16. Cym

Chapter 16

Cym

B eing trapped inside a dog crate wouldn't have been as bad if it hadn't smelled so horrible. The odor of paint thinner and motor oil wafting from the corner of the garage they'd stuck him in couldn't hope to compete with the reeking dog bed he was sitting on.

Cym was tempted to try and cram the disgusting thing through the narrow bars of his cage to get away from the smell but thought better of it. He had no idea how long he was going to be stuck inside the thing, and the idea of sleeping on a cold concrete floor in an unheated garage was more unappealing than the smell.

Cym shivered in his thin tank top. He should have taken the time to steal a shirt from Fourteen before they tried to make a run for it. But then they probably would have died, and it would have been stupid to kick the bucket over an item of clothing that would likely have fallen off him the first time he shrugged.

Speaking of dying… waking up alive had been a novel experience. He'd been certain his family had decided to wash their hands of him, though if they were planning on sending him back to his gilded prison, he'd prefer death. It sounded less boring.

He held tight to the memory of Fourteen plowing through the mercenaries to safety and hoped the man was far away from anything even remotely connected to the Other. If Fourteen could stay away from The Company, it was possible he could find his way to a normal life—get a job somewhere in security, meet someone…

Cym's heart twisted, and he kicked at the bars of the crate in irritation. It was selfish of Cym to wish to have a life with Fourteen, and he needed to get used to being alone. It wasn't like they'd even spent much time together. It was ridiculous of him to feel so attached.

A snippet of memory chose that moment to interrupt the scolding he was giving himself, and suddenly he was drowning in the sensation of Fourteen's hard body pressed against his own. Cym remembered the way Fourteen had looked at him when they'd woken up together. Like if Fourteen had to choose between being with Cym and breathing, he'd see how long he could hold his breath before he died.

It couldn't have just been the conditioning. It felt too real.

A loud clattering shook him from his thoughts as the door rolled open to the garage. His mother sailed through the opening, looking like a socialite arriving at a press conference.

Her blonde hair was piled artfully on top of her head, and a large pair of sunglasses perched on top. The linen dress she wore was incongruous with the chilly weather, but witches didn't make a habit of worrying about the cold. If they didn't like the weather, it was a small matter of changing their own body temperatures. If she wanted, Elanor could have sauntered in wearing only her underwear and been perfectly comfortable. Cym shivered and chafed his bare arms with his hands, wishing he'd learned that trick before his confinement.

"Darling, I'm so glad they found you!" His mother cooed and flapped her hands distressingly.

"Um." This wasn't what he'd expected at all. Threats and menacing glares, sure, but motherly concern? He hadn't known Elanor had it in her.

"How could they put you in a crate? I could slap that boy sometimes. Sterling!" She shouted through the door. "The future heir of the family doesn't belong in a dog crate! You go find something better for him this instant." Elanor made a shooing motion, presumably to Sterling.

"What do you want, Elanor?" Cym did his best to channel Fourteen by making his voice as cold as possible.

Tears sprang up in his mother's eyes, and her lip began to quiver. "Baby, how could you ever—" She cut herself off and looked toward the open door. "Okay, he's gone now. Honestly, that little shit is going to be trouble later."

In a split-second his mother had gone from a forty-something, cooing socialite to an ageless, calculating creature. It wasn't that her features had changed, but more like a hidden depth had emerged, exposing something dank and rotten. Cym gaped at the transformation.

"Oh my, was I supposed to keep up the fa?ade with you too? Well, tough. You'll be toast soon enough, and I'm sick of this charade." The woman in front of him made a harsh barking noise that sounded inhuman. Cym realized it was laughter and cringed inwardly.

"You aren't my mother, are you?" At this point, he sincerely hoped she wasn't.

"I'd give you points for cleverness, but since it took you thirteen years to notice, I'm going to pass."

"Who… what are you?"

The woman studied him as though trying to decide if the conversation was worth her time. She shrugged. "Why not? We have a little time before the big event."

"What event?"

"Your coronation, silly. Do try to keep up." The imposter wearing his mother's face moved closer to the cage but stopped herself. "Kids today, honestly. If you could just refrain from asking so many questions, you'd find that illumination would come sooner."

