Alaskan Fire (13 page)

She peered at him warily, and he
saw all the intricate little gears turning in her head as she watched him with
all the alertness of a fox.  “Why are you so interested in having me stay?”

Oh shit,
Jack thought,
windmilling to recuperate from such a blunder.  “Uh, ‘cause it’s been awhile
since I had a decent neighbor that wasn’t a loudmouth gossip who spread rumors
I been livin’ here since the gold rush.”  The
last
thing he wanted her
to know was just how decadent her presence was making the ground he was
standing on, and how if
he
could feel it,
other
woodland
creatures were going to feel it, and pretty soon his territory would be
crawling with all sorts of edible furry friends.

Blaze lifted an eyebrow at him. 
“But you said you
have
been living here since the gold rush.”

“Yeah,” Jack muttered, “but she
don’t need to go tellin’ everybody.”  He
hated
the way it sounded like
he was sulking.  He wasn’t sulking.  He was in charge here.  He needed to put
his foot down, tell her she was way outta line and he was gonna go tie her ass
to the—

 “So are you gonna stop being an
asshole?” she asked.

“Yeah,” he said.

Blaze crossed her arms, and her
elbows came to rest about at his nose-level.  “Somehow, I find that hard to
believe.”

Immediately, his hackles shoved
through his skin and he snarled, “Oh yeah?!  You’ll find it easier to believe
when I shove your
head
up your—”  He cut himself off abruptly, a growl
rattling in his chest.  Biting out every word, he said, “I’ll see what I can
do.”

She raised an eyebrow.

Narrowing his eyes at her, Jack
said, “It might take some…work.  Don’t get your hopes up too quick, all right? 
Gimme some time.”

“You’ve got a year,” Blaze
agreed.

“A year,” Jack said, relieved. 
He could do that.  One year to learn how to not be an asshole.  Yeah, piece of
cake.  No sweat.  Easy-peasey.  Just a few minutes a day…  Then he frowned,
wondering how the hell
him
running
her
down in the woods had left
him
promising to be nice to people.  He peered up at her with increasing
wariness, trying to piece together how this leggy little vixen had warped the
conversation to this new low.  “So…you done trying to run off?” he asked slowly,
trying to recover some of his control of the conversation.  Except it came out
like a goddamned Mexican standoff, one where she had all the guns.  Yeah, he
really
needed to find a way to put his foot down…

Blaze shrugged.  “You done being
a dick?”

“I could rip off your arms and
bury
you in the hill
!” Jack roared, growing to eye-level with her and sprouting
fang.

Blaze peered back at him flatly,
looking utterly unconcerned.  “You done?”

Jack’s jaw fell open, utterly
taken aback by her lack of fear.  “Uh…”

“Good,” she said.  “I’ll be back
at the lodge.  The battery on my phone’s probably just about dead from looping
that recording, and I still gotta call Bruce in the morning.”  Without another
word, she bent down, picked up her backpack, and headed back up the trail,
leaving Jack staring after her, mouth agape.

Way
outta your league, buddy…

Over the next few days, Blaze
worked out an uneasy truce with her new business partner.  Though she was
technically the boss, she had absolutely no idea what it took to get the place
on its feet again, and they both knew it.  Thus, she ended up following him
around like a very large lost puppy as he started fixing up the grounds, doing
her best to keep up, getting frustrated when he made it look so easy.

The boards came off the windows,
first.  Then Jack began the complicated process of getting the generator
running again, after four years of sitting idle.  Between taking it apart,
changing the oil, cleaning rust and corrosion off of parts, griping about
‘cobbled-together pieces of shit,’ and putting it all back together again, that
took almost an entire day on its own.  In the end, Jack had to jump it with the
battery off of his 4-wheeler.  Though Blaze had assumed the machine and trailer
he’d used to pick her up at the lake had been part of the lodge package, Jack
took her to an old shed and showed her the three dusty 4-wheelers sitting on
flat tires in the back of the jumble of mechanical junk.

