Alaskan Fire (58 page)

Sitting there, life bustling all around
her, Blaze had to hand it to Jack.  The wereverine knew how to make a woman
feel at home.

Then she sucked in a startled
breath as a sudden, horrible pain streaked up her arm, like every tendon, bone,
and ligament was being ripped apart, pulverizing her flesh.  Out in the yard,
Jack howled, “You
goddamn piece of shit
!”  She heard something heavy and
metal clang against something solid.

Blaze sighed.  Her mango tree was
overflowing
, and she needed to grab a pail and start picking some for
the pigs before they started falling from the tree and cluttering up the
walkway.  She got up to find a bucket.

Jack yanked the greenhouse door
open and leaned inside, one side of him covered in blood.  “I just ran my arm
over with the dozer and I was wondering if you remember where I put my spare
jack.”  Then he frowned at the chicken beside her.  “Hey now.  Don’t you dare
get sweet on the damn birds.  They’re taking over.  We’re eating him.  His name
is Thanksgiving.  That’s final.”

Oh shit. 
Blaze had
promised him she wouldn’t fall in love with the chickens, because chickens were
food
.  Desperate to divert the conversation, lest Jack take it upon
himself to walk inside, grab the adorable little rooster by the neck and
politely decapitate it for her, she said, “That
hurt
, you know.”  She
rubbed her arm, which was still throbbing in tune with Jack’s wounds.  “Could
you
please
be a bit more careful?”  She thought perhaps making Jack feel
guilty for hurting her would aid in helping her keep the chicken.  She
liked
the Jersey Giants.  They were such sweeties. 

Jack gave her a flat look. 
“Thanksgiving.”

Blaze bristled, dropping her
hand.  “They’re mine.  I decide if they stay or go.”

Jack rolled his eyes.  “Careful,
tootz.  I might just go ahead and change it to Easter.”

“I don’t know where your damn
jack is,” Blaze growled.  “Have you checked the septic tank?”

Blaze felt a wash of amusement
before Jack grunted and left.  Thanks to the total honesty of the link, Blaze
had been shocked to discover, among other things, that the kinky little
wereverine actually
enjoyed
her sass.

Blaze spent a few more minutes
sitting in the sun inside the greenhouse, considering.  Jack had completely
blown her away by suggesting she guide for the lodge.  It had come completely
out of left field, and it kind of disarmed her whole theory that he was only
out to get her barefoot and pregnant, spending the rest of her days cooking
casseroles in the kitchen and making his bed.

Blaze glanced at the chicken.  “I
think I’ll call you Snowball.”

“I heard that!” Jack roared, from
across the yard.  She winced and peered through the triple-layered glass at the
fuzzy shape puttering around the shop.  Just how good
was
his hearing,
anyway?!

Then a somewhat comforting
thought occurred to her.  If Jack could hear her clearly from inside the
sealed, climate-controlled greenhouse, from all the way across the backyard,
with poultry, goats, and pigs creating a cacophony in the background, maybe he
really had a chance of catching an intruder in time to stop another full-scale
invasion.

That, and by Jack’s own words, he
could ‘smell a rat fart at a hundred miles.’  She noticed him stopping often
throughout each day, nose to the wind, a little frown of concentration on his
face as he tested the breeze.

Maybe he really can protect
this place,
Blaze thought, reluctantly.  She certainly had to admit that he
seemed much more ‘on guard’ than he had been before Amber’s attack.  Maybe he’d
just needed a wakeup call.

With that thought, Blaze realized
she had gone outside the lodge without her gun for the first time in months, and
she had a little moment of panic when she noticed the now-empty spot on her
hip.  She was halfway out of her seat to go retrieve it when she hesitated.

Out back, a yak that had wandered
close to the barn grunted as it fed on the fresh grass sprouting up in the
melted spots around the greenhouse.  A little further away, a goat kid bleated
and bounded playfully to its mother.  A duck quacked in the distance, followed
by the ringing trumpet of a goose.  In the main yard, a Black Spanish turkey
gobbled and spread his marvelous, iridescent tail to the sun, strutting on the
melting snow. 

