Her heart drummed hard in her breast as she looked at her bare feet and then at his boots, and dared another step and then another, bringing them to within less than ten feet of each other. Fear trickled through her, flashes of what she had done to the guard tormenting her, unleashing panic into her veins that she fought by telling herself that she wouldn’t touch him. She wouldn’t hurt him.
She quickly but carefully gripped the blade of the dagger and held it out to him with the short handle facing him.
Thanatos closed his fingers around it and she stared at their hands, at how close they were.
The panic won, fear quick to overwhelm her, to show her a vision of their skin touching and his blackening.
She snatched her hand back.
Flinched as she cut her index finger on the blade and stared at it. Crimson bloomed along the thin line on the pad of her finger.
“Calindria,” Thanatos started, warmth in his deep voice, and took a step towards her.
“I’m fine.” She moved away from him, quickly distancing herself, and sucked on her finger.
He looked as if he wanted to pursue her, might even force her to show him the cut so he could check it, but then he huffed and slid the blade back into the sheath on his vambrace and jerked his chin towards something to her right.
“I spied a tunnel that way.”
Calindria looked over her shoulder in that direction, trying to see what he had. There was a shallow indent in the rock, but it didn’t appear to be a tunnel. She turned and strode towards it, still sucking her finger, and frowned as she saw he was right. What she had thought was only an alcove in the black rock was in fact a tunnel. It banked right at the entrance, the left side of it all she had been able to see from a distance, but opened up just behind the wall of the cavern.
She followed it.
Deeply aware of the towering dark god who entered behind her, his gaze locked on her back, sending heat skittering over her skin.
And the dangerous path she was treading, one that might lead to her trusting him.
One that already had her wanting him.
Chapter 6
Calindria was doing her best to maintain the distance between them. Thanatos was doing his best to narrow it down.
“Your brother is much like you.” He had been talking about her family non-stop for the last mile, as if facts about them would change how she felt.
She hated the fact it was changing how she felt.
“How so?” She didn’t look back at him, focused on her footing because she was damned if she was falling from this narrow ledge and plummeting into the ravine far below. She wouldn’t die here in this wretched realm, not after she had survived for so long and had finally found her freedom.
“Spirited. Wild.” He said those words as if they were disgusting to him. “Reckless.”
She stopped dead, leaned her back into the rough wall of the cliff that had been waiting for them at the end of the last tunnel, and frowned at Thanatos. Reckless. Something she had been once, and to her detriment and that of her brother. She saw him die again, saw the one who had taken them slit his throat before her and felt powerless to stop it just as she had back then.
Calindria closed her eyes against it, drew down a shuddering breath and held it as she sought calm, hoping it would erase the images from her mind.
“I’m not… I was… I’m not like that.” She tensed her fingers against the rock beside her, gripping it tightly as pain welled inside her, tore her down all over again and left her feeling as if she was bleeding. “Not anymore.”
She moved on before he could say anything, shuffling forwards along the ledge, her focus on the point where it broadened. She couldn’t shake what he had said though. Not the part about her being reckless, because he was wrong about that. The part about her being spirited and wild.
Was that such a bad thing?
To be wild was to be free.
To be spirited was to not let events in her life bring her down.
She thought about Thanatos, trying those words on him for size, and realised they didn’t fit him. He wasn’t spirited. He wasn’t wild. He was controlled. Disciplined. Perhaps he had said what he had with an air of disgust because being like her was incomprehensible to him. He had already revealed he was very loyal to her father, that he served another with pride rather than contempt towards the perceived difference in their statuses. She was beginning to feel Thanatos wasn’t just loyal. He was a male with rigid principles, one who took nothing lightly.
Calindria found being like that incomprehensible. She had been trapped in a cage for so long, but she had never allowed it to break her. She had thought of the future, had held on to her dream and had known one day she would fulfil it. She would live in a bright, verdant world, with room to roam as much as she wanted.
A world where no one would bother her.
She stepped onto the wider ledge, relieved to leave the treacherous one behind, and turned her back to Thanatos.
Cursed.
Ahead of her, the broad slab of rock ended abruptly. She hurried to the edge, stopping a few feet back from it, and scowled at the enormous drop into darkness. There had to be another ledge she could use to navigate this abyss. She peered left and then right. There was not. She planted her hands on her hips and huffed as she surveyed the ravine. It was at least twenty feet to the other side, probably more. There was no way she could leap it.
“I will have to fly you over.” Thanatos stopped a short distance to her right, at the very edge of the plateau.
With wings like his, she wouldn’t fear any drop either.
“No.” She kept looking, sure she would find either a way across the ravine or around it, and if that didn’t happen, she would go back the way she had come and pick another tunnel.
“Calindria—” Thanatos started.
She barked, “I said no!”