Which, Jack less-than-politely
informed her, wasn’t ‘junk.’ 

“It’s all got its uses,” he
growled, sounding offended.  Now that the generator was running, he had pulled
an air compressor off of the shelf in the big shop and had dragged it out to
the shed.  He was hooking a hose to the flat tires of one of the 4-wheelers, glaring
at her over the handlebars.  “Everything in here is something you’re gonna need
me to use for you someday, sweetheart.”

Blaze bristled at ‘sweetheart,’
but by then, she had learned that mentioning it only made the bastard repeat
the offense about a half trillion times.  “Is there anything I can do to help?”
she growled, watching him work.

“Yeah,” Jack said, wrestling with
the tire.

Blaze’s heart skipped.  Being
both a gifted klutz and mechanically incompetent, she had been feeling like a
fifth wheel all morning.  “What?” she asked, hopeful that it would be something
other than fetching a tool for him this time.

“Get out of my light.”  He
gestured at the open doorway and the sun beyond.

Blaze stared at him for some time
before she narrowed her eyes.  “I’m going to go pull weeds.”

“Don’t waste your time,” Jack
said, distracted with the tire.  “I can mow them down later.”

“I’m going to go
pull
them,” Blaze said sweetly.  “It should be relaxing to have the company of a few
noxious garden pests over a glorified wall-ornament.”

His head snapped up and frowned. 
“So what crawled up
your
asshole?”

But Blaze had already turned and
was walking back to the shop.  She snagged a pair of men’s work-gloves off of
the wall—Blaze, embarrassingly, had neglected to bring her own, not realizing
just how rough-and-dirty much of the reconstruction work would be—and yanked
them onto her hands.  The gloves were too tight, riding the tips of her
fingers, but Blaze left them there anyway and headed out to the yard, mentally
adding it to the list of things she would be buying on the next town run. 

She pulled weeds until she got
blisters through the gloves, and kept pulling.  She had gotten a full
twenty-foot-wide swath of lawn finished when she heard Jack start up an engine
inside the 4-wheeler shed.  Expecting a 4-wheeler, Blaze was shocked when, a
few moments later, Jack rode a lawnmower around the edge of the shop.  He
saluted, then kicked the blades into gear, sending a gust of chopped grass and
pulverized tree shoots in her direction.  In thirty seconds, he had covered
more lawn than Blaze had tended in four hours.

Blaze jumped up and stormed into
the lodge, listening to the whine of the mower at her back.  She slammed the
door and dragged a chair in front of the woodstove, staring at the orange
tongues flickering behind the tiny glass portal in the door as she fumed.

Flames had always calmed her,
which was a
good
thing, considering that the next step after fuming was
starting to cry.  And, Blaze viciously assured herself, she would rather stick the
barrel of a twelve-gauge down her throat than cry again.  It was
so…inconvenient, unpleasant,
embarrassing.
  And she was
not
going
to do it in front of a four hundred and fifty pound weasel.

Blaze stared into the flames for
long minutes, listening to the mower as it circled the big yard.  Then, once
she had calmed down, she got up, went outside, slamming the door behind her
again, and stalked right out into Jack’s path and stopped.

For a moment, it looked like Jack
wouldn’t slow, and she was playing chicken with a lawn-mower.

Then, reluctantly, he kicked the
blades out of gear and turned off the machine, rolling to a halt a few inches
from her big boots.

Blaze slammed a fist down on the
lawn-mower’s front.  “I
hate
feeling so useless!” she snapped.

Both of Jack’s brows went up. 
“You just dented the hood.”

“I don’t
care,
” Blaze
said, denting it again.  “It’s
my
hood.  Find me something
useful
to do before I lose my
mind
.”

The wereverine grunted.  He
peered up at her like a fox analyzing just how long the Yeti would make a
nuisance of herself before she got bored and trundled off.

