“You do sleep then?” He canted his head when she glanced at him.
She nodded this time.
He shrugged and grimaced, held his shoulder. “You just do not want to sleep around me.”
And she felt bad about that, especially now that he had protected her from her own power.
“I do not like to sleep around anyone,” she said, aware that it wouldn’t make things better between them. “Although I suppose I slept around you in the end.”
Had she been too tired to keep going? She hadn’t felt that tired. Normally, she only slept when she had no choice, her body shutting down against her will. She had the vaguest notion she hadn’t chosen to sleep this time either.
“I made you sleep.”
Those words leaving Thanatos’s lips shocked her.
“You made me sleep?” She frowned at him, not quite able to believe it. Some distant memory lurked in the darkness of her mind, and she pursued it, caught it and pulled it to the surface, into the light. “My brother… Keras… has the power to make people sleep.”
“So I have heard.” He inspected his shoulder again, looking for all the world as if he was avoiding looking at her.
“You have that power too.” She felt as if she was fishing again, trying to catch the truth from Thanatos this time rather than a memory.
He didn’t look at her. “Something like that.”
“What is that supposed to mean?” She hit him with another frown, was on the verge of demanding he answer her when he loosed another long, deep sigh.
“I cannot make others sleep. Only you.” His gaze met hers, a solemn edge to it as he held it.
He feared upsetting her with this knowledge, but there was no need. The more time she spent with him, the more aware she became that he was right about her in many ways, and the more she believed that he was telling her the truth.
She had died.
Only she had been brought back from death before she ever reached the veil. She was sure she would remember such a place if she had been there.
“How do you know you cannot make others sleep?” Calindria pulled a face at the blood staining the blue bandeau she wore. She looked around and found her waterskin, grabbed it and splashed a little of the water on her chest, washing the blood away and even managing to remove some of it from her top. Her gaze drifted back to Thanatos. “Have you tried?”
His black eyebrows knitted hard above silver eyes that held a flicker of blue flames. Perhaps it was merely the reflection of the fire he had started, was tending to by adding more wood to it. Perhaps emotions other than anger made his eyes change and she had much more to learn about him than she had thought.
As she stared into his eyes, those blue flames faded, whatever thought had provoked them clearly leaving his head as he leaned back from the fire, but refused to look at her this time.
“I admit, I have not tried. I have not had any reason to want to compel someone to sleep.” He poked at the fire with a twig, short and sharp jabs that had blue sparks dancing high into the air. His mood was darkening again. She could read it in his face, didn’t need his eyes to change to show her that his thoughts were treading a dangerous path.
Was he upset with her because she hadn’t wanted to sleep around him? Or was his mood blackening for another reason?
“Thanatos?” she murmured, hoping to draw him back from whatever place he was going in his mind, because she liked it when he was calm around her.
He was more talkative then. Better company. She liked being around him when he was like that.
He frowned and blinked, and when he opened his eyes again they were fixed on her. “What powers do you have?”
She shrugged this time. “I do not know. I was captured when Calistos was running his rite of passage, facing the trials. We were both young, around two hundred, so our powers hadn’t truly come into being at that stage. We knew Calistos could control the air, but mine were… Calistos used to tease that I was a slow developer.”
She still recalled her brother as he had been back then, a fresh-faced youth who appeared no older than a teenager in mortal terms. He had been scrawny, just as she had been, not an ounce of muscle on him, and she had worried about him when their father had announced he would face the trial.
She had recklessly decided to follow them deep into the bowels of the Underworld, into a realm where their father couldn’t easily see, one that Calistos would have to navigate his way back from once their father removed the blindfold. She had wanted to help her brother by guiding him home, only in her haste, she had taken a wrong turn somewhere and they had ended up lost.
Captured.
She hugged her knees to her chest again. “Any powers I have, they emerged when I was in the cage. The cage suppresses everything.”
“I think it cloaked you too, making it impossible for anyone to know you were alive.” Thanatos scowled at the trees around them. “I think this realm cloaks everything.”
“Nothing is real here, yet everything is real.” She lowered her gaze to the fire. “I know that doesn’t make sense, but it is the truth. Things here are not what they seem.”
“A realm of lies.” Thanatos tossed his stick onto the fire and leaned back, grimacing only a little this time as he moved his shoulder. It was still enough to have guilt flooding her again. “I have a theory about your powers. You have power over nature, but not nature as your mother controls. Yours is not the power to bring forth life from the dirt.”
She rubbed her knees and said what he wouldn’t. “I bring death.”
He gentled his tone. “That is not a bad thing.”
She lifted her eyes and scowled at him, but there was no anger behind it, only a strange sense of hopelessness, of sorrow that seemed to fill her up inside and weigh her down. “You would say that. You bring death too. What’s it like being the god of death?”
He hiked his shoulders stiffly, his face settling in placid lines that held a hint of pride, an expression that looked a lot like a mask to her, one worn to cover some serious hurt. “I am respected.”
Calindria read the other meaning in that word. He was feared.
“Do you have many friends?” She pursed her lips and looked at the ceiling of the cavern, barely making out a few of the heavy spikes of rock that clung to it. The darkness was strong here. “I think I had friends once, but I do not remember. My brothers were my friends… perhaps.”
Maybe she had wanted to have friends. She had a notion she had tried to make some once, but it hadn’t gone well. As soon as they had learned who her father was, they had avoided her.
Thanatos gruffly bit out, “I have no need of friends. I have siblings.”
“Your twin. Hypnos.”
He glared at the fire. “I have not seen him in some time now. We drifted apart.”
And it looked as if he regretted it, felt guilty about it for some reason.
“Did something happen between you?” She refused to stop questioning him when he turned his glare on her.
“Something happened, but not between us. It is my fault, and I do not wish to speak of it.” Blue fire swallowed the silver in his irises, the sense of darkness he constantly emitted growing stronger as his mouth set in a hard line and his black eyebrows drew down into a deep frown. “It is not your business.”