Fire Touched (Mercy Thompson 9)

“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.