“It’s not up for debate,” Blaze
growled.  “You want a check?  I want something to do.”

The wereverine heaved a huge sigh
and climbed off the mower, the muscles in his arms and shoulders flexing as he
dropped to the grass.  “Okay,” he said.  He gave her a dubious look.  “You know
how to run a bulldozer?”

Blaze flinched inside, but she
forced herself to remain stoic.  “I’m sure you could teach me.”

He looked her up and down, then
grunted.  “Maybe.”  Without another word, he turned and walked off, leaving
Blaze standing with her fist still resting in the brand new pucker of the
lawnmower’s hood.  Frowning, with him giving her little else to do, she
straightened and followed him.

He took her around the back of
the last outbuilding, to a forlorn-looking parking-lot of heavy machinery.  Old
fireweed stalks had grown up and died around the six rusted metal
monstrosities, which were for all the world looking as if they were slowly
returning to the Earth.

Jack stopped at the biggest one
and climbed up onto a long metal track so he could peer into the leaf-strewn driver’s
compartment.  He cursed and jumped down, without another word stalking back
over to the shop.  He came back out with a key, which failed to get the machine
started when he inserted it in the ignition and turned it.

It took another two hours for
Jack to add the various fluids, charge the battery, check the gas tank for
water, clean
out
said water, and otherwise get the engine sounding like
something other than a dying weed-whacker.

Blaze was actually rather
impressed when he fired it up the fourteenth time, to the sound of a low,
healthy rumble.  She didn’t say as much, of course.  The prideful bastard
already needed about a seven-peg attitude adjustment.

“There,” Jack said, making a
satisfied grunt.  He gestured for her to get in the driver’s seat.  “I’ll show
you how this baby works, then you can go play in the woods for awhile.”

Blaze narrowed her eyes.  “I told
you I want something important to do.”

“You want yaks, right?” Jack
demanded.

She stared at him in confusion,
her mind unable to follow the convoluted twist that had brought the wereverine
from bulldozers to yaks.  “What does that have to do with an angry yellow
machine?” she finally demanded.

He groaned and dropped his head
into his hand again.  “Just get in the seat,” he growled.  “You’re gonna go
make some pasture for your damn farm animals.”

Blaze froze, realizing he meant
for her to push down trees.  She glanced up at the towering birch and spruce
all around them, suddenly not feeling so confident.  “Uh…”

“Well?” he snapped, gesturing at
the seat.  “Or ya gonna chicken out and make me do it?”

When Blaze only stared at the
rumbling machine in horror, Jack sighed.  “Better be some good hot food waitin’
for me when I get back,” he said.  “I’m tired of this cold sandwiches and fruit
shit.”  He started crawling into the cab. 

Snarling that he could make his
own damn food from whatever meager supplies he could scrounge from the pathetic
contents of his
own
pantry, Blaze shoved him out of the way and climbed
into the seat herself.

“Okay,” Jack said quickly, “Now
don’t touch anything until I’ve given you an explanation.”  He then spent the
next twenty minutes detailing just how deadly the machine she was sitting in
could be, and just how many ways she could tip it over, dig her own grave, plow
into something important, or otherwise get herself killed.  Here and there, he
would intersperse his warnings with a hint or two about how the machine worked—right
before he launched right back into how easily she could ‘sputch’ herself. 

‘Sputching,’ Jack informed her,
when she asked, was a wereverine term for the sound of blood and gore exiting
the body as one’s soon-to-be corpse contacted something brutally hard, sharp,
or otherwise destructive.  Generally, it applied only to non-weres—a.k.a.
‘mudborn’—when attacked by a were, dragon, titan, vampire, or other critter
with the power to squish, stab, flatten, dismember, or otherwise brutally and
liberally spread gore across at least fifty feet with ‘a good kill’.  In other
words, to be sputched, Captain, was to become gore. 

And Jack had a
word
for
it. 

The Return To Anchorage column got
quite a few more checkmarks during
that
particular lecture.

