Alaskan Fire (66 page)

“Let ‘em.”  Jack grinned wider. 
“I’ll be sure to break their cameras.”

And she was pretty sure he didn’t
mean that in the metaphoric sense.

Groaning, Blaze also realized it
would probably be the highlight of some kid’s life, to be chased around the
woods by a wereverine.

That, and Jack was just
way
too excited to rain on his parade.

“Fine,” she said, jabbing a finger
at his chest, feeling her finger hit home on his breastbone as if it were her
own.  “But no blood, and no letting them get pictures.”

“Darlin’,” Jack said, looking up
at her lazily, “Just who do you think you’re dealin’ with, here?”  Face still
smeared with that wolfish grin, Jack reached up, tangled his big fingers in her
hair, and dragged her head down for another heart-pounding kiss.  Then,
releasing her, he climbed aboard the four-wheeler and started the engine.  “Now
let’s go.  King Kong’s got steaks cookin.”

Blaze winced, deciding she was
definitely
going to have to work on his people skills.

It took Bruce Rogers three trips
with his 206 to bring all twelve kids out that Thursday.  Against her better
judgment, instead of calling to cancel at the last minute, Blaze found herself
standing on the beach of Lake Ebony with Jack, Kimber, and ‘Aqrab, waiting to
greet the first load of guests as Bruce’s plane taxied toward them from the
middle of the lake. 

“No blood, no pictures,” Blaze
said, through her smile.  She waved at the plane, as it approached.

“Honey,” Jack said, also through
his teeth, “Me an’ the wolf got this shit
covered
.  It’ll be like icing
a cake.”

“Icing a cake is hard.”

“Hell,” Jack said, as if he
hadn’t heard her, “We even hired that Nicolai guy downriver to help us out.”

“The
tiger
?” Blaze cried,
turning to face him, her jaw open, now.

Jack continued to smile and wave
at the plane.  “Figured it’s ‘bout time he started earning all those yaks.”

“They
might
have mistaken
a wereverine for a were
wolf
,” Blaze said, “but I’m pretty sure a
tiger’s
gonna stand out.”

“‘Course he is,” Jack said, still
waving.  “You want the little turds to come back, don’tcha?” 

“I suppose,” Blaze said,
reluctantly.  What she
really
wanted, at this point, was not to have a
huge liability lawsuit on her hands.  She glanced down at the waivers in her
hands, trying to avoid the sick building of dread in her gut.

“It’ll be fine, sweetie,” Jack
insisted, as the plane loomed closer.  “You remember everything?”

They’d rehearsed every moment of
the kids’ stay for several days, and Blaze had the nagging suspicion that all
four of them were going to jail by the end of it.  Jack’s plan was horrifyingly
simple—turn the Sleeping Lady into the centerpiece of a week-long scare-fest
that left the kids with nightmares.  Starting with kidnapping one of the
students—hopefully a pretty blonde—and dragging her off to the ‘lair’ that Jack
and Kimber had dug out off the mill trail.  Oh, and the phones going down, the
power going out, and all the keys pulled from the 4-wheeler ignitions.

This could go so bad so
quickly,
Blaze thought, trying to decide how, exactly, she was going to
tell the judge she had conspired to just
temporarily
kidnap a pretty
young girl and haul her off into the woods.

And then Bruce cut the engine and
Jack was wading out to catch the airplane’s float, keeping the big Cessna from
running aground

Please
let them not be professional
serial killers
, Blaze thought, seeing the heads watching her from behind
the dim windows of the airplane’s cab.  Bruce piled out, followed immediately by
a striking young blonde woman in hunter’s camouflage.

Yep,
Blaze thought,
wincing inside,
she’s the one.

Then Jack was walking forward,
smiling, holding out his hand and welcoming the girl to the Sleeping Lady
Lodge, and oh how he
really
hoped she enjoyed her stay…

“Dude, that is some
freakin’
awesome
chainmail!” one of the kids cried.  “Are those
real swords
?” 
Blaze actually watched the kid give Jack a plus three against werewolves in his
little mental stat-sheet.

We’re going to Hell for this
,
she thought, fighting down a pang of guilt as all the geeks crowded around
Jack, taking pictures, cooing about his ‘cool gear.’

