Alaskan Fire (10 page)

“Hey, now,” Jack growled,
unfolding his arms from his chest in warning.  “Do we gotta repeat the last
twenty minutes?”

“No,” Blaze said quickly.  Then she
gave him a considering look.  “You’ll help me build a farm?”

“On the side,” Jack said. 
“You’ll be paying me to get the lodge up and running.  Don’t really wanna take
the wind outta your sails, but farming don’t pay near as well as gettin a bunch
of rich fucks in a boat and takin’ em out to thrash the water for a few hours.”

“I know,” Blaze muttered.  She
took a deep breath, then let it out with a sigh.  “Just seems like I should be
able to
do
something about all this, you know?”

He gave her a long, analyzing
look.  Then, shrugging, he said, “You will.”  He turned back to the front of
the cabin and yanked the chair out from in front of the door.  “Come on.  Let’s
get home before it gets dark.”

This far into spring, it was
already almost twenty-four hours of daylight, but Blaze wasn’t about to argue
the point.  When he opened the door for her, she stepped through it and out
onto the tiny, rickety porch.

“Just so you know,” Jack said, behind
her, “I can track something by scent.”

Though his words clawed at her
insides, Blaze gave him a sweet smile over her shoulder.  “I’ll have to
remember to stock up on ammonia.”  Then she turned, stepped confidently, out
onto the weather-worn boards…

…and fell to her knees, vomiting over
the edge of the porch, into the grass.

Jack immediately squatted beside
her, giving her a worried look.  “You okay?”

“I’m having minor digestion
issues,” Blaze whimpered, ashamed at the fact she’d been unable to hold it down. 
“Must have been the flight.”

Jack watched her, his pretty green
eyes telling her he knew exactly why she was feeling ill, and that he was
sorry.  “Was pretty windy up there today,” he agreed.

“Absolutely,” Blaze said, once again
feeling a pang of queasy fear looking into his deep green eyes.  Inhumanly
green, now that she thought about it.  Her stomach heaved again and she retched
up the rest of her breakfast into the meager pile beside the porch.

A big hand touched her shoulder. 
“Hey, sorry.”

“You’re an asshole,” Blaze
whimpered, but she didn’t shrug off his grip.

Surprisingly, Jack chuckled and
rubbed her back.  “I’m a wereverine.  We’re not exactly a friendly bunch.”

Blaze swallowed, hard, and met
his gaze.  His pants were still shredded, leaving him mostly naked as he
squatted beside her.  “So,” she managed, “You bite me and I get sick and…?”

Jack wrinkled his nose and snorted. 
“No.  My kind aren’t into that shit.  The wolves, on the other hand…”  He
sighed.  “They’ve got dominance issues.  Gotta have a pack.  So they make
themselves one, usually from whatever mortals strike their fancy, whether
they’re interested or not.  It’s
them
you gotta avoid.  Nah, if a
wereverine gets hold of you and don’t like what he sees, he’ll just sputch you
and get it over with.”

…sputch?
  “But you
could
turn me?” Blaze insisted.

Jack made a dismissive sound, but
his shoulders stiffened, the subject obviously making him uncomfortable.

“How?” Blaze demanded, wiping her
mouth with a sleeve.

Jack scowled at her.  “I’m not
gonna turn you into a—”

“Tell me,” Blaze snapped.  “For
Christ’s sake, what am I gonna do? 
Force
you to bite me?” She scoffed,
though her whole body was trembling.  “Just ease my mind a little bit, okay?”

“I’m
trying
to ease your
mind, girl,” Jack growled.  “I stopped turning people four thousand years ago,
once the intrigue wore off.”

Blaze waited, watching him.

Jack sighed, throwing up his big
hands in surrender.  “Fine.  You saw those little teeth in the back?  The ones
that punched through?”

“They weren’t little,” Blaze
managed.

“Those are them,” Jack grunted. 
“They’ve got venom-tubes, basically.  Something gets bit with those, they’re in
trouble.  Either they’re lunch—which is mostly the case—or sometimes they escape
long enough for the poison to take hold.  Then it’s a really long, really
painful
process of figuring out just what the hell is happening to them.”  He winced,
his gaze growing distant.  “
Really
painful.”  Then he shook himself.  “Nowadays,
most of us older ones see an accident, we sputch it.  There’s enough of us as
it is, and the way humans are moving outwards, we’re only getting more
crowded.”

