She looked around them at the trees, at the brambles that laced some of them together, and the prickly cones that hung from some of the branches, marvelling that she had been the one to change this landscape. To breathe a strange sort of life back into it.
Thanatos’s gaze tracked her, searing her back as she went to one tree and twisted a cone from it, and tested the fine teeth of the spines that formed its oval shape. She turned back to Thanatos and brushed her hair with it, flinching at each knot she found and tried to untangle, deeply aware of what she must look like to him. A mess didn’t seem a strong enough word. She had looked bad enough before, but now his blood stained the blue fabric of her top, a constant reminder that she had injured him.
“Tell me about my mother.” She approached him, retrieved her waterskin and gripped it in her other hand as she started walking with him.
He fell into step beside her and she didn’t make him move away this time, because she had touched him more than once without hurting him now, believed he was right and she couldn’t harm him with her power.
“She mourned you for centuries and still wears black for you. She is eager to see you again.” Thanatos tilted his head back and stared at the ceiling of the long cavern. His head dropped, his gaze landing on her, but she kept hers on the path as she brushed her hair. “She has transformed the palace grounds in recent years, growing flowers everywhere. The gardens there are beautiful now. Like nothing else in this world. There is every bloom imaginable. I hear that recently she has even summoned trees to form an orchard where fruit grows… food for the new residents of the palace.”
She untangled another knot. “I do not remember the palace.”
“What do you remember?” He spoke that question softly, a gentle prompt that had her mind wandering, delving deep into her memories.
“I remember the Elysian Fields… I think. It was green and lush, and so many poppies bloomed there. The sun was warm on my skin.” She looked down at her body, saw a dress in the same colour as her scraps of clothing on a figure far smaller and far less womanly than her own. “I remember my dress… this dress.”
She toyed with the material around her hips.
Thanatos’s gaze left her. “I wish I had brought something for you to wear.”
Heat bloomed on her cheeks, a wave of awareness crashing over her as she looked at her meagre clothing, as she saw how her top and shorts barely covered her intimate parts. She brushed her hair a little more frantically, unable to keep her nerves in check as the thought of Thanatos gazing upon her curves heated her blood to an unbearable degree.
“I outgrew my dress. It was ripped in places too. So I tore the fabric into pieces.” She plucked one of the needle-like teeth from the cone and showed it to Thanatos, tried and failed to stop herself from rambling as her nerves got the better of her. “I used something like this to make holes in the material for me to thread the pieces together.”
His silver eyes fell to her body and darted away. “You couldn’t have made yourself something that covered more?”
She tossed the spine aside. “You do not wear much either.”
And gods, she had noticed. She noticed it whenever he moved, stalking like a predator, every muscle shifting in a powerful symphony that shook her.
A hint of colour touched his cheeks now as he looked at his leathers and his bare chest.
“My wings,” he muttered. “I tried to wear robes around them once or twice long ago, but having material near them irritated me. I do not like to feel my wings are hindered.”
That, she could understand. “If I had wings, I wouldn’t want them constrained either.”
He flicked her a glance and then moved away from her, heading around the other side of one of the black trees to her. He joined her again on the other side.
“If you had wings, where would you fly?” he said.
She didn’t even need to think about that. “The Elysian Fields.”
The air between them seemed to cool again, a distance growing as Thanatos fell silent. She looked at him, studying his noble profile, seeing something akin to hurt in his eyes.
“What is it?” She lifted the hand she held the waterskin in, meaning to touch his arm to make him speak.
He edged away from her, beyond her reach. “Your brothers were desperate to guide your soul to that place.”
“And now?”
He looked her over, from her head to her toes and back again, heat blooming in his gaze that warmed her too before he shut it down. “I do not think you belong there. You are definitely of death, touched by it, but you are not dead. You are not a soul. I am certain of that.”
“How do you know?” She looked herself over. She felt solid and real enough, she felt alive, but she wanted to know what she felt like to him.
“I just know.”
That wasn’t a good enough answer.
“It might be an illusion caused by this realm. It is a strange place and tends to play tricks on people. I have been here a long time by your account, but even I am not immune to these illusions and lies it casts.” She finished brushing her hair and tossed the cone away. “I am haunted by some of them.”
“Haunted? Is that what you saw in your nightmare?” Thanatos closed ranks with her, drawing so near to her that his black wings were in danger of brushing her skin. His grim expression amused her as he glared at everything around them, as if he wanted to protect her from the illusions that tormented her, even when it was impossible.
“No. They haunt my waking hours.” The things she saw in her sleep were always the same—a horrifying replay of watching her brother suffer and die, and her family abandon her.
“Tell me an illusion you have seen that haunts you.” He sounded as grim as he looked, and she wanted to tell him he couldn’t fight an illusion or stop it from haunting her.
She settled for picking a lie the realm had shown her recently instead, sure that talking about it would make him see he couldn’t protect her from everything.
