Fire Touched

10

“It’s not quite the biggest crane in the world,” said the Lampson guy to the police officer. He’d introduced himself as Marley.

The Pasco police officer, whom I’d seen before but didn’t know personally, was Ed Thorson. He was the only police officer left on the scene because I’d asked him to get rid of as many people as he could. No one is proud like a dominant werewolf in front of an audience. If there were too many people here, we might end up with him jumping, even if he didn’t intend to do it in the first place.

Above us, nearly forty stories up, on the top of the Transi-Lift LTL-3000, was one of our werewolves. I couldn’t see him, I’m not sure I could have seen him even in the daylight without binoculars, but he’d been seen climbing up it at the end of his shift, and everyone was very sure that he hadn’t climbed back down—or jumped.

Three days had passed since we’d confronted the fae in the hotel meeting room—and we hadn’t heard anything from them. We’d had to step down our security because we just didn’t have enough people to stay at high alert for very long.

Though Adam made sure that there were at least two werewolves at our house at any given time, mostly everyone’s lives had returned to normal. Even Aiden’s setting something on fire when he slept felt normal—one of Adam’s techie guys was working on rewiring some smoke alarms so that instead of shrieking, they just buzzed a little.

Back to normal meant when Adam got called to work after dinner, he left me in charge. So when the police called to tell me that one of our wolves was sitting on the top of the big Lampson crane and they were worried about him jumping, I was the one who got to go fix it. If Darryl, Warren, or George had been our guard wolves, I’d have sent one of them because I’d exchanged about four words with Sherwood Post. “Yes, ma’am” and “no, ma’am” only counted as four words, even if they’d been said every time I’d tried to strike up a conversation with him. But as luck would have it, Ben and Paul were the watch wolves on duty, neither of whom I could trust not to drive a suicidal werewolf right off the edge—both metaphorically and literally speaking. Sherwood Post had come to us a month ago from the Marrok. He was too quiet, too polite, and missing his left leg. Werewolves heal. They heal broken things, they heal crushed things, and they heal amputated things. But apparently not if witches were involved.

About four or five years ago, there had been a nasty coven of witches in Seattle. Their leader had been killed by the Emerald City Pack. When the pack went to clean out the home of the leader, to make sure that there were no nasty magical surprises left behind, they had found, among other things, an emaciated werewolf in a cage. He was missing his leg.

He hadn’t remembered who he was or where he came from—and neither did any of the packs. He also didn’t remember what had happened to his leg. As best anyone could figure out, he’d been brought over from Europe and traded around among various black witches for years, if not decades.

Bran took him home, eventually coaxing him back into human shape. When he couldn’t do anything that could make Sherwood’s leg regrow—yes, that’s as bad as it sounds—he sent Sherwood to doctors who provided a prosthetic for the human form. The wolf just ran on three legs.

Sherwood took his name from two books that happened to be lying on Bran’s desk when Bran told him to pick a name. That Bran would read Sherwood Anderson was not surprising. I wasn’t sure if I was more amused or horrified that Bran had been reading Emily Post.

According to Bran, Sherwood had approached him in January and asked for a transfer to somewhere with a shorter, more congenial winter than Montana. Most places have more congenial winters than Montana, so Bran had a lot of places he could have sent Sherwood, but he sent him to us.

When the call came in about Sherwood and the crane, I hadn’t been able to get in touch with Adam other than to leave him a voice message. His office wasn’t answering, either, which meant whatever he was involved in was some security issue with the government contracts he held. I couldn’t feel anything through the pack bonds that suggested Sherwood was about to kill himself, but Bran hadn’t been able to tell when my foster father had gone out to commit suicide, either. Sherwood felt just as he always did to me—quiet.

I squinted, trying to see him, but he was too far up, and it was too dark.

I might not have known Officer Thorson, but I liked him. When I explained that all the extra people who’d been there when I arrived were problematical, he’d listened gravely. Then, without arguing, he’d dispersed everyone until there were just two guys from Lampson, Officer Thorson, and me. Marley continued to talk to the officer about his crane with the enthusiasm of a golf addict describing his new putter. “So not the biggest—that mark keeps moving. But it is the largest twin-crawler crane in the world, and the biggest crane we’ve ever built. So far, anyway.”

