When his fingers touched the wand, the warmth of his fingertips melted the thin frost coating its surface into a fine layer of droplets. The droplets slid a short way down the wand under the pressure of his grip, gathered into a single drop at the tip, and fell to the ground.
Douglas did not speak until he had watched him grip his wand properly.
His voice was not loud, but it was clear enough for every living person on the docks to hear.
"Tsk, tsk, tsk... Clumsy coordination, panicked responses, and careless negligence. You've truly disgraced the Ministry of Magic. As Aurors, do you still need an outsider like me to remind you how to deal with high-risk targets, Captain?"
He turned and tilted his chin toward his own men. The six members of the Enforcement Squad moved in unison, cutting in from the flanks. Their wands were raised at identical angles, and the Cutting Charms they fired spread out in a fan, precisely covering every fallen body on the docks.
Someone twitched the instant the Cutting Charms struck, then went still. Someone else received a second spell where the first had missed, the two beams overlapping as they hit a figure slowly rolling over. In less than twenty seconds, every prisoner on the dock who still showed signs of life had stopped moving.
Then the Enforcement Squad members began clearing the scene in pairs.
One member used a silver disc like the one Morgan had carried earlier, equipped with life-detection capabilities, to scan the "corpses" on the ground for prisoners hiding among them by feigning death. The other cast layered defensive spells around them to ensure their safety, then repeatedly cast Impedimenta and Petrificus Totalus on the "corpses" to prevent any sudden incidents.
Sure enough, they caught two