She looked around the garage until she found a stool. With a grimace of distaste, she gingerly moved the stool closer to Cym, but not too close. She reached into her purse, pulled out a handkerchief, and placed it on top of the stool before perching delicately on the edge.

"I'm your grandmother, the first Hester Blaike. With about two—no wait"—a pink-tipped fingernail touched her mouth thoughtfully—"three greats in front of that. I suppose technically I'm all your grandmothers and your mother. It's kind of funny if you think about it. You've known me longer than you ever knew your mother."

"Run that by me again?"

With a disappointed sigh, the woman said, "I suppose it was too much to hope for any real intelligence in a child who spent most of his life alone in a room."

Anger spiked in Cym's chest in violent shades of pink, making his skin feel too small for his body.

Elanor-Hester's eyes widened slightly, and she scooted back on the stool, but her voice was steady. "Let me spell it out for you then. I make my way through life by possessing my heirs. Once my current body dries up, I hop into a new one, easy as pie. Hester is the name I prefer, by the way."

"And you plan on hopping into me next because Elanor is drying up too fast for you?"

"The process does seem to be subject to the laws of entropy, unfortunately. Your mother lasted half as long as the last one for some reason."

Hester's body jerked like a marionette. For one ghastly moment, it looked as though she had broken her own neck, but then she sat straight, and the wrongness around her intensified.

"Love, should you be giving out all of our secrets, right now?" When she spoke, no trace of humanity remained, instead leaving Cym with the impression that the words spilling out of the creature in front of him were a thick sludge oozing across his skin. There was nothing left of humanity inside whatever he was facing now.

Another horrible jerk and the wrongness faded drastically, and Cym was looking at Hester again. The woman laughed, a high-pitched squeal of joy that clashed with the situation. "Darling, you've just given away our biggest secret of all. You are such a tease."

Cym felt like reality was fracturing, and he gripped the bars of his cage tightly, unable to do anything but stare helplessly at the monster in front of him.

Hester laughed again. "Look at him! I think you broke him, sweetie." She waved a hand in front of Cym. "Oh well, it doesn't matter what you know or what state you're in, we only need your body. You see, the process is almost complete, so however long you last will get us the rest of the way. Right, dearest?"

Her body spasmed once more, giving way to the nightmarish presence. "We could probably do it now, but I'd rather be certain, wouldn't you? No one wants to enter the Demon Realm at anything less than fully charged."

Understanding dawned on him at last. From an early age, the children of the magical community were taught about nightmares. They were such a plague that the Guard wanted every person to have the knowledge to be able to spot a nightmare possession. Before Cym had been locked away, he'd been brought up on stories of nightmares being defeated by dreamwalkers.

His favorite one had been about Guardian Shael and her battle to destroy the nightmare-turned-demon that had subjugated an entire village. It had possessed the town elder and was using its power to consume unsuspecting travelers and anyone who had no family. At the height of its power, it had gone on a killing spree and had wiped out half of the town before Guardian Shael and her team arrived. Shael and her team had sacrificed their lives to bring it down before it could enter the Demon Realm, bloated on stolen life.

"How did no one notice?" Cym's voice was quiet as he absorbed the revelation. "Most of the people in our family are powerful enough to see you for what you are." Cym himself should have been able to see it.

The body jerked and twisted like a puppet under the control of too many puppeteers. "I want to tell him; it's just too clever to keep to ourselves." Hester wiggled on the stool like an excited child. "We discovered if we possess a body together, my soul acts as a disguise for Sekt. He's free to consume the spark inside the body at his leisure, and my soul makes it look like everything is normal. Of course the last few months of the process make it harder to disguise what's going on. A soul in its final moments of being devoured makes quite the spectacle—to a guardian anyway. So I hide away during that time and stay with members of the family I can trust."

"The family knows?"

"Most of the family knows, dear. You'd be surprised by the number of people who are willing to sacrifice a few useless morals for the sake of more power—my sister, for example. When your magic showed you to be an undesirable vessel, I'd decided to take Stella instead. Personally, I find it hilarious that she fought so hard to kill you. If she had, she'd be in your place right now." Hester giggled, and the sound made Cym's skin crawl. "Oh well, what she doesn't know won't hurt her.

