The Beast Tamers Hidden System

CHAPTER 6: THE NIGHT BOOK

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 center of the great floor, and the benches sat in rows like a congregation waiting for a sermon that wasn’t coming. Harlan led him past it without looking. The night office was a closet behind the east stairs, with a desk, a lamp, a kettle, and a wall of ledgers so old their spines had gone soft as cloth.

Adrian had Nyx inside his coat, wrapped in a gray wool scarf Harlan had thrust at him on the stairs. It was heavy for its size, with a fine metallic thread woven through the weave.

“Warden issue,” Harlan had said. “Lead wire. Dulls a lens reading at close range. It won’t hold against anything serious, and it won’t hold for long. But it’ll do for tonight.”

Nyx had hated it. The bond had flared with pure disgust the moment the cloth touched its fur. Then it had curled up inside anyway, and the disgust had faded to a low, sulky hum.

It knows it’s necessary, Adrian thought. It just doesn’t have to like it.

Harlan sat at the desk, pulled out a drawer, and brought up a black ledger. The spine was cracked, the pages stained. He opened it somewhere in the middle and smoothed a page flat with his missing-fingered hand.

“The last real night book,” he said. “Five years old. I kept the practice up until a few months after the Wardens were disbanded, and then I stopped. Nobody asked.” He flipped a few pages. “Funny how a thing nobody asks about turns into a thing nobody checks, until one day someone does.”

“Why does it matter if you kept it?”

“Because Kessel’s the kind who matches ink.” Harlan uncapped a pen and tested it on a scrap. “He’ll check the dates, the hand, the weather in the margins. A lie that costs you nothing is the first one anyone checks. So the entries I write tonight can’t be perfect. They have to be boring. Chairs stacked. Floors swept. A lamp that kept going out.” He glanced up. “You’ll help me remember which lamp.”

“The one by the east stairs.”

Harlan blinked.

“It flickers,” Adrian said. “Every night. I’ve mentioned it three times.”

A short dry sound came out of the old man. It took Adrian a second to realize it was a laugh. “Good. That’s the kind of detail he’d never think to fake.”

They worked in silence for a while. Harlan wrote, and Adrian fed him names and small facts, and the lamp hissed and the ledger filled with dull, believable days. Nyx stirred once inside the scarf, then settled.

At some point the pane unfolded in the corner of Adrian’s vision, soft and blue, while he was reaching for the kettle.

[ DING! ]

MAIN MISSION 2: REGISTER YOUR COMPANION

Register your companion with the Halcyon Academy Bond Registry within 30 days.

Reward: Bond Points x 80. Access to Academy Training Grounds.

Failure: Companion flagged as unregistered. Bond Strain applied to Tamer.

He read it twice. Then he said quietly, “The System wants me to take Nyx to the Academy.”

Harlan’s pen stopped.

“It’s not a choice,” Adrian went on. “There’s a deadline. Thirty days. If I miss it, Nyx is flagged unregistered, and anyone can seize it.”

“That’s the law, too.” Harlan set down the pen. “Every awakened tamer registers a beast within thirty days or loses the seat. The law’s older than the System. It’s meant to keep wild things off the streets.” He was looking at the wall rather than at Adrian. “It also means anything that wants to hide among tamers has to stand in front of an appraiser and be written down.”

“Tobi can’t read it. His lens comes back empty.”

“Then the Registry will read it differently.” Harlan reached into the desk and came up with something small and dull. It was a collar, no wider than two fingers, dark gray, with a hairline seam of lead wire running through the metal. “Ash-iron. E-grade suppressor. Hides essence from standard readings and shows the beast as a plain F-rank.”

“It’ll look like a pup.”

“It’ll look like a pup that someone’s put a leash on.” Harlan set it on the ledger. “Nyx will hate it more than the scarf.”

“I know.”

“Good. Hate is more honest than gratitude.” He picked up the pen again, and for a while there was only the scratch of ink. Then, without lifting his eyes: “Aren’t you going to ask?”

Adrian’s grip tightened on the kettle. “Ask what?”

“Why I’m doing this.”

He’d been waiting for the question since the landing. He had asked it of himself a dozen times on the walk through the dark streets. And every time he’d come back to the same answer, which sat in his chest like a stone.

“You knew my father,” he said.

Harlan nodded slowly.

“You were at Gate Seven.”

“I was.” The pen stopped. “For eleven years. Your father was my partner on the east watch. We walked the wall at night. He was the better of us.” A thin smile. “He hated this job. He was bad at it, too. He never could stop asking what was on the other side of the thing we were guarding.”

“The other side of what?”

“That,” Harlan said, “is a longer conversation than tonight.”

He reached across the desk and tapped the cracked black ledger. “Hand me that. Page two-nineteen. I need to match the lamp-oil entries.”

Adrian set down the kettle and took the book. The pages were soft, yellowed, and heavy with the faint stale scent of old paper. He turned them carefully until he found the right number, and then he stopped.

The handwriting on the page wasn’t Harlan’s.

It was sharp and slanted, with a tall looped g that Adrian had spent his whole life tracing in letters, in birthday cards, in grocery lists his father had left on the kitchen table. In the margin of an entry dated three weeks before the Wardens were disbanded, someone had written a single line, pressed so hard into the paper that the pen had nearly torn it.

East bell, third hour. The Threshold answered. If a black one comes through, do not let the Crown count it. Do not let them name it. Tell Adrian nothing until he’s old enough to refuse.

The lamp hissed. The room was suddenly very small.

“Harlan,” Adrian said. His voice came out as a scrape. “What’s the Threshold?”

The old man didn’t look up. His pen had stopped halfway across the page, and a bead of black ink had gathered at the tip and fallen, slowly, to blot the paper.

“I hoped,” he said at last, “you’d never find that.”

“You knew.” Adrian was holding the book so hard the cover creaked. “You saw the poster. You knew exactly what it meant.”

“No.” Harlan finally raised his eyes. They were red-rimmed and very old. “I knew what your father was afraid of. I never knew what it looked like.” He glanced at the bundle in Adrian’s coat, and something terrible crossed his face. It was grief, and relief, and something very close to dread. “Until tonight.”

On Adrian’s chest, inside the scarf, Nyx lifted its head.