He gave her his patented scowl, and she knew she was being difficult, but he didn’t know what she did. If he touched her, he would be hurt. Worse, she might kill him. The thought of hurting him was horrible enough. The thought of killing him—she shut it from her mind.
Some of the tension building inside her flowed away when she spotted a bridge of rock connecting the two sides of the ravine just beyond Thanatos. She started towards it, and Thanatos reached for her, clearly thinking she meant to take him up on his offer after all.
She was quick to leap to her right, away from him and the edge, and scowl at his hand. “I said not to touch me, and I meant it.”
He looked wounded by that for a moment, but it was gone when he blinked, a hardness settling over his features that made her feel he was bringing a wall up.
Or building the one that surrounded him higher anyway.
It wasn’t that she didn’t trust him, not anymore. If he had wanted to get his hands on her to capture her, or to do something else to her, then he would have done it by now. It was fear of harming him that made her stop him, and no matter how many times she tried to put into words why she was afraid of him, they refused to leave her lips.
She walked past him, heading for the bridge, one that looked more and more treacherous by the second. It was little more than an arch of black rock, and there were cracks in it in places, ones that worried her. Would it support her weight?
The alternative was Thanatos insisting he fly her, maybe even going as far as attempting to force her, so she strode up to the start of the span of rock and sucked down a fortifying breath.
“Calindria, do not be so foolish,” Thanatos growled and stormed after her.
His wings shifted against his back and then spread, and fear that he would grab her when he reached her propelled her into action.
She stepped onto the bridge, moving quickly at first, but slowing as Thanatos came to an abrupt halt at the start of it.
“Damn you, reckless female,” he muttered, his voice backing up the feelings she could sense in him as he watched her.
Fear. Anger. Irrita
When the rock beneath her wobbled, she made the mistake of looking down into the ravine. Her breath hitched, her eyes widening, and her heart felt as if it might stop as the bottom of the abyss seemed to zoom towards her. Her skin prickled, ice chasing over it, and she spread her arms out at her sides, seeking some balance as fear gripped her. The bottom of the ravine wasn’t rock as she had expected. Water rushed down there, black and dangerous, crashing against boulders and swirling in deadly whirlpools.
She was immortal in the sense that she lived for millennia and could heal quickly compared with a human, but she could be killed, and she had no doubt that she would die from falling such a height and being smashed against the boulders, or sucked deep beneath the surface by one of the eddies.
She tilted her head up and fixed her eyes on the other side of the ravine, where dead-looking trees that were little more than gnarled stumps crowded the plateau. She shuffled her right foot forwards and then her left.
“Just let me fly you.” Thanatos sounded angry, but he made no move to grab her against her will.
She shook her head and kept moving, kept breathing. In. Out. Calm. She was almost there.
A great groaning noise echoed around the cavern, followed by the sharp crack of rock splintering. Her heart leaped into her mouth, her gaze whipped to her feet, and adrenaline shot through her as the section of bridge she was on gave way. On a shriek, she launched herself forwards, stretching for the other side of the ravine as the entire bridge collapsed. Everything slowed as she sailed through the air, as she reached for the plateau beyond the wall of rock in front of her.
As she realised she wasn’t going to make it.
She grunted, air exploding from her lungs as she hit the wall almost ten feet below the plateau. Her fingers burned as she scrabbled for purchase and pain blazed up her right arm as she managed to grab a small crack in the rock and the weight of her body yanked on her shoulder.
Wind buffeted her as Thanatos flew to her and she screamed again as he reached for her.
“No!” She twisted and grimaced as her shoulder ached, wanted to swat at him to keep him away from her, but focused instead on finding somewhere to hold on to with her other hand to stop herself from falling.
He beat his huge black wings, holding steady in the air just behind her, no doubt giving her that look.
And then he grabbed her by her waist and hauled her up, his wings beating the air as he lifted her.
“No!” She tried to jerk free of his grip, gave up when she realised it was too late to save him even if she did break free of him.
He had touched her.
Sorrow welled inside her, had her gaze falling to his strong hands where they gripped her bare waist, his arms as he banded them around her and held her close to him, her back pressed to his front as he flew with her.
What had he done?
Any moment now, darkness would mar his skin, and it would turn to ashes before her eyes.
He carried her over the flat land and gently set down with her.
Any moment now.
He released her and stepped back. “I could not let you fall.”
“And you damned yourself because of it.” She pivoted to face him, grief and horror combining to make her words come out hard and desperate, together with fear of what she would see.
By now, the darkness would be blooming on his arms, his hands, possibly even his chest since he had pressed it against her.
She stilled. Only there was no darkness. Not even a trace of black skin on him anywhere.
She felt empty inside as she stared at him, as she waited, sure that it was only taking longer to manifest, that he would succumb to her power soon, unable to dare to hope that he was somehow immune to it.
