Chapter 16Cym
Being 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 façade 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.”
