rose to his feet and gazed down at her.
Or because he had ordered her to sleep?
He wanted to scoff at that. He wasn’t his twin. Hypnos could put people to sleep with a simple command. Still, it didn’t stop curiosity from gripping him, pushing him to find out. A simple experiment was all it would take to reveal he hadn’t been the one to make her sleep.
He stooped and jostled her. “Calindria. Open your eyes now. Stop sleeping.”
She didn’t respond, just rocked gently back and forth beneath his hand as he moved her. He tried to think of other things to say that implied he wanted her to wake without saying the word itself.
“Calindria.” He nudged her harder. “It is time to go. Leave sleep behind. Come now.”
She still didn’t respond.
Thanatos shook his head at what he was doing. He wasn’t his brother. He didn’t have the power to make her sleep and was being foolish by thinking he did, believing coincidence was confirmation of some kind of power he had over her.
There was one way of finding out for sure.
He stared at her face and put force behind a single word.
“Wake.”
Her blue eyes fluttered open and met his, a flicker of confusion in them as her nose wrinkled and she frowned at him.
“Sleep,” he commanded.
She instantly sagged against the dirt again, her eyes slipping shut.
Thanatos stood, reeling from what he had discovered. He had the power to make her sleep. Because she was dead and fell under his domain rather than her father’s? If he had this power over her, what others were at his disposal?
Could he restore her somehow, transforming her back into the bright, light female he had known?
He frowned down at her.
Did she even need restoring? The more time he spent with her, the more he felt that she wasn’t alive, but she wasn’t dead either. She wasn’t a soul. She was flesh and blood.
She was something else.
Chapter 9
Thanatos kept watch over Calindria as she slept, musing what he knew about her. The fire cast flickering blue light over her where she lay on her back on the ground, lending an eerie quality to her, one that made her look as ethereal as she felt to him. He had gone in circles for the past two, perhaps three, hours, trying to decipher what she was and how he had come to have power over her.
His original conclusion hadn’t changed.
He had power over her because she had died. Whether she remembered it or not, she had been killed, but she hadn’t crossed over into the veil, and he was beginning to feel that she hadn’t lost her soul either. Something had happened to her after her death.
She murmured something, softly growled and twitched, her legs kicking, bare feet scraping at the dirt. What was she dreaming?
Thanatos canted his head and studied her more closely, intrigued by her even more now as she muttered things he couldn’t make out. Dark sounding things.
When she whimpered and kicked, and her muttered words turned desperate rather than dark, an urge to stand and go to her ran through him, so powerful it almost had him on his feet before he knew what he was doing. What kept his backside planted to the black ground was shock.
It was quick to roll through him as the dead trees that surrounded them on all sides began to shift and sway, and grew new branches. Spiny branches. They spread like jagged tendrils, black fractures in the air that knitted together to form a web across the canopy of the trees, and then across the clearing. He waited, but not a single leaf emerged, not a trace of softness. If anything, the branches sharpened instead, spikes jutting from them in places, like huge thorns.
Those thorns thickened as the forest continued to grow, as Calindria continued to whimper and lash out at the air, her desperation rolling over him now.
A nightmare?
He looked at the trees as they closed over him, forming a prickly dome.
Remembered that her mother was Persephone, goddess of nature and creation. He had never asked what Calindria’s powers were, but he was beginning to wish he had. Her brothers all controlled elements of nature—fire, ice, lightning, water, wind, earth and shadow.
As the forest thickened, blocking out the ceiling of the cavern, he had the feeling Calindria had inherited her mother’s power over nature.
Only that power wasn’t anything like the one Persephone possessed.
Calindria’s power was darker.
He looked at her and stilled, arrested by the sight