Alaskan Fire (48 page)

Blaze narrowed her eyes at the
wereverine.  “I do
not
need rescuing.”

He raised a single, manly eyebrow
at her.

Disgusted, Blaze stood up and
stormed towards the door.  Before she yanked it open, however, she hesitated. 
Over her shoulder at the wereverine, she asked, tentatively, “They’re, uh, all
dead?”

“Place is all yours again,
princess,” the wereverine said, gesturing grandly at the door.

“Good,” Blaze said.  “You stay
here.  I’m gonna go call the cops.”

Propped against the 4-wheeler,
the wereverine’s pretty green eyes went wide and he said, “
What
?” just
in time for the shop door to cut off the rest of what he was going to say.

Blaze took out the new cell-phone
she had purchased while the wereverine had stayed stubbornly cooped up in the
hotel room, and dialed 9-1-1.  Behind her, she heard the tell-tale scraping as
the wereverine crawled to the door, and she yanked it shut, then set the latch.

On the other side, she heard the
wereverine grunt, then strain, then slam his fist against the door.  “They
can’t know about us!” he shouted.  “You’ll start an all-out extermination!”

“Don’t worry about it,” Blaze
said, waiting for the line to connect.

“
911, what is your emergency?
”
a polite female voice on the other end asked.

Looking out at the multi-colored carcasses
strewn about the yard, Blaze said, “Uh, yes, I’d like to report a wolf attack.”

* * *

Blaze and Jack watched from the
basement window of the Sleeping Lady as Fish and Game and the Alaska State
Troopers loaded the last of the werewolf carcasses into the ADF&G helicopter
that had landed in the enormous crimson bloodstain that was her backyard. 

“Lucky to be alive.  Pfft.”  Jack
snorted and popped the cap off of his beer with a thumbnail.  “I should’ve
stuffed my fist down that little prick’s throat.”

The ‘little prick,’ in this
instance, had been a six-foot, rather muscular wildlife officer who had taken
their statements while his comrades collected bodies, made a few on-the-spot
autopsies, and then quickly started packing whole wolves—viscera and all—into
body-bags the moment that they found a human hand in the first animal’s
stomach.

Outside, the racket was intense. 
Multiple news crews had been flying in helicopters overhead ever since Jack had
ever-so-politely told the first camera crew to get off of his property at the
wrong end of a twelve-gauge.

Never mind that it isn’t even
his property,
Blaze sighed.

The troopers, of course, seeing
the sad state of the interior of the lodge, the gashes raked into the metal on
top of the shop roof, and the gore spattered for six hundred feet in any
direction, had given the cranky little curmudgeon a bit of a break.  The shotgun
was even then somewhere in the back of the troopers’ chopper, on loan, the
‘little prick’ had assured them both, until they could finish cleaning up and be
on their way.

The ‘cleanup,’ unfortunately,
took the entire day.  It was dark again by the time the officers finished
taking pictures and collecting bodies, and it wasn’t until seven-thirty before
an officer knocked courteously on the back door and carefully leaned the
shotgun inside against the steps before jogging back to the chopper.

By the time the troopers had all
climbed aboard and the helicopter began to lift off, Blaze had gone a day and a
half in clothes that still had the faint white lines of salt-crystals where her
sweat had dried on them.  Thus, the first thing Blaze did once the police and
news crews finally departed was go out to the shop, light a fire in the
furnace, and start the water circulating to the hot water tank.

When she came back inside, Jack
was still staring out at the blood-darkened snow of the backyard, his empty
beer sitting on the window-sill beside him.  “What bothers me,” he growled,
without looking at her, “Is you just went and told the whole world there’s
werewolves in Alaska.  I mean flat out
told
them they were all
werewolves.”

Blaze snorted.  “And I was an
exhausted and frightened female that was hyperventilating and talking about how
they’d tried to eat me.  Telling them I thought they were
werewolves, oh my
god, werewolves!!
was going to make that as the least likely solution in
their minds, because they’re all big, strong, rational men who are going to
immediately pat the terrified woman on the head and go find the
real
answer to what happened here.”

Jack peered at her.  “That was
pretty convincing, you know.” 

“What was?” Blaze asked,
confused.

“The whole babbling and
hyperventilating thing,” he said, with the start of an evil grin.  “Makes a man
wonder if you’ve had practice.”

Blaze narrowed her eyes. 
Sniffing, she said, “You don’t really think anyone’s gonna see this and scream
‘werewolf!’ do you?  Hell, I overheard one of the biologists talking.  They
think it’s a missing link.  Something ancient that survived the Ice Age,
precursors to both wolves and foxes.”

Jack turned to give her a flat
green stare.  “You’re kidding.”