I hadn’t quite worked out if Marley was the night manager who’d summoned the police or if he was security, the CEO of the company, or someone in between. He wore scruffy jeans, a Western-style button-up shirt, and needed a shave. He also smelled like beer, but I think most of that was coming off his boots, so maybe he’d come over from a bar or party. I did wish he’d shut up about how big the stupid crane was because I was pretty sure I was going to have to climb it and see if I could talk Sherwood down.

I’d seen the crane before; you can’t help but see it when you drive across the suspension bridge—which we had not been able to do tonight. There were no estimates about when that bridge would go back in use. They had to figure out how badly it had been damaged, first. I didn’t know why I felt guilty about that—I didn’t turn loose a troll on the city. Still, even without being on the bridge, you could see the crane for a long way.

Lampson’s Pasco yard was located in a warehouse district near the railroad. The whole area still showed signs of the army depot it had once been with long wooden warehouses laid out in orderly patterns. It was haunted. If I looked—and I tried not to—I could see a few ghosts flickering around. There was one, dressed in a World War II army uniform, who watched me. I was pretty sure he was one of the rare self-aware ghosts. If I stared at ghosts for very long, even just the repeaters, they tended to start following me around.

This wasn’t the first time I’d come out here—there were a couple of junkyards not too far away. But I’d never seen the crane up close and personal before, and it was a lot bigger than it looked from the bridge.

“So Hitachi commissioned it to build nuclear power plants,” Marley was saying expansively. “Then along came that tsunami that hit the Fukushima Daiichi plant and, well, no one is building nuclear power plants in Japan now, are they? So here it sits.”

The big crane was part of the Pasco skyline, which admittedly was not much of a skyline compared to Seattle or Spokane. In the daylight, the crane part of it was bright orange with sections of white, and the crawler part—this thing moved with two tanklike treads that were taller than I was, each with its own control booth—was bright Lampson blue. Obviously, no one with a hint of estrogen in their veins had designed the color scheme.

In the dark, though, it rose above us, black against the lighter sky. We were standing right next to one of the treads, just beneath the crawler that allowed the humongous structure to move. Above the crawler, the crane rose like the orange, Leaning Eiffel Tower of Pasco. If I squinted and used my imagination, I could, just barely, see that someone was sitting on the end of the boom head—the highest point of the crane.

“We could start it up if you want,” said Marley, following my gaze. “But we waited until you came out because if we start moving it around, he could fall. I don’t know how you feel about your people, but we like ours to survive their tenure with us.” He squinted up. “So this guy’s tenure is going to end as soon as we get him down.”

The nameless guy standing next to him, the only one of the four of us standing there to whom I hadn’t been introduced, murmured, “Marley, that’s Sherwood Post. He speaks Russian and English without an accent, in either language, I’m told. That means when he’s on shift, everyone can communicate with everyone else. Let me say it again: everybody knows what they are supposed to be doing. And his shift mates say he can move a three-hundred-pound bar of steel all by himself.”

Marley made a growly sound. “So maybe we give him a second chance. But I hate to encourage this behavior. What if he jumps?”

“Then you probably don’t have to worry about firing him,” I said.

“What I don’t get,” said Officer Thorson, looking up to the top of the crane and saying it once more with feeling, “what I don’t get is how you let him get up there in the first place.”

“One of my guys saw him start to climb up,” the other Lampson guy answered. “He went running for help, and by the time they got back, he—Post, I mean—was most of the way up. He didn’t respond when they yelled, but truthfully, it is windy up there. I don’t know if he could have heard them.” He frowned, then shook his head. “But he sure as hell should have noticed all the police and the fire trucks with their sirens and lights.”

Yep. It had been a real circus when I got here.

“How much can you drop that arm down?” Thorson asked.

“All the way to the ground,” Marley said. “We’d have already done it, but it doesn’t happen instantaneously, and if he wanted to jump off and kill himself, he’d have plenty of time to do it. Seemed to me that we’d be putting pressure on him to do that very thing.”

“How high is that?” Thorson asked.

Marley smiled like a proud father. “She’s 560 feet tall and she can lift six million pounds. Six million.” He shook his head. “I don’t know how he managed to climb all the way up there with one leg—that boom isn’t exactly equipped with a ladder.”

“He’s a werewolf,” I groused. “They are hardwired to do dumb stuff.” Maybe I wasn’t being fair to Sherwood, whom I didn’t know well, but, since it looked like I was going to have to follow him up there, I was entitled to be judgmental. I bent down to make sure my shoes were tied. I didn’t want to have to tie them while 560 feet in the air, though I supposed since the boom wasn’t at a ninety-degree angle, more like a sixty-five, it wouldn’t really be that high. Probably only like 400 or something. My long-ago unlamented geometry class was too far in the past to be of much help. I straightened up and started for the crane.

