Alaskan Fire (65 page)

Once he was gone, Kimber sounded
amused when she said, “Aqrab could have defended himself.”  The way she said
it, the thought that Jack could have hurt her friend was akin to the idea that
a teddy bear could rip off a grizzly’s legs.

“I was really worried about the drywall,”
Blaze confessed.  “It’s been a rough year, and I’m getting
really
sick
of drywall.”

Kimber peered up at her face for
long minutes before tentatively saying, “You truthfully intend to let us
stay?”  The withheld hope in her voice was almost painful.

“I’d be very
grateful
if
you stayed,” Blaze corrected.  “For as long as you and your…friend…decide you
want to make this place your home,” Blaze said, hesitating over the djinni’s
exact wording.  She hated calling someone a slave, and somehow couldn’t see
this tiny woman perpetuating such a thing.  Jack must have simply
misunderstood.

“My slave will do as he is told,”
Kimber said, her voice suddenly harsh.  “I suspect that too much time has
passed since he was reminded of that fact, and he has forgotten his place.”

Well, I guess that answers
that
question. 
Blaze winced, suddenly not even wanting to be in the same room
as the tiny woman, with the dangerous glint in her brown eyes.  “Oh.”  Licking
her lips nervously, she said, “Uh, well, you’re both welcome, regardless.”

Kimber glanced around the lodge,
examining everything she could see from where they stood in the kitchen.  Then,
turning back to Blaze, she lowered her voice.  “Is he gone, then?” she
whispered.

Instinctively, Blaze knew the
woman was talking about the djinni.  “Uh, I felt him…leave…when you were
talking with Jack.”

“Good,” Kimber whimpered.

…
whimpered
?

Blaze watched the sheet of calm
masking the woman’s face suddenly break, revealing a roiling wash of agony
underneath.  “Thank you, flamekin.  Your generosity…”  Her voice cracked.  “I
was about to give up, and let ‘Aqrab go home.”

By ‘go home,’ Blaze got the gut
feeling that Kimber wasn’t talking about chartering a plane back to Africa. 
She was pretty sure it was something else, something deeper that bound the man
to this Realm.

The despair in the woman’s soft
brown eyes held the answer Blaze sought.

She was going to kill herself,
she thought, horrified.

Then, as Blaze was still trying
to comprehend that, the tiny woman stepped forward and wrapped her delicate
arms around Blaze’s man-sized midsection.  Before Blaze had really figured out
how to deal with
that
, the woman started to sob as she clung to her,
weeping in long, heart-wrenching wails against Blaze’s shirt.

There’s more here than meets
the eye,
Blaze thought, returning the tiny woman’s embrace tentatively. 
She’d never had someone cry in her arms before, much less someone who could rip
her arms off if she patted her wrong.

“Thank you so much,” Kimber
sobbed, as Blaze held her awkwardly.  “I had nowhere else to go.”

Blaze returned the woman’s hug
tighter, then, deciding right there that she and Kimber had much more in common
than she first assumed.  “You have a home here,” she assured her.  “Make
yourselves comfortable.  We have extra food, as you noticed.  All the fruit,
dairy, and meat you can eat, whatever strikes your fancy.  And if there’s
something else you’d like that we don’t have here, you say the word, I’ll have
it shipped in.”

The werewolf gave a timid laugh. 
Backing out of Blaze’s embrace, she wiped her eyes and sniffled.  Her voice
soft and shy, she said, “I’m rather fond of dates and pomegranates.  It’s been
too long since I’ve tasted home.”

Blaze winced inwardly, but didn’t
let the little werewolf see it.  Mangoes were bad enough, but
pomegranates
? 
She might as well post a huge neon sign on the lodge that screamed, SOMETHING
WEIRD IS GOING ON HERE, but she kept the thought to herself.  “I’ll buy the
seeds off eBay when I’m in town,” she assured the woman.  Cocking her head at
Kimber pointedly, she said, “Are you going to be all right?”

Kimber gave her a sideways look
and bit her lip.  She took a deep breath, and for a moment, it looked as if she
would explain.  Then, softly, she said, “It is nothing you can change,
flamekin.  By giving us a home, you have helped enough.”  Then the mask of calm
was back in place, the only indication that the werewolf had just been sobbing
in Blaze’s arms being the redness to her eyes and the wetness against her
lashes.

Distressed, wishing she could
help the woman, yet knowing she couldn’t pry, Blaze decided to change the
subject.  “Would you like a tour?  I can show you around.”

