Alaskan Fire (27 page)

The sudden pain, so soon after
the washing waves of relief, send Blaze over the brink.  She fell into the
welcome arms of infinity, and this time, there wasn’t anything Dick could do
about it.

Blaze woke to the smell of fried
eggs and bacon, artfully presented alongside a couple slices of buttered toast,
on a platter a couple inches under her chin.  Blaze moaned and dumped it on the
floor.

Jack, who had been wolfing down
his own breakfast in a chair beside her bed, paused, his mouth half-open, fork
poised to stuff another piece of egg into his mouth, eyes fixed on the pile on
the rug.

Slowly, the wereverine lowered
his fork.  “Not hungry, I take it?”  It sounded like every syllable was being
pushed through concrete.

“You think I’m ever eating
anything of yours again?” Blaze groaned, putting a palm to her forehead at the
throbbing in her temples.  “You sick bastard.”

Still scowling at the pile of
food, Jack jammed the piece of egg into his mouth and chewed.  “You know,” he
said, “I’m not cleaning that up.”

Blaze glared at him from
underneath her fingers.  “
I’m
not cleaning it up.”

Jack shrugged.  “Your room.”  He
went back to eating.

Blaze slumped back to the pillow
to stare at the ceiling.  “So what’s the peace offering for, anyway?  You
sodomize me?  You get me pregnant?”  She paused, turning her head to look at
him, an eyebrow raised.  “You give me some sort of venereal disease?”

Jack choked, spraying egg
particles across the room.  Glowering, he shoved a fork in her direction. 
“You,” he growled, jabbing with the fork, “Have an awfully funny way of saying
‘thank you.’”

“
Thank
you?” Blaze
scoffed.  “Thank you for what?  Getting me drunk?  Making a deposit at the bank? 
Taking your beaver cleaver and going skinny-dippin’?”

Jack narrowed his eyes at her. 
“How about, ‘Thank you, Jack, for rescuing me from another bout of my own
stupidity.’”  Then he cocked his head at the wall, thoughtful.  “Or better yet,
‘Thank you, Jack, for dragging my dying ass out of a hole and pounding some
life back into me?’”  Then he waved his fork and shook his head.  “Nonono. 
Here we go.  ‘Thank you, Jack, for proving to me yet again how utterly awesome
you are, while bathing in the blood of my enemies?’”  Then his green eyes
refocused on her flatly.  “Or how about just, ‘Thank you, Jack, I’m sorry I
just dumped your food on the floor?’”

Blaze snorted.  “You broke my
nose.”  She remembered that much.

Jack scowled at her.  “The
wolves
broke your nose.  I straightened it for you.”

…Wolves?
 It triggered
some memory just under the surface, tantalizingly close.  Blaze frowned, trying
to remember.  Last time she had heard about wolves, the Department of Fish and
Game commissioner was resigning due to claims of mismanagement.

Jack must have seen her
confusion, because his jaw fell open.  “You honestly don’t remember, do you?”

“I remember you breaking my
nose,” Blaze growled.  And, now that she thought about it, somehow molesting
her with his ass.

“Oh for the gods’ sakes,
nothing
is easy with you, is it?”  Shaking his head in obvious disgust, Jack went back
to his food.

A bit taken aback by his obvious
irritation, Blaze hesitated.  “You mean we really didn’t have sex?”

“Nope,” Jack growled, around
another egg.  He had, Blaze noticed, an entire plate of them.  Probably a
couple dozen or so.

“I
knew
it,” Blaze said,
watching him. 

“Knew what?” Jack asked, sounding
not the least bit interested.

“You’ve been sneaking off to hunt
all this time, haven’t you?”

Jack shrugged.  “You didn’t bring
enough food.”

And now that she had, he was
working his way through a month’s supply in a single morning.

“So what
did
happen
yesterday?” Blaze asked cautiously.  She peeked under the covers, found herself
topless, but still wearing pants.

“Well, for one, it wasn’t yesterday,”
Jack said, without enlightening her further.  “How much you remember?”

Blaze scowled.  “You called me a Yeti.”

“Yeah, and?”  The way he said it,
he might as well have said the sky was blue.

Narrowing her eyes, Blaze said,
“And I decided to fire you.”

“Uh-huh,” Jack said, around his
food.  “That before or after you walked off in a tiff and got yourself captured
by werewolves?”