“I swore I saw my eldest brother looking at me from the bluff above my cage… but then he disappeared and one of the guards attacked me.” She couldn’t shake that, had been convinced for weeks that it had been Keras come to save her, only to abandon her again.
It had reopened old wounds and still grated on her now, filling her with a need to seek her family and make them pay for what they had done.
“Keras,” Thanatos started and then drew down a deep breath, one that stretched his wings and made them brush her arm.
He was quick to distance himself.
Slid her a black look as if she had been the one to touch him.
Why did he do that? For the same reason he had looked afraid when she had touched his face? The same reason he had been swift to break contact with her before that, when she had touched his hand after she had discovered her power didn’t hurt him?
“I am here because Keras saw you in another’s memories. He told me of the vision he witnessed, of how you were in a cage suspended from the ceiling of a great cavern, and how a male had come to you with a black spear… and how you had screamed.” His tone lost all warmth and light, was blacker than the Styx.
She shook her head. “No. That doesn’t make sense. I had been in that cage for a long time, but I never saw anyone else watching me from that vantage point. I only saw Keras.”
Thanatos frowned at her, clearly not believing her. “You must have seen someone there, because Keras said you looked right at him.”
“I did. I saw Keras. I saw him as clearly as I see you before me now. The guard did come to me and he hurt me, made me scream.” Calindria flexed her fingers around the waterskin and couldn’t resist the urge to take a sip of it, lifted it and uncapped it. She swigged it, wanted to sigh as the liquid flowing down her throat calmed her, setting her at ease. Her gaze slid to Thanatos as she capped it again. “I thought Keras a vision… a twisted version of a memory. The realm does that sort of thing. It warps the mind, turning memories into il
“How long ago was this?”
She immediately shrugged. “I cannot say. Not long ago. I… I do not know for certain. Time when you are…”
Thanatos nodded, understanding dawning in his silver eyes to chase the hardness away.
“I am familiar with how easy it is to lose your awareness of time. A minute can feel like an hour, and an hour can feel like a day.” He looked around them at the dead forest, giving her the impression he didn’t want her to ask about this either, regretted that he had told her such a thing.
She didn’t. It made her feel closer to him. Made her feel that if anyone could understand her, it was Thanatos. They shared more than a power born of death.
“Would you say perhaps it might have been four years ago?” He glanced at her.
“Perhaps.” She shrugged again. “It is hard to say. It might have been longer, although it doesn’t feel as if it was that long ago.”
“Keras saw the memory four years ago. You must have seen someone before that.”
She shook her head. “I know I didn’t. I would remember, because I have been hoping to see the one who killed my twin. I have catalogued the faces of all who have come to me.”
“Calistos is alive.” Thanatos gave her a hard look, his tone unyielding, as if he could force her to believe that.
She swayed between doing just that and being sure he was dead.
“If it was Keras you saw, how is that possible?” Thanatos rounded another tree, drawing away from her and remaining away this time. The distance between them felt cold, a yawning chasm that had her aching to move closer to him.
What was it about this glowering, gruff god that had her wanting to be close to him?
Was it merely because she had been alone for so long and he was an ally she had badly needed in the years of her captivity?
Or was it something else that drew her to him?
“The realm takes memories and makes them real. Perhaps it was my doing? Maybe the barrier between the present and past was thin enough and it was my need to see my family that summoned Keras since he was walking in someone else’s memories.” That sounded crazy even to her. “Maybe I somehow pulled him to that spot, although I didn’t see him until he was about to disappear.”
She edged closer to Thanatos as he fell silent, frowning at the ground as he walked, his left hand balancing on the pommel of his sword, fingers drumming against the black leather on the grip.
He was silent so long that she thought their conversation was done, was searching for another topic to keep him talking when he finally spoke.
“I have a theory. Your brother, Ares, told me that Keras almost killed himself with that dive into the wraith’s mind.”
Calindria stopped dead. “Wraith?”
He nodded and turned towards her. “Eli. He was with the enemy who attempted to rise up against your father and claim this realm by shattering the gates between it and the mortal world. They had intended to cause the two realms to bleed together. Eli was instrumental in many of their plots, but he met his demise that night, before my cursed siblings made one final attempt to succeed.”
Her eyes slowly widened. “Your siblings… You said family couldn’t be trusted. Your own siblings rose up against my father.”
His lips flattened, blue fire filling his irises to devour the silver. “Cursed siblings. Hades now holds the ringleader in Tartarus. Questions her daily.”
“Her?” She blinked. “I thought perhaps Hypnos—”
“Good gods, no!” Thanatos boomed, anger tightening his handsome features, the force of his denial shaking her and making her feel bad. “Hypnos would never betray our family or our god-king. It was vicious little Eris and devious Apate, and they lured poor Moros and Oizys into it too. I do not wish to speak of it.”
