"In the Magix Daily Late News tonight, no further updates on the De L'Or Kidnapping Case out of Isis. It began almost a week ago when Amethyst and Jasper De L'Or were snatched on their way home from friends' birthday parties last week Saturday evening. It was a daring attack, which left their driver Pietro Vidal seriously injured and..."
Roxy closed off the webpage that she was watching the news report on her laptop as she heard Rainer come in.
"You were watching the news coverage again, huh?" Rainer asked dryly.
"Yeah." Roxy got up from her chair and stretched. "I wanted to see if there was an update. Poor kids. Only thirteen and nine. And to be snatched away from home like that. Who knows where they could be now?!"
"Exactly. Momma says that Garnet- their dad and Topaz- their mom- are going completely out of their minds about it. I can't really blame them..." Rainer sat down on her bed and looked down at her feet, swinging them idly.
"They'll be found soon. I'm sure they will." Roxy reassured her.
"I sure hope so. They were like cool little cousins to Nephele and I..." Rainer flopped back into her bed and pulled up the sheets around herself.
Roxy did the same after she checked on Artu and found that he was indeed asleep. Hedwig, who Harry had asked her to look after for the duration of his field assignment was out somewhere flying, leaving her perch empty.
"Harry, I wonder how you're doing right now too. Knowing you, that field exercise of yours is never going to be an ordinary one..." she thought as she let her thoughts wander away.
"How exactly do you plan on finding these people and getting that girl out of there?" Aki asked softly as they left the cave. "Especially since you can't use magic here?"
"Jasper was able to give us a lot of information to go on. I mean for a kidnapped child that would obviously have been under a lot of stress..." Harry noted. "I think we're capable of doing something with that information. I mean, what kind of Red Fountain students would we be if we couldn't?"
"Exactly. We're students. What the hell could we do against them?" Aki retorted.
Harry raised an eyebrow.
"We fought in Hogsmeade against several swarms of creatures, most of which we'd never encountered before, but weren't too uncomfortable fighting, for one." Harry shrugged.
"Yeah, well, those were just mindless monsters!" Aki pointed out.
"Mindless monsters controlled by the Trix." Harry also pointed out. "Added to the fact that we had to fight them and defend the townspeople..."
"These people, these kidnappers had to be extremely well trained and skilled to have pulled off a kidnapping like that and not even have been identified as the suspects yet. I know that the De L'Or children are just that. Children, who couldn't fight back. But still... Plus there's the minor fact that these people have even more weapons than we do..."
"The way I see it..." Harry paused for a moment. "...is that Amethyst and Jasper De L'Or are children who need our help and that we're the only ones who can help them right now. Are we supposed to just sit by and do nothing?"
"Of course not. I'm just sharing some of my concerns is all..." Aki shrugged.
"Right..." Harry nodded.
They walked in silence for several moments until they came upon a fork in the trail leading further up into the mountains.
"Which side do we go up now?" Harry wondered.
"Jasper mentioned that the path he remembers running down for dear life had a large grove of trees intertwined above it about halfway up. But of course, we can't see that from here..." Aki looked around.
"Maybe we need to use the night vision goggles that we packed..." Harry rummaged into his backpack, retrieved a pair of goggles and replaced his ordinary glasses with them.
Immediately, the night scenery around him became clearer; several times sharper, as if it had been thrown into high definition.
He could see the leaves of trees swaying in the wind and spotted a dark-coloured owl flying out into a distance with something (likely, a rat) clutched in its claws.
"Sweet Merlin, these glasses are amazing..." he thought.
"These things are pretty damn cool..." Aki murmured as he adjusted his.
"They are indeed..." Harry agreed. "Now, back to tracing Jasper's escape route..." he glanced down the two paths again.
"Harry," Aki's voice called from the path on his left. "Come look at this..."
Harry jogged over to him and knelt down to see what Aki was showing him.
Some scraps of fabric were hooked onto a thorny bush with dots of blood on them.
Harry picked a piece of the fabric off the bush gently and examined it.
"It's the same kind of fabric from the shirt Jasper was wearing when Lucas and I found him earlier today..." Harry realised.
"That's what I was thinking." Aki nodded, his expression becoming more serious. "I think we're on the correct track here..."
"If we're getting closer to where the kidnappers are holed up, we need to go into stealth mode. We can't take any chances right now." Harry rummaged into his bag and pulled out his Invisibility Cloak, draping it carefully around himself.
"Works fine and still fits..." Harry briefly smiled to himself. "I haven't had cause to use it for such a long time..."
"I'm surprised that whatever that thing is works. Even pre-charmed objects can malfunction out here, I've been told..." Aki looked at the spot where he last knew Harry to be.
"I don't know about that. I don't really care right now either. It's the least of my concerns..." Harry's voice came from somewhere in the darkness.
"Right, right. More important things to deal with right now." Aki nodded. "Let's keep on moving then..."