"That little brawl between you two ended up changing everything, by the way. When we saw that you managed to keep from driving that champion of yours away, it got us thinking. If we could figure out how he resisted your ridiculous magic, we could find a use for you after all. I mean really, what use is possessing a body that drives everyone around them insane? Feel like cluing us in on how you did it?"

Cym spat at her in response. It always seemed so offensive when the hero did it in a book. The satisfaction he received when Hester looked at him in disapproval was worth accidentally getting some on his pants.

"Try to at least pretend you weren't raised like a savage, boy."

"I wasn't raised at all, bitch. You saw to that."

Hester glared at him, and for a second, Cym thought she was going to lose herself and come near his cage, but she caught herself and shrugged like his words hadn't affected her. "It's up to you how you spend your last hours in control of your own body. Personally, I would attempt to go out with class."

"Is that what the coronation is? A spell to steal my body?" Cym wondered how much damage he could do to his body before he was stopped. If he encountered stairs on the way to the coronation, he was throwing himself down them. With some effort and luck, he might be able to break his neck or some important bones. The least he could do was give the bitch a broken body for what she'd done to Cym's family.

"Once we've figured out how to control your power, there will be no need to keep you around, so why wait?"

"Good luck with that. You've had years to work on the problem. I don't know what makes you think you'll figure it out now."

"Once we get our hands on your champion, it'll only be a matter of time. After all, we don't need his body to be in good shape, only yours."

Cym forced himself to laugh even though fear made his throat painfully tight. He always hated reading scenes where the hero had to lie their ass off to save their lover, but now that he was in the same position, he knew exactly why they'd done it.

"Yeah, so here's the thing, creepy Grandma Hester, that guy couldn't give a crap about me. He was just in it for the money. Before Stella and company showed up, he and I were in the middle of an argument. He didn't think putting up with me was worth what I was paying him. He was minutes from ditching me, so chances are good that you'll never see him again." Cym tried to look irritated but unconcerned. Whatever happened to him, he needed to keep Fourteen out of his family drama.

The bitch wearing his mother's skin smiled enigmatically. "We'll see."

A knock on the door drew Hester away from where she was perched. With slow, lazy strides she went to the door, a queen in her own castle. She opened the side door a crack and called out, "Stella! Do you have what I need?"

Cym could just make out his aunt's quiet tone as she said, "You're going to have to come see this for yourself."

Hester looked back at Cym. "I'll be just a moment, dear one." She blew a kiss to Cym's one-fingered salute and closed and locked the door behind her.

Cym didn't feel as though the lying thing had worked very well. He would need to practice more if he ever got free. Though, in hindsight, it rarely worked out for the protagonist in any of the books he'd read, so he wasn't sure he should waste any more time developing that skill.

Rather than getting all worked up over the potential of having his soul eaten, he decided to figure out how to get out of his smelly crate. It was really beginning to get to him.

As he examined the structure, he specifically chose not to think about how his family might track down Fourteen. As long as Fourteen kept his armor on, any spellwork done would be fruitless. As Cym poked and prodded every screw and bolt he could find, he also specifically didn't wonder about how angry Fourteen would be at him right now.

If he could even be angry. It was possible, without Cym around, Fourteen would regress back to what he had been before—a mindless killer. It should probably bother Cym more that Fourteen had killed a countless number of people, but it didn't. He knew it wasn't Fourteen's choice.

As Cym was busy failing to not think about Fourteen, he found a bolt holding one of the bottom corners of the crate together that wiggled a bit when he poked at it. The problem was that it was rusty, stripped, and wedged deep inside the bolt hole. There was nothing for him to hold onto. The bars were spaced closely together, but upon further examination, he found a spot he might be able to fit his hand through. It was nearly a foot from where he needed to reach, but the alternative was sitting on his ass and being a half-frozen, helpless loser in a stinky cage.

He squeezed his fingers through the bars, scraping lines of skin off his hand as it caught on bolt after bolt. Nausea swirled in his stomach, reminding him how much he hated pain. He told his stomach to stuff it and kept pushing.

Slowly, his arm followed his hand, and tears burned in his eyes as the bolts tore deeper into his flesh the farther he pushed. When he finally reached his goal, he had left a good deal of his skin behind and was panting from strain and the urge to vomit.

