Two Bounty Hunters

London has a fog problem. It has had one for a long time. Most people have stopped noticing.

Kaela and Jonah Vale notice. They are married, they are good at this, and they have spent nine years pulling people out of the parts of the city that do not appear on any map — the tram tunnels that were sealed in the forties, the market beneath a Southwark church, the vault under Parliament that no surveyor has ever logged.
Then the disappearances change shape. They start coming in threes. One child, one adult, one elder, always at 2:33 in the morning, always with the cameras dark for half a mile in every direction. A nine-year-old girl goes missing from Bethnal Green. A ledger turns up in a house in Mayfair with the same sentence written on every page in a different hand.
The trail runs down. Past brick, into bone. Into a structure called the Hollowed Court, which is not thirteen creatures but thirteen positions, and which cannot build anything without human hands — so it borrows them, from people who file requisitions and carry lanyards and go home at six.
And somewhere in that structure is a woman who was in the same ward as Kaela six years ago, who has been leaving her a trail of manufactured feathers, and who wants only one thing before the end.
Because six years ago, someone in a very good coat asked Kaela Vale a question.
She answered it in under two seconds.
Everything since has been the bill.

A fast, clean, relentless supernatural thriller set beneath the streets of London.
Written by Dr. Rabea Hadi, a board-certified family physician whose years of clinical practice inform this full-length fiction.