Alaskan Fire (29 page)

“What I’m
saying
,” Jack
said, flushing, “is don’t insult him, don’t raise your voice around him, and
for Chrissakes, don’t tell him he’s an effeminate prick.”

Blaze thought she could handle
that.  Hell, if she had her way, she would keep her distance and let Jack do
the talking, maybe smile and nod if it was necessary.  She was still trying to
get over the idea that she was about to entertain a
god
.  With
spaghetti
.

A couple hours later, Blaze was
starting to wonder if their guest was actually going to show up when
Thunderbird just
arrived
, a crack of lightning out of a perfectly clear
sky, scorching a good swath of her desiccated front lawn.  He was fashionably
late, dressed in black and red Spandex, a fluffy white towel draped over his wiry
shoulders.  He was also
gorgeous
.  He oozed a startling, almost sexless
beauty, much like the Japanese bishōnen.  Tall and slender, but with a
presence of
power
, his long Athabascan face had a handsome agelessness
to it, and his long ebony hair was braided into a thick rope that trailed up
the steps behind him.

“You know, weasel,” Thunderbird
said, making every hair on her body raise in a wash of static electricity as he
climbed up the stairs of the front porch, glaring at the wereverine.  He pulled
a fuzzy black exercise headband from his brow and tossed the headband onto an
Adirondack chair.   “I was in the middle of my salsa class.  I have
triplets
in that class, weasel. 
Triplets
.  But no, I am
here
, on your
front porch, after flying from
Anchorage
to talk to you about
gardening
.” 
He made a disgusted sound.  “
Tell
me you are serving something other
than spaghetti.”

Blaze blushed, thinking of the
pot of red sauce even then bubbling on the stove.

“Oh for fuck’s sake!” Thunderbird
cried, throwing the towel onto the chair with his headband.  He jabbed a
manicured finger at Jack.  “
Every
time I’ve come to your beck and call
like a trained pet monkey, it’s undercooked spaghetti.  Have you not a single
creative cell in your entire testosterone-saturated body?”  The rain-god gave
Blaze an irritated look, and she saw, in shock, that his eyes were no longer
glowing, but a very pretty shade of blue.

A moment later, Thunderbird
remedied that by yanking two contacts from his eyes and stuffing them into a little
white case he carried in a convenient little fanny-pack on his hip.  “All
right,” he said, waving a disgusted arm at the backyard.  “By all means. 
Show
me this garden of yours, weasel.”

“It’s
her
garden,” Jack
growled, crossing his arms over his chest.  “And stop being an asshole.”

Pot.  Kettle. 
Black
? 
Blaze stared at Jack, wondering if he’d popped something important in the
forest, hefting all those big boards. 

“You should find it refreshing
that I’m dropping to your level,” Thunderbird said, peeling off thin cloth
gloves and dropping them onto the pile upon the towel.  “Half the time, I’m not
sure you even understand civilized conversation.”

Then Jack said, “Generally, I
don’t give a shit, but there’s a lady present.”

Blaze’s mouth fell open.  Just
what
were
the symptoms of an aneurysm, anyway?

But instead of laughing and
dissolving into a little raincloud and floating away—or jolting Jack into
oblivion—Thunderbird twisted to look up at Blaze.  “You’re taller than me,” he
said.  Like he found it annoying.

Blaze, who had fully intended to
stay
far
back and let Jack plead their case for them, suddenly found
herself stammering.  “Uh, yes, well, I—”

“Just show me the garden, feed me
your slop, and let me go back to my triplets,” Thunderbird said.  “You have…” 
He yawned and checked his fancy gold watch.  “One hour.”  Then he crossed his
wiry arms and peered up at her, one brow raised impatiently.

“Well, go
on
, tootz,” Jack
said, when Blaze could only stare down at Thunderbird, completely at a loss as
to what to do or say.

“Uhhhh,” Blaze said, “can you
please make it rain?”

She thought she saw the
rain-god’s face darken.  Thunderbird sniffed, glanced at the sky, then out at
the parched brown lawn, then at his watch.  “Fifty-nine minutes.”

Blaze, realizing she’d probably
just committed a horrible faux pas, just
asking
the god of rain to wet
her crops, babbled her apologies.  “Sorry, Mr., uh, Thunderbird,” she managed. 
“I didn’t mean to offend, sir.  I thought Jack was gonna do the talking.  I
really don’t know how to do this properly, and I…”  She hesitated, mouth open,
realizing she was about to ask someone what kind of sacrifices he preferred to
be made in his name.  Yeah, following Yeti Isn’t My Style and Werewolf
Abduction, the Return To Anchorage column was definitely gaining the lead.