“I’m still hungry,” Kimber
admitted almost fearfully.  Almost as if she expected to be slapped for the
audacity of not being full.

Blaze stared at the woman. 
Amber
was starving her,
she realized.  “Okay,” she quickly said, gesturing out the
second-story window at the farmstead beyond.  “We’ve got a little bit of
everything out there.  Take your pick.  Yak, turkey, rabbit, more goat, a pig,
chicken, waterfowl…”

Kimber flinched at ‘a pig’ and
tentatively cleared her throat.  “Perhaps you will show me where you grew these
cherries?”  She paused, looking up at Blaze, for all the world like a nervous
teenager in a friend’s mother’s house.  “If you did grow them, that is…”

“I grew them,” Blaze said
quickly.  “Come on.  They’re in the greenhouse.”  She twisted towards the
stairs, a bit too fast, and Kimber suddenly flinched away from her, like a
whipped animal.

That was…weird…
Blaze
thought, making a mental note to move more slowly around the woman as she led
her out to the greenhouse.

It took Blaze the next hour of
observation, watching the woman’s timid reactions as she guided her through her
farm, before she understood. 
This woman is
terrified
of me,
she
thought, a bit startled.  Despite the façade of total calm, and perfect collectedness,
the woman was absolutely
terrified
.  And it wasn’t just Blaze that
scared her, she realized, looking out at the yard.  The way the woman nervously
eyed the yaks, the way she jerked when a chicken flapped its wings, and the way
she had let out a breath when the djinni had gone…  She was afraid of
everything
.

And when Jack came out of the
shop wiping his greasy hands on a rag and started assisting Blaze with the tour
of the property, the wereverine must have also recognized it, too, despite the
immediate icy calm that doused the woman’s features upon his arrival.  As Blaze
watched, he actually started curbing his crass behavior and kept his gestures
slow and muted as he explained how the Sleeping Lady worked.

And, for once, through it all,
the wereverine had the good sense to keep his mouth shut.

After watching the wereverine
keep a tight rein on himself for the following two days, in fact, Blaze was
reasonably sure she could trust him alone with the werewolf and her companion. 
With two days of preparation and some sort of illusory spell that Kimber cast
on her at Jack’s request, Jack had reluctantly agreed to let Blaze go alone
while he kept the ‘backward idiot shits in line,’ and Blaze re-scheduled her
flight out with Bruce Rogers. 

In between buying groceries—mostly
things like toilet paper, flour, sugar, salt, and other necessities—taking her
guiding class with the Alaska Department of Fish and Game, buying feed for
those animals that needed the extra boost, depositing money and making her
first loan payment, three nights of hotel rooms, and paying Bruce for the
flight back, Blaze had exactly seventeen dollars left to her name by the time
she got back to the Sleeping Lady, and no idea how she was going to buy the
fuel, groceries, and other supplies necessary to begin the fishing season.

Some Business major I am,
she thought unhappily. 
Less than a year and I’ve already bankrupted myself.

Then, a logical side of her brain
noted,
Well, you did have help with that.

Had it not been for the brawls in
her living-room, she was pretty sure she could have scraped by with enough cash
from her savings, her last two paychecks from her part-time apprentice
accountant internship with the State of Alaska, her loan, and her PFD to get
her well into next winter, even without a single guest for the lodge.

Wincing at the ‘brawls in the
living-room’ thought, Blaze began to have a very bad feeling that she was going
to be making a few more trips to Home Depot as Bruce Rogers dropped them on the
deep black surface of Lake Ebony and began taxiing to shore.  She wouldn’t have
left Kimber and the wereverine alone if she could have helped it, but her loan
had
to be paid, or she might as well have just grabbed the deed to the Sleeping
Lady and kissed it goodbye.  She just hoped that hiring Kimber and ‘Aqrab
instead of some bright-eyed young kid in Anchorage hadn’t been a horrible, drywall-crushing
mistake.

Jack was waiting for her on the
beach, hip-waders pulled up to his thighs, as Bruce cut the engine and the
plane drifted to shore.  The wereverine grabbed the plane by the float, then held
it steady as Bruce and Blaze climbed from the cockpit of the Cessna 206.

As soon as Blaze was out of the
plane, Jack grabbed her, swept her off of the float, and carried her up the
bank in his arms, his hard body holding her tight as he grinned down at her. 
“Missed ya, sweetie,” he said, kissing her long and hard, in full view of God
and everyone, and Blaze clung to him, enjoying the feel of his warmth, his
love, his heartbeat.  Then, setting Blaze breathlessly on dry land, Jack turned
and waded back out to Bruce, who was giving the wereverine a look like he’d
grown antlers.