Gripping the nut as tightly as his blood-slicked fingers could manage, he worked at the rusty object. It looked like he was well on his way to giving his creepy Grandma a damaged body. He wondered if there were spells to counteract the effects of tetanus.

Once he had the nut free from the bolt, he had to push the bolt back through the hole, but he didn't have the leverage necessary. He reached and twisted until he heard a pop and felt a sharp pain lance down him arm.

Creepy Grandma was going to love that development.

Cym gritted his teeth and continued, ignoring the unstoppable tears springing into his eyes from the pain. Whatever he had done to himself had given him the reach he needed, but it had made his fingers go numb—ignoring any and all orders he was sending it. It took time, but he managed to flop his hand back and forth until it knocked the bolt far enough for him to pull it out from the other side. He eased his mangled hand back inside the crate, losing even more skin in the process. Gingerly, he placed the useless hand on his lap and tried to ignore it, focusing instead on inspecting the crate to see what his sacrifice had bought him.

He put his foot to the corner and pushed with everything he had, gaining himself a four-inch opening. When ten minutes of pushing earned him less than an additional inch of space and a reminder that his feet weren't doing great either, he bit down on a howl of frustration. There was no point in drawing the attention of whoever was outside guarding the door. If Creepy Grandma was to be believed, most of his family wanted everything to keep going as planned.

At least it wasn't all of them. Considering their interaction earlier, Creepy Grandma must have been keeping up the fa?ade with Sterling. Cym was momentarily warmed at the possibility that his baby brother might not want him dead. If Cym could find a way to contact Sterling, maybe he could convince his brother to help.

Cym's attention went to the door as it opened.

"Look what we found!" Hester announced gaily as she breezed back into the garage. "Please put him over there." She pointed at the floor next to Cym's cage.

Cym's uncle Grant came through the door and took up a position by Hester. He avoided eye contact with Cym and watched silently as two young men dragged a body into the room. Hope shattered as Cym watched them drop Fourteen on the floor beside him.

"You should see your face!" Hester crowed triumphantly. "You really are the worst liar ever. If I hadn't known he meant something to you before, there's no doubt about it now. Are you going to cry? Please do, I'd like to see that." She clapped her hands like a small child anticipating a special treat.

A guttural cry tore from his throat as a single thought resonated through his entire being.

How fucking dare they?

After Cym had sacrificed Fourteen's trust and his own well-being to get the man away from a dangerous situation of Cym's own making, how dare they drag Fourteen back here?

He began to thrash wildly in the crate, kicking and straining at the damaged corner of the cage mindlessly, screaming like a wild thing.

"Oh for fuck's sake… Cym, stop that, right now." A welcome voice in long-suffering tones broke through Cym's rage.

Cym stopped dead and looked at where Fourteen was now kneeling, hands bound before him, but looking none the worse for the wear.

"This would have worked better if your stupid family thought I was unconscious, but I'm not going to let you damage yourself over this." Fourteen frowned, as he took in Cym's blood-stained, mangled arm. "What did they do to you?" His voice sapped what little heat there was from the room.

"He did that to himself, champion." Hester clucked her tongue in disapproval at Cym. "Did you really think I wouldn't want your body if you injured it? This is nothing—a day wearing a few spellpatches at most."

Cym ignored her. "Fourteen, you can't?—"

"Don't!" Fourteen's voice rang out sharply. "Just… don't, okay?"

Hester clapped her hands again and twirled around in a circle in delight. "Oh yes! Stella told me about this. Does that beautiful man really have to do everything you tell him to? Cymbeline, you naughty fox, I can't wait to play with him once I'm you." She wiggled in anticipation.

Nausea returned in full force.

Cymbeline. That was his name. His full name. It had been so long since he'd been called anything other than The Boy that he'd only been able to give Fourteen a mangled version of it. Hearing it come out of the mouth of the freak show in front of him sounded foreign and wrong.

"Over my dead body, bitch." Cym would choose a reenactment of what he'd done at the cemetery over letting this monster have control of Fourteen.

