Page 82 of House of Kallan
I was surrounded by shaking heads.
“Then it’s on you, Apricot and Cera. Tell us when you’re ready.”
They took the barest time, shifted their positions in the room, and then it all happened. “Shadow!”
He didn’t run so much as just take a step and suddenly he was in front of me. I scooped him up and waited for the kids to get ahead of us. With a last sweep of the room, I raced to the door and slammed it behind me.
Solana and Mayr waited. Solana touched the door, and it immediately heated brightly under his touch. Then Mayr washed it all with ice, effectively welding it together.
Taking a breath, we ran down the stairs as fast as we could. “Okay, sweetheart. You can stop crying,” I told Bael. He immediately quieted and looked at me with wide eyes. I smiled. “You are a wonder.”
There was no one left in the basement and the door to the ‘water’ room was closed. Throwing it open, we burst inside, and I told the two kids to seal this door shut, too. Hopefully, everyone was out. I was pretty confident that we’d succeeded in evacuating Haven.
The portal was easy enough to find, and we stepped through, into an abandoned village, just as promised. “Choose a house,” I said. “There should be a tunnel.”
We went through two before finding one and somehow managed to climb down without falling. Keeping Bael in my arms and slinging Shadow to my back to clutch like a koala, I somehow hung on to the rungs and closed the hatch at the same time. Plunging us into darkness.
When it opened up, there was no one, but a light shown in the distance.
“Go to it,” I whispered, “but be ready. Just in case.”
Our caution wasn’t needed. Thankfully, we came out to theother end in an enormous cavern filled with everyone we’d evacuated from Haven. I was immediately in Aden’s arms, and I almost cried in relief.
When we settled and I had a chance to look around, I asked, “Did we suffer any casualties?” I spotted all the human husbands and all my kids from the third floor. But when silence met my question, my chest tightened.
Tatum
I’d seena lot of death in my lifetime. Being born into a world where Silence existed meant that death was everywhere. Angels themselves weren’t usually hunted, as our strength was slight. Compared to most other monsters, angels were relatively weak.
Yet, we saw death constantly because our families were often filled with different species of the divine. And many of them were hunted.
I’d lost two fathers before I was eight, and my mother when I was sixteen. Then I lost a sibling when I was twenty.
Maybe I should have known then that I’d see death around every corner. Within every chapter of my life. It had followed into my love life when Hawthorn died and was thankfully brought back. And then again, when Cobalt was taken and presumed dead.
Strangely, I thought the cycle had been broken with the introduction of Adeline Daemon. A harbinger of death had essentially brought Cobalt back from the dead. He wasn’t actually dead, of course, but he was to us. We’d lived for years thinking we’d lost a husband.
Since then, we’ve beenjust barelyin time to save our friendsover the years. Sometimes it felt too late, but somehow, we’d been able to turn the tables. We’d saved lives.
The cycle of death was broken.
I still thought this, even as we all gathered in this strange underground of an abandoned village and I was mentally keeping track of whether I’d seen all our friends or not. Because they appeared to have all returned, if not a little worse for wear, I’d been surrounded—but not touched—by death once more.
I honestly wasn’t sure what the worst part of today had been. Leaving my family without a proper goodbye and the dread that hung over me suggesting I might never see them again. Aden being sent away, angry that he was left behind but not arguing because he knew that death was waiting for us.
I expected the robo-hybrids. We knew they’d be there in droves. At all houses. They had a fucking army of them. But everything that came after that was too much. The beasts that shouldn’t exist. They had one task, and that was to kill. I’d seen them attack us just as much as those they came with. The beasts had no idea what they were doing, only that they were fulfilling their biological calling.
But the most disturbing were the children. There were more than a dozen at the Theron house—although ‘house’ might have been a bit of an exaggeration. It had already been burnt to the ground.
As soon as we got there and aligned ourselves with the Theron family where they were taking a stance, one of the kids stopped his attacks and came running at us, crying. “Kill me. Please, kill me! I don’t want to do this anymore,” he pleaded.
I thought we were all startled as we watched the boy come running toward us. Toward what he thought was going to end the horror he was living in. Idris caught him, hugging him tightly for a minute.
“We’re not going to kill you. Sit here, okay? Stay out of the way.”
The boy did as he was told. He dropped to the ground andbrought his knees to his chest. Another three kids followed, running at us with their hands held out and all their magical attacks dropped from their bodies. We treated them the same, having all four kids huddle together.
They became our heart; that which we were protecting, since nothing else on the property had been salvageable by the time we arrived. I thought that maybe having them there gave us something to center around. We knew where to have our backs so that we created a perimeter.