“What are you doing?” Marley asked in the tone of someone used to getting answers. “Stop.” But I didn’t work for him.

“Someone’s got to talk him down, and he didn’t bring his cell phone,” I told him, and hopped the chain that blocked off the metal stairway on the side of the crawler. Once I started moving, I moved fast; I was up and on top of the two-story-tall crawler before they’d considered doing anything but talking. By then it was too late to stop me because they were human, and no one who was just human could catch me unless I wanted them to. I heard Marley swear, but it didn’t feel like he was emotionally involved—his voice had a frustrated sound rather than honest anger. He wasn’t coming after me.

The boom was built of scaffolding-like bars that crossed and crisscrossed the heavy outer beams that were the corner supports of the boom. Everything was size huge. There was a catwalk along the left edge of boom that ran all the way to the top. It would have been easy to use if the boom had been flat. As it was, I was forced to scale the thing, clinging to the top rail like Batman in the old sixties TV series.

I don’t have a problem with heights, generally speaking. But, I decided, clinging to my perch and fighting an attack of vertigo, when cars started to look like they belonged in a Matchbox set, that was too freaking high. No more looking down.

Jaw clenched and sweating, as soon as the dizziness subsided, I climbed and climbed some more. My shoulders and arms ached, but my hands took the worst of it. I wished I’d brought a pair of driving gloves. My palms grew blisters that burst. My fingers were sore from grabbing the rail.

“What do you think you’re doing?” said a man’s voice. He sounded pretty close, and it startled me.

I froze, then wrapped myself around the bar I was climbing on before I looked up. Just a car length from me, Sherwood sat on the last, highest rung of the boom, his leg and prosthetic both dangling off the side. He wasn’t holding on.

Reflexively, I looked down before I remembered how bad an idea it was. I put my forehead against the cool metal and swallowed until I knew I wasn’t going to throw up. I looked up at him again.

His words had been pretty aggressive, especially for a wolf addressing his Alpha’s mate, but the tone was soft and relaxed. I answered the tone, not the words.

“I’m climbing up after you,” I told him.

He turned around—balanced on his rump until he could get all the way around—so he could see me easily. I was going to take a wild guess that the height didn’t bother him at all.

Bastard.

“That’s dumb,” he said. “Where’s one of the werewolves? If they fall, they might be able to catch themselves. What’s Adam thinking to send you up here?”

I growled at him. “Adam is otherwise occupied. Next time you decide to kill yourself, wait until he’s home and can climb up here himself. If I have to do this again, I might just push you off myself.” It probably wasn’t what I should have said to someone sitting five hundred feet—more or less—in the air, but my hands hurt, and I had made it up here by concentrating on how mad I was at the stupid werewolf who made me do it. Also, I have a problem with suicide, and have ever since my foster father had left me alone at fourteen because he couldn’t bear to live without his wife. I couldn’t take my anger out at him, so I let Sherwood be the scapegoat.

He laughed.

“And yes, I agree with you,” I said. “Climbing up here is very, very dumb. I know why I did it. Why did you?”

He sighed and spun around again, making me cling more tightly to my bar. “I’m a useless freak,” he said, gesturing at his leg. “It’s hard to kill a werewolf, but I’m pretty sure that drop would do it.”

Me, too. But that wasn’t a productive thing to say, so I found something else. “Marley was going to fire you for climbing up here until the other Lampson guy told him who you were. Apparently you are too useful to them to fire.”

He snorted, and I had a thought. He’d been working here since the third day he’d come to the Tri-Cities.

“Just how many times have you climbed up here without getting caught?” I asked.

“All of them but one,” he said.

“You came here to get out from under Bran’s eye so you could kill yourself,” I said.

He didn’t say anything, which was a “yes” in my book.

I thought of the kind of courage it would take to climb all the way up here to kill yourself, decide not to, and climb all the way down nearly every day for the better part of the month. And the question that occurred to me then wasn’t “why?” but “why not?”

“What stopped you?” I asked his back.

He raised his head and looked up, gesturing to the night sky with one hand, waving with what I considered to be reckless abandon. “Look at that. Do you see the lights? And the sky? Beautiful. Up here? It feels like the huge tightness in my spine that contains all those things I’ve forgotten loosens up a little.” He tapped his forehead. “I can feel those things, curled up inside me, waiting like the sword of Damocles. And I think, maybe I should wait and see if I can find myself. Then I’ll have a better idea of what I have to lose.”

