AI Harlow’s boot skidded on wet tarmac, she slammed her shoulder into an overflowing wheelie bin to avoid a speeding black cab that blared its horn as it tore past. The salt-and-pepper strands of her close crop stuck to her sweat-slick forehead, the worn leather of her watch digging into her left wrist as she pumped her arms harder, her 5’9 frame cutting through the thin crowd of stumbling Camden nightlife. She had tracked Tomás Herrera from the Raven’s Nest, three blocks back, when he’d slipped out of the bar’s hidden back room through a side exit, too sharp to miss the unmarked car parked across the street. She had staked out Silas’s bar for six weeks, had peered through its smudged front window once to spot the frayed old maps and cracked black-and-white photographs lining its dim walls, had watched the regulars slip through the fake bookshelf that hid the Nest’s back room, all while gathering proof the clique that ran it was responsible for seven unsolved deaths that had littered London’s underbelly for the past year. The same clique that had left her partner, DS Jim Morris, bleeding out in an alley three years prior, a death the Met had written off as a random gang attack, even though Harlow had seen the claw marks raked through his tactical vest, even though she had seen whatever had torn him apart vanish into the dark before backup arrived.
She spotted Tomás’s short curly dark hair bobbing twenty feet ahead, the edge of his Saint Christopher medallion glinting under a flickering sodium streetlamp as he rounded a corner into a boarded-up side alley, away from the blaring music and drunken shouts of Camden High Street. Harlow put on a burst of speed, the decades of military-style fitness training that shaped every movement of hers letting her close the gap in seconds. Broken glass crunched under her boots, the stale stench of rot and discarded weed hung thick in the air , and a scrawny tabby cat bolted from a mouldering mattress left propped against a brick wall.
“Herrera!” she yelled, her voice sharp enough to cut through the distant hum of traffic. “Stop running. I’m not here to nick you for off-label pethidine to patch up clique grunts.”
Tomás skidded to a halt ten feet from a rusted iron gate set into the far wall of the alley, a faded Tube roundel half scratched off the brick above it, the abandoned old Camden Town station that had been sealed off since the 1970s, written off by most locals as a derelict death trap. His sleeve ripped as he grabbed the gate’s cold bar, the long pale scar running along his left forearm exposed to the dim light, and he spun to face her, his chest heaving. Olive skin glistened with rain, his warm brown eyes wide with a fear she had never seen on the quiet former paramedic’s face, the man whose NHS file she had pored over a hundred times, who had lost his license for treating patients the NHS would have locked up as delusional, patients that were not human.
“You have no idea what you’re walking into, Quinn.” His voice cracked, half snarl half plea. “Turn around. Walk away. This place doesn’t let outsiders wander out when they please.”
Harlow pulled her badge from her inner jacket pocket, flipped it open even though she knew he did not care about Metropolitan Police jurisdiction. The cracked leather ID holder had sat in her bag for three years, a relic of the case that had broken her career’s upward trajectory, the only thing she had left of the old life she led before Morris died. “I’m not turning around. You’re the only link I have to what killed Jim. Whatever is down there, whatever sells the potions that eat people from the inside out, whatever tears coppers apart in alleyways, I’m taking it down. I’ve waited three years for this.”
Tomás reached into his jacket pocket, pulled out a small smooth fox’s bone, and pressed it flat to the gate’s rusted lock. The mechanism clicked once, loud as a gunshot in the quiet alley, and the heavy iron swung inward with a low groan. Harlow’s blood ran cold . She had an identical bone in her own pocket, picked up from the scene of a Hackney murder three weeks prior, a fragment forensics had dismissed as a random trinket, a bit of new age nonsense left by a junkie. She had stuffed it into her wallet that night, unable to shake the sense that it was important, that it was the same small white object she had spotted clutched in Morris’s hand as he died.
“That bone you’re carrying,” Tomás yelled, backing through the gate as the heavy metal began to swing shut behind him, “it’s the only thing that’ll get you inside, but it won’t keep you safe. They can smell unsponsored outsiders within ten minutes. The Market moves every full moon, right? If you’re still locked in here when it seals at dawn, you’ll be trapped forever, just another piece of stock to sell off to the highest bidder. I’m warning you for the last time. Stay out.”
He vanished into the dark beyond the gate, the iron swinging shut so fast it nearly slammed. Harlow did not hesitate. She thought of Morris’s laugh, the way he had brought her a strong black coffee every shift start, the way he had begged her to wait for backup before following him into that fatal alley three years prior, the way she had ignored him and arrived too late. She reached into her pocket, wrapped her fingers around the small fox’s bone, and ran at the gate, slamming her palm flat against the lock before it could latch. The mechanism clicked once, just as it had for Tomás, and the gate swung open again. She slipped through into the dark, the iron clanging shut behind her.
Light hit her a second later, bright and golden, strung along the old Tube station’s vaulted ceilings, hundreds of stalls lining both platforms, crowds of figures in hooded cloaks weaving between them, the air thick with the stench of burnt sage, copper, sweet fermented cider and something sharp, like ozone. A huckster yelled from a nearby stall, holding up a jar of glowing blue liquid that pulsed in time with a heartbeat, touting its power to turn vampires mortal. A woman with antlers curling from her hair haggled over a stack of cursed love letters, her gloved fingers tapping the worn wooden counter. She spotted Tomás halfway down the central concourse, weaving through the crowd, his curly hair visible above the throng, and she lifted a foot to follow.
A hand wrapped around her upper arm, hard enough to bruise, and she spun, yanking her taser from her belt and aiming it at the figure holding her. The woman was half a foot shorter than Harlow, her skin the colour of polished obsidian, two small curved horns curling from her forehead, her eyes solid black, no whites, no irises. She sniffed the air once, loud and deliberate, and grinned, her teeth sharp as shards of broken glass.
“New meat. Came in alone, didn’t you? No sponsor. The stewards love unsponsored outsiders. Fetch a pretty price, you will. A detective, too. Can smell the gun oil and the badge on you. Perfect for the alchemists up north, they pay a fortune for the bones of honest coppers.”
Harlow jerked her arm free, her finger hovering over the taser’s trigger, but she froze when two huge men stepped out from the shadow of the old ticket booth behind the horned woman, their hands twisted into thick, black claws, their shoulders wide enough to block the only path back to the gate. They stepped forward, and she heard Tomás’s voice cut through the crowd’s roar, half angry half desperate, from the far end of the concourse.
“I told you not to follow me!”