“It’s what they were saying,”
Blaze said, shrugging.  “Slitted eyes and all.  Freaked ‘em all out a little at
first, until someone mentioned it could’ve been a forgotten branch of the
lupine family tree, and then they all got real excited, kind of like a bunch of
nerdy kids with a science project.”

Jack stared at her a minute, then
turned back to the window, grunting.

“Modern man just isn’t ready to
see magic,” Blaze said.  “Even when it’s biting them in the ass.”

“Still,” Jack growled.  “It’s
gonna be all over the news.”

Blaze shrugged again.  “It was
gonna be all over the news one way or another.  At least this way, we’re not
going to be implicated as mass murderers, considering that we were the only
survivors.”

Jack’s face twisted.  “I can
think of someone else who survived who’d I’d sorta wished she hadn’t.”

Blaze’s heart began hammering,
realizing there was really only one person who had survived that she could
think of. 
Me?
a girly, insecure part of her thought, horrified and
anguished. 
Does he really think I’m that much of a dead weight that he—

“That Jennie Mae Hunderson from
Ebony Creek Lodge was on that first news helicopter.  They dropped her off at
her place and did an interview.  Said she and Russ and Ralphie all took a
family vacation around the end of August for a vacation in San Diego.  Went to
the zoo and everything.”

Blaze was caught between joy that
the Hundersons had survived and irritation at the wereverine’s lack of
charity.  “That’s not very nice,” she muttered.

“She’s a loudmouth gossip,” Jack
growled, bristling.  “Has been riding my ass since she got here thirty years
ago to go find a girl, and when I finally told her to bugger off a couple years
back, she started telling the neighbors I was gay.”

Blaze winced, remembering her
conversation with Jennie Mae.

Jack scowled at her.  “She told
you, didn’t she?”

“What,” Blaze asked innocently,
“That you were gay?  That’s nothing to be ashamed of.”

“Th-That I’m…” Jack sputtered.  “
…not
gay
!”

“You know,” Blaze said, “It’s
becoming a perfectly acceptable thing nowadays, to be gay.  Guys like you are
coming out of the closet all the time.”

A rabid growl started rumbling in
the base of Jack’s chest and she saw hair sprout against the shirt on his back.

Feigning disinterest, Blaze
yawned and crossed the basement to the downstairs bathroom, utterly grateful
that the commotion had finally settled and the police had departed.  “I need a
shower.  Then I’ll want my massage.”  She grabbed a towel from the closet—one
of the only things that the werewolves
hadn’t
ransacked—and ducked
inside the bathroom, trying not to think about Jack’s big hands playing up and
down her spine, kneading out the tension in her thighs and calves, rubbing the
knots out of her shoulders…

After all, she doubted he’d
really do it.  She was pretty sure it had just been something he’d said to keep
her from dumping his ass in the woods and leaving him there to insult the
passing magpies.  And maybe, if he got lucky, a moose.

Thus, when Blaze stepped out of
the bathroom wrapped in a towel, she was rather shocked to find the wereverine seated
in his wheelchair in all the glory that God had given him upon his birth.

And then some.

Through some tantalizing
moon-magic phenomenon, he had rebuilt most of the muscle he’d lost, even in his
legs.  All that upper body workout, though, had left his torso, shoulders, and
arms a rippling mass of sexy Adonis manmeat that completely took her breath
away.

“You said naked,” he muttered, at
her shocked look.  “That was just you foolin’ around, then?”  He plucked at a
frayed peeling edge of vinyl on his chair, refusing to look at her.

“Naked works,” Blaze managed, and
it came out as a strangled sound in her throat. 

Hearing it, Jack yanked his head up
to peer at her suspiciously.  “It does, does it?”

“Sure,” Blaze said, swallowing. 
To think that those big hands were about to work their way over her body while
the rest of him moved and glistened nearby…  “Uh, where do you want me?”

Jack seemed to contemplate that a
bit longer than necessary, studying her face for long moments before saying,
“It’d honestly be easier for me to do this on the floor.”

Blaze winced, glancing at the
shards of splintered wood, broken glass, and chunks of wet drywall that made up
the floor of the basement.  Tomorrow, the place was going to get a
top-to-bottom inspection and an overhaul.  Today, she had just planned to curl
up on one of the unshredded mattresses with her Desert Eagle and try to sleep.

“Okay, uh, lemme go find a
broom,” Blaze said.

She found half a broom—the
important half, thankfully—embedded in the wall of the upstairs kitchen, and
once she had finished sweeping aside a blanket-sized spot on the floor beside
one of the unharmed downstairs beds, threw down several layers of blankets as
padding.  Then Blaze helped Jack out of his chair and laid herself face-down on
the floor in front of him.