What was worse, the girl in
camouflage looked to be one of the more serious of the contestants of Jack’s
‘festivities.’  Whereas all the others carried pepper-spray and cameras, she
carried a
gun
.

Yep,
Blaze thought again,
watching her sling the .375 H&H rifle over her shoulder with professional
ease,
she’s gonna spend a week in a hole.

“I’m Sarah Evans,” the blonde
said, stepping up to give Blaze a firm handshake.  “I hear you got wolf
problems.”

The woman couldn’t have been more
than five-foot-three, but Blaze got the general idea that she was
just
the right sort of Type-A personality to sue their asses completely into the
ground when Jack finally allowed Blaze and the assorted heroes clamoring off of
the plane in various colors of green to ‘rescue’ her from his ‘den.’

We are sooooo dead,
Blaze
thought, forcing a smile down at the woman.  “We haven’t had many wolves around
here since the attack,” Blaze said.  “It’s mostly been real quiet.”

Sarah’s eyes sharpened in that
I’ve Been To Law School look that a lot of Blaze’s father’s friends had gotten,
whenever they heard something that disagreed with them.  “
Mostly
?”

Oh
yeah.  They were
screwed.  Clearing her throat, Blaze slipped the stack of papers out from under
her arm and said, “Look, before y’all go any further, we’re gonna have to get
you guys to sign a release of liability.  This really isn’t our thing here at
the Sleeping Lady, and I would’ve cancelled had my
mechanic
not already
allowed you to put down deposits.”  She started passing out the bleached white
sheets to the knot of kids forming on the beach.  “We’re not a hunting lodge,
and these woods are
dangerous
, as you well know, and we really don’t
want this to come back and bite us in the ass.”

“It won’t,” Sarah said, but she signed
anyway.  She even went so far as to collect the papers from her friends and
hand them back to Blaze.  “So,” she said, in an all-business, no-nonsense
attitude, “Where would you say is the likeliest spot to catch them, if you were
gonna go do it?”

Blaze’s eyes flickered to Jack,
where he was carting luggage off of the plane and dumping it on the 4-wheeler
trailer.  “Uh, well, I got some ideas, but I wanna stress, they’re
really
dangerous.”  Then, inwardly biting her lip and praying for forgiveness, she
lowered her voice and said, “Don’t tell anyone, but I don’t really think they’re
wolves
.”

While that seemed to make the
knot of youngsters’ eyes light up, Sarah just gave a curt nod.  “Don’t worry,
Miss MacKenzie,” she said.  “We’ll take care of the problem for you.”  She
patted her rifle.  “My marksmanship team took nationals, a few years back.”

Blaze narrowed her eyes.  Yes,
this one was
definitely
going in the hole.

* * *

The kidnapping, unexpected
escape
,
then re-kidnapping of the pretty blonde took Jack the first couple days.  Then,
when it was ‘clear’ that they had to rescue the girl ‘without the authorities’
help,’ ‘Aqrab, Blaze, and all twelve of the kids spent the next five days
scouring the woods, getting their tents ripped apart, firing lead-filled Desert
Eagles blindly into the night, and generally getting the crap scared out of them
when Jack, Kimber, or Nicolai materialized out of nowhere and ripped apart a
few tree-trunks ‘trying to eat them.’

In the end, the kids rescued the
maiden, who, with great surprise lighting her face, described the beast that
kidnapped her as ‘a total gentleman with a lonely streak’ and her time with him
as ‘a Beauty and the Beast moment,’ where she spent time ‘calming his tormented
soul.’  The blonde, in fact, seemed so enamored with the ‘forlorn monster’ that
it didn’t even sound like she was going to try and press charges.

Thus, Blaze was all-too-happy to
give them the additional day at the lodge ‘for free’ and shoo them off with
Bruce just as quickly as she could get what was left of their stuff packed and
on the plane.  Under the guise, of course, that ‘the beast might be back’. 
After all, according to reports, he’d spent untold hours down in the hole with
the girl, recounting his lonely, unhappy life.

“You laid it on pretty thick, I
hear,” Blaze said, as they watched the last plane take off.

“Yeah,” Jack said, grinning like
an imbecile, “but I’ll betcha they’ll be back next year.”

