after her, starting to feel he was fighting a losing battle and only getting her away from this realm of lies, as she called it, and getting her to her family would convince her that he was telling the truth. “Calistos is alive. Your family never abandoned you.”
She scoffed, but said nothing.
Thanatos knew why.
Because they were the same in another regard too.
He too found it easier to hold on to hate, to continue treading the dark path he had made for himself, than admit he was wrong and turn back.
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