I made sure my grip was tight, then I looked—out, not down. And he was right. It was beautiful.

And the wind decided right then to blow hard enough to send a buzz through the rail I was holding on to. I felt the vibrations of it under my fingers and had to reassure myself that this crane had been sitting here for at least a couple of years and hadn’t fallen down yet. It was certainly designed to hold up more than the three or four hundred pounds that Sherwood and I represented between us. Surely.

And still, the metal vibrated.

“I see your point,” I said tightly. “But I think your hiding place has been found out. You think maybe we could talk with our feet on the ground? Fair warning, if I fall and break every bone in my body, Adam will never forgive you.”

He laughed again. “Okay,” he said. “Do you need any help getting down?”

About halfway to the ground, I stopped to rest. He was below me. When I’d told him I’d get down the same way I got up, he’d scrambled around me to get underneath where he could catch me if I fell. He hadn’t said it, but he hadn’t had to.

After a minute, I said, “You know what makes me crabby? I didn’t need to go up there, did I? If we’d waited for you, you’d have come down just like you always have.”

“Yes,” said Sherwood. Then he said, his voice a little dreamy, “Probably. But maybe I’d have come down another way.”

He started down again then, moving slower than he had to so that I didn’t hurry.

“You missed your chance,” I told him. “I think your days of climbing up here unseen are over.”

“Yes,” he said. “But there’s always the suspension bridge.”

“If I have to climb up the suspension bridge,” I told him. “I really will push you off.”

He must not have understood I was serious because he laughed again.

So neither of us got arrested for trespassing, though it was, I understand, a near thing. I got Sherwood into Adam’s SUV. The Vanagon’s radiator had developed a leak and I hadn’t found it yet, so Adam had taken a Hauptman Security SUV and left me his. I had to think a bit to get the lights on and the SUV in gear, but I remembered not to swerve to avoid the ghost of the guard who stepped into the road in front of us. But I couldn’t help but mutter, “Sorry, Sorry,” under my breath when the bumper went through him.

Sherwood looked at me and raised a brow in query.

“Ghosts,” I said. “I see dead people.”

“Do you?” he said.

I nodded.

“Sucks to be you,” he said.

“Beats climbing 560 feet up a crane trying to talk down an idiot who couldn’t avoid being seen.”

“True,” he said thoughtfully. “But doesn’t take away from my earlier observation that it sucks to be you.”

I had to drive back to the interstate and over the Blue Bridge to get home. It added fifteen or twenty minutes to the trip. Having the Cable Bridge down was going to get old really fast.

My phone rang through the stereo system, an unfamiliar number. It wasn’t my car, and my purse with my phone in it was tucked under my seat. And then Sherwood helpfully hit the ANSWER button on the stereo’s touch screen—I think he thought I was having trouble reaching it. Any number not in my contacts list I usually let leave a voice mail. It saved me from the guilt of hanging up on someone trying to sell me auto warranties on cars I didn’t own.

“Mercy,” I said.

“Stay away—”

“Pastor?” I said. “Pastor White. Is that you?”

He cried out, and the connection was reset.

I turned on my turn signal, hit the gas, and headed to church. Maybe they were at Pastor White’s house, but I didn’t know where he lived. The best I could do was the church.

“What’s up?” asked Sherwood.

“That’s my pastor,” I told him. Pastor White was new; our last pastor had left to take over his father’s church in California. Pastor White wasn’t quite as engaging or accepting, but his faith was real. “Somebody wants me to go to church,” I said.

I hit a button on the stereo, and said, “Call Adam.” Sherwood and I listened to his phone ring. When the voice mail picked up, I said, “Someone attacked slash kidnapped my pastor, and I’m heading to the church right now. It is eleven fifty-four.” I disconnected. Whom to call? Ben and Paul were home with Jesse and Aiden.

“Call Honey,” I said. And got her answering machine. I didn’t leave a message. “Call George.” Another answering machine. I pounded a fist on the steering wheel. “What the heck good does it do me to be a pack member when there’s never anyone home?”

“I do not understand ‘what the heck good,’” said the stereo. “Please say a command. Some commands you might find useful are ‘call’ or ‘search address book.’”

I growled, then said, “Call Mary Jo.”

She picked up immediately. “Hey, Mercy,” she said, her voice wary.

