And yet he didn't want to give her up. Not now.
Not ever.
She was the one person in all of history he would die for.
No doubt tonight he would.
Thanatos lay on a warm, comfortable bed in the house of a Spathi warrior. The Spathi, like the Spathi's family members (both Daimons and Apollites), were all asleep in their bedrooms, waiting for sundown when it would be safe to go out.
After he had lost Zarek's trail last night, Thanatos had searched until exhaustion overtook him.
The Daimons had brought him back here to rest, and though he was still tired, he couldn't sleep anymore. Not while his nightmares racked him.
He could feel the call of the Oracles trying to summon him back to his cage in Tartarus.
He refused to heel.
For nine hundred years he'd been waiting for this. Waiting for his vengeance.
The day Artemis had created him, she had promised him that he would be able to kill Zarek of Moesia. Then for some unknown reason, she had changed their bargain.
Nothing had gone the way she had said.
Instead of living in wealth and comfort, he had been confined to a tiny cell, forgotten and alone.
"No one can ever know you're alive," she'd told him. "At least not until I need you."
And so he had waited. Year after year, century after century, screaming at the goddess to either let him out or kill him.
She'd never answered.
And he'd learned that there were some things worse than the short life span that terrified his Apollite kin.
Immortality in a dark hole was far worse.
He would not go back. No one would ever cage him again. He would tear down the whole of Olympus first.
Artemis had been so afraid of her Dark-Hunters running amok that she hadn't thought ahead. There was no one who could stop him.
Something flickered through his mind. A fragment of a memory.
He saw himself as an Apollite... saw...
The image changed to that of Zarek killing his wife.
Thanatos roared with anger.
No, killing Zarek was too easy.
He wanted the man to suffer just the way he had.
Suffer.
Pain...
For the first time in nine hundred years, he smiled. Yes. Zarek had protected a woman last night. He had cradled her against him on the snowmachine.
His woman.