“An…accident.”  Blaze swallowed,
hard.  “I’m sorry.  I think I should head back to Anchorage.”  She stood up,
intent on marching straight back to the lodge, grabbing her things and using
her cell phone to call Candy Rogers to schedule the next flight out.

Jack stood with her and caught
her by the shoulder.  “Hey,” he said softly, “My mistake, all right?  You’re
obviously not one of us, so it won’t hurt to have you on my land.”  He gave her
a wolfish grin.  “Besides.  You said you wanted a farm.”

Blaze’s irritation rose, despite
herself, at mention of ‘his’ land.  Nonetheless, she hesitated, remembering how
the lodge had felt looming around her.  She had been
standing
in her childhood
dream, and it had easily been one of the greatest moments of her life—until it
had been shattered by a monster dragging his tongue across her neck. 

Then again, she knew she wasn’t
going to have another opportunity like this.  Besides, who really
cared
if the area seemed to be inhabited by a shape-shifting lycanthrope?  He seemed
to be friendly enough…

“Come on,” Jack said.  “I’ll lead
you home.”  He started off into the woods, hesitating just long enough to see
that she would follow.

Reluctantly, Blaze did.  They
chatted awkwardly about little things—how Jack had to hook up the battery
system and show her how it worked, how the generator would probably need some
tinkering before it would fire up, how the four-wheelers had all been put away
in storage—until Blaze was simply too tired to make conversation.  While she
had maintained a gym membership back in Anchorage, trudging through the woods
used a whole different set of muscles, and it wasn’t long until she just wanted
to sit down and die.

Eventually, Jack sighed.  “All
right, sweetie.  Come here.”  He half-squatted in front of her, showing her a
large stretch of his muscular back.

“What are you doing?” Blaze asked
suspiciously.

“I’m getting this show on the
road,” Jack said.  “We keep going like this, it’s gonna take hours.”

“It took me hours to get out
here,” Blaze said.

Jack winced.  “Uh, yeah, hmmm.” 
His green eyes caught hers and she saw indecision there.  “Well, see, tootz,
that whole little jog took me about ten minutes.  Maybe.  Once I stopped being
Captain Oblivious upstairs.”

Oh shit,
was all Blaze
could think.

“So, uh, yeah,” Jack said. 
“Please climb on?”  By the nervous way he was biting his lip, Blaze was pretty
sure he wouldn’t force the issue, if she didn’t cooperate.  She opened her
mouth to say she’d rather walk.

Jack sighed and straightened. 
“All right.”  He resumed picking his way back through the woods.

Blaze, who hadn’t yet spoken,
said, “Just don’t brain me on a branch or something.”

The wereverine gave her a
surprised look over his shoulder, then obligingly squatted again and held
position while she awkwardly climbed onto his back, like a Zulu mounting a
midget.

“Here goes,” Jack said.  “Hold
on.  This is probably gonna scare the crap outta you, but it’ll be over quick.”

And then he was growing
fur
underneath her hands, and Blaze was clamping her cheek to his hairy shoulder,
just to keep from having her head snapped off at the neck from the sheer
speed
at which they bounded through the woods.  She squeezed her eyes shut, feeling
sick again, and fervently began praying she didn’t vomit down the wereverine’s
fuzzy spine.

“There we go,” Jack said, sliding
to a gravel-crunching halt in the back yard of the Sleeping Lady.  He lowered
Blaze gently to the ground, but she fell on her ass anyway, staring up at him
in horror.

“What
was
that,” she
blurted.  “Mach 2?”

He grinned at her as his fangs
started sucking back into his face.  “Never really had a way to measure it.” 
He cocked his head.  “Faster than a horse-and-buggy, though.”

“You
think
?!” Blaze
cried.  Her world was still moving around her in a wild, twisty chaos in her
inner ear, and she carefully puked into a pile beside her forearm.  Then,
shakily, she got to her feet and stumbled towards the lodge and her cell phone.

“I’m really sorry I scared you,
Miss Blaze.”

Blaze froze on the back steps,
hearing genuine regret in the wereverine’s voice.  She turned slowly and peered
at him.

He was standing in the middle of
the yard, still dressed in his shredded remnants of jeans, wincing, looking
like he wanted to say more.