Thunderbird just peered up at her
impassively, that weird tingle-before-a-lightning-strike lifting the hairs off
of her skin.  “You’re just wasting your own time, Fourthlander.” 

Fourth…Lander?  Was that like
‘Highlander?’  Lots of people thought Blaze looked Scottish, what with the
freckles and fiery red hair.  Her parents’ surname only heightened the effect. 
Blaze swallowed, glanced at Jack, who was scowling at Thunderbird, then said,
“My garden’s out back.”

“By all means.”  Thunderbird made
a dismissive gesture towards the back yard, boredom showing in his electric
eyes.

Seeing the rain-god’s disdain, Blaze
swallowed hard.  “Okay, uh, this way.”  She led the demigod off of her porch,
rubbing her arms at the weird way every hair in its follicle was standing on
end.  Thunderbird yanked his dance shoes off, tossed them on the chair, picked
up his ten-foot-long braid, wrapped it carefully around a shoulder, and followed,
barefoot, across the lawn.  Behind them, Jack followed at a distance.

Rounding the west side of the
Sleeping Lady, the sad state of Blaze’s test-garden was readily apparent.  Dust
lay in thick swaths, painstakingly pulled into neat mounds by Blaze’s constant
effort.  Well-marked signs indicated each type of heritage crop. 
None
of it was growing.  The little specks of green that had stubbornly worked their
way out of the ground as a result of her tediously-applied buckets of
lake-water looked dried and shriveled, like salad-sprouts left out overnight. 
Seeing that, Blaze wondered how long she had been asleep.

“So this is my garden,” she said,
walking Thunderbird over to it, as Jack continued across the yard to turn his
attention to the lumber pile, leaving her alone with the rain god.  “Not very
impressive right now, for obvious reasons.”

Thunderbird grunted and picked
grass bits from the end of his braid.

“I’m trying to grow heritage
crops,” Blaze offered.  “Really rare stuff.  The kinds that still taste good,
that haven’t been bred to produce wads and wads of cardboard with little or no
nutrient value.  Stuff our
grandfathers
used to grow.”  She hoped that
Thunderbird, being what he was, might sympathize with goals to resurrect dying
agricultural legacies.

“I don’t have a grandfather,”
Thunderbird said.  He surveyed the dusty rows with something between boredom
and apathy.  “It looks horrible.”

“It hasn’t rained at
all
,”
Blaze blurted.  She gestured at the painstakingly-tended quarter-acre of dusty
rows.  “Alaska’s the perfect climate for a lot of this stuff, but it’s rained
everywhere
but
here.  The neighbors talk about getting flooded, down on
the river, ‘cause of all the rain they’re getting north of us, and the farms in
the Mat-Su valley are having the best year they’ve ever seen, but we haven’t
seen a drop.”

“Of course not,” Thunderbird
said.  “The weasel insulted me.”

Blaze’s mouth fell open.

“But,” Thunderbird said, “I’m
interested to see what kind of platitudes he has in store for me.  The petulant
little shit actually thinks I’m going to let him con me into letting it rain
around him.  Ever again.  I’ve heard drought does interesting things to one’s
pantry, and moon-kissed are notorious for their appetites.”

Blaze stared at him, her heart
pounding at the thought of watching her entire thirty acres dry up to dust. 
“Please let it rain again.”

Thunderbird sighed and glanced
again at his watch.  “Fifty-four minutes.”  His eyes fell to Jack, who was a
dozen yards away, arranging the lumber they’d hauled out of the woods.  “I find
it particularly underhanded that he tried to get a
woman
to do his dirty
work for him.  I think I’ll maybe add a few tornadoes, for that.”

Blaze swallowed hard, realizing
he was utterly serious.  “So, uh, I guess you’re already aware.  The weather’s
not been cooperating with me.”

“Weather doesn’t
cooperate
,”
Thunderbird said, swiveling on her with a sudden flash of irritation in his
glowing white-blue eyes.  Waving a disgusted hand at the quarter-acre of dusty
rows, he said, “Too many people on my continent think that weather is just
another thing to be controlled.  Cloud-seeding, hurricane tracking, preventing
tornadoes, weather
predictions
.  The
arrogance
.  Weather is a
force of Nature.  You work
around
it.”

