Like the cell we had just escaped, the hallway was made of stone and probably the work of an Earth Mage, or a group of them, from the uniform look to it. It was only slightly better lit than the cell with the occasional glowing stones sticking out from the ceiling above us. The hallway itself was long, with almost a dozen more thick steel doors like the one we had melted our way through, indicating more cells and possibly more prisoners as well.

One end of the hall led to a dead end while the other led to a set of stairs going upward, further cementing the idea that we were in a dungeon in my mind. Between us and those stairs were four Trolls, who were now rushing toward us after shouting something about an escape to someone up the stairs. Well, I guess it was to be expected since the burst of flames that probably filled the hallway after we melted the door wasn’t exactly subtle.

Speaking of not subtle, whoever was tearing apart those wards was really going to town, not just dismantling but destroying them one after another. It wouldn’t be long before there was nothing left. I had a feeling that it was Mom, and that she was pissed since she was usually the biggest advocate for subtlety and fine control of our magic. These assholes shouldn’t have kidnapped her daughters.

The Trolls hurriedly approached to bar our path forward. Trolls were generally intimidating due to their size, strength, and durability, but apparently, that wasn’t enough for the Chimera Syndicate since these guards were all carrying some kind of assault rifles and pointing them at us. I wasn’t sure I could do anything with just my Ice magic quick enough to stop a bullet, let alone more than one, and I didn’t want to give away that I was dual-aligned.

The Troll who seemed to be in charge wasted no time in telling us, “Get your asses back in your cell, slaves. Or are you that eager for us to give you a test drive?” Delilah, who was leading the way with Mallory, began to visibly shake as the Trolls all leered at us and he turned to the trembling Fire Mage to add, “Is that it, Blondie? Our last gangbang earlier wasn’t enough for you, and you want more? We’d…”

His words were cut off as Mallory’s flames flared and she charged forward, her entire body wreathed in near white-hot fire as she snarled, “You fucking bastards!”

“They’re not…” one of the Trolls began to say in sudden fear as Mallory charged them and they tried to bring their weapons to bear. It was probably something like ‘they’re not wearing collars’ but he didn’t get to finish as Mallory was close enough to grab the barrel of the closest weapon, melting it almost instantly before turning to do the same to another while our enemies were still trying to figure out what was happening.

Unfortunately, the rest of us weren’t very useful in this situation since Jess couldn’t get close enough to use any of her self-defense lessons with the heat of those flames. I wasn’t built for physical fights, even if I did have the disposition for them, and even if I could generate some ice, it probably wouldn’t be long before it melted under Mallory’s now oppressive heat. Delilah was just staring at the Trolls in horror and trembling in fear. Dammit, we needed her!

Jess stepped between the Fire Mage and the scene unfolding before us, blocking her view, and started to shake her by the shoulders. “Delilah! Snap the hell out of it!”

I quickly joined her, putting myself between my sister and the heat of Mallory’s conflagration to shield her since I was fireproof, and she wasn’t. “Delilah, are those the guys who… hurt you?” I couldn’t bear to say what they really did to her, and she was totally lost in fear right now, I could see it in her widened eyes and from how she was shaking and struggling to breathe. There was no answer.

“Delilah!” I tried again, this time getting right in her face beside my sister. “You are not this fucking weak! You’re not wearing a collar anymore; you have your magic! Mallory is giving you plenty of fire to work with, so fucking use it! Make these assholes pay for what they did to you!”

From the moment I said the word weak, her entire demeanor started to change. She was still trembling, but the fear that showed on her face and in her eyes was quickly being replaced by rage with every word that I spoke. Now she was looking past us at the Trolls that Mallory was struggling to handle on her own. The Efreeti had made their weapons useless, and I saw some of the Trolls looking badly burned, but she wasn’t a fighter and while she could control her output somewhat, she couldn’t control the flames themselves, and the Trolls were backing off to keep some distance between them.

“Get out of my way,” Delilah stated in barely controlled fury.

