“Astin claimed they wanted me to abdicate. It isn’t unheard of, but it isn’t common either.” He gazed intently at his hands, as though he was expecting them to burst into flame at any minute. “It doesn’t always work—like I said, the universe is the one who ultimately decides in these matters—but I would have gone along with their plans. I know I’m in no fit state to rule the family.”
“Why not?” Fourteen’s instincts told him this was the part he’d been waiting for.
“Isn’t it obvious?” Cym huffed impatiently, though Fourteen could tell he was blustering, putting off spilling his secret for as long as he could.
Fourteen gave him an impassive stare.
“I’m a monster.” Cym looked up hesitantly from his hands to gauge Fourteen’s reaction, but when Fourteen rotated a hand in the universal gesture of keep going, he straightened his spine and said, “Look, you’ve been incredibly tolerant of me and my condition, but you can’t say you haven’t noticed anything.”
“Assume I haven’t noticed anything monstrous, and fill me in.” Miraculous, perhaps.
Cym frowned, looking mutinous, but complied. “Fine. I’ll give you the whole sordid scandal. The morning of my eighth birthday, I came into my magic. It doesn’t usually happen at a specific age, so no one was expecting it. I hadn’t noticed anything unusual, other than the normal excitement that birthdays bring, so I was a bouncy bundle of happiness when I found my family waiting for me in the breakfast room. It was covered in fairy lights and streamers and all my favorite foods were weighing down the table, ready for me to enjoy them. I walked in ready and willing to receive all the happy attention a spoiled, rich child tends to get on his birthday, but instead, my mother nearly killed me.
“The only reason she didn’t succeed was because she tripped over my aunt who was attempting to attack her. In fact, the entire room broke out into a horrible brawl the moment I walked into the room. So, instead of having a celebration, my family nearly destroyed itself right in front of me.
“I ran away as soon as the fighting broke out, expecting someone to come after me and explain it was all a big joke or something, but no one came to find me until the end of the day.
“It shouldn’t have been hard to find me because any adult witch can do a simple tracking spell. Eventually, my mother’s servant Emily came to the tree I’d been hiding in and ordered me to come down but told me to keep my distance. She brought me to Elanor—my mother—who was waiting for me in the garden.” Cym went quiet and looked at the oversized cruise ship entering the harbor, squinting in the early morning light as they drove past it. Maybe he wanted to be on it.
Fourteen had worked on a cruise ship once. He’d had to pose as a cabin steward in order to get close to a target who had chosen to live out the rest of his life on a boat. Once Fourteen had granted his wish by drowning the mark in a bowl of lobster bisque, he’d had to jump overboard and swim twenty miles back to shore in the dark.
The swim had been incredibly irritating, and Fourteen wouldn’t have minded if he’d been made to forget it, but he didn’t get a say in such matters.
“Elanor made me stay far away from her too, so when she told me how disgusted she was by my magic, she’d had to shout it loud enough for everyone on the estate to hear.” Cym’s hand reached up absently and started twisting an escaped strand of long, baby-blonde hair around his fingers. “She told me I was an abomination who had to be kept away from everyone. Apparently, that happens sometimes in older families if a child is born with warped magic that can’t be controlled.” Twist, tug, twist.
“They fixed up a new place for me to stay in a different part of the estate where I could live safely away from everyone else. Emily herded me to the old training house. Until they had a new, better training house built, it had been the place where everyone in the family learned how to control their magic. It was a good choice; the wards aimed toward keeping dangerous magic contained were still active. I lived there for eleven years.” Cym’s voice was so soft he had to strain to hear the last part.
“Your family locked you away for most of your life and then expected you to abdicate?”
Cym nodded. “And I would have! I went through their big, creepy ritual with the giant bonfire and the long-winded phrases in Latin, but it didn’t work. The whole family had shown up for it, and when it was done, all we had to show for it was a series of fights that kept breaking out because people kept getting too close to me.” His hair was wrapped so tightly around his fingers that they were white-tipped with blood loss.
A sharp pain reared behind Fourteen’s left eyebrow as he struggled to understand. “And the people in your society, they just allowed your family to lock up one of its children?”
Cym frowned. “I was pretty young when I was locked up, so I don’t know all the ins and outs of magical society. From what I do remember, the Blaike family is kind of high on the totem pole among the Other. I remember hearing a lot of bedtime stories about family members defeating some really scary creatures. Outside of the Guard—our version of the police—we were supposed to be the best at fighting these things. A family as powerful as the Blaikes doesn’t get asked a lot of questions about their inner workings.” He bit his lip, and Fourteen noticed it was frayed. This was obviously a habit he indulged in often.
Magical society didn’t sound much different than regular society to Fourteen. The weak and innocent always fell through the cracks. He felt the hole in his mind stir uncomfortably, and to distract himself, he asked, “What made your family think the ritual didn’t work?”