 “I tried,” Blaze growled, face
heating at the rain-god’s irritated stare.  “I carried up buckets of water from
the lake.  Like a hundred gallons a day.  It just dries up.  Evaporates.”

“You obviously weren’t trying
hard enough,” Thunderbird said.  And that, Blaze realized, was what he thought
on the matter.  As if to heighten the effect, Thunderbird pulled out a pink nail
file from his convenient little fanny-pouch and started running it across his
nails, then held them up and blew the dust off of them.  Returning his file to
his fanny-pack, he said, “Are we done here?  I’m hungry.”

She felt something twitch in her
brain as she looked down at the Spandex-clad rain-god.  “How hard would it be
for you to make it rain here?” she demanded. 

Thunderbird sighed, deeply, and
started to turn towards Jack.  Raising his voice to the wereverine, he called, “Feed
me that slop so that I may be on my—”

Blaze grabbed the man by the
shoulder, twisting him back around to face her, angry, now.  “How
hard
? 
We talking a few hours?  A few minutes?  A
thought
?  What?”

Thunderbird pulled himself out of
her grip with a look that made it obvious he thought she might give him some
sort of grow-tits-and-drop-nuts disease.  “I am a
god
.”

Which meant with a
thought
. 
Blaze’s eyes narrowed.  “But you’re making me beg.  For nothing.  Because you
don’t intend to let it rain.  Because he called you a fag.”

Thunderbird sighed again. 
“Jack!” he called, turning.  “I will eat your disgusting food and then fly back
to—”

“No,” Blaze snapped, grabbing him
and dragging him back around again, “you
won’t
.”

For a long moment, the very air
around them seemed to gain the scent of ozone, and Blaze’s hair started to
stand on end, floating around her face in a little halo as Thunderbird once
more removed her hand and they scowled at each other.  Very slowly, Thunderbird
said, “Excuse me?”  His voice sounded like the crackle of electricity, and she
thought she saw the blue flash of current sizzling in the back of his throat.

“It’s my land, my lodge, and
my
food.”  Blaze jabbed a finger into his breastbone.  “You showed up, let me make
an ass out of myself begging for something you never intended to give me, and
then called my food ‘disgusting slop.’”  She raised her arm and pointed towards
Anchorage.  “You can get the fuck off my property.  Right now.”

Judging by the way Thunderbird’s
eyes lit up and the tingling she started feeling in her feet, Blaze honestly
thought she was about to be electrocuted out of her shoes.  Jack, too, seemed
to think this, because he dropped the boards he was carrying and started
running towards them, yelling, “Hey now!  No need for that, Brad, goddamn it.”

But Thunderbird never took his
eyes off of Blaze.  “What kind of food?”

“Spaghetti, you dick,” Blaze
snapped.  “We thought you
liked
it.”

“I do,” Thunderbird growled. 
“What kind are you
growing
?”

Blaze frowned at him, caught a
little off-guard.  “Anything I can.”

Thunderbird sniffed.  For a long
moment, he simply continued to scowl up at her.  Eventually, he reached up,
scratched his nose with a slender finger, then took a deep breath, sighed, and
put his hands on his hips.  Turning back to face the garden, he said, “I like
peas.  Green Arrow, two rows of fifteen feet each, with the vines held up by
five-foot fencing, full sun, a good walkway, and a bucket nearby.”

Blaze stared at him, absolutely
shocked by his arrogance.  “I don’t give a fuck
what
you—”

“Sounds great, Braddy-ol’-Boy,”
Jack cried, jogging up and shoving Blaze aside.  “We’ll get that up and running
for you ASAP.”

Blaze’s mouth fell open and she
stared at Jack.  “You have
got
to be shittin—”

Her words ended with a jab of
Jack’s elbow.  “Remember Zeus,” she thought she heard Jack mutter to her.

Thunderbird sniffed and rubbed
his nose with his manicured hand again.  He cocked his head up at Blaze with a
sideways look, then walked out into the garden, stepping
on
her
desiccated rows, and stopped in the nicest, most central part of the garden. 
He glanced up at the sun, then at the rows around him.  “And I want it to be
right here.”  He then proceeded to mark off a row with one bare toe, then paced
off fifteen feet and marked another spot, dislodging what few zucchini plants Blaze
had gotten to grow.