Blaze groaned.  “You want
more
kids running around in the woods?”

“It was ten grand,” Jack said. 
Then he cocked his head.  “That, and Sarah’s got a crush on me,” Jack said,
showing teeth like the Cheshire cat.  “I can
smell
it.”

Blaze whirled on the wereverine
and grabbed him by the scruff of the neck.  “You,” she growled down at him, “had
better ease up on the ‘tormented soul’ routine before you start giving people
the wrong idea.”

Jack shrugged, but happiness
rolled off of him as he grinned up at her.  “I’ll bet you a hundred bucks we’ve
got ten more reservations by the end of the day.”

Ten, it turned out, was a bit
off.  As soon as tales of their ‘encounter’ hit the web, the phone started
ringing off the hook.  Blaze actually had to start switching it off at night,
due to the fact that so many people in opposite time-zones didn’t bother to
look at the time-charts before deciding when to call.  Or they simply
mis-calculated, adding when they should have subtracted, or read ‘am’ when they
should have read ‘pm.’

“You know,” Blaze said, as the
lodge booked its seventh straight weekend, “This could eat into fishing time.”

“Already told ‘em June through
September was off-limits,” Jack said.  “They posted it on their website.”

“Yeah, but—” Blaze started.  The
phone cut her off, ringing for the sixth time that day alone.  Another
potential guest, this time wanting to bring his wife and kids.

“I’m sorry,” Blaze ended up
telling the man, “but that’s just too dangerous.  Call back when they’re all
eighteen.”  She hung up and gave Jack a tired look.  “We’re gonna have to limit
it to groups of six or more.”  Then, wrinkling her nose at him, she added, “And
you
are going to have to come up with a different shtick.”

Jack chuckled.  “Aw, I think the
‘lonely werewolf’ motif worked rather well.”

Blaze opened her mouth to argue,
then her words kind of died in her throat.  It
had
worked, and it had
allowed all the young, geeky boys to rescue the damsel in distress, who in turn
got all gushy over the big, beefy werewolf who’d captured her.  Typical
Stockholm Syndrome at its best.  Hell, they’d all been so high on their own
awesomeness afterwards that they’d completely forgotten the fact that Jack had
been nowhere to be seen for much of the screaming-and-running-through-the-woods
bits.

This is going to work
,
Blaze realized, looking around her at her new home in awe.  She had enough
money to make her loan payments, had her farm up and running in a
year
,
instead of a
decade
, as she had first planned, and she had so much food
growing on her property that she was having to
beg
her neighbors to take
it off of her hands.  Runt, once he returned that spring, had taken up
gardening and cuddly-animal-tending duties in return for the lion’s share of
her hot peppers, packing out huge, shimmering sacks of them and returning with
a fancy new hairpin here, a rainbow-glinting cloak there.  Judging by the
substantial increase in quality of his attire—and the added bounce in his step—Blaze
suspected he was selling them for obscene profits in the Second Realm, but from
the way he was keeping the garden and greenhouses immaculate, she found she
couldn’t begrudge him a few peppers.

Through the window out back, Blaze
could see Kimber planting flowers beside the new cabin that Jack and Blaze had
built for them, while ‘Aqrab sat in a lawnchair in the sun reading the Shakespeare
tome Blaze had bought for him on her last trip to town.  The djinni, she had
found, not only set tables and delivered meals with a smile on his face, but made
an excellent conversationalist when everyone gathered for dinner, winding
stories of love and adventure and keeping their guests so enthralled that half
the time, they forgot to eat.  And Kimber, while quiet and reserved around their
clients, had made herself utterly indispensible cleaning rooms, vacuuming,
tending the grounds, making beds, and doing dishes.

Leaving Jack to manage repairs,
tidy, and tend the mechanics, and Blaze to schmooze, run finances, and share
cooking duties with the wereverine.

“Wow,” Blaze managed, suddenly
overwhelmed.  “Jack, I think we did it.”

“Ain’t no question, sugar,” Jack
said.  He wrapped a heavy arm around her waist and grinned up at her, and his
pride was overwhelming through the link.  “So…  Yak tonight?”  He sounded
hopeful.

She grinned down at him.  “Yak
tonight.”

-End-

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