Jess and I stepped aside, and the Fire Mage walked past us, her eyes focused on the Trolls and burning with malicious intent as the hallway ahead of us became a veritable inferno that engulfed the Trolls. Screams emerged from the wall of flames and Delilah allowed no escape for her tormentors until those screams finally ceased. When the wall of fire dissipated, all that remained of them were four blackened and charred corpses.

For a moment, silence gripped us as the smell of burnt Troll filled the air. “Should we check these other cells? There could be more prisoners,” Jess suggested uncertainly with a look at one of the metal doors.

“Don’t bother,” Delilah snapped bitterly. “When I was brought here, they said they would be sending their latest shipment out on Saturday. If they caught you, it must be at least Monday now. They only kept me around to get any more information for their plan and to…”

She didn’t finish her sentence, but we all had a pretty good idea of what she was referring to. She had been missing almost five days and that whole time she was probably being either raped or interrogated. Yeah, these assholes here going down.

We did check the cells quickly, just to be sure, but none of the others were locked or had the big steel bars blocking them that ours had, and Delilah was quickly proven correct. So, we hurried onward to the stairs going upward and entered a cavernous room that looked like some kind of gathering place. To one side was what looked like a bar, complete with stools in front and a plethora of booze behind it while the rest of the space had couches, chairs, tables, and even a couple of beds. There was also a small, raised stage area off to the side of the doorway we entered through from downstairs.

It was like some sick mockery of the club, though it lacked any real atmosphere with its bare stone walls, dim lighting, and exposed pipes and wiring along the ceiling. I know it was probably just some generic bar hangout for the Syndicate members and their guests, and they probably didn’t even know what the inside of Pandora’s Box looked like, but it still pissed me off. I had a disturbing feeling that the stage area was more of an auction block than a stage though, and that this room was probably where they auctioned off any ‘merchandise’ they weren’t keeping for themselves or didn’t already have a buyer for.

The place smelled of cigarettes, booze, and something else that was very familiar. There was a faint smell of sweat and sex in the room too, recently enough to make me believe that this place would probably hold very unpleasant memories for Delilah. The way she tensed up ahead of me seemed to confirm that.

The one thing I wasn’t all that surprised to see there was a welcome party. I counted four Mages, including the Earth Mage who had come to gloat in our cell earlier, though none felt extremely powerful. The others felt like a Death Mage, a Water Mage, and a Fire Mage, and those last two could make things tricky for Mallory and Delilah, but I was pretty sure Delilah was more powerful than their Fire Mage.

The far bigger problem was that they had goons with them as well. There were almost a dozen Trolls, a couple of Vampires, some Goblins, and even a massive, purple-skinned ogre that must have been ten feet tall. By this time, I could sense that the wards were almost completely demolished. I figured that it would only be a minute or two before they were gone entirely, and these guys had a lot more to worry about than a few escaped high school girls.

Maybe I could buy a little time here. I grinned as I called out to the Earth Mage from earlier, who there was no way I would ever call Master, “Hey, Asshole. Someone’s knocking at your door, are you gonna answer that? I’m gonna kill you regardless, but don’t you know it’s rude to ignore company?”

Jess, bless her little bunny heart, figured out that I was trying to buy us a few minutes and added, “Gotta give those Vampires props though, Sis. They’re still here when there’s probably a very pissed off Night Princess outside ready to bring this whole place down.”

Said Vampires suddenly got even paler than they already were and looked dubiously at the mages as if to ask, “Is that for real?”

“We have people waiting for your ‘friends’ upstairs, and they won’t get past the front door,” the Earth Mage replied with a sneer. Then he turned to the goons and said, “Get them collared and locked up again, and try not to damage the merchandise too much.”

“Dude, really?” I asked as I looked at him like he was the single most idiotic person on the planet. “You have heard of teleportation, right? Who says that they’re all coming in by the front door.”