“I need you to gather anyone you can find who is not guarding the house,” I told her, “and bring them to the Good Shepherd on Bonnie.” I gave her terse directions because it was hard to find, even with the address.

“Got it,” she said.

I hit the END CALL button and settled in to drive.

“I’m not much good in a fight,” said Sherwood tightly. “My leg.”

“You can pick up a three-hundred-pound bar of steel, you can fight,” I told him, not looking away from the road. I was driving too fast, and I didn’t want to hit anyone.

There was a pause.

“I guess that is so,” he said, like it was a revelation. “Okay.”

The church was small. It had been a house that someone converted into a church about twenty years ago. It was tucked unobtrusively into the most mazelike section of Kennewick, a little residential area on the north side of the railroad that ran along the Columbia. There were only two ways in or out, one on the far east side, one on the west. The east-side entrance was the easiest to navigate.

The church grounds backed up to the railway, and between a couple of empty lots and the parking lot, it was half a block from the nearest house. There were two cars in the lot, parked next to the handicap parking. One of them was Pastor White’s. The other was a Ford Explorer that had seen better days.

I parked Adam’s SUV on the side of the lot farthest from the cars and the church building. I gathered the Sig’s two spare magazines from my purse and stuck them in the back of my waistband because my stupid jeans didn’t have pockets. Sherwood scrounged around and came up with a tire iron. I shook my head at him, opened the rear hatch, and pushed back the mat to expose the big locked box. My handprint released the lock. I opened the box and revealed Adam’s new treasure chest. Inside was a collection of guns and various bladed weapons.

“Any idea what we’re facing?” Sherwood asked, examining the contents of the box.

I shook my head. “Probably fae, but it could be one of the anti-supernatural groups or Cantrip or anyone. If they are here, in the church, it probably won’t be vampires.” Sherwood had spent a few years in the Marrok’s pack. He’d know how to fight whatever we’d face as well as I did. “If you figure it out first, let me know.”

He picked up an ax and checked it for balance. “This works for the fae,” he said. Then he picked up the HK45 compact, checked it. (It was loaded.) “This will do for anything else.” He decocked it and put it in the pocket of his jeans. “Compact” was an optimistic label for that gun.

“That’s a dangerous place to carry it,” I told him.

He grinned at me. “Nah, that’s my bum leg. Can’t shoot my foot off ’cause someone already did that. What does the interior look like?”

“The church was a house, once upon a time,” I told him. Then I described it the best I could.

We paused for a moment by the cars. By now, the scent of fae magic lingered in the air, so I was pretty sure that was whom we were facing. However, the Ford Explorer belonged to a human male who did a lot of smoking.

“Do you recognize him?” asked Sherwood in a voice that wouldn’t carry.

I shook my head, but the church wasn’t empty during the week. I was grateful that it wasn’t a Tuesday when the choir practiced or Thursday when the youth group met to plan their monthly community service. On other days . . . “The pastor has a degree in sociology,” I told him, softly. “He makes most of his living as a counselor for recovering addicts.”

“Not a lot of money in that,” Sherwood observed. He was looking around alertly; the conversation was to keep relaxed and ready. It wasn’t how I functioned, but I’d fought side by side with enough people—mostly wolves—to know that it was a technique that worked for some people.

I said, “Not a lot of money being a pastor of a small nondenominational church, either. I expect that if he wanted to be rich, he’d have gone into a different business.”

“Does this change our strategy?” Sherwood asked, patting the car soundlessly.

He was acting as if I knew what I was doing.

“I don’t think so, right?” I said. “Two hostages, or two victims if the fae have already killed them.”

“The humans aren’t dead,” said Zee, startling a squeak out of me and an annoyed look out of Sherwood. “I was alerted that something was planned—and apparently my information was correct.”

“Where did you come from?” I asked him.

He frowned at me. “Where your enemy might be next time.”

“Nah,” said Sherwood. “He was waiting around the corner of the building, Mercy. Downwind, but I caught a glimpse of him when you parked. I figured he’d been waiting for us. If he’d been the enemy, I’d have said something. I didn’t see him approach, though.”

“Do you know who they are?” I asked Zee. “What do they want?”

“Nine or ten idiots who follow a greater one,” Zee answered. “These are the ones who left a letter on Christy’s front door. According to my source—and Adam’s telephone conversation—they want Aiden.”

I frowned. “I can scent at least three.” One of whom I knew.

