Cym’s family wanted him dead.

The concept continued to astound him, even though he'd had weeks to adjust to it. Sterling, his own brother, wanted him dead. Of everyone in his family, Sterling had been the one he was closest to.

As children they had been confidants and partners in crime—always escaping their nanny and having adventures together. After Cym had been confined, Sterling had come to him once and had spent the entire time crying. His brother never came back after that.

Cym assumed it had been too hard for Sterling to be around him, so Cym didn’t blame him—or so he had tried to tell himself.

A sharp pain in his hand caused him to break from his gloomy reverie, and he looked down. It was clenched tightly around the material of Fourteen’s jacket, and it was hurting him. He examined the leather closely, running his hands along the front, and discovered hard plates woven inside the material. When his fingers found a plate, they felt funny, almost as if he were touching something that wasn’t there.

If he hadn’t had such a disastrous object lesson in the cemetery from tinkering with his magic, he would have considered trying to play with the sensation. Instead, he decided to be smart and ask Fourteen about it when he woke up.

Cym should get up and leave the poor man alone to sleep instead of gawking at him and feeling him up in his sleep like a pervert, but he couldn’t find the will to do so.

Cym’s eyes caressed Fourteen’s face, taking in the strong line of his stubble-covered jaw and his full mouth, relaxed in sleep. The faint lines at the corners of Fourteen’s eyes didn’t detract from his looks. Instead, they enhanced them. Cym thought they made him look competent and experienced, and he had firsthand knowledge that Fourteen was both.

A strand of glossy dark hair had drifted over one of Fourteen’s eyes, and Cym brushed it away before he could stop himself. It was so soft that his fingers lingered for a moment, relishing the sensation. Fourteen’s entire countenance was like a personal invitation for Cym to explore at his leisure.

He jerked himself out of his thoughts. What the heck was wrong with him? The last thing Fourteen needed was for Cym to be creeping on him in his sleep.

Carefully, Cym rolled away from him and sat up. Maybe he could take a walk inside the warehouse to clear his head.

The thoughts and feelings Fourteen evoked may have been new to him, but he knew enough to understand both parties needed to be awake and consenting. Fourteen had exhibited clear feelings about touching, and Cym didn’t want to violate those feelings no matter what his own thoughts were on the matter.

Before Cym made it out of the bed, a hand grabbed his arm and held tight.

Cym startled and looked at Fourteen’s face, but Fourteen was still asleep.

Cym tried to tug his arm free, but the more he tried, the closer Fourteen pulled him in. Cym felt like a fish getting reeled into a fisherman’s boat. By the time he gave up, he was on top of Fourteen’s body with his face pressed against a hard, well-muscled chest.

That was kind of like consent, wasn’t it?

He stopped worrying about small things like morals and how a decent person should properly use them, because now that Cym had been made aware of it, the quiet nothingness Fourteen’s jacket was giving off was loud and clear.

How could he not have noticed it back in the cemetery? Maybe it had something to do with being attacked by people who were supposed to love him.

The nothingness was a soothing hum against Cym’s cheek and encouraged him to relax. Fourteen had no right to smell as good as he did—a mixture of sawdust and leather. It was exactly what Cym imagined sin would smell like.

He gave in and buried his face in Fourteen’s jacket to breathe in his unique scent. Fourteen’s smell and the gentle hum of his jacket encouraged Cym to sleep too. Hopefully Fourteen wouldn’t react too badly to waking up with Cym in his arms.

Things skittered and writhed at the edges of Cym’s vision as he walked down a dimly lit hallway. He kept jerking around to try and catch whatever was there, but the hall behind him was always empty. Eventually he forced himself to stop reacting because he didn’t want to give the whatever the satisfaction of seeing him jump.

As Cym continued down the hall, the way got brighter, but the scrabbling at his periphery intensified. Before long, he came to a plain, white door that stood out in the dingy hall. Dream logic dictated he open it, so he did, noting that the whatever fell behind as he passed through and didn’t follow him.

On the other side of the door was a stark, white room with three men gathered around a large, black sphere that dwarfed the room.

