Page 51 of House of Kallan
Not going to lie, I felt a little better hearing that. Hadrian wasn’t wrong. The people behind all three organizations werevery different. ORKA and Silence may be similar at their core, but The Harem Project was not. They were on the complete opposite of the spectrum.
“I think it’s safe to say that The Harem Project is not being orchestrated by the same person or persons responsible for Silence and ORKA,” Hawthorn said. “Though I’m not discounting the possibility that ORKA and Silence are, in fact, run by the same person.”
“Bottom line is really simple,” Aden said. “ORKA is getting this magic from somewhere. They’re just as surprised by what the weapons do as those who they hit more times than not. Someone is giving them targets and telling them not only how to hit them but how to hold them. A few years ago, they tried to feed Jennings to a Minotaur that they’d been torturing foryears.They managed to capture almost a third of a pegasi herd. Deep sea monsters. And the Savages—monstrous monsters. None of that is an accident.”
My head was spinning now. I didn’t know what to think. In what direction to look. But by all means, I didn’t think they were wrong. Even if they weren’t run by the same person, someone out there was giving this information to ORKA. They were selling out their fellow monsters. Sharing secrets. Giving them weapons that they shouldn’t have access to in an effort to help them hunt monsters.
“I shudder to think what they have in their database now,” Toby said quietly.
“What do we do?” I asked.
Hadrian smiled. The entire room was smiling at me. I could feel their pride, but I wasn’t sure why it was directed my way.
“Right now, just do your thing, Tatum,” Hadrian said. “We’ve all learned we have to do our parts, or this is going to keep growing and there won’t be anywhere safe left in the world. The best thing you can do is what you’re already doing.”
“It’s huge,” Cobalt said. “I know what they do to monsters, and we’re genetically capable of handling a lot more thanhumans. I can’t even imagine how they’re surviving this. Don’t ever discount your value, love.”
I nodded, but for the first time, I didn’t feel like it was enough. I needed to be able to do more. Somehow. I wasn’t sure what ‘more’ looked like, but there had to be something I could do.
When I looked up, Aden was crossing the room to me. He knelt on the edge of the chair in front of me and took my hand. His smile was sweet and beautiful. “One thing I learned when I came here was to recognize my strengths and my weaknesses. To know my limits. I think you know your strengths and weaknesses pretty well, Tatum. But I think maybe you need some help recognizing your limits. You can’t do everything. What you’re doing already is more important than almost anything else the rest of us are.”
“You think so?” I asked skeptically.
Aden nodded. “I think Cobalt would agree. When you’re finally released from your own personal hell, there’s a lot of trauma that lingers, and it takes some time to fight your demons. Cobalt had his family. Eventually I had my new family. But these women and children? They don’t have people they know they can trust. That’s what you do. You’re giving them hope and family and teaching them to trust again. You’re healing them more than you think you are.”
I bowed my head and closed my eyes. “Thanks, Aden.”
He wiggled into the chair with me and wrapped the blanket around us. Taking my hand under the blankets, he squeezed it hard. “My limits without outside input are very little. I short circuit quickly in public. That’s the biggest reason I stay inside with people I know and who I know love me. Those are my limits. I know this about myself. I think you should think about yours. How much can you do before you’re stretched too thin and therefore aren’t useful anywhere but a hazard to yourself?” he asked, then rested his head against the side of mine.
This man was wise beyond his years. When I let myself focuson more than just him, I saw the rest of the men in the room were watching with such sweet smiles, I could feel their angelic glow brushing my skin.
Except Toby. He was radiating light like a lighthouse beacon.
Tatum
Just as Ithought we were getting ready to move beyond the horror, Toby said, “Then there’s that thing that Ellis suggested.” He looked at Hadrian. “Remember?”
Hadrian frowned, but nodded.
“He suggested that maybe Silence didn’t actually kill all the extinct species. Maybe they still have some somewhere and are holding them. Experimenting on them or forcing them to make new magic and stuff,” Toby said.
“You know the scary part is that I can almost imagine it,” Hawthorn said.
“It would definitely explain some of their weird advantages,” Lazarus said.
“And if they have DNA from every species in existence or that we believe has once existed to work with, they have a lot to draw on to create their anomalies,” I said.
I wasn’t sure if this was a good solution or not. Sure, maybe that means all the species that had been lost to Silence’s hunting weren’t actually extinct. But then again, the alternative might be a lot crueler.
We continued to lounge around for the rest of the afternoon. The conversation shifted away from ORKA and Silence, thoughmy mind continued to shift back to them from time to time. Since I was old enough to understand what the two organizations were about, I’d been sick to my stomach over them.
Once, when I was a bright-eyed and somewhat foolish teenager, I had these grand daydreams of joining Silence as a secret operative and working my way up to the top to gain their trust. Maybe make the person in charge fall in love with me. And then I’d poison them all and the supernatural world would be free.
It wasn’t the heroics that I cared about. There was a moment in school when we had this random lockdown drill and I remembered thinking, “does this mean Silence is attacking the school and taking kids now?” All around me, my peers looked terrified. I knew that more than one had thought about Silence too. I heard their whispered fears.
That my mind went right there spoke a lot to the frame of mind children go to in times of panic.
It was then that I began thinking that if I ever had children, I wanted them to grow up in a different world. Not one in which a distant threat where our school was just taking extra precautions would immediately make me think we were under attack by Silence.
