settling in hard lines and a deep frown knitting his eyebrows.
He hadn’t wanted to talk about her testing her powers on things provided by her family. He had wanted to talk about him providing those test subjects for her. Had he been thinking about making more golems just for her?
As far as she knew, golems were living but not alive. They didn’t have feelings or experience pain. They just existed to carry out the commands of whoever had made them. Thanatos had seen the pain it had caused her when she had killed the beetle, and had found a solution for her, one that would spare her the guilt and the hurt whenever she accidentally killed whatever she was experimenting on.
It was thoughtful of him.
Beautiful.
What had stopped him from offering to do such a thing?
It hit her that he thought she wouldn’t want to leave her family once she was back with them—that she wouldn’t want to continue seeing him.
He thought that what they had would end once she was free of this realm.
How wrong he was.
Before she could say anything, he jerked his chin towards something.
“There. Do you see it?”
She turned her cheek to him and peered into the gloom, beyond the next mountain range, trying to see what he had. The shadows were too strong at first, but as he approached the cragged black peaks, something in the next valley began to take shape.
It was a sprawling ruin for the most part. The large walls that surrounded the central building had crumbled in places, revealing it and rendering it vulnerable. That building was big, several storeys in places, and it looked as if it had once had a tower of some sort. It lay as rubble across one of the perimeter walls now.
“I can see it.” She studied it as Thanatos flew around it, high above it. “We should set down and try to touch it. That way we will know if it is real.”
She sensed the fear in him as he looked at it, together with pain.
“No.” He banked right, beat his wings and gained elevation, taking her further from it. “You see it and therefore I am sure it is real.”
She wasn’t.
“The realm could simply be showing us the same illusion.” She leaned away from him and he growled and tightened his grip on her, so fiercely she gasped as pain speared her where his fingertips pressed into her thigh. She shifted her weight back towards him. “Sorry. I just wanted a better look.”
She hadn’t meant to make him feel he was going to drop her.
He blew out his breath and swept lower. “Do you think you could sense if anyone was inside it from a distance?”
She nodded. “If they are in contact with anything joined to the ground, then yes, I think I should be able to sense them.”
Thanatos spread his wings and glided down to the ground around two hundred feet from the building. He landed gently and walked a short distance, furling his wings against his back, and then set her down on the loose black ground.
Calindria eased to her knees and pressed her hands to the dirt, closed her eyes and drew down a deep breath. She felt it when the connection between her and the earth opened, revealing Thanatos and then a multitude of small creatures as her senses sharpened, rushing outwards in a wave all around her.
They reached the building and she focused on it, narrowed her senses down to that point so she didn’t miss anything. When she was sure of what she felt, she opened her eyes and looked up at Thanatos.
“It is empty. No sign of life there at all.”
He still looked as if he didn’t want to go near it. She stood and took hold of his hand.
“Unless the people inside it can levitate, it is empty.” She squeezed his hand and looked in the direction of his gaze, over her shoulder at the building. “Touching it is the only way to know it is real.”
When she looked back at him, he looked closer to agreeing to go near it, but still reluctant.
“I could go alone.”
The moment those words left her lips, his gaze leaped to her and darkened, his lips drawing back off his teeth as he growled.
“You will go nowhere near that place without me.” He tightened his grip on her hand, interlinking their fingers, drawing her focus to their joined hands.
She liked the way he held it so fiercely and possessively, as if