"Well, that didn't go exactly as planned."

Will leaned back against the seats of the carriage, Jem casting furtive, concerned glances over towards the opposite seat, where Ciel leaned against the carriage door, wincing as his bruised temple struck the glass each time the vehicle thudded over a hole in the road. He sat up, abandoning the comfort of leaning against the cool window when Sebastian guided them over a long stretch of cobblestones.

"Where are we going?" Ciel asked, twitching back the velvet curtain on the window against which he had been lounging.

"The Unseelie Court." Jem said grimly, with a suppressed shudder of horror at the prospect.

"Is that not where we just went?"

"That was the Seelie Court, this is the Unseelie Court." Will explained.

"The difference being what?" Ciel prompted.

"The Seelie Court has some level of rationale and sense about them. The Unseelie Court is the opposite; they're prone to random attacks."

"What, and this was not a random attack?" Ciel demanded, gesturing to his bruised face and Will's torn sleeve, revealing skin beneath that had been slashed with scratches in their earlier fight with the Fey. "I thought that the Seelie were horrible, and now you're telling me they have some counterpart who is even worse?"

"Oh, indefinitely worse." Will nodded. "A Seelie knight might let you explain yourself; an Unseelie knight would slit your throat before you had even opened your mouth."

"Seelie means 'blessed'." Jem explained.

"And Unseelie," Will finished. "Means 'unholy'."

"Here we are."

The four of them stood around what appeared, to Ciel at least, to be an overgrown swamp in the grimy outskirts of London. He couldn't help thinking that the Seelie Court entrance had been both more inviting and more aesthetically pleasing. Not to mention far less offensive to the senses. As if to prove this point, Jem leant his cane forward and plunged it into the lake's murky depths. When he pulled it back, it was liberally coated in mud and was being clung to by a tiny, sharp-toothed pixie, who was gnawing on Jem's cane like a termite and cackling all the while in high-pitched glee. The laughter near shattered their eardrums, and Jem – closest to the source – was wincing with each new peal. He shook his cane firmly and nudged the creature off with the toe of his boot. The creature landed back in the mire with a desolate splosh. It screeched angrily, spat a spray of dirty water at Jem, - who stepped back swiftly to avoid the plume – and disappeared under the surface in indignation.

"How unpleasant." Sebastian commented. "It seems they too know not how to treat guests. This is quite inhospitable."

Jem, who had been attempting to clean off his cane on the surrounding swamp weeds, sighed.

"Well, I suppose we had better get this over with. Let's go in."

"How do we do that exactly?" Ciel asked.

"We jump." Will answered bracingly, and launched himself off the bank of the swamp and into the murky depths.

Upon being submerged into the watery deepness of the Unseelie Court entrance, a few things struck Will: firstly, how wet it was; secondly, how slimy it was; thirdly, that there was a creature with extremely sharp, needle-like fangs biting his leg. Holding his breath, he swatted the thing away, extracting its mouth from his ankle and flinging it as far as he could. He saw the arch of reeds up ahead, forming an entrance to the Unseelie Court, stopped briefly to untangle his arm from a vine that had been enchanted to grab and cling, tightening like a boa constrictor, then heaved himself through the archway. He gasped air into his burning lungs, pulling Jem up beside him onto solid – or at least more solid – ground. Ciel looked miserable, as did Jem. In fact, Jem looked as terrible as Will felt. Worse, perhaps. It was freezing down in the Unseelie Court, and their wet clothes paired with Jem's constitution meant he was extremely, miserably, indescribably cold. Will, unsure if it would make a jot of difference, removed his coat, wrung it out, and handed it to Jem. Jem smiled, shrugging the overcoat on gratefully and Will turned to Ciel and Sebastian.

"Same rules apply. You saw before how volatile Fey can be. Just tread carefully."

"Oh, believe me, I'm trying." Ciel muttered, as his shoes began to sink into the boggy ground.

Will was about to reply when someone – something – grabbed his arms and forced them behind his back. He turned to try and see who his captor was, but they held him fast, keeping him from moving.

"Jem!" he called frantically as the others were seized, then a huge hand went over his entire face, muffling his mouth and obscuring his vision in one fell swoop, and he was dragged into the unknown, kicking out and struggling for all his worth – to no avail.

Will was hunched in such darkness he assumed he had been blindfolded, and did not attempt to press the matter after opening his eyes. He felt around him, reaching his arm around experimentally, and his hand struck against something hard that thudded like metal. Clumsily, he tried to feel for it. His fingers brushed it, then closed around it curiously. A bar? It was cold and hard, like iron, and felt rough on his skin, like it was flaking with rust.

"Uncover them." A mysterious voice hissed, their tone raspy and as offensive to Will's ears as nails on a blackboard. He winced, then recoiled back as something shuffled overhead.

The surrounding darkness lifted as a cloak of heavy, dark material was pulled from above him. In the new light, he took in his surroundings. His knees were drawn up to his chest and below him was a circle of iron. The floor beneath him. However, rising up around him in a dome were metal bars. He was in what appeared to be a birdcage, hanging from a high cave ceiling by a chain that creaked, threatening to plummet him to the rock floor far, far below. Metre upon metre below him were forty or so dwellers of the Unseelie Court – huge Lubbers, dark faeries and unsettling Bogles, to name but a few. And around him, in identical wavering cages suspended in midair, were Sebastian, Ciel, and Jem.