Slowly, Blaze sat back down.  The
mid-March sun was filtering through the glass, warming the mango leaves over
her head.  Everything around her practically
buzzed
with life.  If she
watched the pink flower-buds on the cherry tree too long, she could almost
believe that she saw them opening before her eyes.

I could live with this,
she realized, feeling the flourishing energy around her.  It felt…right. 
Fulfilling, somehow.

Now, if only she didn’t have the
sinking dread that somebody, somewhere, was going to try to take it from her.

Or take
her
from
it
. 
Jack hadn’t been incredibly clear on that part.  He seemed to suggest that a
phoenix would make a better prize than the feather alone, but how did one
control a winged ball of sunfire if it decided it wanted to go on a walk? 
Blaze decided she really needed to have another chat with Jack about that, and
soon.

With the gentle ebb and flow of
life around her, however, and Breakup hitting full-swing within the next week
or two, thoroughly blocking off the stresses of the outside world for a couple
weeks as the rivers thawed and the ice flowed out to the ocean, Blaze found it
easier to relax. 

In one fell swoop, Jack had
alleviated her fears.  Instead of offering to buy her a washing machine that
didn’t chew up the laundry or a commercial-grade dishwasher so she didn’t have
to wash every dish by hand, Jack had offered to set her up with a boat that
started with the turn of a key, cook, do dishes,
and
clean the guest
bedrooms, all while she was off making money.

Blaze thought of the details
involved with running men—men who were, according to Jennie Mae, raucous, crude,
and utterly chauvinistic—up and down the river for long days of salmon fishing
and her heart fluttered, both with nerves and excitement.  Though she’d never
really made many friends, Blaze had the gift of gab.  She could keep an entire
room of people enthralled for hours as she told stories of things she had seen
or heard.  It was a talent she’d learned from her dad, who was constantly
schmoozing the Alaskan elite, and a talent that had served her well on several
occasions, like scholarship interviews and conferences with the dean.

And, she would imagine, such a
talent would come in handy when stuck in a sixteen-foot aluminum boat with four
to six men for fourteen hours on end.

She just hoped that the total
enthrallment she’d gotten from her audience was, in fact, due to her
storytelling skills, and not the fact she was six-foot-four and had hair that
looked like she’d been accosted by a mad friseur. 

“You gonna sit around all day or
you gonna come help me change the track on
your
bulldozer?!” Jack called
from just outside the shop.  “I need another set of hands, and this fucker
already bit me once.”

Sighing, Blaze got up off the
bench.  Snowball the Thanksgiving rooster looked up at her curiously, then went
back to sleep.  Idly, Blaze wondered if she could sell some of the nicer
roosters as breeding stock, instead of eating them all.  Seemed such a shame to
waste good heritage genetics.

Unfortunately, selling roosters
wasn’t very feasible a hundred miles from the nearest road.  For the rarer
breeds, she might be able to get seventy-five dollars for a particularly nice
specimen.  With transportation being restricted to Bush plane, riverboat, or
snow-machine, it would cost that much just to ship it anywhere.

“You wait much longer and I might
just put a fifty-cal through the crankcase and call it good!” Jack hollered. 

“I’m coming!” Blaze snapped. 
Then, under her breath, “Impatient old curmudgeon.”

“Heard that!”

She yanked the greenhouse door
open, got a quick jolt as the forty-two degree outside air hit her skin, then
went to see what the wereverine wanted.

* * *

The next morning, Blaze woke to
the sound of the wereverine puttering nearby.  She got up, dragged a shirt over
her head, then went hunting for a pair of pants.  As she dressed, her eyes
caught on the Desert Eagle she had left beside her bed, still in its holster.  Jack
hadn’t touched it, despite getting up before she did—of all the stubborn,
asshole things he’d done, he still hadn’t crossed that line, and for that,
Blaze hesitated.  She picked it up, felt its heavy weight in her hands.  Not
really reassuring.  Just…heavy.