Reddening, Jack said, “You need
another dunkin’, asshole?  Your mama never teach you not to stare?”

Bruce Rogers quickly started
unpacking the plane.  Between the three of them, they got the Cessna 206
unloaded and packed onto the trailer cart in under ten minutes.

“So, uh,” Bruce Rogers called,
half-inside his airplane, giving Blaze a nervous chuckle as they carried their
last loads up the beach to the 4-wheeler.  “Watch out for werewolves, eh?”

Both Blaze and Jack swiveled on
him.  “Why’s that?” they both demanded, at once.

Bruce gave an uneasy laugh and
gestured at the woods.  “You haven’t heard?  That’s what all the kids on the
internet are calling those wolves you guys killed.  Got a whole kind of
pop-cult goin on, tryin’ ta raise money to stay at your place.  Say they’re
gonna go hunt werewolves.  It’s kinda funny, but not really.  After all the
damage those things did…”  He just shook his head.  “You just be careful,
okay?”

Blaze and Jack glanced at each
other, then Jack grunted and started securing the trailer load with bungees.

“Thanks, Bruce,” Blaze said,
meaning it.  She dropped her armful of paper towels on the trailer, then waited
as Bruce Rogers got situated in the cockpit and Jack got the Cessna turned
around and pointed in the right direction.  Then she and Jack stood on the
beach, watching Bruce taxi the plane across the lake and out Ebony Creek.

“I know what you’re thinking,”
Blaze said, as the plane disappeared around the bend, “And I think it’s a
horrible idea.”

“Aw, come
on
,” Jack
chuckled.  “I would have
so
much fun making those panty-waisted
city-slicker asswipes run screaming through the woods.”

“They might bring silver bullets,”
Blaze noted.

Jack considered.  “I’ll scope ‘em
out once they get here.  They look like something other than a geeky college
kid with his father’s peashooter, I’ll take it easy.”

Blaze frowned at him.  “You
almost make it sound like you
want
to be hunted through the woods.”

“Sugar,” Jack said, looking up at
her with an infernal grin, “Obviously you got some misconceptions about who’d
be hunting who.”  The way he said it, he’d already been planning it in his
mind.

Blaze dropped her face into her
hands and dragged her fingers down her cheekbones.  “You got some calls
already, didn’t you?”

“They’re coming out this
Thursday,” Jack said, teeth glinting in mischievousness.  “Twelve of the little
fucks.  Six days.  Already put down a deposit.”  He grinned out at the woods. 
“I’m gonna give ‘em a week they’ll never forget.”  Then he shrugged.  “If they
stay that long.”  His grin was demonic when he said, “Prolly won’t last the
night.”

“You will
not
be eating my
guests!” Blaze cried.

“Oh no,” Jack said, laughing. 
“That’d spoil the fun.”

Groaning, fighting the urge to
tell him to cancel their arrangements, her business mind began tabulating
numbers.  Curious, despite herself, she said, “How much of a deposit?”

“Hmm,” Jack said.  “Lessee…  They
didn’t want guides, so I cut ‘em a break.  Knocked a couple hundred off the
daily price.  Think it ended up being close to ten grand.  They wanted to write
a check, but I told ‘em to wire it to your bank, considerin it was such short
notice.”  He gave her a suspicious look.  “Why?  You ain’t gonna go all
wet-blanket on me and try to refund ‘em, are you?”

There’s ten thousand dollars
in my bank account…
  Thinking about that, Blaze grunted.  “Well, as long as
they’re not shooting silver bullets and you’re not hurting anyone, I guess I
can’t complain about another ten grand.”

“Good,” Jack said, a slow smile
spreading across his lips, showing long, ivory fang.  “‘Cause Kimber and I’m
gonna have a blast.  We already talked about it.  Won’t let the silly bastards
go home ‘til they all peed themselves.”

Well, they must be getting
along okay, if Kimber has agreed to it,
Blaze thought.  Then, wincing, she
realized that, while they might be getting along
now
, it was quite
possible they hadn’t gotten along for a couple
minutes
, yesterday
afternoon.  She said a mental prayer for the preservation of her décor, then
said, “You know, scaring the crap outta a bunch of teenagers isn’t gonna do
much for keeping your cover, once they get photographs.”