Blaze snorted at that ridiculous
accusation.  “I didn’t get captured by—”

Suddenly she remembered a woman’s
icy blue eyes, boring into her, as several rows of hypodermic teeth sank into
her shoulder. 
“Welcome to the family.”

Blaze shrieked and crawled up the
wall.  “They
bit
me!” she cried, patting her shoulder, trying to find
the wound.  Did that mean she was a werewolf?  A
beast
like the one
sitting beside her bed?

Jack raised an eyebrow, but
didn’t stop his meal.  “You know, I’ve been meaning to tell you…  Nice tits.”

Blaze’s world came to a crashing
halt.  She slapped her hands over her breasts in horror and snapped, “Get me a
shirt.”

Jack paused in chewing, his mouth
half ajar.  With a little frown, he raised an eyebrow at her, jabbed a thumb at
her scattered pile of clothes behind him, said, “Plenty of ‘em right there,” then
went back to masticating his food.

“Get out of my room so I can
dress!” Blaze cried.

“Ain’t nothin’ I haven’t seen
before, honey,” he said, still eating.  Around eggs, he said, “
Multiple
times.”

Seeing the wereverine continue to
stuff food into his face, realizing that arguing with him would have the same
general effect as arguing with a retarded chimpanzee, Blaze slid back under her
covers, glaring at him.

“So,” Jack said, finishing his
last bit of eggs.  “While you were snoozing, I called in a favor upriver. 
Thunderbird’s gonna be here at three, to tour your garden and have dinner.”

Blaze froze, her heart suddenly
pounding at the idea of once again being face-to-face with the electric-eyed
rain-god.  “He’s going to
help
me?” she squeaked.

Jack winced, rubbing the back of
his neck with a callused hand.  “Uh, well, no promises on that one.  You can’t
really buy the sonofabitch.  Only way you can get him to cooperate is to
convince him it will make him prettier.”  He shrugged.  “But he says he’ll come
out for dinner.”  Putting his plate aside, he said, “Oh, and I built you a coop. 
When you gonna send those chickens out here?”

Blaze blinked at him, her brain
having trouble going from having
dinner
with
Thunderbird
to
populating a chicken coop.  “Uh…” she stammered.  “Soon?” 

“Good,” Jack said.  “It’s high
time you got this farm running.  I’m getting tired of cold sandwiches.”

Blaze peered at him, disconcerted
by his new…willingness to please.  “Why are you being so helpful all of a
sudden?”

She thought she saw his eyes
widen before he slid a talon from his finger and started pulling splinters from
the arm of his chair. 
Scratch-snap.  Scratch-snap.
  Blaze had long ago
given up on trying to curb him of that nasty habit, with the understanding that
he would repair it later.  To the arm of the chair, Jack said, “Just figure you
ain’t paid me yet, and it’s high time I started importing some real food around
here.”

Blaze’s mouth fell open.  “You
will
not
be eating my chickens.”

“Then what the hell’s the point?”
Jack cried.

“They’re a rare heritage breed,”
Blaze replied.  “I’m going to be ensuring their survival by raising breeding
stock.  You can’t
eat
them.”

“The goats, then,” Jack said.

“You will
not
be eating my
goats until I’ve established a breeding population,” Blaze growled.  “And once
I do, you
ask
me which ones you can eat.  You don’t, and I’m going to
shove a snub-nose revolver up your nostril and pull the damned trigger.”

“Pigs?” Jack demanded.

“Same thing for the pigs,” Blaze
growled.  “They’re an extremely rare variety.  Only about two hundred breeding
individuals in existence.”

Jack glared at her.  “I just
saved your life, so you owe me.  I’m also not letting you out of my sight,
which means I’m not gonna be hunting anymore.  Get me something to eat.”

It took Blaze a couple minutes to
realize he was utterly serious.

“We don’t have the lumber for the
barn,” Blaze growled.  “And
won’t,
until the river comes up and we can
start barging it in.”

“Oh yeah?” Jack asked, crossing
his arms.  “How much you need?”

Remembering her calculations,
Blaze made a disgusted sound.  “Only like fifty grand worth.”

Jack got up, went digging through
her clothes, and tossed a shirt at her.  “Get dressed.  I’m taking you for a
ride.”

Taking it, Blaze slid further
under the covers and pulled it over her head.  “What about the werewolves?” she
demanded.

Jack snorted.  “Those puppies? 
They’re gonna hide away awhile, licking their wounds.”

“And when they come over here and
massacre my stock?” Blaze demanded.

