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The only real option for escape I had found was to take advantage of a visitor's culture.

So I glared at him before gritting my teeth and dragging my eyes back down to the floor, hating and loving the wild, powerful woman inside of me, I had to suppress to save myself.

"If you aren't limited, then tell me what it is spelled for," he said, his voice soft.

"If you climb onto that bed, it will chain you to it," I said, glancing back up to see his brilliant eyes still gazing at me.

"Something has changed," he said. "To try and trap me now… What has changed?"

All of the mundanes talked to each other. Information was how we survived. At least it was after we got to our second year. No one who had survived their first year trusted the incoming class. It was hard to trust people who couldn't comprehend the true level of shit that they were in.

Maybe he would see me as valuable if he knew I had information he needed.

"They are saying that the seals are being broken, and the dungeon is escaping," I said.

A smile broke across his face, sudden and startling, like the first heat of the sun's rise when it first breaks through the ice-cold air of the night, soft, gentle, and brilliant all at the same time. "That is what my brother said."

He held out one hand to me, not stepping any further into the room. “You have saved me. Let me save you."

“What about your brother?” I asked.

His face grew dark. “If they are trying to trap me while I sleep, then that will only put him in more danger. He is safe as long as they need him to control me. I am sorry, but you willhave to leave any of your belongings behind. We must leave at once.”

“I don’t have any belongings,” I said, walking towards him. I didn’t have anything that mattered as much as getting out of here, at least. I had earned different small trinkets for good behavior while I was here, but there was nothing I wanted to hold onto.

I didn’t take his hand. I wanted to take it so badly to feel my skin slide against his, but I didn't. Instead, I clasped my hands in front of me, and he let his own fall back down to his side. He gave me a nod, then turned into the stone hallway. It was one of the narrow ones, leading to the living quarters. He led the way to the larger connecting hallway that could fit at least six people shoulder to shoulder, with an arching ceiling that a shifted lycan could stand up in comfortably.

“There is enough space here,” Rí Túath Crystallo murmured. He lifted a hand and focused, runes appearing in midair on the far side of the hallway, rimming a small alcove on the far wall. I gasped as I recognized what he was doing. There had been a brief segment on portals in one of my classes.

“I thought we couldn’t portal within school grounds!” I said. “I thought they would be blocked!”

“This fort is on the edge of the area they have shielded against portals,” he said. “Didn’t you wonder why students weren’t allowed to roam these halls?”

I hadn’t wondered.

I just assumed they wouldn’t let us in the fort because we might sneak through it and out to the other side of the caldera. None of the mundanes knew how to cast a portal, nor were any of us strong enough, as far as I was aware.

We were used as batteries.

I braced myself, waiting for Rí Túath Crystallo to reach out and start to drain me. Different monsters did it in different ways.The Seelie Aos sí, the higher fae that were born ‘right’, with the ‘right’ hair color and the ‘right’ abilities that didn’t include shapeshifting, would demand that I channel energy to them as I had been trained, making me focus on sending it out so that they could grab hold and use it. Refusal would be met with torture or death.

The other monsters… it depended on whether they were unbound or not. The late headmistress had been unbound, and I’d learned her preferred method for feeding on magical energy during Orientation.

I shuddered at the thought.

I waited, but Rí Túath Crystallo said nothing, just continued focusing on the runes as they glowed into place, activating one by one from his own power.

The steady thud of boots on stone caught my attention, and I turned to look down the hallway towards the sound.

The next sound that came out of my own mouth was garbled, a product of shock and fear, of not understanding how or what or why. What I was seeing was not possible, at least, it was another thing that shouldn’t be possible.

“Orcs,” I forced the word out.

Tusks gleamed in the light of the hallway, leather and metal armor creaking and clinking, their breaths harsh in the absence of any words. They were as quiet as they could be for a destructive force in a place where they shouldn’t be… where they couldn’t be.

There was no way for them to get here.

There was only one entrance or exit from the Dungeon where they lived onto the campus, and it was on the exact far side of the Caldera as this fort. This squadron of Orcs would have had to fight through the Order Army blockade and then through the ‘Proper Students’ who had been using them as training fodder for centuries.