Alaskan Fire (33 page)

Jack shrugged.  “Yeah, well, the
Fish and Game guys don’t want it made public, considering the stink going
around right now about predator control.  They’re trying to blame it on the
heavy snows last winter.”

“Wow,” Blaze whispered.  “That
can’t be good…”  She tried to calculate the amount of food that forty
werewolves were eating, and found her brain sputtering to a stop.  “
Moose
? 
Is that where the wolves are getting their food?”

Jack took another swig of his
root beer.  “Moose, bear, fox, rabbit…  Anything they can get their hands on,
I’m sure.”

“Oh my God,” Blaze whispered. 
“There won’t be anything left.”

“Hey,” Jack said, shrugging. 
“There’s a reason why we try to keep our numbers down, honey.  The wolves are
the ones with the annoying habit of starting populations the ecosystems can’t
support.  The rest of us try to keep it to one or two every twenty square miles,
which usually does us pretty good.  Times are getting tougher, though, so
lately we’ve had to squish closer and closer together, and frankly, yeah, I’ve
been thinning down the population some.  I’ve been hoping you’ll help with
that.”

“How?” Blaze asked, turning to
him.

He reddened.  “Your feather. 
Leave it in the ground long enough, the ley-lines will carry its magic outward
and stuff will start to regenerate.”

“Yeah,” Blaze said, “But
forty
werewolves?  What can recover from that?  I don’t care how much magic is in the
soil…they’re probably going through a moose or two a week.”

“Try more like one or two a day,”
Jack said.  At her stunned look, he shrugged.  “Wolves eat more than
wereverines.  They got more mass.”

When she just stared at him, he
shrugged.  “Way I see it, eventually the wolves are gonna eat themselves out of
a home, and then they’ll have to move to greener pastures and won’t be my
damned problem anymore.”  He finished his soda and crushed the can.  “Just
gotta hang in there ‘til they do.”

Blaze bit her lip.  She was
looking at her ability to attract and retain hunting clients this fall and next
spring dwindling to nothing.

Seemingly reading her mind, Jack
patted her on the back and said, “Just worry about getting your farm up and
running and those fishing clients in here next summer.  I’m thinking the wolves
will probably move north this winter, probably go up the Yentna and challenge a
dragon for its territory up in the Brooks Range.  Amber’s the kind to do
something that stupid, and when she does, good riddance.”

Disturbed, Blaze looked out the
window at the goats that were even then munching their way through the cranberry
bushes.  “What will keep them from coming out here and eating everything we
just flew out?”

Jack gave her an irritated look. 
“I told you.  I took care of it.”

Blaze squinted at him.  “Took
care of it…
how
?”

He gave her a long look.  “I have
a dagger,” he said finally.

“Oh yeah?” Blaze said.  “That one
of titan bone?”

“Titan bone and dread unicorn. 
The evil kind.  A unicorn that went bad.  Necromancers.  The horn will destroy
any living flesh it comes into contact with.  Kind of like a really bad
spider-bite, but faster.”

Blaze frowned, remembering the
snippets of conversation she had overheard from her friends Dungeons and
Dragons parties in her living-room.  “I thought necromancers raised the dead.”

Jack grimaced.  “It does that,
too.”

Blaze stared at him so long her
mouth got dry.  Finally, clearing her throat, swallowing several times, she
squeaked, “You have something that will raise the
dead
?”

“I don’t
use
it for that,”
Jack cried.  “Even a
fool
knows not to do something that stupid.  I only
use it when I have to.  It will take down just about anything, and as much as I
love a good, old-fashioned fistfight, if you’re gonna go toe-to-toe with the
big boys, sometimes you gotta play rough.”

Blaze suddenly didn’t feel good. 
“Where is it?”

Jack stiffened.  “I’m not telling
you that.”

She raised her brows.  “Why?  You
think I’d use it on you?”

“No,” Jack growled.  But he
didn’t say anything else.

“What if I need to use it?” Blaze
demanded.

“You won’t,” Jack snapped.

“What if you’re not here and I
have to defend myself?”

“I’ll be here.”

Now he was just making her mad. 
“You said you wanted to show me your weapons collection.”

“Not
that
part of my
collection,” Jack growled.  His hackles were pushing through his skin, raising
the shirt on his back.