She was still standing there,
staring down at the gun in her hands, when Jack opened the door and looked
inside.  His eyes immediately fell to the Desert Eagle.  “Felt you wake up,” he
said.  “You want hot water for a shower?”

“I can wait,” Blaze said.  As the
days got warmer, they’d been letting the fire die overnight and shutting off
the pump from the furnace, and it probably would have taken him a full
forty-five minutes just to heat up enough water for a shower.  Hot water, in
the Bush, was worth its weight in gold.

And yet he still asked.  Every
morning.

Slowly, Blaze set the gun back on
the bed.  Leaving it on the pillow, she turned her back to it and looked at
him.  “You want breakfast?”

Eyes on the gun on the bed, Jack
said, “Wouldn’t mind.”

“All right,” Blaze said.  “Any
preference?”

“Whatever you’re making.”

Which, with as many poultry as
they had on the farm, meant eggs.  Maybe bacon, once the slabs that Jack had
showed her how to hang and smoke were done curing.  Leaving the Desert Eagle on
the bed behind her, Blaze ducked past Jack, who gave her an odd look as she
passed.

Blaze filled a non-stick soup-pot
with eggs, leftover turkey, onions—Jack routinely insisted he was not a
vegetarian, but he didn’t mind copious amounts of onion, peppers, or other
spicy additives—cheese, salt, and black pepper, then mixed it up and left it to
simmer.  She supposed it was a
good
thing that they were getting as many
eggs as they were, because they used up about six dozen every morning for
breakfast:  Three for her, sixty-nine for the wereverine.

“Smells good,” Jack said, sitting
at the bar with his daily writing ‘homework.’  Pencil and paper in hand, he was
watching her like a martin trying to piece together a hunter’s trap.

“Thanks,” Blaze said, stirring
the pot.  The eggs never had the standard clumpiness she was used to with
scrambled eggs cooked in smaller portions, but Jack didn’t seem to mind.  It
was always satisfying to see how quickly the wereverine wolfed them down.

She went to the fridge, grabbed a
mango, some cherries, an apple, and some oranges for fruit salad.  As she set
them down on a cutting board to start slicing them into a bowl, Jack continued
to watch her like he expected her at any minute to suddenly twist the knife
around in her grip and launch it at him, blade-first.

“Bad dreams?” Jack finally asked.

Blaze smiled, remembering the
long, tantalizing dream of being in the wereverine’s arms.  “No.  Pretty good,
actually.”

He squinted at her, but said
nothing else.  Reluctantly, he went to work scrawling down the words she had
given him the night before.

By the time the eggs were done, Blaze
had finished the fruit salad, made coffee and set out dishes.  She served
Jack’s eggs in a huge ceramic mixing bowl—the only dish in the house big enough
to hold it—and then sat down beside him at the bar with her own meager pile of
eggs and fruit.  She ate thoughtfully for several minutes watching the sunrise
on the back lawn while listening to the not-so-pretty sounds of the wereverine initiating
the digestion process.  As usual, he didn’t bother to use the spoon she always
pointedly laid out for him, diving in with his hands and face, instead.

When she was done with her meal,
Blaze got up to put her dishes in the sink and retrieved a wet rag for the
wereverine.

“Thanks,” Jack said, taking it to
wipe grisly bits of egg from his hands and mouth.  In the same span it had
taken Blaze to eat three, Jack had wiped out an entire
henhouse
worth of
eggs,
and
had time to lick the inside of the bowl, afterwards.  Still
not so sure she wanted to know the mechanics of that, Blaze said, “I’ve gotta
go feed chickens.”  She hesitated, feeling the emptiness at her hip and the
nagging fear of werewolves.  Tentatively, she met his eyes.  “You, uh…”  She
bit her lip, feeling as if her heart was sliding out, within striking-range. 
“…gonna be out there?” she finished softly.

Jack seemed to understand,
because his face melted until he hid it by picking egg off of the table.  “Of
course,” he said gruffly.  “Always am, aren’t I?”

