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 façade 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?