But Blaze wasn’t satisfied.  “So
why do you think that this dagger is so scary that Amber’s gonna keep her
distance?”

“She got a taste of what it can
do,” Jack said.

Blaze gestured at his hip.  “I
don’t see you carrying it.”

“I don’t
need
to,” Jack
snarled, slamming his fist into the hewn-log table, making the massive thing
jiggle precariously.  “Now drop it, before you piss me off.”

Irritated, Blaze got up.  “I’ve
gotta go check the barn.”

“You do that,” Jack growled. 
“I’ll clean up my mess.”  He grabbed the uneaten half of the goat by the spine
and turned toward the fridge.

Blaze’s mouth fell open when he
opened the refrigerator door.  “You can’t mean to put that—”

He stuffed the carcass into the
center rack, still dripping juices, then slammed the door.

Staring at the refrigerator,
Blaze managed, “I’m going outside.”

“You already said as much,” Jack
said, dumping both plates of leftovers onto the table and tossing them into the
sink.  Then, grabbing a bowl from the central island beside the stove, he slid
the load of bones and salad remains in a greasy smear across the table and
dropped them into its basin.  He shoved it at her.  “Put this out there.  The
chickens and the pigs will go apeshit.”

Eyes on the grease-smear that was
even then soaking into the wood, Blaze managed, “Are you going to clean that
up?” 

“I did clean it up,” Jack
retorted.  He gestured at the bowl.  “See?”

Someday, she would have to bring
him up-to-date with twenty-first-century food sanitation codes.  If she started
that argument right now, though, Blaze was pretty sure that the grease
dribbling out of the fridge and down onto the floor would still be there in the
morning and she’d only have a new window for her troubles, where Jack had
hurled a half-eaten goat carcass through her wall.  She could see it now. 
“You
don’t want it in your fridge?  Then
fine
!  Let’s put it back
outside
!”
 

Blaze took the bowl down the
stairs and deposited its contents in the pig trough that Jack had made.  The
piglets, it turned out, didn’t really have the chewing capacity to work their
way through the bones, but they nibbled the meat and gristle off of them and
spread them around the yard.

Sighing, Blaze started picking up
the scattered bones, dropping them back into the bowl to be put into the
compost heap later, when she saw motion in the trees over the fence.  She stood
up to look.

The four-foot man with the
hundreds of tiny braids was standing beside a birch tree, watching her, his
black hair gleaming iridescent purple-green in the sun.  As soon as their eyes
met, he disappeared.

“Jack!” Blaze screamed, dropping
the bowl.  She turned and bolted for the lodge.

The wereverine was through the
back door and into the yard before she even made it over the fence.  “What?” he
demanded, coming to a running halt in front of her.

“I saw him,” Blaze babbled,
pointing to the birch tree where she had seen the fey.  “He was standing over
there, watching me.”

Jack lifted his nose and sniffed
the air.  “Yeah,” he growled, bristling.  He shoved her behind him, facing the
woods.  “It’s him.”

“Please don’t leave!” Blaze
cried, grabbing him by a shoulder that was even then growing in fur and bulk. 
“Just stay here, okay?”

“Little bastard needs his
ass
kicked,” Jack snarled at the forest.  He looked half-tempted to take off after
the fey, anyway.

“Please?” Blaze asked.  She hated
the way it almost sounded as if she were pleading.

Jack turned to look at her, a
single eyebrow going up.  “Well, I guess if you’re gonna beg…”  He looked
genuinely surprised.

Blaze blushed against the shame
of feeling so helpless without him.  She looked away.

“Hey, honey,” Jack muttered, his
face melting, “Come here.”  He grabbed her by the waist and pulled her into his
arms, giving her the choice of falling against his perfectly muscled chest or
having him snap her spine.  She stumbled forward, her mother’s nagging voice in
the back of her mind lecturing her about independent women and how she should
be kicking him in the gonads right now, but her relief of being
held
overwhelming
the impulse.  She just swallowed and let herself feel the wereverine’s body
around her, taking carnal comfort in the fact he seemed perfectly willing to
shred someone alive for getting too close.

Her mother, she decided, had
never been stranded in the Alaskan Bush, with only a crabby little wereverine
between her and a multitude of horrifying creatures who grew fangs and swiped
at her with glowing silver swords.