“Four,” said Sherwood. “One of them is flying, but I caught something where it landed on the top of the car.”

Zee considered the church. The lights in the upstairs rooms were on, but the windows had all been replaced with stained glass. It was impossible to see inside.

“The humans are upstairs with Uncle Mike,” Zee said, confirming my nose. “I heard them set him to watch.”

“Is he the one who told you about this?” I asked.

“Probably,” Zee said. “I can’t imagine that he’d be this stupid unless he’s working as a spy for the Council.”

“What’s stupid about it?” asked Sherwood. “They take hostages Mercy cares about to get an unlikeable ancient in the shape of a boy who is doing his best to burn down Mercy’s home. Trade the hostages for the boy—and it’s a win-win for all.”

The dry dislike in Sherwood’s voice told me that he’d had an unpleasant encounter with our Aiden. Aiden was prickly and very good at getting under people’s skin when he wanted to. If I hadn’t seen him vulnerable, hadn’t heard his nightmares, maybe I would be more ambivalent about him, too.

Zee snorted. “Only if you don’t know Mercy or Adam. Or anyone else involved. As if either of our idiot-heroes would ever turn someone who looks as helpless as Aiden over to the fae.”

“Hey,” I protested softly. I’m not an idiot or a hero. But he had the last part right.

By mutual consent, we left the Explorer and headed into the church. The front porch had been modified with a wheelchair ramp next to the stairs, and both led to a double-door entryway that wasn’t original to the house. The changes had been made with an eye to economy rather than harmony.

We could wait for reinforcements, but if the fae thought themselves outgunned, they were likely to kill and run. We had a better chance going in now and hoping the cavalry made it in time to help with the cleanup.

“Mercy,” said Zee in a nearly soundless voice that was hard for me to hear even with my ears, and I stood two feet away. “You go upstairs with your werewolf. Wolf?” Zee met Sherwood’s eyes and didn’t look away. “You keep her alive. I think that it’s only Uncle Mike up there with the human hostages, and I think that he’ll let you get them free.”

“Meanwhile?” asked Sherwood in the same very quiet tone.

Zee smiled wickedly and snapped his hand down—where a narrow, black-bladed sword appeared. “I’ll keep the others occupied.”

“Zee?” I said. “Are you okay to fight?” He still wasn’t moving right.

Zee nodded. “Against these fools? I could fight them off if I were blindfolded and tied hand and foot.”

I let it go—though I was still worried. The fae speak the truth—as they know it. Just because Zee was an arrogant old fae didn’t make him right.

We walked up to the doors with me in front and the others flanking me. I pulled the right-hand door open, and Sherwood reached around me to pull the left so we could enter as one group.

The entryway was a twenty-by-ten room cut off from the rest of the church by a wall with a walkway on either side. There was a kitchenette to our left with a refrigerator, a sink, and a stove. The interior wall had a counter and a half wall that opened into the main room, with a curtain that could be shut or open. It was shut.

On the right was the stairway that led up to the pastor’s office, three rooms that were set up as classrooms, and the bathroom. Zee slipped around the wall and into the sanctuary that encompassed the rest of the first floor. Sherwood and I, in that order, headed up the stairs.

Below us, in the sanctuary, there was a huge crash, a wary cry, followed by the clashing sounds of weaponry engaging.

The top of the stairway led to a hall with five closed doors. The door to the immediate right of the stairs was the pastor’s office, to the left was the bathroom. Then there were the three classrooms, one left, one right, and one at the end of the hall.

My sense of smell was of limited use for finding Pastor White—his scent was everywhere. The man who’d driven the Explorer was better. He’d gone into the pastor’s office, but I caught his scent farther down the hall—where he’d have had no reason to go.

I tapped my nose and pointed at the classroom door at the end of the hall. Sherwood nodded as a huge crash below us spelled the end of one of the stained-glass windows. My fault. The fae had only come here because of me.

Sherwood took point, the ax in one hand and the big gun in the other. I reached past him to turn the knob, and he elbowed the door in.

The classroom was the largest of the five upstairs rooms. The pastor and a stranger were tied to folding chairs, gagged with duct tape. The floor of the room was covered in a dark brown carpet that showed the triple ring of salt someone had placed around them.

Between them and us stood Uncle Mike, a crossbow in his hand. He’d brought it up—but let the nose point down to the floor as soon as he saw it was me. There were three containers of Morton salt. Two of them were open, but the third still had a seal on the spout.

