She broke out into a cavern, tipped her head back and looked around her, kept moving forwards. Always moving forwards. Her step didn’t falter, not even when something chittered in the gloom, and something else answered it. If it hadn’t been for the way she had looked at him from time to time, he would have sworn she feared nothing.
She was as much a warrior as her brothers, as her father.
And it impressed him.
He had thought he would be carrying a whimpering, sobbing maiden home to Hades, but here he was trying to corral a spirited, brave woman and he was beginning to feel he was trying to capture the wind, had set his mind on an impossible task. Gods be damned, she was going to do whatever she wanted to do, regardless of how hard he tried to make her do as he wished.
There were more similarities between her and the ever-reckless Calistos than he had thought, but he had the feeling that unlike her brother, her power wasn’t over the air.
It was something far darker.
And far more deadly.
Chapter 5
She was beginning to believe her name was Calindria. The more this god of death said it, the more it felt right for her. Fitted her. She was also beginning to believe that she had known him once, so long ago the memory of him was a dim flicker in a far recess of her mind.
What she couldn’t bring herself to believe were the things he kept telling her.
Calindria moved forwards, exploring the new cavern. It was enormous. The ceiling had fallen away in places, formed rubble and boulders three times as large as the seven-foot-plus male who stalked her. She glanced back at him. Was he an illusion?
He was as dark as a nightmare, glowered at her whenever she made him keep his distance or said something he didn’t like. His silver irises kept gaining a strange ethereal blue shine too, something she was coming to associate with his mood. Whenever it darkened, his eyes gained that blue fire. In the last few hundred feet of the tunnel they had just exited, she had decided to attempt to decipher what feelings made his eyes change, so she could use them as a sort of emotional barometer.
A way of judging whether he was liable to want to hurt her again.
She was no fool.
He had wanted to hurt her when she had pushed him too far, had only reined himself in when she had spoken his name. Another thing she filed away. There was power in his name when she wielded it.
She glanced at him again, found him studying the ceiling of the cavern, his eyes brightening as he pinpointed the places where the winged creatures hung from it by their bare feet or loitered on ledges, watching them. Once, she had been held in a cage in a cavern more like this one, where she’d had company other than the two guards. The vicious black beasts had regularly flown to her cage to attempt to reach her, their tiny sharp claws catching her flesh at times as she had tried to evade them. The guards had always chased them off for her.
She’d had the impression the creatures had wanted to eat her.
Well, if they tried now, she would kill them.
Calindria looked at her hands, closed her eyes as she saw another flash of the guard she had touched turning to ashes, withering before her.
“Is something wrong?” Thanatos’s deep bass voice rolled over her like a wave, one that washed away the sickening memory that haunted her.
She shook her head and then frowned and whirled to face him when she realised he was closer to her now. Her eyes dropped to the smaller distance between them.
“I told you to keep your distance,” she snapped, panic rippling through her to shorten her temper.
He arched a black eyebrow at her and huffed as he backed off a step. His huge onyx wings shifted and he stretched them slightly, busied himself with preening them as she went back to looking around the cavern, seeking a path to take. Only she couldn’t concentrate while Thanatos was stroking his hands over his feathers, carefully tending to them, as if they were precious. Questions bubbled up, ones she wanted to voice but held back, because she didn’t want to get comfortable around this male.
Did his feathers feel soft? How strong were his wings? What was it like to fly? Did he love his wings as much as it looked like he did?
Would it be such a bad thing to be more comfortable around him, to trust him?
The answer to that question hit her hard. Yes. Yes, it would be bad to trust him. She didn’t know him, still wasn’t sure whether or not he was with the enemy, or a fabrication created by this realm as another form of torment.
Until she was sure of him, she wouldn’t trust him.
Besides, it wasn’t as if he trusted her.
She hadn’t failed to notice how on edge he was around her, how whenever he gazed at her he would go from relaxed to tense, would seem shocked at times, as if he couldn’t believe he had been lowering his guard around her. She didn’t think that reaction was because of this realm, or because he needed to be alert at all times, prepared for those who were no doubt looking for her by now, aware of her escape.
She had the feeling that he didn’t want to trust her, just as she didn’t want to trust him.
He didn’t want to be comfortable around her either.
Calindria began walking again, frowned as the gentle plip of water striking something reached her ears and followed the sound.
Thanatos stalked after her, her constant shadow. At least he kept his distance this time, although she wasn’t sure that was a blessing when he spoke.
“Your family did not abandon you. They sent me to find you.”
She scowled at the boulders that blocked her path. “You have told me that many times now. You should try telling me something new. Perhaps I would believe that.”
She grunted as she scrambled over the first huge rock, struggling to find purchase, and eyed the next one. Her legs were getting stronger, the water she had imbibed reviving her and the exercise she’d had putting life back into her muscles. She glanced at the dark grey cloth wrapped around her right hand as she reached for the next boulder. The deep cut across her palm still stung from time to time, but she felt sure the bleeding had stopped now and it was healing.
“Calistos did not die.” Thanatos’s baritone echoed around the cavern, stirring the creatures. “You did.”
Calindria stilled with her hand on the boulder, twisted at the waist and looked back at him where he stood on the ground below her. His handsome face was deadly serious, his black eyebrows pinched together above his silver eyes, his broad mouth set in a flat and unyielding line.
She frowned as she pushed away from the boulder and came to face him, looking down at him. “I do not feel dead. I do not know what dead feels like, but I still feel alive.”
It dawned on her that this was the reason her father had sent Thanatos to find her—because he was the god of death.
She stared at him, struggling to take in the fact that she was apparently dead.
“I have been to the Elysian Fields many times… have seen those who call it home and have even spoken with some of them.” She eased back against the boulder, resting for a moment as she tried to make sense of what Thanatos had told her. “All of them had appeared real enough, as if they were flesh and blood… but while they could touch each other, they could not touch me. They were as ghosts to me, but solid to another of the dead. If what you say is true, then I should be as a ghost to this world too… yet I am not. I can touch and be touched.”