Adrian had one hand clamped over the creature’s muzzle and the other pressed flat to a slab of fallen wall, and he was trying very hard to stop his blood from falling on the ground.The boots had stopped at the arch. He could hear them stop. Then a man’s voice, low and bored, the voice of someone who got paid by the hour.“Snare’s cut.”A pause. A crackle, like a brass earpiece waking up.“No, Captain. Clean cut. Blade, not teeth.” Another pause. “Silver’s on the ground. Whatever was here isn’t anymore.”Adrian was lying in the cellar mouth of a collapsed shop, eight feet from the archway, with a sheet of rusted roofing pulled across the gap and a creature the size of a cat shivering against his ribs. Through a crack between two bricks he could see a sliver of the alley: one black boot, one crimson-stitched cuff. The Crown of Fangs. They’d been hunting this thing. They’d hunted it hard enough to lay silver wire and wait for it to bleed out.And his hand was still dripping.He felt the

Adrian scooped Nyx off the pavement so fast that its claws snagged his sleeve.The shadow snapped back beneath its paws like a dropped rope.“The sun,” he said. “It’s the angle of the sun.”“Sure,” said Tobi. “The sun does that.” He hadn’t moved, and the playfulness had drained out of his face. What was left looked younger and more careful, like a kid who had just realized the ice under him wasn’t as thick as it looked.A baker’s cart rattled past the end of the alley. Tobi waited until the wheels faded.“Walk with me. Not far. I’m not going to scream.”They went down Cutler Row side by side, past shuttered stalls and a man hosing down the pavement outside a laundry. Adrian kept one arm clamped over his coat. Nyx had gone rigid inside it, offended in every muscle.“Yesterday afternoon,” Tobi said, “two men from the Crown came into the Appraisers’ Hall. Black-and-crimson, polite, the kind that never raise their voices. They asked the senior appraisers one question. Had any of them ever

Harlan didn’t say another word until Mina was asleep.He stayed on the landing with the mop bucket while Adrian got her water, checked her breathing, and tucked the blanket back under her chin. Nyx had refused to leave the bed. It lay across her ankles with its eyes half open, the way a guard dog lies when it has decided the job is its own.[ Companion essence: 18% ]Two points gone, just from hiding under that blanket. Stabilized didn’t mean safe. It only meant the bleeding had stopped.When Adrian finally came out and shut the door, the old man was sitting on the top stair with his bad hand wrapped around his knee.“Tonight,” Harlan said. “The Hall. After the cleaners leave. Bring the fox.”“Mina can’t be alone.”“Then bring the girl’s neighbor. Or the girl. I don’t care.” He rubbed his face. “Kessel’s going to read that book before sunrise. I need to write three years of it before he does.”The Awakening Hall at night was a different building.The crystal Pillar stood dark in the c

“Again,” said Tobi.Adrian rolled onto his stomach, spat sand, and got his palms under him. The Training Grounds of Halcyon Academy were a ring of packed earth behind the east wing, walled in old brick and lit by the last orange of the afternoon. Access had come with the registration reward, and for eleven days he’d used every minute of it.Across the ring, a gloam rat the size of a terrier shook itself out of the net he’d dropped on it, snapped the cord with one jerk of its jaws, and came straight at him.“Nyx!”The bond pulled. Black smoke ran across the sand ahead of the rat’s feet, and Nyx stepped out of it two yards to the left, small and sharp-eared, and bit the rat’s flank. The rat shrieked, swung around, and Adrian hit it across the skull with a weighted training staff he’d bought secondhand for six marks.It folded. He stood over it, wheezing.[ DING! ]Gloam Rat defeated.Experience gained. System Level 4 → 5 progress: 88%“That’s the fourth one,” Tobi said from the wall, wh

The Hollowwood did not look dangerous from the gate.It looked like a very old forest that someone had taken good care of. The path ran between oaks wide enough to hide a wagon, and the early light came down through the canopy in soft gold shafts. Birds were singing. Somewhere ahead, water ran over stone.“Pretty,” said Tobi, in the voice of a man who did not trust it.Eighty-eight students stood in a loose crowd before the iron gate, divided into teams of four. Every team had a beast. Wolves, hawks, a pair of armored badgers, something with six legs that kept licking its own eyes. Instructors in gray coats walked the line checking collars and handing out signal flares.“One flare per team,” Instructor Dane said, stopping in front of Team Nineteen. “Fire it and the run ends. Your instructors will retrieve you. You fail, but you live.” She looked at each of them in turn. “The Hollowwood is managed. The wards hold nearly everything above D-rank out. Nearly. I would like to see all four