Blaze found, however, to her
amazement, that the gruesome scenarios he painted in her mind somehow fixed the
meanings of the controls into her brain.  Under Jack’s direction, she was able
to raise the blade, move the machine forward in halting jumps, and even turn it
slightly.

After a few minutes of watching
her, Jack gave her a thumbs-up and walked back toward the 4-wheeler shed.

“Wait!” Blaze cried, above the
roar of the engine.  “Where am I supposed to put a pasture?”

Jack grunted and made a
dismissive gesture at the trees.  “Wherever you want it.”  Then his broad back
was disappearing into the dim interior of the shed, his tight T-shirt giving
her yet another excellent view of his chiseled torso before the shadows
swallowed him.

Blaze scowled after him a moment,
but when she realized that he wasn’t going to come back out and offer any more
assistance, she reluctantly turned the dozer towards the woods and started
forward.

Three hours later, Blaze had a
twenty-foot-square patch of churned earth, and she had just pushed down her
first tree.  She felt an exhilarated thrill as it groaned and came down, and
automatically turned to see if anyone had been paying attention.

Jack had been standing ten yards
off, tool-filled workbelt clinging to the sexy bulk of his thigh, watching
her.  Seeing her look, he grinned and gave her another thumbs-up, then headed
back to the shop.

It got easier after that.  Once
she had the hang of it, Blaze managed to push over a good dozen trees, clearing
a forty-foot swath through the woods.  When Blaze finally shut the bulldozer
off, it was the hazy half-dark of an Alaskan summer, indicating it was probably
sometime after midnight, and she was all but giggling in glee.

She had slid out of the driver’s
chair and was climbing down off the tracks when she saw the man watching her in
the forest.

He was tall and lithe, his lean
form dressed in a pale robe that seemed to shimmer like a cloud in the dusky
haze of the Midnight Sun.  His hair was
long
—the braid having enough thickness
and length to be flipped over his shoulder and wrapped several times around his
waist, then tied like a belt.  It was his eyes, though, that had left her
feeling cold.  They were flame-blue, and they shone like twin lightning-bolts
in the dim light.

When he saw her looking, he
turned and unconcernedly walked away, seeming to disappear in the very forest
itself.

Blaze slowly lowered herself the
rest of the way to the forest floor, then, when she was sure the man was gone,
turned and bolted for the lodge.

The wereverine, at least, was a
familiar evil.

“I saw a wolf!” she cried,
lunging inside and slamming the door behind her.  She had to shield her eyes
from the orange light of the gas-lamps that Jack had found in the attic, and
realized looking out the blackened windows that it was later than she had
thought.

Jack looked up from a book he had
been reading.  It was one of hers, a smutty action-adventure she was still
looking forward to devouring, once she had the time.  Seeing it, Blaze bristled,
knowing that the last time she had seen it, it had been safely buried in the
bottom of her underwear duffle. 

“Thought you were gonna be out
there all night,” Jack said, closing the book.  He yawned, and she saw pointed
teeth.  “How many trees you get down?”

“I saw a
wolf
,” Blaze
repeated, pointing in the general direction of where the guy had disappeared.

Jack raised a brow.  “So?”

“Glowing blue eyes.  He just
stood there, watching me.  Big long braid.  Robes like he’s the second coming
of Jesus or something.”

“Wait,” Jack said, frowning. 
“Hold on.  Back up a sec.  You said you saw a
wolf
?  In a
robe
?”

“Well, it was a guy,” Blaze
said.  “But you told me about the werewolves, and he had evil glowy eyes and
I’m pretty sure he wanted to eat me.”

Jack threw down the book in a
snarl and got to his feet, a deadly look constricting his features.  “You stay
right here.”  He was already changing, his body growing in size and hairiness. 
Blaze flinched and got out of his way, which was just as well, because the way
he brushed past her, he probably would have knocked her down if she hadn’t.