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.