Calindria did, but she held her tongue, because she could see this betrayal had deeply scarred him. She was familiar with how terrible it felt to have family betray you. Or was she? She wasn’t sure anymore.
“Eli was…” Thanatos looked away from her and sighed, and then met her gaze again. “Your brothers learned that Eli was the one who captured you and Calistos.”
She frowned at that, mulling over what she remembered of that day. She remembered a village. She remembered a black-haired man appearing. And she remembered him stabbing her brother and how afraid she had been, both for Calistos and for herself.
She remembered the same male torturing them, taking pleasure in tormenting them both. He had hurt her brother, making her watch while she had been unable to do anything, and then he had hurt her, causing Calistos to suffer as she had. It had gone on for so long and she had been so weary, had even wished that death would come for her.
And according to Thanatos it had, but in her version of events, she had watched her brother die and had blacked out.
The wraith hadn’t been the one to kill him. Another male had done it, one who had reeked of death.
“I think that because Keras almost killed himself, he straddled the line between the dead and the living.” Thanatos looked at her, pulling her gaze to him. “I have a theory that you saw Keras because of your connection to death.”
She didn’t like the sound of that, but it made more sense than her theory.
“I am still not comfortable being so close to death,” she whispered and rubbed her arm as she walked, stopped when Thanatos didn’t move and looked back at him. “Not you, Death. I mean this darkness inside me… It murmurs sweet alluring things to me, purrs and cajoles me, and often I find myself sinking into it. Is that darkness the source of my power, one warped by my apparent death and the things that have happened to me?”
Thanatos shook his head. “That darkness is your father’s blood in your veins. It speaks to your brothers in the same way, turns them possessive and vicious at times, has had more than one of them baring fangs at me for saying something wrong.”
Fangs.
She lifted her hand and prodded her canines. They were dull right now, looked much the same as his canines, but when her anger got the better of her, they sharpened and grew longer.
“I have fangs.” She dropped her hand from her mouth.
“And the bite to go with them.” Thanatos chuckled softly.
She frowned at him, but didn’t mean it. It was nice to see him lightening again, the darkness that had come over him falling away once more.
“What other things has this realm shown you?” He fell into step beside her again, not keeping his distance this time. “I would like to be prepared in case it begins to affect me.”
“It might be affecting you already.” She looked across at him. “You would not know. I would be surprised if you could tell the difference between reality and the illusions.”
“Humour me.”
She lifted her shoulders in a small shrug, getting the feeling she wasn’t the only one that liked keeping the conversation rolling between them. “Very well. Hundreds of times, it has shown my family to me… has tormented me with images of them that I believed at first. I have seen them turn their backs on me, have seen them refuse to my face to release me and save me… I have heard them disown me and point out all my faults, belittling me and making me feel useless… unwanted.”
And every time it had wounded her, despite the fact she had told herself they were lies, that none of it was real. It was all an illusion.
“Calindria,” Thanatos started, his voice softer than she had ever heard it.
She shook her head and steeled herself, brought up walls around her heart to stop the hurt from flooding it again.
“Be on your guard, Thanatos.” She looked him right in the eye, her tone grave. “This realm is a living thing, and it will use your deepest fears and darkest memories against you.”
Chapter 12
Another distant shriek rang out, echoing through the tunnel to make Calindria tense. Her small shoulders hunched up and she flicked a look over them, her blue eyes landing on him.
She quickened her already brisk pace as another long, howling shriek reached them.
The urge to grab her and run with her was strong, almost undeniable as he flexed his fingers around the hilt of his sword, ready to draw it at a moment’s notice. He wasn’t sure whether the creatures that made those noises were ahead of them or behind them. They echoed too much, making them seem as if they were all around them.
Maybe they were.
Maybe he and Calindria were trapped between two groups of the beasts.
Calindria muttered things beneath her breath, an obvious attempt to keep her mind off the fact they were most likely being hunted.
“What was your daily life like in the cage?” he murmured, keeping his voice low so it didn’t draw attention to them, but unable to resist the need to give her something to focus on other than the creatures.
“The guards would check me regularly, but after the first few… centuries, I suppose… they grew bored with tormenting me every visit. One would simply come and stare at me in a way I did not like. The other would make him leave, would speak of not touching me.” She chuckled softly, the sound out of place given the gravity of what she was speaking about. “At least I know why he was repeatedly told not to touch me. They knew of my powers.”
Which made him suspect she had touched someone at some point to reveal them, only she either hadn’t seen what her touch had done or she had blocked the memory or believed it another illusion.
She looked back at him, a solemn edge to her beautiful face as her brow furrowed and blue eyes glittered with something familiar to him—shame.
“I could not leave the cage…” She hesitated and he sensed her nerves, was on the verge of telling her that she didn’t have to tell him any more when she continued. “I could not leave it even to bathe or… other things.”
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