As luck would have it, that was when the final layer of wards was ripped apart with a force that seemed to make all of Creation tremble and made every magic-sensitive person in the very large room wince and recoil. An instant later, two forms appeared out of thin air, placing themselves between us and the Syndicate members and their goons.

Melody looked exhausted from that one teleport, and she was awfully pale too, but that didn’t stop her from placing herself to act as a shield for me and Jess. With her was my magic teacher, Ms. Norstrom in all her Valkyrie glory, fully armored in something that looked straight out of a Viking movie and wielding a massive hammer. “Melody, would you mind taking the girls home so they can be healed?”

“Nope, not happening,” I told my teacher calmly. “I have something to do, so leave the Earth Mage to me.”

“If my sister stays, then I stay,” Jess agreed. “This is as much our fight as anyone’s.”

Mallory and Delilah quickly agreed, neither of them wanted to give up the chance for a bit of payback now that the odds were more in our favor. Melody gave my sister and me a worried look, her eyebrows rising as she saw that we were now completely identical, but she quickly turned back to the Syndicate members, cocked her gun, and said, “Not sure if I could teleport again so soon anyway. Let’s do this.”

The Valkrie sighed and grumbled something about Fey and vengeance but nodded and informed us, “Carmilla and the others will likely join us once they’re cleaned up the rest of the filth.”

Carmilla’s name caused the two Vampires to rethink their allegiance and then my teacher said something in a language that I wasn’t familiar with. An aura of light manifested from her hammer and covered both her and the weapon completely. Before I could blink, she was rushing at the ogre and hit it square in the chest hard enough to send it flying back twenty feet, where it demolished a table and chairs and then skidded along the floor, where it was slow getting back to its feet.

Mallory’s flames flared, but Delilah and the other Fire Mage were both seemingly fighting for control over them until Melody shot the other Mage with her hand cannon and turned his head into a fine red mist. Yeah, that was going to be in my nightmares for a while. My demonic fiancée then wasted no time in doing the same to the Death Mage as he started using some kind of spell, one that he couldn’t finish with a gaping hole where his chest used to be. No longer having to fight for Mallory’s flames, Delilah used them to engulf the small pack of Goblins that were trying to close in on Melody before she could fire her gun again.

One of the pipes running along the ceiling burst, letting loose a torrent of water that was turning in midair to head straight for us, particularly Mallory. Thinking that the Water Mage was likely responsible for this turn of events, I grinned at him. “Thanks, I needed that. You might want to watch ou… oops, too late.”

From the look on Melody’s face, my fiancée was responsible for diverting some of Mallory’s flames at the Mage in question causing him to frantically try to divert some of that water to put himself out. Not that I was going to let him. Water is Ice’s bitch, so I was freezing his weapon and turning it into mine, ignoring his screams to unleash a barrage of icicles at the Earth Mage as Melody finished off the burning Water Mage with a bullet to the head.

The asshole raised a wall of earth, destroying a table and some chairs in the process and my icicles shattered harmlessly against it. I now had a pretty good idea who had led the attack on us at the school. Now that I thought about it, his annoying voice was very similar to the one I heard before I blacked out. Well, that just gave me even more reason to do this.

Melody looked like she was still in pretty rough shape following whatever happened to her when I was knocked out (something else I owed this asshole for), and she was picking off Trolls with her big gun now that the other Mages were down. Delilah had finished off the Goblins and was now using Mallory’s flames to barbeque another Troll who had gotten the bright idea to try to make a run for it. Meanwhile, Ms. Norstrom had finished beating the Ogre to death with her hammer and was taking care of the fleeing Vampires.

I had this bastard all to myself amongst the chaos going on around us. Well, not quite to myself since Jess had my back as I moved closer to press my attack. Apparently, she figured that there was no point looking like me if it didn’t make her useful right now, so she had shifted her form to that of an Amazon that rivaled Annika for height and muscles. So, when he tried to copy me by turning his wall into a bunch of stone spikes to hurl at us and I created a wall of ice, my sister picked up a couch to give us some extra coverage.