She looked down into his sincere
green eyes, considered going back to her apartment in Anchorage—which only had
another six days left on the lease—laughed in despair, then slumped against the
doorframe of the lodge, using it to slide down onto her ass.  All of her plans
had just come tumbling down around her shoulders.  She needed to decide if she
was going to stay or go.  Then stick with it.

She glanced out at the decrepit
outbuildings, the ancient, meager woodpile, the graying, weathered siding, the
weed-strewn lawn.  It was her childhood dream, staring her right in the face.  Unfortunately,
so was Flash the Wereverine.  “So how’s this gonna work?” she managed.  “I
mean, you
seem
nice enough, but do you eat people who piss you off?  I
intend to run a
fishing
lodge.  With
guests
.  Anyone who works in
customer service knows that guests can be dicks.”

Jack gave her a pained smile.  “I
don’t eat the other white meat.  Too stringy.  Tastes like chemicals.”

That he would
know
something like that was enough for Blaze to put another checkmark next to
Return To Anchorage.  She dropped her face into her hands.  The Sleeping Lady had
spent four
years
on the market—possibly more—until some really tall rube
in Anchorage dropped all six hundred grand of her inheritance in it in an
insane scheme to make her dreams of self-sufficiency come true.  It might spend
another
ten
on the market until she could find someone to buy it from
her, and she wasn’t going to be able to pay off the loan—currently on a
one-year deferral to allow her business to get up and running—if she didn’t
operate the lodge.

“I am so screwed,” she whispered
to the rickety wood panels between her knees.  She had just gotten so
exuberant
and
excited
.  Like a goddamn three-year-old.  Four years of Business
classes and three years of accounting work, completely tossed out the damn
window the moment she had a chunk of change actually
worth
anything
sitting in her bank account.  She was a disgrace to her family name.  And it
wasn’t even her
family
.  She’d been freakin’
adopted
.  The rat
fucks should have
told
her.  Not let her find out when they
died
.

Blaze quickly re-routed that
thought, knowing it would lead to tears, and the
last
thing she wanted
to do right now was become a sobbing wreck and deal with the consequences that
followed.

“I always wanted a farm,” she confessed
to the porch.  “A place of my own out in the woods, you know?  Ever since I was
a little kid.”

Jack, a total stranger until she
had called him a week ago in search of a maintenance man, gingerly climbed the
stairs and lowered himself against the opposite frame, listening.

“I’ve always had a good head on
my shoulders,” Blaze continued.  “Only really get worked up about the way the
agricultural conglomerates have been taking the
life
out of foods, but
that’s just crazy, right?  I mean, who cares about that shit?”

“It’s not crazy,” Jack said
softly.

Without lifting her head, Blaze
snorted.  “You don’t have to patronize me.”  Shaking her head at the porch, she
said, “No, I’m usually not this knee-jerk.  I just got that check, six hundred
thousand after taxes, and I just kind of dropped everything and headed for the
Bush.  Thought I’d found a way to make my dreams come true.”

“Who says you haven’t?” Jack
asked.  He was picking at a splinter in the weathered wood.

Blaze gave a mirthless laugh and
gestured at him. 

Jack glanced up at her quickly
with a frown.  “I’m not runnin’ you off.”

Blaze snorted miserably.

“I’m
not
,” Jack insisted. 
“And frankly, I’d rather you stayed.”

He’d rather she
stayed
?
 
Blaze blinked at him, suspicion rising within her at the way his words
almost sounded like a plea. 
Gee,
her logical mind said,
what
would
a lonely little man all alone out in the woods want from an all-too-available
female?

“I mean,” Jack said hastily, “I
can protect you.  You obviously can’t take care of yourself, so I’d do you a
favor and keep you safe.”

Yep, that answered it.  He was
going to do her the
favor
of screwing her.  Blaze felt her hackles
raise.  “I can take care of myself.”

“Uh,” Jack said, “No offense,
Blaze, but you start walking in any direction from here and you’re gonna run
into something that would sputch you ‘soon as look at you.”

Blaze didn’t know what ‘sputch’
meant, but from the context, she was relatively sure that it wouldn’t be
pretty.  Looking wistfully at the lodge’s outbuildings, she said, “Maybe I
could sell it and buy a new place in Canada or somewhere.”