AI Harlow’s boot slips on a grease-stained kebab wrapper, and she slams her palm into a damp brick wall to arrest her momentum. Her worn leather watch digs into her wrist, the fogged face reading 1:14am as she pushes off the wall, legs burning, and picks up the pace again. Thirty yards ahead, Tomás Herrera’s dark curly head bobs around a corner, his medical bag slapping against his hip as he runs. She’d tailed him out of the Raven’s Nest ten minutes prior, the bar’s distinctive green neon sign bleaching the back of his jacket before he’d spotted her unmarked car idling across the Soho street and bolted. She’d sat on that nest of vipers for six weeks, digging up every scrap of evidence she could link them to the three teenagers found drained of blood in Shoreditch, their wrists carved with the same unreadable mark that had been burned into her partner’s chest three years prior. No one at the Met would listen. They called her obsessed, said DS Morris’s death was a random gang killing, said the marks were nothing but graffiti. Harlow knew better. She’d seen the way the case files vanished from the mainframe, the way her superiors transferred her to desk duty after she pushed for an investigation into the clique that ran the Raven’s Nest. This was her only shot.
She cuts through a gaggle of drunk students stumbling out of a Camden pub, their shouts fading behind her as she watches Tomás flag down a black cab that pulls over before he even finishes raising his hand. No queue, no hesitation, the driver’s window rolling down just far enough to show a flash of white teeth before Tomás climbs in. Harlow sprints back to her own idling car, yanks the door shut, and slams her foot on the accelerator, the cab pulling away three cars ahead of her. Rain lashes the windscreen, her wipers fighting to keep the road clear as they cross the canal bridge into Camden, the high street’s neon signs blurring into streaks of pink and blue. She keeps two car lengths back, her eyes fixed on the cab’s rear plates, too familiar with the clique’s habit of dumping tails to get careless. Ten minutes later, the cab pulls over on a dim side street lined with boarded-up shopfronts, half a block from the locked entrance to the old Camden Town Tube branch, abandoned since a 1979 fire. Tomás climbs out, doesn’t look back, and walks straight for the chain-link fence strung across the entrance.
Harlow kills her engine, sits in the dark for two minutes, waiting to make sure he’s not laying a trap. She runs a hand over her closely cropped salt-and-pepper hair, plastered to her sharp jaw by rain, and rests her hand on the service pistol holstered at her hip. She’d snuck out of her flat with nothing but her badge, her gun, and the crumpled photo of her and Morris she kept in her wallet. She’d spent three years chasing the shadow of what killed him, and it had led her right here. She climbs out of the car, locks the door behind her, and creeps along the side of the road, sticking to the shadows of the buildings. She peers around the fence line, and watches Tomás pull a small, smooth bone token from the pocket of his jeans, run it along a faint groove carved into the brick wall beside the entrance. The heavy metal door embedded in the wall swings inward with a low groan, no alarm, no sound, just dark. Tomás slips inside, and the door starts to swing shut behind him.
Harlow’s first thought is to call for backup. Her second is that backup would never come. No one would believe her that there was a market full of who knew what behind that door, that the clique she’d been chasing wasn’t just a group of drug dealers, but something else entirely. She thinks of the three dead teenagers, their cold bodies pulled from the Thames, of Morris’s grin in that photo, the way he’d laughed when she told him they’d crack the case that night. She runs for the door, slips through the gap before it closes all the way, and presses her back to the cold brick wall inside, her breath caught in her throat. The air smells of cinnamon, burnt sage, and a sharp metallic tang that stings her nostrils, copper, fresh and thick. Her eyes adjust to the dim light, and she blinks. The old Tube station is strung with warm orange fairy lights, strung from the cracked ceiling along the length of the platform. Stalls line both sides of the overgrown tracks, vendors leaning over wooden tables stacked with oddities: vials of glowing green liquid, small leather pouches strung on cord, stacks of bone tokens just like the one Tomás used, their surfaces carved with the same unreadable mark she’d seen on the dead kids. A woman with horns curling from her forehead sells mirrors that show faces that aren’t the viewer’s, a man in a hood sharpens a silver knife that glints in the fairy light, muttering to himself in a language Harlow can’t place. She’d heard rumors, once, of a veil between the human world and something else, a market that moved every full moon, that sold things no human shop could stock. She’d thought they were just urban myths, stories coppers told each other on late shifts to pass the time. She’d been wrong.
She pushes off the wall, keeping her head down, and walks slowly along the platform, her boots silent on worn concrete. She spots Tomás ten yards ahead, standing at a stall piled high with sterile bandages and glass vials, his medical bag open on the table as he hands the vendor a stack of cash. The vendor passes him a vial of glowing blue liquid, and Tomás tucks it into his bag, his hand brushing the Saint Christopher medallion around his neck, the gold glinting . Harlow steps forward, her hand moving to the gun at her hip, and a loose tile skitters under her boot. The sound echoes off the tunnel walls, and Tomás’s head snaps up, his warm brown eyes locking with hers. He doesn’t yell, doesn’t run, not at first. He just stares, his jaw tight, the scar along his left forearm peeking out from the sleeve of his jacket.
“Detective Quinn.” His voice is low, the faint Seville lilt thickening, the way it did when he gave his witness statement years prior, after he lost his NHS license for treating unauthorized patients. “You shouldn’t be here.”
“Turns out I’m sick of people telling me where I shouldn’t be.” Harlow’s hand wraps around the grip of her pistol. “Three kids are dead, Herrera. You’re the only link between them and the Raven’s Nest. You’re coming with me.”
Tomás laughs, a sharp, bitter sound, and steps back, away from her. “You think this is a normal arrest? You think you can walk out of here with me in cuffs and that’ll be the end of it? You don’t know what you’re walking into.”
“I know you lost your license for treating patients no other doctor would touch.” Harlow advances slowly , the stalls around her going quiet, every eye in the market turning to her. “Those kids weren’t human, were they? They were whatever this lot is, and something killed them, and you’re running because you’re next. I can protect you.”
A low boom echoes through the station, and a set of heavy iron gates slams down across the mouth of the tunnel behind Tomás, cutting off his only escape. He flinches, staring at the gates, then back at Harlow, and this time there is unmistakeable fear in his eyes. “You brought the wardens. They don’t let trespassers leave. Not alive.”
Harlow spins around, her pistol raised, and comes face to face with three men, their eyes solid black, their shoulders broad enough to block the entrance she’d slipped through. The lead man holds a cudgel carved from the same dark, pitted wood as the gates, and he takes a step forward, the concrete floor creaking under his weight . Behind her, Tomás yells her name, but she can’t look away, her finger tightening on the trigger of her gun, as the lead man smiles, and his teeth split into a row of sharp, yellowed fangs.