She let out a breath. “Bespelling the surveillance cameras,” she murmured, and relayed that to the elves mind to mind so they’d pass the word.
Now those at security monitors would see only the trees, the rain, the swampy ground.
“Take down the alarms.”
She and other witches worked the spell, painstakingly, while the storm blew.
When the all clear ran through the ranks, she ignored the pang, gave the order. “Archers, go.”
The guard towers had to be taken out, swift and silent. She felt Tonia, lead archer, friend, blood of her blood, nock an arrow, release.
With eyes gray and focused, she watched arrows strike, men fall, in the towers on the four corners of the prison walls.
Moving in, she took the electronic gates, using power to disarm. At her signals, troops flowed through the opening, elves scaled the walls and fences, shifters leaped, tooth and claw, faeries glided with a whisper of wings.
Timing, she thought as she spoke to the elf commander Flynn, to Tonia in her mind. They would breach the three doors simultaneously, and each team leader would focus their troops on priorities. Destroy communications, eliminate security, take the armory, secure the lab. Above all, shield all prisoners.
After one last glance at her father, seeing the courage and determination in the face she trusted completely, she gave the order.
Drawing her sword, she blew the locks on the main doors, charged in, blew the secondary doors open.
Part of her mind overlaid the now with the prison on Hatteras, the visions she’d stirred there at fourteen. So much the same.
But here, soldiers lived, reached for weapons. Even as gunfire rang out, she struck, enflaming sidearms that left hands blistered and men screaming with pain. She struck out with sword, swung out with shield to cut through the enemy.
Fighting through, she heard the shouts, moans, pleading from behind the steel doors, and felt the fear, the terrible hope, the pain and confusion of those locked in.
Drenched in it, she cut down a soldier as he rushed to his comm, sliced her sword across the radio, sent a bolt of shock through the entire system.
Sparks showered, monitors blanked to black.
Boots clanged on metal stairs, and death, more death, met them as arrows sliced through the air. Fallon took a bullet on her shield, sent it flying back and into the shooter as she pivoted to the iron door someone inside the prison had managed to secure.
She blasted it open, taking out two on the other side and, leaping over the smoking twists of metal, cleaved her sword through a third before she rushed toward the stairs leading down.
War cries followed her. Her troops would spread out, swarm through—barracks, offices, mess hall, galley, infirmary.
But she and those with her surged toward the lab and its chamber of horrors. There, another iron door. She started to punch her power through, stopped a breath away from the blast as she sensed something more, something dark.
Magicks, black and deadly.
She held up a hand to halt her team. Forcing patience, she searched, tall in elf-made boots and leather vest, black hair short, eyes blurred with power.
“Stand back,” she ordered, and shouldered her shield, sheathed her sword to hold her hands to the door, the locks, the deep frame, the thick metal.
“Booby-trapped,” she murmured. “We push in, it blows out. Stand clear.”
“Fallon.”
“Stand clear,” she told her father. “I could unwind it, but that would take too long.” She swung her shield up again, and her sword. “In three, two—”
She shoved her power, light against dark.
The doors erupted, spewing fire, raining out jagged, flaming metals. Shrapnel thudded on her shield, whizzed by to impale the wall behind her. Into the torrent she leaped.
She saw the man, naked, eyes glazed, face blank, shackled to an exam table. Another in a lab coat flung himself back, sprang on his hands, then scaled the back wall in a blur of speed.
She flung power at the ceiling, brought the one in the lab coat down in a heap as Simon dodged the scalpel swipe by a third before taking him out with a short-armed jab.
“Search for others,” Fallon ordered. “Confiscate all records. Two to secure this section, and the rest move out, clear the rest of the level.”
She approached the man on the table. “Can you speak?”
She heard his mind, the struggle to form words.
They tortured me. I can’t move. Help me. Will you help me?