Alaskan Fire (19 page)

* * *

“Where are my clothes?” Blaze demanded,
storming up the stairs to slap a Gigantor hand on the table beside Jack’s plate
of eggs.  She was wearing a shirt that still had creases from the nice little
department-store package she’d taken it from, because somewhere during the night,
even through a
locked door
, her flannel shirt from yesterday had gone
missing.

“Uh,” the wereverine said,
blinking up at her over the kitchen table.  “What shirt?”

Blaze narrowed her eyes at him.  “I
said ‘clothes,’ not ‘shirt,’ Jack.”  Then, before Jack could spout some
bullshit story about how, gee, this neck of the woods is inhabited by Marty the
Shirt-Stealing-Marshmallow, she swiveled and started down the stairs.

“Where are you going?” he called
after her, sounding a bit concerned.

“I’m gonna go run the dozer a
bit.”  She went outside, yanked her boots on, and strode across the yard.  She
could feel Jack watching her through the second-floor window as she hopped up
onto the wide metal track and climbed into the driver’s seat.

Ignoring him completely, she
turned the key in the ignition and cranked the engine over.  For the first time
in weeks, the engine roared to life, she lifted the blade, backed it up, and
started attacking the edge of the forest once again.

A couple hours later, she was
really settling into the groove, learning the machine, relieving all her
tension in the upturned earth, when the engine sputtered and died.

Blaze frowned and turned the key
again, but the engine cranked over uncooperatively.

“Sounds like it ran out of fuel,”
Jack called from behind her.

Blaze twisted to look over her
shoulder.

The wereverine was sitting on the
trailer, watching her, idly playing with a set of vice-grips.  He dropped the
tool back to the trailer and got to his feet, making the springs groan from the
sudden release of weight.  She expected a sneer or a quippy comment, but
instead, he gestured for her to get down from the dozer.  “Come on over to the fuel
shed with me,” he called.  “Generator’s running…I’ll show you how to run the
pump.”

He seemed to hesitate, then,
waiting to see if she would follow.  Blaze turned again to look at the
bulldozer’s controls, then, reluctantly, she climbed out of the driver’s seat
and hopped off the track, into the soft earth.  Seeing her get down, Jack
started toward the smallest shed on the property.

Once Blaze arrived at the
barrel-filled shack, Jack flipped a switch on the wall that made the ancient
gas-station pump start to hum, then went and grabbed a yellow plastic gas
carrier off a shelf and set it on the wooden planks between the barrels.

Blaze had to stoop to enter the
tiny shack.  Once she was inside, there wasn’t much space to maneuver, and
Jack’s leaden arm brushed her stomach as he uncapped one of the barrels and
stuck a metal-ended hose inside.

“This is diesel,” he said,
dipping his fingers into the liquid inside the barrel and holding it up to
her.  “Big rigs like the dozer and the backhoe are gonna use diesel.  We keep
the diesel in the green barrels.”  He wiped his hand off on his pants and went
for the line of blue barrels opposite the green ones.  After twisting off the
cap with a 4-pronged metal lever, he dipped his finger into the second barrel
and held it up to her.  “Gas,” he said.  “Short for gasoline.”

“I know what gas is,” Blaze
growled, scrunching her nose at the slight difference in smell.

Jack shrugged and recapped the
barrel.  “In the fuel business, we call gas ‘gas’ and diesel ‘oil.’  You don’t
say you need gas for your dozer.  People will look at you funny, because you
put gas in your dozer, you kill your dozer.”

Blaze watched him suspiciously,
trying to figure out why he was suddenly being so nice.  Finally, she decided, “You’re
afraid I’m gonna take that cell phone out of your pay, aren’t you?”

He blinked at her.  “What?”

She made a gesture at the
barrels.  “Why you being so nice all of a sudden?  What did you do?  Aside from
steal my shirt?”

Jack’s brilliant green eyes
widened for a moment, then he cleared his throat and turned back to his work,
but not before she saw him redden.  Instead of responding, he pulled the hose
nozzle off of the ancient pump, then stuffed it into the yellow canister.  “We
use the yellow jugs for diesel, the red ones for gas.”

“It says it on the side,” Blaze commented.

Jack’s entire body went stiff,
and she saw his green eyes flicker at the lettering on the side of the
canister.