And, Blaze realized as she went
about all of her daily chores, Jack
did
stay close.  Always within
sight.  He even went so far as to drag a tarp out onto the backyard and drop a
snow-machine on top of it so he could fiddle with the engine nearby while she
tended her greenhouse, all the while nonchalantly pretending as if he had
planned to do his work there on the cold, slushy ground anyway, instead of in
the warmth of the shop.

She bit her lip.  “Thanks,” she
whispered.

The rush of joy and pride singing
down the connection was completely belied by the masculine grunt that followed.

That afternoon, Blaze selected
four geese—she’d been around the wereverine long enough to judge his appetites
such that, if he had had a rather easy day, like today, he needed to eat just
under four large birds, or a ham off a pig, or a half a goat, or a quarter-haunch
of a yak just to maintain his body weight.  All in all, about a thirty to forty
pounds.  If he’d been stressed or working hard, that doubled or tripled,
depending on the activity.  Birds picked, she got the wereverine to help her butcher
them.

Plucking a bird, Blaze had very
quickly realized upon her first chicken-butchering venture, was something that almost
required
two people, just to keep from going insane with boredom.  And
Jack, with his big hands and firm grip, was good at plucking.  He settled down
beside her on a fold-out chair and together they spent the next two hours
dumping feathers and down from her extra American Buff ganders into a
five-gallon-bucket for use in pillows or blankets later.  Every few minutes, he
would lift his nose to the wind, often pausing in telling her some enthralling
story about his past to sniff the air with a look of concentration before
picking up where he’d left off.

If there was one thing that Blaze
marveled at about the wereverine, it was that he had no qualms with helping to
cultivate his own food.  From the random times he’d filled in for her at
feeding time, to slaughtering, to final preparation, he was always there, if
she needed the help, always ready to lend a hand.

“You wanna eat it, you better
damn well be ready to kill it,” Jack said, when she commented.  He pointed a
bloody, feather-covered finger toward his mouth and grinned.  “And honey, much
as I like mangoes, these babies ain’t made for chewin’ veggies.”

“Yeah,” Blaze said, shaking her
head as she dropped another handful of white and khaki-colored fluff into the
bucket.  “I think too many people have kind of lost touch with that part of
it.  I mean, I hear plenty of people tell me they love to eat beef, chicken,
pork…but the moment I mention butchering my own, they’re like, ‘Oh no, I could
never
do that.’”

“Hypocrites,” Jack said, as his
eyes darkened.  “Part of where this country went wrong.”

Blaze almost opened her mouth to
tell him that’s what
everyone
said whenever they didn’t agree with the
general populace, then flinched.  Jack had
been
there.  He’d been
part
of it, from the beginning.  He would
know.

“Can burn the rest off with my
torch,” Jack said, dropping the final gander on the picnic table beside her.  Then,
without preamble, he went into the shop, grabbed the little portable propane
torch they used for starting fires in the furnace, and brought it back to the
table.  Blaze watched his body move like a lithe cat, for the first time truly
appreciating the simplicity to his way of life.  The wereverine truly was a
relic of the past, and as such, gave her a window into an existence before
machines, before factories and agricultural conglomerates and massive slaughterhouses. 
An existence that, until now, she could only dream about.

As Blaze finished up her last
goose, Jack burned away what was left of the feather fluff from the other three,
then went inside to get a tray.  Piling the four birds on top of it, he carried
the heavy lot upstairs while she held the door open for him.

There was an awkward moment when Jack
hesitated in the kitchen, like he wasn’t quite sure who was going to be making
that night’s meal, but then he seemed to relax as Blaze started cooking one of
her grandmother’s favorite Christmas recipes—roast goose with apple stuffing.  The
wereverine hovered nearby almost nervously for a few minutes, then he wandered
off into the living-room, and she heard a vacuum-cleaner pick up nearby.

Blaze had to give it to the
wereverine—he was
clean
.  Each time Blaze cooked, she realized, thinking
back, he had done the dishes.  And, to his credit, he’d even picked up that
bottlecap he’d popped across the room.  It had been gone when she’d woken up,
no doubt swept up in yet another of his random cleaning sprees.