The first thing the wereverine
did was yank her towel from around her waist and toss it up on the bed.  Blaze
gasped, skin prickling at the sudden cold, but fought the impulse to sit up and
reach for it.  She completely forgot her protests, however, when the wereverine
started kneading his fingers into her back.  Within minutes, she was so limp
she was drooling, head tilted at an angle on the blankets, staring at the ruins
of her lodge in a dreamy half-haze.

“You know,” she slurred, “I’m
finished.”

“How’s that?” the wereverine
asked, running his hands along her shoulders, turning them to mush.  “Someone
take your Himalayan ancestors to a Chinese wildlife preserve?  They need you to
hire a lawyer to get them out?”

Blaze felt something twitch in
her neck, but it was quickly massaged back into place by expert hands.  She
sucked up the drool that had been about to hit the blankets.

“You were saying something about
being finished,” Jack said, shifting over her, using his big hands on the small
of her back, now.  She felt his warm, naked torso moving against her ribs with
the rhythm of his massage.

“Blaze?”

“Uhhhnng,” she managed.

Laughing, he pushed himself away
from her and dropped lengthwise beside her, so that he was leaning on an elbow,
looking down at her.  “You were saying?”

Blaze’s eyes caught on the
jumbled mess on the floor around them and sighed.  “Yeah.  I took out a two
hundred and fifty thousand dollar loan to get this place on its feet.”  She
gave a despairing laugh.  “Now it’s soggy, the inside’s tore to shit, glass
everywhere, and I was counting on being able to use some of that cash for
advertising for the fishing season next year.  I’m finished.  Kaput.  Done. 
Sell it all off and send me home, sir, ‘cause that’s all she wrote.”  She
snorted.  “Hell, maybe I can go find an apartment in Anchorage with a
greenhouse and sell mangoes to the local farmer’s market.”  She sighed,
twisting her head to look up into the wereverine’s green eyes.  “Of course, no
one would believe I grew ‘em myself.”

The wereverine seemed to consider
that, then glanced around them and grunted.  “I can help you fix it up this
winter.”

Blaze laughed.  “Have you
seen
how expensive drywall is, nowadays?”  When Jack just gave her a blank look, she
said, “It’s like nine dollars a
sheet
.”  She flopped a limp arm to
include the lodge in general.  “And
look
at this place.  There isn’t a
piece of wall
anywhere
that isn’t punched to shit.  Ten thousand square
foot lodge, that’s like,” she paused to do the math, then decided she was too
relaxed to do the math, “…at
least
a million dollars.”

Jack winced.  “That’s a lot.”

“Uh huh,” Blaze said, nodding up
at him.  “Then we start looking at the cost to replace the windows, the floors,
the doors that got ripped out of the walls…” Blaze snorted.  “I’d be lucky if I
could sell this place for a couple hundred grand, after this.  ‘Bout the only
thing worth anything is the stuff in the shop, the heavy machinery, the barn,
and the land we’re sitting on.  And I already burned all my loan money on
sprinkler systems, barge trips, and farm animals.  I’m screwed.”

“Hmmm,” Jack said.  “So you need
a million dollars?”

“Oh, at least,” Blaze said.  “Ten
million would make things easier, though.”  She yawned into her blanket. 
“Shit, I could sleep right here.”  She lifted her head just enough to peer at
him pointedly.  “You may
continue
, by the way.”

“Oh,” Jack said, jerking as if
he’d been lost in thought.  “Sure thing, tootz.”  He propped himself back
upright and put his big hands back on her spine, and Blaze lost her train of
thought.  In fact, she was pretty sure she started drooling again immediately,
considering the way her cheek kind of squished up toward her eye socket in
bliss when he started kneading the backs of her thighs.

She must have fallen asleep
sometime after that, because Jack woke her with a low, throaty rumble of, “I do
have one concern about what happened the other night, princess.”

Blaze, delirious, raked her brain
for what could have happened between them, and came up empty.  “You mean inside
the barn?” she mumbled, peering up at him bleary-eyed.  Sometime during the
night, he had pulled a cover over them both, and he was seated beside her,
propped up against the bed with the Desert Eagle in his lap.

He frowned at her a moment, then
shook his head.  “The wolves.  I don’t think we got Amber.”

That made Blaze sit up in a
hurry.  “You
don’t
?  Why the hell didn’t you say something?!”

“Didn’t want to spook you.” 

Blaze’s mouth fell open.  “Didn’t
want to
spook
me?  What
did
you want?  Me to die completely
oblivious, like the blonde ditzes in a horror show?”  She grabbed a fistful of bad-bleach-job-orange
hair and held it out to him, shaking it.  “You know, people like me don’t last
long, when there’s serial killers on the loose.  We tend to run screaming from
the building and get stabbed by the guy with the machete standing outside the
back door.”  She cursed.  “And you let me take a
shower
.  You
ass
!” 
She started frantically reaching for her clothes.