Jack seemed to sense her inner
struggle.  Looking up into her eyes, Jack said, “You’re not a warrior, all
right?  There’s no shame in that.  World needs all types.  Hell, I wouldn’t
want
you to fight, not when you’ve got me to take care of this sort of thing.  I’m a
warrior, through and through.  I’ll fill that role for you.  I’ve done it
before, and I’ll do it again.” 

His sudden gentleness, so soon
after her panic, tried to bring on a wave of tears.  Fighting them viciously
down, because she would
not
swoon into a coma in his perfectly masculine
arms, Blaze bit her lip and lifted her chin with that surge of Independent
Woman she’d learned from her mother.  “I want to learn to use the sword.  If I
could use a sword, I wouldn’t have to have you save me all the time.”

Jack stroked her hair, holding
her.  “Okay, honey.  I’ll teach you.  Hell, you can play around with a sword
all you want, but when it comes to stuff like this, let me fight your battles
for you, okay?  I don’t want to see you get hurt, and you aren’t built to take
the sort of punishment I am.  I was born and bred for this stuff.  I can hold
my own against a fey.  Even the lords, if I’ve got the right equipment.  You…  You’ve
got another purpose in life.”

Remembering his demand for
marriage, Blaze pulled away and narrowed her eyes down at him.  “What, like
cooking food and raising babies?”

“Yeah,” Jack said.  “Like cooking
food and raising—”  Then he frowned at her scowl.  “What?”

“So let me get this straight,”
Blaze said, her indignance rising.  “You want me to play the part of the
housewife, all barefoot and pregnant, while you do the macho thing and defend
me from the big bad world, is that it?”

“Oh Zeus and Apollo,” Jack
moaned, rolling his eyes.  “I just want to keep you safe.”

“So that I can pump out kids for
you,” Blaze accused.  She jabbed a finger at her bicep.  “So should I get this
taken out, then?  Maybe start early?  Since I won’t even be able to defend
myself?  Better reproduce as much as possible
now
, because who knows
when my genetics are gonna be completely wiped off the map because I’m a
helpless woman whose only purpose in life is to make your babies.”

Jack made a disgusted sound and
let go of her.  “I said I’d teach you to use a sword, not have sex with you.”

Blaze’s mouth fell open at how
easily he said that.  Fury bubbling up from within, she snarled, “And then you
went on to say, ‘I’m gonna teach you to use the sword, Blaze, but don’t ever
try to use it when it really counts.  Just go have fun with make-believe while
I go fight your real battles for you.’”

He glared at her.  “I didn’t say
that.”

“Yes,” Blaze said, “You
did
.”

Bristling, Jack turned and
started walking back to the house.  Over his shoulder, he said, “I’ll be
inside, when you come to your senses.”

“I think I’ll sleep in the barn!”
Blaze shouted back.

“You
do
that,” Jack
returned.  “Maybe your friend will come back, give you a chance to show him how
macho you are!”  Jack stomped up the steps and slammed the door behind him,
making the window-panes rattle.

Blaze glared at the back door
until the sounds of animals in the yard once more brought her attention to the
gate she had left open in her blind panic.  She shooed the animals back inside,
then shut it behind her and went to collect the bowl of bones.

When she stood up, the tiny man
was there again, watching her.  Closer this time, squatting under a spruce.

“Fuck
off
!” Blaze
screamed, waving her arm in the general direction of the forest, scattering
chickens and goats.

Then, without waiting to see what
he did, she turned her back on him and went to the gate.

Jack was already on the porch,
giving the woods a concerned look.  “He come back?” he asked, as she walked up
to him.  Blaze brushed past him, set the bowl of bones inside the house, then
started walking towards one of her 4-wheelers.

“Where are you going?” Jack
demanded.

“Going to make a phone call,”
Blaze said.  She got on a 4-wheeler and started it.

“Now hold on a second,” Jack
cried, coming to stand in front of the machine.  “What’s going on?  I said I’d
teach you the sword.  What form you want?  I’m a master in dozens.  I’ve
studied in Japan, China, Egypt, Turkey, Germany, Spain, Italy…  You looking for
fencing or just wanna hack at stuff with something big?  Katana or rapier? 
Shield and longsword or a couple of cutlasses?  Kenjutsu or San Cai Jian?  You
wanna use a dao or a gladius?  A claymore or a falchion?  What?”  He looked
desperate, and a bit scared.