Mara opened the door to the holding cell, and we stepped inside. Instantly, I smelled sweat and misery. Amantha cast an illusion orb into the air to provide us with light, but the moment her spell illuminated the space, I wish she hadn’t. There had to be over a hundred people in here, crammed into three little tiny cages. They were shoved in so close together, they nearly had to lay on top of each other to sleep. Amantha’s eyes welled with tears, seeing people being treated this way. The floor was wet and filthy from waste, which the humans laid in, and their clothes were in tatters.
The humans gave no reaction when we came closer to their cages. They were bewitched, that same strange stupor infecting their eyes. They were totally brain dead, no idea where they truly were.
There were bolts upon the cages keeping them contained. Finlay tried to rip the nearest lock off, but even with his shifter strength, it did no good. I reached out to touch the bars, but hissed in pain the moment I did so.
The bars were made of iron. The metal burned my hand and caused welts to ripple across my fingers. I suppose Elijah had used the first of the human slaves to construct these cages, so any fae who tried to break them would injure themselves. Clever.
The locks, though, were clearly magical, and nothing else. Mara tried all sorts of magic, tossing spell after spell at the locks, but nothing made them come loose.
“It’s an enchantment. I can’t break it,” Mara said. She ran a hand through her hair in frustration.
“But what kind? I can’t feel it with my magic. It’s strange,” Amantha said, running her hand over the lock.
I put my hand on the lock, and immediately felt a surge of dark energy. A realization came to me. These cages were made by Unseelie magic, which meant the other fae in the group couldn’t break the boundaries on them. They were Seelie fae.
But as we’d discovered last semester, I had Unseelie blood, so I might be able to break the boundary.
I put forth the same spell that I’d learned in class yesterday, but drew it inside from the dark reservoir of Unseelie magic inside of me, rather than the Seelie part I knew to be close to my heart.
I hadn’t touched my Unseelie magic since Emma and I had discovered it. I thought it a piece of the leshane, a part of the demon, dark and dangerous.
Now I knew better. Unseelie magic could be used for good. Emma had done so before, and I would use it that way, too. I summoned my Unseelie magic from the depths of my chest up to my fingers, and concentrated on the locks. The person who’d put the boundary on these locks had a clear intent to keep these people inside, to manipulate them, to use them. I wasn’t able to break Hemlock’s enchantment on the book during class, but I didn’t care about that. There was little more I cared about than getting these people out of those cages. I wanted to free them far more than Elijah wanted to trap them here.
My will had to be stronger than whoever had cast the spell upon these cages, because the locks broke open. The rest of them gasped as the cage doors freely opened.
“Ethan, how did you do that?” Finlay said in amazement.
“There’s no time. We need to get these people out of here,” I said. I reached through and began pulling humans out of their cages by the arm. They stumbled brainlessly out of their prisons with blank stares. Behind us, other students began making portals.
“It’s best to hold the enchantment on them until we get them through the portals,” Mara whispered. “They won’t remember a thing about magic once we cut them loose.”
“Will it affect their memories?” Amantha asked.
“Let’s hope not. If we can get these humans to a public place, then lift the enchantment on them, hopefully they’ll remember where they came from and be able to make their own way back home without any consequences to the magical community,” Mara said.
“The humans are going to notice if hundreds of them are disappearing and then coming back with no recollection of where they’ve gone,” Finlay pointed out.
“There is no alternative. We can’t leave them here,” Mara replied. She opened up another portal besides Amantha’s. They began shoving humans through them, one by one. The humans lined up mindlessly, walking through the portal with no fear whatsoever and disappearing from sight.
“Where did you send them?” I asked.
“The outskirts of Vashtyn,” Amantha said. “It’s the best place.”
I nodded. Vashtyn was one of Malovia’s capital cities, and the one with the biggest human population. It was a good guess most of these slaves had come from there, or around the area. We continued pushing humans through the portals, until all of them were gone. It was then that Mara stood in front of her portal and glanced back.
“I will go through the portal and break the bewitchment on these people. Now that they’re far from Dolinska, the magic on them should be weak, and easy to sever,” Mara said. “Amantha, I will need you to come with me, to help break the bewitchments. Ethan, Finlay, escape this place and ensure the others made it back safely. We won’t be long to return.”
Both Mara and Amantha vanished through the portal. Finlay changed into a wolven and said, “Let’s be off, before they have our tails.”
I followed his lead by changing, and we took off together out of the building. We met back up with the three shifters, who’d made quick work of the rest of the guards. They’d done their work stealthy, without alerting the rest of the compound.
“Good work,” I told them with a nod. “Now, let’s get out of here.”
The shifters changed, and followed me out. Two were griffins, one was an alicorn, and one was a wolven. When we escaped out the back, Dorina waved at us from the trees. The griffin flew up to her, and she climbed on his back. They took off into the sky, sailing upward into the cloud cover.
“Scatter. We can’t be seen,” I ordered the other shifters.
All of us took off in different directions, save for Finlay, who stuck with me. We crept near the fence line, and I thought we were going to get away free— until an awful siren broke out against the night.
