AI Harlow Quinn stepped over a split railway tie, her steel-toe boots scraping rusted rail that hadn’t carried a train since 1956. The abandoned Tube station beneath Camden reeked of stagnant water, rot, and the sharp, coppery tang of blood that seeped into concrete and never washed out. CSIs in blue coveralls ducked under string strung between broken ticket booths, their flashlights bouncing off grime-caked tile walls that still bore faded ads for pre-decimal cigarettes. It was 2 a.m., the moon a thin silver sliver hanging over the high street’s locked pub fronts, and the first call that had come in had cited a trespasser found dead in the shuttered station, a routine overdose call dumped on her shift because no one else wanted to trek through the half-flooded access tunnel to reach the site. Harlow’s salt-and-pepper hair lay cropped so close it framed the sharp line of her jaw, the worn leather watch on her left wrist glinting as she swept her flashlight past a cluster of uniformed officers loitering by the station’s only intact stairwell. She had spent six months tracking rumors of a black market that operated out of this very space, a supernatural racket that moved location every full moon, and the call of a dead body here had not felt like routine . It had felt like a break.
She crossed the ticket hall’s cracked tile floor and stopped three feet from the body splayed in the circle of CSIs’ work lights. The man was mid-30s, thin, wearing a faded hoodie and clean white sneakers that held no trace of the ankle-deep mud that caked the access tunnel leading to the station. That was the first thing that didn’t add up. A CSI looked up from where he swabbed the man’s lip, shook his head. No needle marks. No pill bottles, no baggies, nothing that tied to an overdose. The paramedics had listed time of death at roughly 14 hours prior, which put it around noon the day before, when the high street above was packed with tourists and market stalls. Harlow knelt, her knees cracking against the cold tile, and lifted the man’s right hand. His fingers were rigid, locked around a small brass object that dug half an inch into his palm. She worked her thumbnail under his knuckles, pried the object loose, and turned it over in her palm.
It was a compass, its brass casing streaked with a patina of green verdigris, its glass face etched with looping symbols that looked nothing like the numbers or markers of a standard navigation tool. The needle spun in wild circles, never settling on north, never settling on anything. It hummed, a low vibration that seeped through her gloves and into the bone of her wrist, even though the man’s body had gone cold 10 hours prior. That was the second thing that didn’t add up. The leather of her watch strap caught on the compass’s edge as she shifted it, and she stood, turning to call out to the CSI who had flagged the symbols as possible gang tags, the one who’d called in a museum researcher to ID the markings.
A figure shifted at the cordon, curly red hair falling into round glasses, freckles standing out pale on her cheeks under the harsh work lights. Eva Kowalski shifted the weight of her worn leather satchel, its sides bulging with the spines of thick books, and tucked a strand of hair behind her left ear. She had been waiting on the other side of the tape for 20 minutes, her own boots caked in the same access tunnel mud that the victim’s shoes lacked, and she’d said nothing until Harlow’s light landed on her.
Those aren’t gang tags.
Harlow wrapped her fingers tighter around the compass, the hum rising in pitch. She knew Eva. She’d built a file on the small clique of occult researchers and thieves that operated out of the British Museum’s restricted archives, the group that snuck into the Veil Market to buy and sell banned relics. Eva was at the center of that file, the woman who arranged access, who traded academic texts for bone tokens to get into the market. She nodded toward the tape, and Eva ducked under it, stepping carefully around the CSIs’ equipment cases to stop beside the body. She didn’t look at the man’s face, kept her eyes fixed on the compass in Harlow’s palm.
Those are protection sigils. Carved to keep the wielder from getting torn apart when they step through a rift. The compass points to the nearest active portal, that’s what it’s for. They were made by Shade artisans that sell out of this market, only a handful exist.
That was the different interpretation, the take no one else at the scene could offer. The CSIs had seen meaningless scribbles, a trinket a homeless man had picked up off the street. Harlow had seen a clue she couldn’t place, and Eva had handed her the context to stitch the gaps together. She pulled a small plastic evidence bag from her coat pocket, dropped the compass inside, and reached into the victim’s hoodie pocket, pulling out a small carved wolf’s tooth, its surface polished smooth from years of handling. The bone token required to enter the Veil Market, the entry pass Harlow had spent three months trying to track down a sample of. She held it up between her thumb and forefinger, the light glinting off its carved edges.
If you need that to get in here, how did a man with no mud on his shoes, no signs of walking through the access tunnel, end up dead in the middle of the ticket hall?
Eva’s jaw tightened, and she tucked another strand of hair behind her ear, the nervous tic triggering when she withheld information, a tell Harlow had noted in her file months prior. A lot of people sneak in through a service grate on the high street, it’s less muddy. It’s closer to the market’s main entrance.
Harlow nodded, but she leaned down to brush a strand of hair off the victim’s forehead, revealing two tiny, perfectly spaced puncture marks on the side of his neck, just below his jaw. They were the same marks she’d found on her partner’s body, three years prior, the marks the coroner had written off as spider bites, the marks that had never made sense until that night. DS Morris had been investigating the same clique Harlow now tracked, had chased a lead into an abandoned warehouse on the edge of the city, and had turned up dead with no wounds, no signs of a struggle, just those two tiny punctures in his neck. She lifted her flashlight to the puncture marks, holding it so Eva could see them.
The coroner will call those spider bites. They’re not. What drains a man’s life fast enough to leave marks like that, leaves no other trace of violence?
Eva’s breath caught, and she stepped back, her boot hitting a loose piece of tile that skittered across the floor. A coven of blood mages that have been working the market for the last six months. They steal compasses, use the wielder’s life force to power their own portal jumps, drain them dry before anyone can catch them. They leave the bodies where they fall, make it look like they died of natural causes. She paused, her eyes darting to the compass in the evidence bag, then back to Harlow’s face. Those sigils on the compass, they burn out when you siphon the wielder’s life. That’s why the needle is spinning, the compass is dead. It can’t track rifts anymore.
Harlow let that sink in, the pieces clicking into place that no one else at the scene had bothered to put together. The CSIs would write this off as a trespasser who died of a heart attack, a junkie who’d scored a bad batch, a nobody who’d gotten lost in the old tunnels and succumbed to the cold. They’d miss the mud on the access tunnel that didn’t match the victim’s shoes, they’d miss the puncture marks on his neck, they’d miss the fact that the bone token in his pocket had a chip in its edge that matched a token she’d found in Morris’s pocket the day he died. She pulled that token from her own coat, the small carved wolf’s tooth she’d kept in her wallet for three years, and held it up beside the victim’s. The chips aligned , the carvings on the surface identical, etched by the same hand. The same coven that killed Morris had killed this man. They hadn’t dumped him here to hide his body, they’d dumped him here to make the murder invisible, to a police force that didn’t believe in the supernatural, that would write off any oddities as quirks of a forgotten space.
She looked up at Eva, who was still hovering by the body, her satchel slipping off one shoulder, and tucked the two tokens into the same evidence bag as the compass. The full moon was three nights past, the market would move again in 27 days, the same cycle it had followed for as long as anyone had tracked it. Harlow had 27 days to catch the coven, to prove that the clique she’d tracked for years was mixed up in more than just relic theft, to get justice for the partner she’d lost three years prior. She slung the evidence bag over her shoulder, nodding toward the access tunnel, and Eva fell into step behind her, the sound of their boots echoing off the tunnel walls as they left the body and the confused CSIs behind, the only two people in the world who knew what the murder really meant.