"Jem!" Will exclaimed, leaning forward towards his encaged parabatai. Will's own metal prison swung dangerously, and he clutched the bars on either side, steadying it into stillness. He did not particularly want to die after plunging to his death from a great height, taken hostage in a cage by dark Fey. That was not quite the noble warrior's death he had envisioned.

"Jem! Are you alright?" Will called desperately, and the Fey below laughed cruelly. Concern and love and friendship were not words in their personal vocabularies.

"I'm alright, Will." Jem told him. "Now be quiet. Let's just find out what they want from us."

"At least one of you has some sense." A man's voice said, and Will leaned gingerly to one side to see who was addressing him. From this height, he could see fairly little, though the speaker appeared to be an ashen-haired man wearing an enormous crown of bracken and thistles. "You are being addressed by the King of the Unseelie Court." The man said, and Will realised it was the same voice that had instructed the removal of the coverings around their cages. "Bow down."

"We would, of course." Will said. "But we happen to be in a rather compromising situation at present. If you were to free us, however..."

"A good attempt, Nephilim scum, but the answer is no. You will remain there, like our little chandeliers, until we decide otherwise. You will act as a warning to other puny shadowhunters who dare to cross us. Sort of like severed heads, spiked on London Bridge; a message to Angel-mundane monstrosities like you."

"Sebastian," Ciel sighed. "How long are you planning to play this idiotic little game?"

"Say the words, my lord, and I will oblige."

"Get us out of here, Sebastian, and kill them all."

"Yes, my lord."

The room was plunged suddenly back into utter blackness and Will heard frenzied cries from below, which transformed rapidly into screams of agony prefixed by the loud creak of metal. Will's heart sped up. What on earth was that? And what did Ciel's ominous order have to do with it? All that lit the darkness were a pair of crimson, slit-pupilled eyes that made the breath in Will's throat catch. Sebastian. But...how?

Instantaneously, the room fell silent and the light returned to the room. Will's eyes flew to Sebastian's cage, the bars of which were bent out of shape to allow for someone to escape, with Sebastian nowhere to be seen. But these were made of thick, hard iron. How? In answer, Sebastian pushed gently up off the ground, leapt the stretch of air, and grabbed onto Ciel's cage by the base, warping the bars to release his master from his imprisonment. It swung dangerously and Ciel slid down and through the hole in the bars, reaching for a bar to keep him up. But his fingers slipped and he began to fall.

"Ciel!" Will cried as Ciel plummeted, but Sebastian merely reached a hand out with lightning reflexes and caught the wrist of his master, who hung there, looking bored.

"Be careful." He snapped.

"My apologies, master." Sebastian replied, and lowered Ciel to the cave floor delicately, where Ciel retrieved his cane from the hand of the dead Unseelie King. The King's eyes were rolled back and his hand surrendered the cane easily. The cave floor was in chaos, carpeted in bodies, shrouded in blood. It was time, Ciel thought, that they left.

When Sebastian had retrieved both Will and Jem, much to their significant concern, and Jem had collected his own cane, they were all very keen to go. If they ever saw the Unseelie Court again, Jem thought, it would be too soon.

They all dived back into the lake, swimming and kicking their way up through the dark, disgusting water to the surface. Jem's body protested with every stroke, the cold freezing his bones to brittle icicles that could shatter at any second, and the events of the evening weighing him down and making it hard to keep moving upwards. He dragged himself up onto the bank beside Will and Sebastian. The front of his shirt was slick with mud and grass stains, the wetness making him colder still. His chest protested at the elemental assault, making him wheeze in retaliation. Will heaved him to his feet when, behind him, there was a cry.

"Jem!"

He spun and saw Ciel be yanked under the surface by a wart-covered, moss-hued hand. His arm flung out and grabbed the edge of the lake. Jem ran forward.

"Ciel!" he cried, catching hold of Ciel's outstretched hand, heaving him out onto the bank beside him in a heap on the boggy, mudded ground.

"What was that?" Ciel gasped, coughing, scrambling to his feet, backing away from the edge and anxiously wiping slimy tendrils of vine from his jacket.

"A Boggart." Will said. "They're like trolls, but they don't usually live in water. They're here as guard monsters, I would wager. They're popular in Scottish mundane fairy stories."

"Of course they usually try to steal away small children, but my master is very petite." Sebastian said, and Ciel glared a wicked look. "May I suggest we retire for the night and survey the mundane substance businesses tomorrow evening?"

"Yes, I think that would be best." Will said, and took Jem's arm, ushering him to the carriage, Jem faintly protesting. Will settled his friend into a seat by himself, pulling the blanket from the chest under the seat. Jem thanked him, teeth chattering, and peeled off the two saturated coats he was wearing. He pulled the blanket tightly around himself with shaking hands and curled into the corner of the seat. Ciel sat beside Will, leaning against the carriage door, half-asleep with his head resting against the window. Will himself watched the streets fall away to roads he knew, before his eyelids grew heavy and he sat himself down beside Jem, pulling off his mud-caked boots.

"Will?" Jem mumbled faintly, but Will didn't reply.

The boy rested his head against his parabatai's drawn up knees, his feet against the carriage door, tucked up beside his friend on the seat. Only Sebastian remained awake, guiding the carriage away from faeries and danger and into the open arms of the Institute gates, where Charlotte waited worriedly on the Institute steps.