Page 62 of House of Kallan
“I’m going to pull you out and for right now, sit right here with Rahael, okay?”
He nodded and moved beside Rahael, smiling up at him.
“Now, I’m going to make this a little more complicated. If you can control any kind of storm—wind storm, hurricane, wildfire, earthquake—I’m going to pull you out of your group.”
Three from around the room moved, one from fire, one from water, and one from the middle.
“Good. Choose a wall. You’re storms.”
They really liked that title.
“How about anyone who can heal another person? Whether that means you can by touch or by moving their injury to someone else.” No one moved. “How about if you can make yourself into a beacon of bright light that can burn others?” Still no one. “Do any of you have multiple ways to see? You can see everything around you and you can change how you see someone and it turns into heat signatures—reds, yellows, blues, greens?”
One little girl raised her hand.
“Excellent. Come sit with me.”
She beamed. “We’re considered the divine class. I’ll explain what that means in a bit. How about magic? Can any of you create things out of nothing? Make something happen when you’re upset or scared or angry?”
Three raised their hands. “Very good. Choose a wall, lovelies. You’re the magic class. Okay, so this is where it gets a little more challenging. Most other classes aren’t as easy to readily identify.We still have night, demonic, mythic, elemental, and monstrous. My little guy with a horn, you’re monstrous. The baddest of the bad.”
His eyes widened and he giggled madly.
“There’s some crossover between a lot of the remaining species. Elemental and magic can be confused, but the difference is in their species. Magic monsters are those who change matter but remain in this one specific shape. They don’t change their appearance at all. Elementals are different species entirely that can control a certain element—such as fae, pixies, and so on. So, my magics, do you change shape?”
One moved a foot sideways. I smiled at her.
“Mythical is a specific kind of creature that the nonsupernatural world has deemed doesn’t exist but is a story told from ancient times. Valkyrie. Sphynx. Chimera. Typhon. That kind of thing, although these weird words might not be all that helpful to you. So for now, we’re going to discount mythic class for ease of this conversation. That leaves the last group here.” And the largest by far. “My guess is that you’re pretty evenly spread out between night, monstrous, and demonic. There are a lot of crossovers here too, and it just depends on your specific species. However, since none of you are species that already exist, it’s going to be more difficult for us to classify you.”
“We don’t exist?” Jinnah asked.
“No. You definitely exist. One more lesson before I try to clarify that. Your class is your umbrella. Classes can be further broken down into species and then species further into races. For example, my husbands and I are part of the divine class. Within that class are many species, but within our household, there are two—angels and archangels. Rahael is an angel; Lazarus and I are archangels. There aren’t any different races of angel. But there are nine races of archangels. I’m a virtue and Lazarus is a Nephilim. That means that while we’re alike in many ways, our magic or power, whatever you’d like to call it, is different. Webegan this discussion by talking about families and I said that supernatural families are usually within the same class. Not always; this isn’t a rule. But frequently. So, look around you. Those are your classes. Is this a little clearer?”
There were many nods.
“With my little darklings in the middle, you’ll find that while this is the common practice among your classes, your classes often intermingle because you’re very alike. You might find a demon within a night monster household. Or a night monster within a monstrous household. And again, this isn’t a rule. It’s just how we often fall.”
“I’m very good friends with a family of fire class,” Lazarus said. “And while four of the five of them are solidly fire monsters, the fifth is a demon. Granted, he’s a djinn, which is a kind of fire demon, but he’s still within the demonic class.”
“We also are close with a family of night monsters and within their family is an oni, a shadow demon,” Rahael said.
“What is my species?” the girl next to me asked.
I sighed and touched her hand gently. “We don’t know. The people who had you? Do you know what they’re called?”
She shook her head. No one offered any suggestions.
“The Division of Silence,” I paused, considering keeping the ugly truths from them, but they’ve lived that ugly already. There wasn’t a way I could add to their nightmares at this point. “A long time ago, supernaturals lived in peace in our own world. We don’t know what happened or why, but suddenly this group calling themselves the Division of Silence sprang up, announcing to the monstrous world that there were some species that were too dangerous to live. So they started killing them. There are some species now that are extinct. Sorcerers, for example, which are a type of magical monster.”
“Why didn’t someone stop them?” Jinnah asked.
I nodded, meeting Lazarus’s eyes. “That’s a good question, and I don’t have the answer. I can make a lot of guesses, but I think as a whole, everyone just kind of thought ‘It’s not my joband someone else will take care of it.’ Obviously, that wasn’t the case and while we all sat around complacent, hiding so no one was looking at us specifically, we kind of grew to think that as long as it wasn’t affecting me, I didn’t have to do something.”
“That’s changed now,” Lazarus said. “There are a lot of people doing something about it. One of those things is finding all the places like the one you were held in and bringing those victims here where you can get medical treatment and we can find you families.”
“One of the horrendous things we learned about what Silence is doing is that they’re creating new species. They’re stealing nonsupernaturals and doing unspeakable things to them. To the women, they’re implanting monstrous embryos in which they’ve messed with your genetics beforehand. There doesn’t seem to be any rhyme or reason except for one thing—you’re all intelligent beyond your years. You’re well advanced. Otherwise, there isn’t another like you unless you were born with another.” I knew there was one set of twins. I spotted the little girl that I’d held the night they arrived curled up in her brother’s arms. “We don’t know what they’re doing or why. The reason they were hurting you like they were was because they also didn’t know what they were creating. They wanted to see what you could do.”
Silence met my words until Solana said, “We shouldn’t exist.”