“Shut that door,” he said. “There’s a sprite lord out there, and I don’t want his sprites seeing what I have done until Zee’s through with them. Stupid louts.”

“What’s this about?” I asked.

“I can’t tell you,” he said. “All I can tell you is they gave me my orders—to bring these two upstairs and secure them.” He grinned fiercely. “My orders didn’t say secure them from whom. As long as those idiots”—he paused as the whole building vibrated—“don’t burn the place down, your pastor and this gentleman are safe from most of my kind. Who did you bring with you?” he asked. “Is it Zee?”

“Can’t you get across the salt?” I asked.

He shook his head. “This isn’t just salt, but salt bonded with magic. I’ve locked out most fae, including myself. Zee might manage it. One or two of the Gray Lords—but the only one of this group, the one who gave me my orders and is powerful enough to break this, isn’t here.” He stared hard at me. There was something he couldn’t tell me. He’d said he couldn’t tell me why they were here. I’d thought it was obvious—but if it were obvious, Uncle Mike wouldn’t have bothered to talk to me about it.

What did they gain from their actions so far? Two hostages—but they were human hostages, near enough to me that I’d respond. But, as Zee pointed out, if they knew anything about Adam or me, they’d never believe that we’d turn Aiden over to them. So what had they gained? They’d called me, let the pastor talk until they were sure I knew who he was, and hung up. And I’d come right over, hadn’t I?

I pulled out my cell and called Mary Jo.

“We’re on our—” she answered.

“No. Go to the pack house,” I said. “There are some fae coming for Aiden.”

Uncle Mike smiled.

I called the house, but no one picked up. I called Jesse, and it went to her voice mail. I called Warren, Darryl, Ben, and George with the same results.

I called Adam.

“Not a good time, Mercy,” he said tightly.

“Don’t hang up,” I told him. “Did you listen to my message?”

“No. I’m discussing bugs with Cantrip. We’re—” He would have said more, but I interrupted him.

“The fae are attacking our home,” I said. “Don’t listen to my message, waste of time.” Don’t worry about me—worry about Jesse, about Aiden and our wolves. “There’s a fae attack at the house,” I repeated. “And no one is answering their phones.”

“Headed home,” he said, and hung up.

Uncle Mike’s smile widened and took on a patronizing edge, as if he were a proud father, which he had no right to do.

“Zee says this is a small group,” I said. I didn’t want to be here; I needed to be home. “They aren’t likely to have all of Faery attack us at our home, right?”

“This group wants the Fire Touched,” he said, so apparently my question was not what he was forbidden to discuss. “Underhill talks to people in their sleep and whispers at them when they are awake, asking for the Fire Touched. We’ve been searching for a way to make nice with her for a decade or more. We need her to survive—and she’s been fickle and nasty. Some of us figure that if we give her the boy, she’ll be grateful. Truthfully, others of us figure if we give her the boy, she will shut up about him and we might be able to sleep for longer than five minutes at a time. It’s like Chinese water torture or that noise a car makes when your seat belt isn’t fastened.”

He frowned at me, but it wasn’t a directed frown. “Still, more of us aren’t happy that Underhill can do that.”

“Do what?” I asked.

“Talk to us in our heads.”

I nodded. The sounds from below weren’t getting louder, but the frequency of the crashes was denser. Zee should be finished soon.

Uncle Mike bent down, picked up the unopened container of Morton salt, and handed it to me.

“Here,” he said. “I will keep watch on your humans and secure them for you. I so swear. You two should get downstairs with the salt before Zee gets really upset.”

“We need to release them,” I said, nodding at the hostages. “Get them out of here, where they will be safe.”

Uncle Mike shook his head. “Once the salt circle is broken, I don’t have enough magic to renew it. They are safer here. Take out the threat, then release them.”

Pastor White made a wild sound and shook his head. The other man stared at me with old eyes, closed them, then opened them again. He was okay with our plan—which made me very curious about him.

I met Pastor White’s wild gaze. “Uncle Mike doesn’t lie. He’ll keep you safe—has kept you safe tonight. I’m going to make sure we stop the bad guys before he lets you out of the safe zone.”

As we trotted down the stairs, Sherwood said, “Salt is protection against fae?”

I shook my head. “Some fae. Mostly the lesser fae, because it neutralizes magic. Uncle Mike apparently used it as a component in his spell—which fae aren’t supposed to be able to do. Salt neutralizes magic. What Uncle Mike did is the equivalent of using water to start a fire.”

