Page 6 of House of Kallan
We all knew about Ady, the lone living banshee in existence as far as anyone had knowledge. She was a warning to the entire supernatural world. An omen that threatened:this could be your species if you don’t fight back.
Kohara shook his head. “You have to remember that Ady doesn’t know shit about her species. She was raised—and I use that word lightly—in the bowels of Silence. All she knows is that she was kept silent once she discovered her voice, and she knows that her torture was actually experimentation. Otherwise, you’re basically asking a newborn to educate you about their species.” He looked pointedly at me. “Obviously we’d be a lot farther into decoding what’s going on here if your babies could speak.”
I nodded in agreement.
Kohara’s phone buzzed, and he looked down. We all turnedto him as his eyes got wide. “We have incoming,” he said, getting to his feet. Around the room, everyone followed. My heart began to race as I stood too. His gaze met mine. “It’s not good, Tatum.”
Chills broke out over my body.
Tobiael
I’ve seena lot of hell since we began hunting down Silence’s facilities two years ago. While most of what we did was reconnaissance, what we’d found difficult was leaving what we called the Breeding Houses alone when we located one. There was never a more gruesome sight than those.
There was the argument that what happened within the pits of Silence’s buildings was all horrific and needed to stop. We were aware of the horrors that went on there too. After all, it was in the basement of a Silence facility that we found the first bred humans. We weren’t under the impression that it was an isolated incident.
But we needed to be strategic, as difficult as that was. I was not a patient man. In any aspect of the word.
For instance, Zuri and Emrys handed Cobalt a bouquet, promising us a wife fifteen months ago. Fifteen motherfucking months! Where was our call?!
Our sweet Aden was beginning to feel discouraged, like the lore of the bouquet was broken. We tried to remind him that the Agnis waited a year after they were handed a bouquet. Wherever our wife was, she wasn’t ready to find us yet.
Honestly, I felt his frustration. I was just as impatient.Considering I’ve lived a very long life, I’ve been waiting a lot longer.
“Where’s your head, angel?” Calix asked, knocking his shoulder into mine.
“Trying to imagine what our wife will look like, so if I see her, I can just whisk her away,” I said.
He snorted. “Good luck. Waiting is what we were made for, apparently.”
I wrapped an arm around his waist. The Savages have been waiting for their completion just as long. It was only recently that our group of friends, more incomplete families than completed, started finding their missing pieces. Including the Nashes, who had thought they’d been complete for decades. Then the tiny spitfire Bellamy showed up out of the blue and The Harem Project bot pulled the Nash profile out of the depths of the database and shoved it in his face.Look, I saved this pack for you!
It worked out. But it just as likely might not have. The truly curious thing was, it was as if the bot justknewthat Bellamy belonged there. It wasn’t even just that he belonged. He and Kormac had this weird ass ancient, almost mythic bond that’s shared between Canidae. It’s so fucking rare that what it’s called had been lost, and they’re still trying to dig up the name of it.
Like the weird ass dojem bond between Emrys and another mannotin his family. I couldn’t even imagine the stress, frustration, and ache that it caused. It’s wild.
The Harem Project bot was out of control and yet, it was doing the right thing! Emrys belonged to Agni. He always had. As did Zuri; so if the bot had ignored the ‘hiatus’ status of the Agni family, what would have happened to Zuri?
I knew I had to trust the process. If nothing, watching my friends find their wives and husbands had been very educational. Especially in recent years.
But waiting was so hard! Even my mind was whiny over this.
“What do you see, Toby?” Hadrian asked, and I turned my attention to the building we’ve been watching for hours.
Taking a breath, I stared at the walls and then mentally peeled away all the static noise that was building material until it left me with a shell. At first, I saw just a few heat signatures. They were bright spots, but they were uniform. An oblong red shape that faded to orange and then yellow within a cold blue and green background.
“I count six,” I said, tilting my head as I moved toward the building slowly. Diving deeper. Beyond the first walls. Second walls. The ceiling to the second floor. I shook my head. “Maybe ten, but not what we’re looking for. Definitely inhuman.”
All forms of the divine had very strange magic at their disposal. Strong but specific and unique, with some ridiculous rules to be able to use it. I saw two things when I turned my attention to them. Heat signatures—basically, body heat—which could be enough to identify whether they’re supernatural or nonsupernatural. Sometimes, I could tell the difference between species within the supernatural too, but it depended on the species. Not all were distinct in their heat signature.
For example, I could identify a fire monster from a mile away. They were almost white with heat.
Then there’s another level of heat I saw which wasn’t heat at all but their souls. Souls, or the spiritual essence of a being, were usually a pretty distinct shape and color. However, the bits that I looked for when we were hunting Breeding Houses was the darkness that clung to their soul. Usually, this helped us identify whether we were looking at something bad. And they became a target on our radar.
If those blackened souls were human, we knew they belonged to ORKA. If they’re supernatural, they’re Silence. There’s no doubt in my mind that we’re looking at Silence. Every last one of those souls was inhuman.
I didn’t need to repeat this. We’d already determined thatthis was a Silence outhouse. If I found otherwise, I’d say so, but I didn’t find it necessary to confirm what we already knew.
“Probably underground,” Tyrus said.