“The spell they cast to divine who would succeed Elanor created a stone that showed my face in it. After the ritual they made me do, the image didn’t change, but instead, it started to glow. It was pretty obvious the universe was clear about its wishes.”
“How close do people need to be to become affected by you?” They were almost to the cemetery, so Fourteen slowed the car down, wanting to finish the conversation before they retrieved Cym’s belongings.
“It isn’t an exact science. It seems to vary from person to person. Some people can be in the same room with me and only become highly irritable. Other people can be across a long hallway and want to kill me. It made for a lonely childhood.”
“I can imagine.”
Interesting. Fourteen had gotten about as close to Cym as a person could get, but the only reaction he felt was more akin to grace than anger.
“I ran back to my room after the botched ritual, intending to feel sorry for myself for a bit, but I found a note on my bed that said, They are going to kill you. Underneath it was a list of ways to foil various spells. The most useful was the one on tracking spells.” Cym’s hood had fallen back down to his shoulders unnoticed. “So I ran away.”
Fourteen circled around the block looking for a place to park. Even at dawn, parking in Boston was a bitch. “Considering how sheltered your life has been, that couldn’t have been easy for you.” He left the unspoken question hanging in the air for Cym to answer or not as he willed.
Cym blushed. “I read a lot. Like, a lot, a lot—we’re talking two books a day here, easily. My favorites are fantasies and spy stories.” He squeezed his hands together tightly and hunched his shoulders as though expecting ridicule, but when none was forthcoming, he perked up and continued. “When you have nothing better to do with your time, eventually you plan out an escape route, even if you never intend on using it. I don’t imagine the family could have been more surprised than I was that I actually managed it.”
After pulling the SUV into a good spot, Fourteen turned his body to face Cym. “I’m not.” Fourteen reached out to pull Cym’s hood back over his hair, and his already flushed cheeks turned a deep crimson. When his thumb accidentally brushed Cym’s skin, he welcomed the rush of sensation that broke over him. The smell of rain, the sound of a purring cat, and then it was gone. Maybe it was because he was now familiar with the phenomenon that he didn’t lose himself completely this time.
Cym’s shoulders relaxed, and his mouth turned up in a half smile. “It wasn’t as hard as you might think. No one expected me to run because they thought I was a complacent child who would do whatever they told him to do. I wonder how long it took for them to realize I was gone?”
Fourteen shrugged. “Depends on when they were planning on killing you.” Fourteen realized he had chosen the wrong words when Cym’s face turned a sickly gray color.
“Yeah.” After a long pause, Cym said, “Let’s go get my stuff, okay? The best way to foil a tracking spell is to make a significant alteration to your body—it causes the spell to give a null result. You could shave your head or cut off a thumb, but the easiest way is to completely change your outfit. So the sooner I can get to my spare clothes, the better.” Cym struggled to free himself from the seatbelt, once again emphasizing his tiny frame.
“Wait.” Fourteen’s cold voice made Cym freeze. “You stay here while I look around.”
Fourteen got out of the car and did a quick survey of the scene. As he scanned the surrounding area, he realized he didn’t like how quickly Cym had jumped to obey his order. Cym shouldn’t be so trusting toward someone he had just met, even if it did make Fourteen’s job easier. They would need to talk about that later. If it had been another one of his colleagues chosen for last night’s job—Rust, perhaps—Cym would already be dead.
Fourteen’s stomach became a cold rock at the thought, and once again, the unexpected emotion was nearly paralyzing. This time he welcomed his conditioning when it finally roused itself to remove the feeling. Emotions had no place in the field, and right now he was riddled with them. Fourteen stood still and drew deeply on his training, draining himself of all thought and leaving nothing in his mind except the job.
Only when his mind was as pristine as a frozen tundra did he walk over to Cym’s side of the vehicle and open the door. “I’ll be right back, you’ll be safe in here.”
“Wait—”
Fourteen closed the door on Cym’s protest and pushed a button on his key fob. He’d made a few modifications to his SUV—one of them being he could turn the car into a miniature fortress with the push of a button. No one could get in—or out.
Ignoring the sound of small fists pounding on the door, Fourteen did a circuit all the way around the cemetery. His inspection told him it was an open space, walled in by buildings on all sides—one of the random spots of green in the city.
The whole place was dotted with trees in the early stages of blooming. It was probably pretty, but Fourteen only saw what an assassin would see—exposed branches that left little place to hide. It was still too early in the day for any of the businesses to be open, so it would be easy to spot someone out of place. A lone jogger was doing a lap of the cemetery with her dog. She looked benign, but the best assassins always did. Fourteen waited for a long time after she left before deciding the place was as safe as it was going to get.
When he got back to the SUV, he pushed another button on his key fob and saw Cym tumble out of the back passenger door, falling ungracefully onto the sidewalk. Fourteen approved of the fact that Cym hadn’t sat passively waiting and wondered if he had tried to break a window. It wouldn’t have worked, but it would have been the first thing Fourteen would have tried. He offered Cym a hand to help him up, but it was ignored.
