less blunt way of mentioning her death, one he hoped wouldn’t provoke a negative reaction in her.
He wouldn’t like to hear someone talk of him as a body, a corpse, and he imagined she was the same. That feeling he’d had several times since meeting her returned—the sensation that she wasn’t dead.
He stared at the fire, using it to calm himself and shake off the last vestiges of his anger, and to stop himself from looking at her so she would relax again. If he told her things he knew about her, perhaps she might believe what he had told her about her family too.
“Found and betrayed,” she muttered and sank onto the log.
“Found and mourned,” he corrected, glancing at her when her eyes landed on him. “You were entombed in the Elysian Fields.”
“You mean my body was entombed there,” she said hollowly, revealing she was far more astute than he had given her credit for. He had tried to avoid talking of her corpse, but she had seen right through him and had bluntly put it out there. She sighed and looked down at herself. “Yet here I am.”
He still hadn’t figured out how that was possible yet, but he would.
“Calistos was distraught. He suffers blackouts because of what he witnessed.” He eased those words out, not wanting to cause her any pain, aware that if he knew Hypnos struggled with such a thing and it was his fault that the knowledge would wound him.
“In your version of events… who found me?” She looked as if she wasn’t sure she wanted to know the answer to that question.
“Valen. He… he shook the Underworld and Olympus that day.” And as Thanatos gazed at her, he had the feeling he would do the same if he found her dead. Dangerous. He couldn’t let her get to him. He couldn’t trust her. Couldn’t trust anyone. He focused on the past and shut out the whispers of a future he both craved and disliked. “Valen killed the Moirai, blaming them for your death, and then he tried to kill Zeus.”
Her eyes widened. “Gods.”
She paled a little, and it was clear she was imagining the retribution her older brother had faced. He doubted she could imagine how that punishment had lasted until only recently. Zeus had been furious with Valen. Thanatos thought perhaps Zeus had been furious with himself too, for not seeing Calindria’s death approaching, and being unable to restore her soul as he had with the Moirai.
“Calindria, everyone thought you dead… your soul lost forever… and then only a few years ago, Keras witnessed you as you are now and Hades sent me to find you. You have to believe me when I tell you that your family have mourned you for centuries, and if they had known you were as you are, they would have done something sooner.” He knew he was losing her as she leaned away from him, as she angled her face downwards, as if that would make it impossible for her to hear what he had to say, or perhaps she thought he would stop, but he wouldn’t. “I speak the truth, Calindria. What you saw was a lie. I have fought beside your brothers, have witnessed Calistos struggling to recall what happened to you both without losing consciousness and forgetting things. I have watched your mother mourn you for six hundred years.”
Tears lined her lashes and he felt like a bastard.
He pushed to his feet, sure she would want him gone now, that she needed some time alone. “Get some sleep, Calindria. I will keep watch over you.”
She hugged her knees and shook her head.
His temper snapped. Without sleep, and without him carrying her, she was only slowing them down. She was too tired to walk properly and she wouldn’t let him help her, and he was done with being gentle with her.
He glared down at her. “Sleep!”
Shock swept through him when she slumped onto her side, her golden hair spilling across the black dirt, and he hurried to her, fearing she had collapsed.
He hesitated and then mustered his courage and risked it, brushed his palm across her cheek and then her forehead, feeling her temperature. It seemed normal. Her breathing was even too, slow and calm. He feathered his fingers downwards in a dangerous caress, one that threatened to ignite warmth in his chest, and pressed the pads of them to her throat. Her heartbeat was steady.
She was just asleep.
Because she had grown too tired?
Thanatos