“They set foot on my territory
and they’re dead.”

“The animals I’m going to be
getting are
critically endangered
.”

Jack gave her an irritated look. 
“I said I took care of the problem.”  He turned and started out her room.  Over
his shoulder, he said, “C’mon.  I got something you’ll probably like to see.”

Blaze, muttering, crawled out of
bed and stared down at her huge, Yeti feet.  He hadn’t even bothered to take
her boots off.  Even then, she could see spatters of gore on the leather.  And,
when she thought about, a good portion of her pants were a huge bloody stain,
with crumbles of dirt still clinging to her—

Blaze flipped back the covers in
horror.

A Yeti-sized brown smear was
covering her only set of nice flannel sheets. 

“There’s
dirt
in my bed!”
she shrieked.

“Next time, I’ll remember to wash
you off, first,” Jack retorted.

Blaze froze at the idea of having
Jack languidly run a wet, soapy rag over her body, his muscular arm bunching as
he…  Clearing her throat quickly, Blaze threw on her gear and went to meet him.
 Jack was already on the four-wheeler, cart attached, wearing his toolbelt.

…and a sword.

Blaze hadn’t seen it in the room
from the way he’d been sitting, facing her, but now that she had a good view of
his broad back, she was pretty sure it was some sort of Hollywood-style black
longsword.

“Nice sword,” she muttered,
coming outside.  “Where’d you get it?  Ebay?”

“Made it,” Jack said.  “Forged
void-titan bone.”

That definitely sounded like
something one of her nerdy dorm-mates would have spouted during one of their
all-day Dungeons and Dragons sessions on the middle of the common room floor. 
“So is that a plus-one or a plus-two sword?” she asked, squinting at it. 
“Actually, no, it kinda looks like a plus-three.  It’s
black
.”

Jack blinked over his shoulder at
the hilt of his sword, then back at her.  “It’s void-titan bone.”

“Yeah, whatever,” Blaze said. 
“Next you’ll be slaying adolescent black dragons and using their scales for
armor.”  She sat down on the cart, peering up at the Sleeping Lady.  When she
considered, she was actually rather pleased with how fast Jack had been putting
it back together. 

On the front of the machine, Jack
leaned around to look at her.  “You sure you don’t wanna sit up here with me?”

And run her hands down his nice,
tight thighs while the machine bounced her against his muscular back?  Yes,
thank you very much, I’ll take two.

“No,” Blaze lied.

“It’s gonna be a rough ride.”

“I can handle it,” Blaze said.

Jack grunted.  “Suit yourself.” 
He gunned the engine, and Blaze found her teeth being rattled out of their
sockets as the four-wheeler turned off down a path she hadn’t noticed before,
hidden behind the big diesel machine-lot.  Then Jack gunned the engine and
suddenly it was all she could do just to hold on as Jack found every branch,
root, and rock and drove them over it at about Mach 15.

By the time he finally shut down
the engine and swung his muscled leg over the back of the machine to dismount,
Blaze’s spine hurt and she was pretty sure she’d cracked a tooth.

“So,” Jack said, gesturing at a
big blue tarp with moss and algae growing on top of it.  It was covering
something approximately the size of an elephant.  “What do you think?”  Now
that Blaze looked, there were clusters of moldy tarps all around them, with
baby birch and cottonwood trees growing up in all the spaces between.

“What is it?” Blaze muttered,
pushing off of the cart.

“Sawmill,” Jack said.  “Owners
bought it a couple years before they left.  Got a couple logging permits for
the state land upriver and spent a couple summers milling.  Were planning on
building cabins.”  He walked over to one of the man-height piles, and sure
enough, when he peeled back several layers of tarps, spilling algae-stained
water onto the ground below, there was a pile of boards several feet high and
several feet deep, neatly stacked with spacers in between.  Beside that one,
there were at least a dozen more, like blue, algae-covered lumps in the woods.

“Uh,” Blaze said, as her brain
underwent an overload and politely shut down upon seeing at least a hundred
thousand dollars of lumber staring her in the face, “That’s…a lot.”

“And we can make more,” Jack
said.  “Just tell me what you want, and where you want it, and I’ll get it
built.  They already had the concrete for the cabin foundations shipped out
here.  They’re under tarps out at the site.  Insulation and roofing will have
to wait for the barge, but we got plenty of tarps.  I can jury-rig something to
keep the structure dry until we get the rest of the materials.”