One of the men—a short, balding man in glasses and a lab coat—was speaking to a tall, powerfully built man in uniform. “I don’t know why the adjustments aren’t taking hold, Colonel. It usually only takes one treatment to permanently delete a subject’s memory—two at the very most.” The short man pulled off his glasses and cleaned them nervously.

The Colonel glared at the sphere then turned to face the short man. “I seem to recall you telling me you had perfected this method. Called it foolproof, if I’m not mistaken.” The glint in his eye told Cym he didn’t feel mistaken.

None of the men paid any attention to Cym’s arrival, so he cautiously ventured closer to the sphere.

“It is!” The other man in the room also wore a lab coat and was tall and painfully thin. He twitched as he spoke and made Cym think of a praying mantis. “We’ve never had results like these. It’s fascinating, really. Just fascinating.”

Unlike his associate, the short man sensed the danger exuding from the Colonel and rushed to appease him. “Up to now our method has been one hundred percent effective. If there is a fault, it’s with the subject, not us. He must be defective in some way.” He put his glasses back on and valiantly pretended he wasn’t shaking in fear and drenched in sweat.

The Colonel gazed at the short man with the intensity of a raptor, as if savoring his fear. Finally he sneered and said, “He’s just stubborn. Hit him again. It’ll take eventually. We just have to keep at it.”

“With all due respect, sir, if the subject has any more treatments, we run the risk of damaging him permanently.” The tall man pointed to the readings on the screen beside him. “Why not just scrap him and start with a new subject?”

“Because he’s mine.” A grown man saying such a childish thing should have been amusing, but his harsh tone sent chills down Cym’s spine.

Cym walked around the sphere and saw a small, round window on one side with a panel next to it. Inside lay an eerily familiar-looking teenage boy strapped to a metal frame, with enough wires sticking out of his body to make him look like a porcupine. Cym turned to look at the trio behind him. How could they talk about the boy so callously?

The Colonel stalked over to where Cym stood and used his fist to smash a button next to a speaker on the black sphere. “Do you hear that, boy? You’ll stay in there until you know who you belong to!”

The boy’s eyes cracked open slightly. They were ringed with dark circles, and the corners were lined with pain, but he shakily held up a hand as far as his restraints would allow and gave the man a one-fingered salute.

Cym recognized his storm-gray eyes and gasped. Horror stole over him, leeching strength from his body. How dare they?

A wordless growl escaped the Colonel. “Do it.”

“But… sir!”

“Do it now!”

“Yes sir. Prep Subject Fourteen, maximum dose this time.”

After snapping the ominous order to his partner, the short one bustled around the room, poking at keyboards and squinting at computer monitors. The tall one took a large vial of clear liquid and inserted it into a compartment near the window.

The horror unfolding in front of him snapped Cym out of observer mode. He couldn’t just stand there and let it happen—even if he was fairly certain he was only in a dream.

But if what was happening wasn’t real, what could he do?

Cym didn’t know shit about magic, especially dream magic. His experience was too horribly lacking for him to do anything without explosive results, which meant he was left with mundane methods. When ear-piercing screams began to emerge from the sphere, Cym’s mind kicked into overdrive, forcing him into hyperfocus mode, and it only took seconds to spit out the answer.

If this was dream, what couldn’t he do?

Cym spotted a heavy-looking microscope, picked it up and swung it at the head of the Colonel, who collapsed to the ground like a bag of ground meat. Neither of the scientists reacted, so he gave them the same treatment. Both fell to the ground without uttering a sound. It was so ridiculously easy, Cym was disgusted it had taken him so long to figure it out.

The second the room was full of unconscious assholes instead of conscious ones, Cym turned his attention to the black sphere. Distress was fucking with his concentration and it was amplifying with each of Fourteen’s heart-wrenching screams.

Cym smacked himself repeatedly trying to bring himself back to the task at hand. He couldn’t get Fourteen out if he collapsed under pressure, and Fourteen had helped Cym so many times already. Even if this was only a dream, Cym couldn’t stand by and let the man be tortured right in front of him.

Cym tried to open the sphere, but it had no visible latch on the outside, so he abandoned the idea. He tried to read the screens to get some idea of how to stop the machine, but the words swam in front of him and refused to take any kind of recognizable shape.

Fuck. Stupid dream bullshit.