As had been routine since the
wereverine had taken up residence, Blaze fired up both ovens to cook the geese,
then went downstairs and started on finances while they roasted.  A few minutes
after she had settled in with the books, Jack unobtrusively dragged an engine
chunk from the snowmachine he’d disassembled inside and set it down on the far
end of her table, making the table jump under her paperwork with its weight. 
Then, as if it were nothing at all out of the ordinary to disassemble an engine
inside the basement, he quietly started taking it apart as she worked.

Overall, finances were not great,
but she was pretty sure that, with the guests already scheduled for the summer,
between bed tax, federal taxes, food, gas, diesel, and replacement parts, she
could struggle through the monthly bank payments until the next year.  The most
difficult part of the year, for the Sleeping Lady, was going to be early spring
and late fall, in those months between summer and winter where there would be
no snow-machiners and no fishermen to help keep the business afloat.  Those
payments, she knew, she would have to save up from the fatter times in the
summer, and it certainly wasn’t going to help that taxes would be due smack in
the middle of the leanest time of the year.

“How’s it lookin, Boss?” Jack
asked as he picked at his project.

Blaze squinted at the grease he
was smearing on the table.  “Better than expected, I guess.  Are you going to
wipe that up?”

He looked up with a single raised
eyebrow, then went back to work.

She peered at him.  “Wouldn’t
that be easier in the shop?”

“Probably,” he said.  He was
wearing, she realized, both of her Desert Eagles and two of his long,
light-eating black swords.  A third sword leaned against the wall beside his
chair, a curved blue scimitar with ripples in the metal that looked like
water-splashes. 
Damascus steel,
she thought, still stunned by that
fact. 
And he made it himself…

“Someday,” Jack said, squinting
at a tiny piece that popped off into his hand, “you’ll have to help me take a
look at my books.  I could really use the extra set of eyes.  See where I
stand, ya know?”  He looked up at her and she felt his
terrifying
vulnerability before he quickly hid it by grabbing the rag and wiping down the
tiny piece in his hand. 

Watching him, Blaze was stunned. 
She’d never realized how deeply humiliating the illiteracy had been for him,
and how much of his pride had been built around it, and how desperate he was to
appear intelligent to her, regardless.  It had just taken everything he
had
to ask for her help.

In that moment, Blaze felt a
glowing swell of gratitude towards the wereverine.  “I’d be happy to,” she said
softly.  “And thanks.”

“Thanks?”  Jack frowned up at her
and she felt a wave of confusion, almost dizzying in its intensity.

Blaze gestured at the swords he
carried.

To her amazement, the wereverine
blushed.  “Uh, yeah,” he said, ducking his head, happiness once more rolling
off of him like a warm blanket.  “No problem.”  He went back to tinkering with
his part, discussion over.  She was pretty sure that, had she brought up the
second Desert Eagle at this point, he would have simply told her to get bent,
so Blaze politely forgot to mention it.

After a couple more hours, when the
tantalizing smell of roast goose began wafting down the stairs, Blaze packed up
the accounting books and headed to the kitchen to finish the rest of dinner. 
Jack relocated with her, picking an out-of-the way spot along the bar to
continue working on his project.  Blaze winced at the heavy
clunk
it
made on the Formica of the bar, but distracted herself with chopping potatoes
and carrots to drop into the bubbling gravy accumulating around the base of the
geese.

“You should cook more,” Jack said,
as the savory scent of goose and herb-roasted vegetables began wafting through
the lodge.  “Smells heavenly.”

Blaze felt a little swell of
pride, grateful beyond words.  Cooking was one of those things that she loved
to do, but had always felt this nagging fear of enjoying too fully.  Her mother
had trained her that cooking was not worth the time of a modern, independent
woman, so she was still adjusting to the idea that she could do something she
enjoyed
and have Jack appreciate it for what it was, not take it to mean she wanted to
get pregnant and hand him all of her bank accounts and credit cards while she
got to work making babies.  “During the slow months, if we don’t have guests, I
might just do that.”