Before he could get offended,
however, Blaze squatted and pointed to the first letter on the canister. 
“That’s a D.  It’s used for ‘duh’ sounds.  Like drugs, dick, or dumbshit.”

Jack’s face reddened and he
flipped on the pump.  Liquid began to slosh into the yellow canister.

“Next two are I and E,” Blaze
said.  “Usually, they have their own separate sounds, but English is a fucked
up language, and in ‘diesel,’ they both sound like a hard ‘E’.  Like ‘mean’ or
‘scream’ or ‘steam.’”

Jack cleared his throat
uncomfortably, but she could tell he was paying attention.  He finished filling
the canister and switched off the pump.

“Next is an S,” Blaze said,
pointing.  “Used for things like ‘scumbag’ or ‘shithead’ or ‘stupid stubborn asshole.’”

He flushed crimson and looked
away in agitation.

“That right there is another E,”
Blaze said, tapping it.  “E can have a bunch of different sounds in the English
language, but this time, it’s kind of silent.  The last one is an L.”  She
smiled up at him.  “Used for words like ‘little,’ ‘laughable,’ or ‘lewd.’”

Jack glared up at her and yanked
the canister off of the ground.  “I’ll keep that in mind.”  His big shoulders
flexing under his blue flannel shirt, he stalked out of the shed and out toward
the bulldozer.

Blaze grinned as she watched him
go. 
Maybe we can work together, after all.
 Blaze again felt herself
admiring the rock-hard features of his body, the clefts and bulges pushed tight
against his well-used clothes.  She was still watching him, appreciating his
confident, sexy swagger, when she saw a light flicker out of the corner of her
eye, near where her hand was resting on the door jamb.

Frowning, Blaze turned back to
the shed.

The green speck winked out the moment
she looked at it, and she was about to shake her head and write it off as the
gas fumes getting to her, when it popped back into sight a few yards away, at
the edge of the forest.  When she turned to face it completely, however, the
light slid deeper into the forest, then winked out.  She saw it there, blinking
off and on, keeping its distance.

Feeling a tightness work its way
into her gut, Blaze backed up, then, when she was sure whatever it was wasn’t
going to lunge out at her, she turned and bolted for Jack.

Jack had just climbed atop the
bulldozer and was uncapping the cap from the fuel tank on the side of the
machine.  He didn’t even look up.

“I saw something!” Blaze cried,
climbing up onto the dozer with him, putting him between her and the strange
green light.

Jack grunted and pulled the collapsible
tube from the canister, then leaned it up against the bulldozer and started to
pour.

“A green light,” Blaze babbled. 
“It was bobbing around near my hand, then took off for the woods when I saw it. 
Winking in and out.  Size of a fist.”  She was panting, gasping for air.

“Fey,” Jack said.  “A young one. 
Don’t worry about it.”

“Fey?” Blaze said.  “I thought
you said fey would want the fea—”

Jack slammed the diesel canister
back on the dozer and gave her a
look.
  “Just ‘cause you can’t see ‘em,”
he said softly, capping the gas tank again, “Don’t mean they aren’t out
there
,
sweetie.”  With another scowl at her, he re-sealed the canister and hopped off
the dozer.

“Where are you going?!” Blaze cried.

“I’ve got things to do,” Jack said. 
“We’re gonna need a
ton
of firewood come fall, and that green
four-wheeler is knocking again.  Think I’m gonna spend a couple hours tinkering
with it before dinner.”

“What do I do about the fey?”
Blaze cried.

He raised a jet-black eyebrow at
her.  “What do you mean, ‘do?’  The fey want to hang around, you leave ‘em
alone.”  He grunted.  “Besides.  It’s not the babies you need to be worried
about.  Anything with wings is gonna be more scared of you than you are of it. 
Moment you start seeing wingless teenagers running around, though, then you
should start getting concerned.  They’re usually about a thousand years old at
that point.”  He gestured at the fuel shed.  “Little guys like that, though…”
he snorted.  “They won’t eat much.”

“You
saw
him,” Blaze
realized, horrified.

Jack wrinkled his nose.  “
Smelled
him, more like.  Always makes me nervous when they hang out near the gas shed. 
Smell a lot like ozone, and I always wonder if they’re gonna set off a spark to
make the whole place explode.”

