Thanatos: Guardians of Hades Series Book 8

by Felicity Heaton

  Her gaze darted between him and the fire again.

  A satisfactory reaction. One that made him want to puff his chest out a little. He tamped down that urge, his mood threatening to take a dark turn as the voice inside him hissed questions he didn’t want to answer. Why had he wanted to impress the female? Why did he want her admiration?

  “How did you do that?” She stared at the fire, her voice lowering to an awed whisper. “It’s so beautiful.”

  “Most think it cold. Dead. Fire without life. A grim shadow of true fire.” He stared at it too, lost in the beauty of it, in the comfort he felt as he gazed at it.

  He had always felt deeply connected to this power, one that set him apart from others. Anyone could kill. No one else could make this fire though. This was his and his alone.

  “I think it’s beautiful.” Calindria eased to her backside before it, her seat forgotten, her eyes never leaving it.

  The blue fire danced in them, brightening their colour, as if she had the same fire inside her.

  “You asked about the veil.” He settled on the other side of the fire to her, didn’t do it so he could easily look at her without drawing her attention to the fact he was doing such a thing, not at all. He did it so he could watch her back, and she could watch his.

  She nodded, but continued to stare deep into the flames, as if they had bewitched her.

  “The veil is a dark place, absent of light. It is endless, spanning the universe. A place between the planes of life and afterlife.” He picked up a long, thin stick and poked at the fire. “I can pass into the veil as I am, a physical being in a realm that… has no form. It is difficult to explain.”

  “It sounds dreary.” She inspected her scraps of clothing and frowned at a small tear in the blue cloth near her right thigh.

  Thanatos tried not to look.

  And failed.

  She was graceful in her movements as she brushed long fingers across a scrape on her thigh on the same side, a sigh escaping her. “Is it dreary?”

  “Not at all. The veil is beautiful… to me. Perhaps only to me. The only others who see it are those at the very brink of death. The veil is the darkness that takes them, separating body from soul.”

  “Is it only black?” She lifted her head again, that shimmer of curiosity back in her eyes, enticing him to tell her.

  He shook his head. “Perhaps upon first glance… but deep in the veil, where a body is parted from its soul… it is as if a star is born. A star which moves and glitters, dances like these sparks into the darkness.”

  He prodded the fire, releasing a wave of cerulean sparks that leaped and danced, whirling high into the gloom. Calindria’s gaze followed them, an edge of fascination to her expression.

  An edge he felt sure his own face had as he gazed at her.

  She sank back against the log behind her and tilted her head back, staring at the ceiling of the cavern. “I cannot remember what stars look like… I only remember I found them beautiful, but melancholy.”

  He frowned and leaned forwards, resting his forearms on his bent knees. “Why melancholy?”

  She sighed, her chest expanding with it, attempting to lure his gaze downwards. “Such slender light… travelled from so far across the universe… alone… constantly striving to make contact with another.”

  When she put it like that, it did sound melancholy. He wasn’t sure he had ever taken the time to look at the stars. If he had, he was sure he wouldn’t have seen them in the same light as she did. Her view of the stars seemed to reflect something he was coming to feel about her.

  She was lonely.

  “Did you ever look at the stars with Calistos? I do not think I ever took the time to look at them, not even with Hypnos.” He moved the stick in his right hand, toyed with the other end of it with his left as he thought about his brother.

  Calindria sat up. “Hypnos?”

  “My twin. Like your twin, he is alive… but I have not seen him in some time.”

  She frowned now. “Alive. I saw him die. How am I to know what is real and what is the lie?”

  He had the feeling that she already knew which was which, and that was why she had stopped trying to make him leave her alone and had accepted his company. Either that, or she was still trying to manipulate him into carrying out her vengeance.

  He realised he would if she asked it of him, only he wouldn’t kill the ones who had apparently killed her brother. He would slay the ones who had killed her. Every single one of them, no matter how small a part they’d had to play in her death.

  All of them would die.

  And in the veil, he would make sure they suffered unimaginable torment, were held there for centuries before he allowed their soul to pass on.

