not be enough to protect him.
But then I remembered from Damiel’s interrogation of him twenty years ago that Psychic’s Spell was one of Major Grant’s magical strengths. Chances were decent that he’d be able to remain standing.
“Very well, Major,” I agreed, handing him the knife.
He pricked his finger and dripped a drop of his blood onto each pearl.
“Major Grant and I are going in,” I told everyone else. “Stand back. If you get knocked out, you won’t be there when we need you to come charging in.”
“And when should we come charging in?” a soldier asked me.
“When Major Grant starts singing the Hymn of the Gods.”
A few soldiers chuckled.
I popped the pearls off the necklace. I gave half of them to Major Grant and kept the other half for myself.
“Let’s go,” I said to him.
We rushed in. As soon as we cleared the smoky curtain, we began tossing the pearls at every masked figure we saw. Quickly, before they could shoot. A psychic blast exploded every time one of our pearls scored a hit. I’d designed the spell to affect only living things, so the walls didn’t shake or break. The pearls only knocked out the intruders.
The path before us now clear, I glanced over at Major Grant. He was still standing. Good.
I felt a numb tingle at the very tips of my fingers, like my hands were waking up after falling asleep. That was the aftershock of the explosions. I would have to improve the spell so that didn’t happen next time.
I waved my hand, casting a magic breeze to clear the smoke from the corridor. I could see our soldiers now. The intruders in the corridor all lay unconscious on the floor. There were none awake to recast the fog cover—or shoot at us.
Major Grant looked up from the sleeping soldiers he’d unmasked. “I don’t recognize any of them.”
Which meant we still didn’t know who or what we were dealing with.
“Secure our new prisoners,” Major Grant ordered two soldiers.
Then the rest of us continued down the corridor. At the end, there was a big hole where a door should have been. It seemed the intruders had gotten through the ward protecting the vault.
“Is there another way in or out of here?” I asked Major Grant.
“There’s no door,” he replied. “From the looks of what’s left of our vault entrance, however, the intruders have no problem making their own doors.”
“But that will take time.” I waved at two of the Legion soldiers. “Guard the entrance to the vault.”
The rest of us moved inside.
The room beyond the opening didn’t look like a vault. There was nothing shiny. There were no gemstones or gold. The treasures in here were rather unconventional. Potions filled the glass cabinets. Weapons hung on the walls. Notebooks, probably filled with formulas and schematics, were stuffed into the bookshelves. And there were gadgets and technological doodads everywhere.
The place looked like a lab, not a treasure vault. And it seemed like these things weren’t simply being stored here; some of them must have been developed here too. It reminded me of my lab back at Storm Castle, where I created similar things. Things like the pearls I’d just used to take out the intruders in the corridor.
Masked bandits in black saw us and opened fire. We took cover. Potion vials shattered.
“Are there backups of everything in this lab?” I asked Major Grant.
“Not all, but most. The notebooks are transcribed by hand to other notebooks. There are no digital copies. Some of the formulas and schematics would be too dangerous in enemy hands. And computer defenses are too easy to breach.”
I arched my brows. “As opposed to physical defenses?”
“There has never been a breach until today. General Dragonsire designed the prison’s defense system himself.”
And Damiel was of the opinion that a good defense was incomplete without a copious helping of overkill.
I looked across the room at the intruders. There were eight of them in all, hidden behind the shelves, shooting at us from between the books. They’d lined themselves up so perfectly. Really, they were just asking for it.
I hit the bookshelf with a telekinetic blast. It tipped over and fell on top of them, trapping them beneath its weight. I did the same to two other groups of intruders who were shooting at us.
The shooting stopped.
“Well, that’s that,” I said with satisfaction.
Major Grant’s soldiers gawked at me. Apparently, none of them had ever before watched an angel drop a bookshelf on a squad of enemy intruders. Well, at