“So don’t count on it,” he said, as we reached the ground.

I nodded, stepped around the (broken) wall, and looked out into Armageddon meets Apocalypse.

I’d learned some things from playing computer games with the pack. “When you first enter a room, look around for your enemy” was one of the golden rules of the Dread Pirate games because the scallywags like to hide behind furniture and doorways and get you from behind. So I ignored the splintered furniture and the brightly colored glass shards that littered the room and looked for the bad guys.

Enemy number one was flattened beneath a pew. She was unconscious. She was breathing, but judging by the crushing injury to her back, she wasn’t going to be mobile anytime soon.

Enemy number two was dead. His head was a good twenty feet from his body. Not even the fae could survive that, I didn’t think—certainly he wasn’t going to get up and fight in the next ten minutes.

Enemy number three was a slender man fighting Zee, both of them armed with swords. There was no enemy number four that I could sense via eyes or nose. Zee fought, a wiry old man who moved like a demon. Not a wasted motion, every strike and parry clean and quicker than humanly possible. There was blood on the thin white t-shirt he wore, and some of it was his.

The smaller man he fought moved oddly, though it didn’t affect his control of his blade. There was something wrong with his shape—and with his face. As I tried to pin it down, Zee hit him and . . . the part of his body that Zee’s sword would have hit just dissolved in front of the blade, releasing little bits of sparkly light about the size and color of a yellow jacket. I finally got a clear look at his face—and he didn’t have one, just a suggestion of features that moved constantly, as if all that was under his skin were the little bits that had fled the iron of Zee’s weapon.

Some of those little bits sparkled all the way to Sherwood and me.

“Ouch,” I said, slapping my forearm.

Sherwood swore, and started fighting with the ax. I’ve met a few werewolves who had lived when swords and axes were the weapons of choice for humans as well as fae. He moved like a man born with an ax in his hand—and I don’t mean to cut down trees. His ax sang a little as it cut through the air. The little hornetlike fae things dropped to the ground like miniature falling stars, some of them in two pieces. Sherwood put himself in front of me, and very few of the little vicious beasties made it through him.

Skilled with an ax was our Sherwood. Very skilled—and very fast. His prosthetic leg hindered him occasionally, but it seemed more a matter of annoyance than a real problem because those sparkly lights kept falling.

Couldn’t fight, he’d claimed. Couldn’t fight my aching rump.

I closed my fingers on the wings of one of the critters that had made it through his slicing and dicing as it bit my thigh. I had to rock it back and forth to dislodge it so I could bring it up to my face to see what it was.

Up close, and without the beauty of the fluttering wings, it was utilitarian in design. Or she was. She looked vaguely like a person in shape if not color, complete with arms and legs and miniature breasts. Her eyes were a deep purple that looked almost black against her bright yellow body. Only her mouth completely failed to mimic something human. Instead of lips, there were a pair of chelicerae, gory with my blood.

I threw her on the ground and watched her blink out of existence the moment her body touched the fake wooden floor, the same way the bits and pieces that Sherwood was leaving behind did.

I took the container of salt I’d tucked under my arm and pried open the spout. I poured a pinch onto my hand and dribbled it on my wrist. The nasty bugger chewing there made a popping sound, turned gray, and fell to the ground, a dead husk. It did not disappear in a flash of light. Hah.

I took a spare handful and scattered it on the fae bugs attacking Sherwood, and it sounded like popcorn cooking.

I took the container and ran a gauntlet of biting fae bugs, one arm crooked above my eyes. The fae that Zee fought scored a hit. It wasn’t a hard hit, but Zee responded by increasing the speed and fury of his attacks. I poured salt in my hand as I jumped on top of an upended pew and scattered the handful of salt on the last of our enemies.

The salt landed with a crack of noise, and wherever it hit turned gray. He turned on me. Gray powder fell on the ground, and the sparkly bugs all returned and landed on him, reabsorbed into his odd body.

He raised his hands before I threw another handful, and in a voice like smoke he said, “I surrender.”

Zee snarled but sheathed his sword at my look. Sherwood negotiated his way through the mess of the sanctuary with a little more trouble than a man with two good legs might have, but there was nothing wrong with the speed with which he killed the woman with the crushing injury. He managed to do it before she shot the crossbow I hadn’t noticed when I’d first seen her.

He cleaned the ax on his pant leg, then continued to pick his way to Zee and me. He looked at our prisoner.

“What are we going to do with that?” he asked.