When no help came, I sprinted back to the line of humans and followed them down the trail about fifty feet until they stopped at an archway. My breath left me in a rush. I knew that archway. It was the same one I’d seen in the Land of the Lore, except this was very much not the Land of the Lore. We were on the other side of it. Inside Seelie. My Coven-mates had warned me that archway would deliver a person to the Seelie or Unseelie realms depending on how the spell was recited. I could have sworn they’d told me Sage put up a barrier to keep the Unseelie out.

The humans pulled strange-looking metal tools out of their pockets and crashed the barrier. They slammed the pointed ends of their tools into the air—color flashed. A brick wall appeared that hadn’t been there before. It must have been glamoured invisible. Whatever those metal tools were, they’d sliced through Sage’s glamour to the actual barrier, which I hadn’t expected to be a brick wall.

“Tegan! Tenn? ANYONE?” I shouted. My hands were shaking. This wasn’t good. This couldn’t be a good sign. I turned back to where the fairyflies had just been, but they were nowhere in sight.

When I turned back, I found black smoke seeping through the cracks between bricks. At first it was just little wisps, but then it was billowing like there was a fire raging on the other side. Instinctively, I backed away to hide behind a tree while I gripped my bracelet hoping to be reconnected with my body. The air pulsed sharp and hot, then the bricks burst into dust. Unseelie knights rushed in like a river that’d been blocked by a dam. There was no mistaking who they were with their black hair, black wings, silver body armor, and those soulless black eyes. They rushed in through the archway, then stopped short, their black eyes wide with shock and awe. They yanked their helmets off and looked around like they’d stepped into a fantasy. That emotion lasted thirty seconds, tops, before it morphed into pure rage. Magic billowed in their palms. One by one they screamed and threw their helmets into the dirt, which I only just realized was a dark purple. As each Unseelie knight leapt into Seelie through the archway, the same progress of emotions unfolded.

OH NO. No, no, no, no. I squeezed my bracelet and pushed more magic into the stones, yet nothing happened. TEGAN! TEGAN, IF YOU CAN HEAR ME GET ME OUT! I was too afraid to speak out loud. I wasn’t sure if they’d be able to hear me and I did not like the idea of that.