on by the massive energy transfer to the heart. Or perhaps even the shockwave to the central nervous system,” Eva ventured. “It's quick, brutal. Designed to… disable entirely.”
Harlow stopped at the victim’s left hand. It was splayed outward, palm up. One finger, the ring finger, was bent at an odd angle, and beneath it, something glinted dimly. A sliver of iridescent fabric, exactly matching the victim’s robes.
“He struggled,” Harlow murmured, more to herself than to Eva .
Eva frowned. “A Hex-strike is instantaneous. There wouldn’t be time to struggle.”
Harlow ignored her, moving closer to the burn. She squatted again, her sharp jaw set. She reached into her kit, pulling out a small, high-powered LED penlight. She shone its beam into the circular wound .
The porcelain -like inner surface gleamed. But at the very bottom, inside the neat crater, she saw something else. Tiny, almost invisible fibers, dark against the pallor of the cauterized flesh. And clinging to them, a minute speck of something metallic, glinting like powdered starlight.
“Eva,” Harlow said, her voice quiet . “Hex-strikes. Do they leave internal ash?”
Eva tilted her head. “No, as I said, it’s instantaneous vaporization. Tissue turns to a calcified powder, not ash. Unless the fabric caught fire first, which it wouldn’t, in such a focused attack.”
“Right,” Harlow said. She pointed her penlight into the burn. “What if the fabric *didn’t * catch fire? What if it *was * already there? These robes, iridescent as they are, are made of something. What if something else caused this?”
She straightened again, her gaze sweeping over the whole platform. The shimmering robes. The impossible burn. Eva’s confident, supernatural explanation.
Harlow’s mind raced back to the fiber in the wound , the metallic speck. *Too neat *. *Too perfect *. The market, with its illusions and strange goods, was a perfect place for a killer to hide a mundane act behind a fantastic explanation.
“The sliver of fabric under his finger,” Harlow observed, gesturing with a tilt of her head. “It matches his robes precisely . But it’s not his robe. It looks like it was cut, precisely .”
Eva peered closer. “Perhaps he had it in his hand, a sample, when he was struck?”
“No,” Harlow said, shaking her head. “Look at the edges of the burn. There’s no secondary scorch. Nothing. It’s like something punched a hole out of him. Like a cookie cutter.” Her eyes narrowed . “But a Hex-strike, you said, transfers energy. It creates a *wound *. It doesn’t *remove* tissue in a clean disc.”
She looked at the ground near the victim's feet. There, half-buried in the grime, was a small, circular metal disc. The same diameter as the burn on the victim’s chest. It was blackened on one side, almost perfectly round, like a coin, but too thick. A faint shimmer, almost identical to the victim's robes, coated its smooth, unmarred surface.
She took a gloved hand and carefully nudged it with her penlight. It was heavy.
“Eva,” Harlow said, her voice calm but with an edge of absolute certainty . “This isn’t a Hex-strike. This is something else entirely.” She looked directly at Eva, whose green eyes now held a dawning unease. “My guess? Our victim was murdered with a… projectile. A high-velocity, extremely hot projectile, perhaps a shaped charge, designed to cut through him cleanly. And then, to hide the evidence, the killer took a piece of his own garment, and used that as a cover for the real weapon.”
She pointed to the shimmer on the disc. “This isn't residual energy. This is a coating, designed to make the disc blend in with his robe, to make it invisible to the casual eye. And the fibers in the wound ?” She tapped the burn with her penlight. “That's the wadding, the stabilizer, that held the slug in place before launch.”
Eva stared, her mouth slightly ajar. Her freckled complexion seemed paler under the dim lights . “But… a projectile? In the Veil Market? That kind of technology… it’s unheard of here.”
“Maybe. Or maybe we’re simply looking at someone who’s very good at making mundane murder look like supernatural chaos,” Harlow countered, rising to her full height. Her gaze swept over the bewildered police officers, then back to Eva. “The burn is too clean, Eva. The edges are too perfect . Magic often leaves residue, distortions, lingering effects. It rarely leaves surgical precision, like something cut out with a laser and vacuumed away. And it certainly doesn’t leave behind its own disguised projectile.”
She gestured at the market around them, the impossible stalls, the strange beings. "They want us to believe in magic. They want us to believe this was a Hex-strike, an arcane accident, a supernatural event they can shake off as 'market dangers.' But a victim struggling, no matter how briefly, contradicts an instantaneous magical strike. And a hidden projectile... that argues premeditation."
Harlow knelt again, this time carefully extracting the tiny fabric sliver from beneath the victim's finger with tweezers. It was sharp, precisely cut. Too precise for struggling. Unless...
She closed her hand around the small disc on the ground, then the fabric sliver. The killer had *planted * the scrap of iridescent fabric under the victim's finger, making it look like he'd clutched it in his last moments of sudden, magical agony. A detail to sell the Hex-strike story.
"Someone wanted this to look like a magical death," Harlow finished, standing up, her brown eyes now alight with a cold, clear focus. "But they forgot that magic, like any good lie, still has to make sense." She looked at Eva, a challenging glint in her eyes. "Or at least, it still has to fool a good detective."