“But I thought you said the fey
would—” Blaze began.

Jack stopped her with another
look
.

“Uh,” Blaze said, reddening.  “I
thought you said you kept this place clean of intruders.”

“I do,” Jack said.

“Then why would you let them
stay?” Blaze demanded.

Jack gave her a long look.  “Like
I said, sister,” he said, “It’s not the babies you need to watch out for.  They
don’t know any better, and they’re harmless little buggers.  Annoying
sometimes, but what youngsters aren’t?”  He scowled out at the forest.  “Nah,
it’s the big ones that I’ll rip rim from limb, if I catch them sneaking around
on my land.”

Blaze again felt herself tense at
the way he said ‘my’ land, but before she could correct him, Jack had turned
and started toward the 4-wheeler trailer, which was still piled with drywall
from the last barge trip. 

Blaze started after him to help.

She had taken two steps when Jack
dropped the fuel canister on the ground beside the 4-wheeler and, as she
watched, impressed, heaved an entire batch of drywall off the trailer at once
and carried it inside the basement of the lodge, then came back and drove the
4-wheeler over to where Blaze had knocked down a dozen good-sized birch trees,
threw on chaps, and started attacking the logs with a chainsaw. 

Reluctantly, Blaze crawled back
up into the bulldozer’s operator chair, nervously scanning the woods for little
green glowies.  Fey.  Like
fairies
.  Of the
abracadabra
You Now
Have Ears Like A Donkey kind.  It was just too much.  Maybe she could open a
seasonal greenhouse outside Anchorage or start a farm in the Mat-Su Valley. 
Wasilla or Palmer.  Something a little less…ambitious.

Blaze nonetheless started the
dozer and lifted the blade, and found herself immediately comforted by the low
rumble around her. 

Then again,
she thought,
as she once more began to work the earth, watching Jack cut up the trees she’d
downed for him,
I might be able to make do.

Her land-clearing endeavors, she
decided, would need to include sites for a major greenhouse and a couple of
livestock buildings.  Her first set of stock, according to the plan she had
developed before beginning this mess, would be delivered a month after the
lumber loads, in late-August.  Goats, rabbits, pigs, two dogs, plus a good six
dozen of various fowl.

Her plan included setting up
fencing on a few acres of forested area, releasing the animals inside, and let
the goats and pigs eat their way through the rest of the summer, supplemented
with feed from Blaze’s barge-runs.  The rabbits and fowl would be penned
separately, to protect from martins, foxes, and goshawks.

If it worked out, she would get a
yak or two next spring, along with a few beef calves.

Excitement began to build with
every new stroke of the bulldozer’s blade.  Finally—
finally
—she was
doing something to see her dreams come true.  Soon she would be neck-deep in endangered
breeds of livestock, helping to carry on genetic diversity with critically rare
breeds that had lost their commercial value due to hybridization or genetic
‘improvements.’ 

Looking at the churned earth
around her, however, Blaze realized she needed to stick with the plan, take it
slow.  She remembered one of her Algebra professor’s favorite acronyms,
K.I.S.S..

Keep It Simple, Stupid.
 
Already, her fantasies were running away with her.  She wanted her farm, and
she wanted it
now
, and her brain was politely overlooking the fact that
she had precisely diddly in the form of structures, pens, and paddocks, and
that it wouldn’t be very genetically responsible to have foxes or wolves drag
off a few dozen animals from breeds that, for some, only had two hundred
breeding individuals in North America.

“Just a little bit at a time,”
she told herself, as she rolled another ball of roots out of the way of her
building-space.  She would start small—goats, pigs, rabbits, and fowl.  If that
worked out, she could think about the rest in the spring.

That night, Jack met her by the
woodstove with her smutty adventure book.  He shoved it into her hands.  “There
ya go, Boss,” he said.  “Teach me to read.”

Blaze, hearing the command in his
voice, seeing that he fully expected to be obeyed, almost turned and set the
book up high on a shelf, out of reach for him without use of a stool.  She
fought the urge, however, realizing he would probably just tear a few swipes
through the wall until the shelf came to him.  She forced a polite smile.  “My
name is Blaze.”

He squinted up at her, green eyes
narrowed.  “Sounded to me like your name was Beatrice.”