It was a good thing that she did. My ice wall was shattered and while that couch was now a pincushion, we managed to block the worst of it, and we got out of it with only a couple grazing cuts. “Nice work, Jess,” I told my sister in relief as I focused on the Mage who seemed to be working on something new to try to ruin our day.

“You too, Sis. Now, finish this asshole off,” she replied.

I barely heard her because I was concentrating on doing just that. I was laser-focused on my target and sure, this guy could do some impressive stuff, but I noticed that he needed to concentrate for a minute or two before pulling off anything big. He used the others as a distraction to give him time to put up that wall, and the spikes hadn’t been for at least a minute after that and were easy to see coming, even if they weren’t easy to stop. So, while he had skill, he didn’t have raw power backing it up and a minute or two to cast a spell was an eternity in a pitched battle like this.

I, on the other hand, was starting to develop the skills and I had a whole lot of raw power. I also wasn’t dependent on gestures to focus and channel my spells like he seemed to be. When he had raised that wall, he had been raising his hands and arms, and I noticed that he had his hands outstretched after the spikes were launched. Those gestures gave him away every time he was about to release his spells, even before the sudden surge of magic that followed.

I drew on not only the cold comfort of the Ice within me, but also the Light of the Divine. I focused my mind on my opponent, not only watching for any gestures, but focusing on him, his entire being, everything that made him what he was and what I wanted to do. He had a look of concentration on his face, and I could tell he was working on something big, and just as he began to raise his arms, I let my magic fly first.

It happened in an instant. I took everything he was and made it ice. This wasn’t flash freezing, there was no frozen flesh or bone, every molecule of the ice sculpture that stood where the Mage once did, its face still frozen in concentration, was simply frozen water. I remade him, much as I had once done with Selina by accident, and nothing was remaining of the person he’d once been but the shape of the ice.

The room was quiet now. All our enemies, at least the ones in this room, were down and they wouldn’t be getting back up. The others approached and I noticed that Jess was back to being my identical twin, something that warmed my heart and felt right. We might not be genetically related, but she was my sister, the other half of me, and always had been since the day we met.

Melody practically crushed me in a hug and passionately kissed me until we both needed to come up for air. “I… was so worried about you, Babe. I couldn’t…”

I noticed Mallory and Delilah doing their best to melt my new ice sculpture as quickly as possible, probably not wanting to look at that ugly face again, but I was more focused on the girl holding me tight in her arms. I kissed her back to cut off what was probably self-blame and then told her, “I knew you’d come for me. You look like you should be in bed though so now I’m worried about you.”

“I got shot a few times,” she admitted. “Those enchanted bullets would have done me in if I was a full Demon, and Ember probably helped too. It took a bit for my regeneration to kick in after they were removed though, and Dr. Diaz thinks I need to rest for a couple of days to get back to peak condition. I wasn’t going to miss this though.”

“We should go find the others so Grundle can take you all home to rest,” Ms. Norstrom says, interrupting the moment. “You have all proven that you have the will to fight, but you are injured and tired. That is when people make deadly mistakes. Follow me, and stay behind me, I will keep you all safe. We may still run into Syndicate Mages or their hired muscle.”

Melody released me and brandished her big gun once again. “I may be too tired to fight, but I can still shoot. It’s my job to protect these two, and I’ll keep doing that until we can get to the others and call Grundle to get us out of here.”

I was a bit surprised to hear Grundle’s name being brought up since I thought that certain mothers at the club and Carmilla were still angry with him about the Salamanders. I wasn’t, I loved my little Cinder and understood that Grundle wasn’t trying to harm us. Hell, without Cinder we’d still be chained up in that dungeon.

As for Melody’s insistence, my teacher seemed hesitant, but she took one look at the determined look on my fiancée’s face and gave a reluctant nod. “I understand, you have the heart of a warrior, Melody. Stay on guard, girls, and let’s go find your family.”