During the interplay with his grandmother, Fourteen had crawled over to inspect Cym's arm. "We need to get the bleeding stopped," he stated. "This is worse than it looks. He'll die soon without help."

Cym was probably more occupied than he should be with wondering exactly how mad Fourteen was with him versus whether or not he was embellishing Cym's condition for a tactical reason. Fourteen wasn't exactly being gentle with his examination, but he wasn't being rough either. It was clear, however, that he was taking extra care not to make skin contact or touch Cym any more than necessary.

"I'm not an idiot," Hester said in an exasperated tone. "No one here is going anywhere near Cymbeline until we figure out how to control him. If you want to patch him up, that's your business."

"Your people took everything I had. I need supplies."

"Then I guess you're out of luck. Why don't you do us all a favor and fill us in on how you can stay free of his magic? Is it a norm thing?"

One of the young men in the room piped up. "When I questioned the people in the boy's last apartment building, they all showed signs of being affected by him. If it's a norm thing, it's not common."

"Cym, I need you to promise me you won't tell me to do anything for the next few minutes." Fourteen whispered under the cover of the debate going on overhead.

"You can't?—"

"Promise!" he insisted harshly.

"Fine." Cym choked down his protest. It was foolish of him to keep railing against what was happening. Unless Cym decided to blow up the entire building and them along with it, he was going to need Fourteen to get them out.

"I'm holding you to that." Fourteen's bound and gloved hand squeezed Cym's briefly.

"I don't know how you think you're getting us out of here. If my whole family is here, you're looking at fighting off at least a hundred people."

"I know what the situation is." Fourteen came to his feet in a graceful motion. "Is it possible for you to accept that you might not?"

"And what do you think you're—" Grant's demand was cut off by a boot to his throat.

"Oh for Vis' sake!" Hester exclaimed. "This is ridiculous."

Grant was one of the few members of Cym's family who had only a small amount of magic to call his own. It made sense that his grandmother had him in the room. Out of everyone in the family, Grant was the only one who had any self-defense training. Cym would have been worried for Fourteen, but it only took a few seconds to show him that fear would have been wasted.

Hester was dispassionate in the face of her great-something-grand nephew quickly losing ground to Fourteen. "You can't fight all of us, champion. It isn't like we didn't prepare for this. Did you think we wouldn't be suspicious when you showed up on our tracking spell? You just stood there and let us take you. I mean, we aren't morons." Despite her nonchalant words, she began edging away from the fight.

"You just let them take you? What is wrong with you?" Exhaustion swept over Cym at his stupidity. "Now we're both probably going to die horribly in the immediate future. How is that going to help anyone?"

One of the young men grabbed a tool from the workbench and jumped in to help Grant, who was bleeding from multiple places.

"It was the most efficient way to find you." Fourteen dodged the tire iron swinging toward his head and used the momentum to kick the other young man—Cym's fourth cousin twice-removed, Clint, he thought his name was—in the shield, and his foot sank in, slowing his momentum. Fourteen recovered in time to twist away from the glittering knife that had appeared in Grant's hand.

The fight was too close for Cym's liking. If Fourteen had been fighting norms, he wouldn't be as worried—he'd seen what he'd done to a dozen trained mercenaries by himself—but with his hands tied and without a gun to eat up his opponents' shields, this fight would last only as long as Fourteen's body did.

Cym inspected the damage he'd done to the crate during his frenzy. If Fourteen thought he was going to sit around twiddling his thumbs while Fourteen slowly fought himself to death, he was out of his mind.

"This is the dumbest thing anyone has ever done!" Cym was certain only dogs could hear his voice at this point.

"I imagine you would have suggested running away?" Fourteen asked as he dispatched Grant by throwing his arms around Cym's uncle's head and slamming his face into Fourteen's knee. Cym was irritated Fourteen didn't even have the decency to sound winded.

"It would have been better than coming here alone against an army!" Cym was trying to keep himself calm, but the way his voice was making his own ears buzz made him think he was failing.

More people poured into the room—some of them members of the Blaike family, some of them mercenaries. Cym did his best to force his already battered feet through the hole he'd made and ignored the bolts of pain that shot up his legs as he did so.

Fourteen's cold facade cracked, and he gave a savage smile as he asked, "Who said I was alone?"