  His expression must have darkened with his thoughts, because Calindria pulled her legs up to her chest again and drew patterns in the dirt with her right hand. Not patterns, he realised. Words.

  “You draw your brother’s favour mark upon the ground. Why?”

  Her head jerked up, her gaze colliding hard with his before it fell to her hand and her eyebrows rose high on her forehead. “I had not realised.”

  “It does not contain the power without the favour behind it, if you were thinking of escaping me by casting a portal.” Thanatos smiled tightly when she frowned at him. He had meant his words to be teasing but could see she had taken them the wrong way. His smile faded. “A poor joke. I am out of practice.”

  He was sure he had never been in practice when it came to making jokes. He teased others, ruthlessly at times, but always to deflect attention away from him, and always when he was uncomfortable about something. It didn’t take a genius to see what he was uncomfortable about at that moment.

  Being near her.

  Alone with her.

  “I heard you have a favour mark too.” He meant it as a gentle conversation starter, an innocent way of learning more about her.

  She shot to her feet and twisted her hands in front of her hips. “It is none of your business.”

  He arched an eyebrow at her reaction, at the heat that bloomed on her cheeks, turning her as red as the fire that shone in her eyes. He cringed as he made sense of it. If he had known her favour mark was somewhere intimate, he never would have asked about it. He was trying to direct the course of his thoughts away from her too-alluring body, and all he had done was make it even harder to stop thinking about her. Where was her favour mark that she blushed so deeply when asked about it?

  Would she have blushed in such a way with another male?

  Darkness seethed inside him at the thought of her with another and he clenched his fists so hard he snapped the twig he held. She tensed, didn’t relax even when he tossed the two halves of the twig in the fire, acting as if he had meant only to add fuel to it and hadn’t snapped it out of anger.

  “I never knew favour was bestowed upon you by the Moirai until the day your family found you.” Thanatos barely stopped himself from saying ‘your body’, instead choosing a 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 sighe

d 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 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 of her. He was familiar with some of the mortal fairy tales, and she looked like Sleeping Beauty with her golden hair fanned across the black dirt and the way she was on her back, and the dangerous woods that protected her, closed in to form a barrier between her and the world.

  The brambles and spikes on the trees began to close in on her, tugging a frown from him and propelling him into action. Maybe she was both the wicked witch and the princess from that tale.

  He rounded the fire and sank to his knees beside her, seized her shoulders and shook her as gently as he could manage. “Wake, Calindria.”

  She didn’t.

  She lashed out at him, her cry as she arched off the ground shredding his soul, and he held her more tightly, flicking a glance at the trees. The thorns lengthened, becoming black spears that were dangerously close to her now. What if she couldn’t control this power either?

  A chill skated down his spine.

  What if she wasn’t doing this?

  He looked at her again, and then back at the forest that was encroaching faster and faster the more desperate she became, the fiercer she fought him. No. She was doing this, but she wasn’t aware of it. She was panicking in her nightmare, afraid and desperate to protect herself, and her power was responding to the threat as if it were real.

  “Calindria.” He shook her harder, regretting it when her panic only increased and the trees groaned and creaked as they grew faster in response. “Wake now.”

  He put effort into those words, sure they would rouse her. She kicked at him, her face screwing up, a desperate gasp escaping her lips as she blindly slapped at him, as she kneed and wrestled with him.

  He loosened his grip, afraid it was only making her worse, that he was somehow influencing her nightmare. She calmed a little, but the trees didn’t stop growing. He pushed to his feet and drew his sword, slashed at them, severing branches and growling when new spikes formed from the blunt ends, only making things worse.

  “Wake,” he barked down at her.

  Desperately hacked at the trees that were getting too close to her, were within only five feet of her now, and showed no sign of stopping.

  He cursed. For every limb he cut, two new ones grew. There had to be a way to stop this. There had to be a way to wake her. Why wasn’t she responding to his command? Had he been wrong and he didn’t have power over her?

  -->