“Damned myself?” Thanatos looked himself over, his black eyebrows meeting hard, and then lifted his head and settled his gaze on her. “I am sorry I touched you. The alternative was unacceptable to me though. I will not do it again.”
She was too busy staring at his body to take in what he was saying, waiting for that terrible black stain to appear and his skin to char.
Waiting.
“Is something wrong with me?” He looked himself over again, silver eyes holding a confused edge.
“No,” she breathed and frowned, shook her head as she marvelled at that. “It should… When I touched the guard… his skin… it…”
She almost fell to her knees as her breath leaked from her, as it finally sank in that she had touched Thanatos but she hadn’t harmed him.
“Calindria, you are not making any sense.”
She knew that, was deeply aware of it as well as his gaze as she closed the gap between them, needing to be sure. His gaze tracked her, his frown returning as she reached for his hand. Her fingers shook, fear rising to attempt to overwhelm and stop her, but she pushed onwards, gathering her courage along the way.
When her fingers brushed his, a shiver chased up her arm, and Thanatos tensed, as if he had felt it too.
“What is this all about?” He snatched his hand back, flexed his fingers into a fist, and she had the feeling he was stopping her from touching him again.
She raised her eyes to his, her sense of wonder swift to fade a little when blue fire glared back at her, the sculpted planes of his face set in hard, harsh lines. She had the feeling the look he was giving her wasn’t because he wanted answers. It was because she had touched him.
This time, he was the one who backed off, placing more distance between them as he growled at her. “Tell me.”
She straightened her spine, erecting a wall around herself again, one she hoped was as thick and impenetrable as the one that surrounded him. It didn’t stop the hurt from lashing at her as she lined up the words, forced to remember what she had done.
“I touched the guard and… darkness… or something like it spread from the point where I had laid my hands on his arms.” She wrapped her arms around herself as she thought about it. “It was like… tendrils… a living thing. He screamed… He sounded so pained… and I ran. I ran and I… didn’t want to look back.”
“I found two bodies. Both looked as if they had been burned to ashes… or like a corpse that had withered away.” He canted his head and his expression lost some of its hardness as he studied her.
She felt sick, held herself a little tighter. “I only touched one guard. The other was at the camp.”
She didn’t want to think about the implications of what Thanatos had told her, cursed him when he put voice to it.
“Whatever you did to the one guard must have spread to the other when he came to his aid.”
She closed her eyes and swallowed the bile that rose up her throat, pressed her fingers into her arms and tried to hold herself together.
Thanatos took a step towards her, but she shook her head and countered him, moving one back as she opened her eyes and threw him a pleading look, silently asking him not to get close to her.
“This is why you were so adamant I kept my distance.” His now-silver eyes searched hers. “Because you thought that would happen to me too.”
“I don’t understand why it didn’t.” She peeled her hands away from her arms and stared at them, turning her palms upwards as her brow furrowed. “Is it something I can switch on and off?”
“It is possible.” Those three words offered her comfort, rolled over her and calmed her, easing her fears. She lifted her gaze to meet his again as he took a step towards her, didn’t move back one this time, not even when he came within touching distance. His eyes fell to her hands. “I do not think you know how to control it yet.”
She swallowed hard again. “If I can’t control it… does that mean I only switched it off this time and if I touch you again, I might—”
She couldn’t bring herself to say it.
Thanatos shook his head, his look grave as he raised his eyes and locked them on hers. “I think the reason you did not hurt me is because I am the god of death. Death is who I am, and what your touch brings. I think you cannot hurt me because of that… because our powers are similar. We are similar.”
She liked the sound of that as much as he looked as if he did, which was to say she didn’t like it at all.
She only vaguely remembered who she had been once, as if it was someone else’s life, but she did recall that Thanatos was right about her. She had never been sombre as he was. She had been filled with light and life, with laughter.
Some part of her had been certain she would learn to be that way again once she had escaped and fulfilled her mission, and had found her own bright corner of the world to live in.
Now, she feared this darkness that lived inside her was here to stay, wasn’t something she could slowly erase, replacing it with light again.
And she didn’t like it.
She didn’t like the thought of being of death, like Thanatos.
She didn’t like the thought of killing everyone and everything that came into contact with her.
One of those things she couldn’t control.
The other she could.
Resolve flowed through her, buoying her, raising her spirits again. She would learn to control her power, only she couldn’t do it alone. She would need someone to teach her. Someone who was familiar with this power she wielded.
And what better tutor was there than the god of death himself?
But asking Thanatos to help her with this meant taking a leap of faith. It meant doing something she had decided she would never do again.
It meant trusting someone.
She stared into his silver eyes, losing herself a little in them.
Could she trust Thanatos?
Something deep in her heart warned her not to, whispered that trusting him would only end with her getting hurt, because this gorgeous warrior before her was like her in more ways than he would admit.
He trusted no one.
That was about to change.
And she would be the one to do it.
Chapter 7
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