As they walked (or rather, Harry walked and Aki moved quietly through the trees above him), Harry began to hear faint voices in the distance ahead.
Moving even slower and quieter, he moved behind a large tree trunk as footsteps approached.
"The boy's been gone for several hours. Let's face facts here. He's escaped." a gruff male voice spoke.
A female's voice scoffed. "A nine year old child? Escape from us in this environment? Oh please. We will find the brat, unless he's been devoured by some kind of monster before now. I hear that interesting creatures roam these parts, especially at night..."
Harry felt his stomach clench up at the female's callous tone.
"At least we've still got the girl." The man said. "How much do you think we could get for her?"
"A couple million for sure, at the very least. But if we don't find that boy, the ransom deal will go completely south and we might not get anything at all." the woman answered.
"Damn those brats for trying to escape. Making this harder for both them and us..." the man muttered.
"Well, Amethyst certainly isn't going anywhere again. Not the way we've got her chained up. We made sure of that." the woman chuckled. "And even if this whole ransom thing does go south, because of her stupid brat of a brother, we can still make money off of her anyway. She could be sold. She's a pretty young witch of high birth... Amethyst De L'Or could... would fetch premium price on the black market."
The man chuckled. "Oh yes. There are many who would pay highly. Pay lots of money for a girl like that. I really don't care what happens to her after this. As long as we get paid, it's fine."
Harry had to bite back an angry growl.
"Sell... Sell?! They're talking about her... about Amethyst... Like she's a random piece of property and not a thirteen year old child! As if she's not an actual person with feelings!" he thought angrily.
A brief flashback of his time with the Dursleys passed through his mind. How they disdained him. Regarded him as a lesser being. Didn't care what happened to him. The only thing he was good for in their eyes was to be their domestic servant... or rather, their domestic slave...
The Dursleys were dead and gone. They had been dead and gone for almost a year. That was a lifetime ago. The past was in the past and it should stay there.
He cleared his mind and focused on the situation at hand.
It was several minutes before the man and woman had gone and even more until the sounds of their footsteps and voices faded away.
Harry dropped the hood of his cloak and took a deep breath to calm himself.
Seconds later, Aki jumped out of a tree and landed right next to him, not startling Harry in the slightest.
"Those people are scumbags." Aki said almost casually, though Harry was certain that if he could see his eyes behind those night vision goggles he was donning, the other teen's eyes would be raging with the fires of hell.
He felt the same way about them.
"Yeah, Aki. Those... people are scumbags. I could think of a whole host of more unpleasant names to call them, but..." Harry shrugged.
"Let's go. We're almost there." Aki said.
"Right. But we've got to be more careful, since we're apparently so close..." Harry reminded him.
Harry threw up the hood of his Invisibility Cloak and felt his hands clutch around his swords, strapped to his sides, as Aki took to the trees once again.
As the pair of Red Fountain students moved towards their destination, the mountain began to level out into a plateau with a range of caves.
They heard more voices talking as they moved further in.
"What are we gonna do with this brat now?" A male voice spoke.
"We wait until the other two get back. Then we decide what to do." Another male voice came from the largest cave, which was set a little to Harry's right, not quite at the tip of the naturally made, cave framed cul-de-sack he found himself in.
Moving quickly, yet lightly on his feet, he took a peek inside the cave, readjusting the hood of his Invisibility Cloak as it had slipped off slightly.
He had to stop himself from lunging into the cave and making mincemeat of the two men, both tall- but one was lean and one was bulked up by muscles, looking like a classical bodybuilder who had just won first prize at a fitness contest.
The girl Amethyst was contained in a metal cage near the back of the cave. She'd been restrained around her wrists by the magic suppressor cuffs, her arms and ankles had been wrapped around with chains and those attached to the bars of the cage, as well as a metal collar around her neck, also attached to the bars of the cage by a length of chain.
Her long hair, a lighter shade of blue than her brother's, which was formerly straight, but now completely messed up, was spread across the floor of the cage as she huddled on the floor of it and a gag covered her mouth.
"She's definitely not going anywhere chained up like that..." Harry thought grimly.
Then he noticed the quiet tears sliding down her face, barely visible, even with the night vision goggles on and the roaring campfire that the other two kidnappers had lit.
"How dare they prey on somebody that they are well aware cannot fight back!" he thought, steaming.
He saw Aki quietly make his way to the other side of the cave entrance and sneak a peek.
Judging by the look on Aki's normally happy, jovial face, he too had seen what Harry had seen.
Harry slid off the hood of his Cloak and mouthed: "We have to come back with Darian and Lucas. Do you see these monsters' weapons?" Harry inclined his head towards the inside of the cave, where several types of weaponry were strapped across the walls. "We can't do this on our own!"
Aki nodded and leapt up into a nearby tree.
Harry slipped on the hood of his Invisibility Cloak and moved off quietly.
"Don't worry, Amethyst. You don't know it yet, but rescue is coming. For you and your younger brother..." He thought as he made his way down the mountain.
He promised it.