Alaskan Fire (20 page)

Blaze shuddered.  “I’m getting it
changed.”  Then she caught herself and frowned.  “And that’s none of your damn
business.  I want to be called Blaze, you call me Blaze.”

“You can wanna be called the
Tooth Fairy for all I care,” Jack said.  He crossed his arms over his burly
chest and nodded at the book in her hands.  “You gonna teach me to read that?”

Blaze narrowed her eyes at him. 
“You got one hell of a way of asking nicely.”

“Who said I was asking?”  Jack
pulled a hand free and looked at the back of a fingernail.  He stuck it in his
mouth and started gnawing on it.  “Way I see things, sugar,” he said around his
finger, “you need me a hell of a lot more than I need you.”  He spat whatever
he’d collected from his nail onto the floor, scowled at his finger-tips, then
re-crossed his arms.  “I’ve gone my whole life without books.  You, I’d wager,
probably never changed a carburetor or pulled a spark plug in your life.”  He
gave her a polite smile.  “So, you gonna be reasonable?”

Blaze felt her lip curling in a
snarl.  “You are not the only one who can change a spark plug.”

“Maybe,” Jack said.  He casually
leaned back against a corner wall, “But I’m pretty sure that any other mechanic
you hire won’t stay long.”  He winked at her.  “Considerin’.”

I hate him,
Blaze
realized.  And at the same time she wanted to rip out his guts and nail them to
her wall, she was struck by how utterly sexy he was lounging against her wall,
sleeves rolled up, big arms bunching against his chest.

Muttering, she set the book down
and went into her room.

“Hey,” Jack growled, unfolding
from the wall to quickly follow her.  “We had a bargain, there, missy.”

Blaze ignored him and found her
journal.  She grabbed a couple sheets out of the back, ripped them free, and
brushed past him to sit at one of the hand-hewn wooden chairs beside the fire.

“Sit down,” she said, thrusting a
heavy chair at him with her foot.

Jack grunted as it hit him in the
legs.  Scowling at her warily, he brought it up beside her and sat down with
his upper body leaning over the chair’s back.  She heard the wood creak and
wondered if he was about to snap off the backrest with his weight.

“How much do you weigh?” she
asked.

As if knowing exactly why she was
asking, Jack showed his teeth and leaned harder on the chair, and she heard
wood pop under the pressure. 
I break it, I’ll fix it.  You don’t need to
worry your pretty head about it.
  That had been the excuse he’d used for
everything from tearing holes in her drywall to shattering her sink because
he’d cut himself shaving.

“It’s
my
money we’re using
to fix
your
damages,” Blaze growled, watching the chair strain
underneath him.

He bared his teeth more.  “Take
it out of my pay.”

She glared at him.  “Maybe I
will.”

“Fine, honey.  You do that.”  As
if it didn’t matter to him one way or the other.

After another moment of glaring
at Jack, Blaze reluctantly looked back down at the notebook sheets, once again
having to resist the urge to wad them up and put them somewhere out of reach.  As
legibly as she could, Blaze scrawled out the upper and lowercase alphabet on
the top of the page.  Her handwriting had never been particularly neat,
described by most as deranged chicken-scratch, but she went slowly.  She had to
erase several times—penmanship had never been her strong suit—and bent over as
she was, her hair kept getting in her face.  She took a moment to pull off her
hat, pull her thick carrot-orange hair out, comb the rats’ nests with her
fingers, and weave it back into a quick braid between the Q and the R. 

“You got nice hair,” Jack
muttered.  Like he was mentioning a pustule growing from her forehead.  He
hadn’t looked up from the page.

Caught between frustration at
Jack’s complete, stubborn
maleness
and a little girly flutter of ‘he
thinks my hair is pretty,’ Blaze quickly cleared her throat and ignored him
completely. She tossed her boonie-hat on the chair beside her, leaving her
braid pulled over one shoulder.  Once she had all twenty-six letters aligned
out in six neat rows, she slapped the pen down in irritation.  “There,” she
muttered.  “The alphabet.  Twenty-six letters, both upper case—that’s the big
ones—and lowercase—the little ones.”

When she looked up to make sure
Jack was paying attention, he was staring at her, jaw open, appearing completely
lost in thought.  He didn’t seem to notice she was talking to him.

“You paying attention?!” Blaze
demanded, jabbing a finger at the letters.

Jack blinked suddenly.  “Huh?” 
He shook himself, frowning, and glanced down at the page of notes.  When he saw
them, he reddened.  “Yeah?” he growled, bristling.  “So?”

“So that’s the alphabet,” Blaze
said, handing him the pencil and paper.  “All the letters in the English
language.  You try.”

By the way he blushed, she might
as well have asked him to strip down naked and pirouette for her.  When he
didn’t reach for the proffered paper, she nudged him with it. 

“That’s just gibberish,” Jack
growled.  “What am I supposed to do with that?”

“You
learn
them,” Blaze
sighed.

Jack snorted.  “I don’t need to
do that to learn.”

Blaze gave him a long look.  When
the wereverine just glared at her stubbornly, Blaze sighed and stood up.  She
went over to the nice, warm woodstove and opened the door on the front.

Jack flinched and lunged out of
his seat, eyes on the papers.  “What are you doing?”  The panic in his voice
was almost comical.

Blaze yawned.  “I’m going to use
this to heat my home, because it’s obviously no use to you.”  She moved to drop
it through the open door.

Jack jumped forward and caught
her wrist, that feral growl deep in his chest.  “Listen, missy,” he snarled, “It’s
in your best interest not to piss off the wereverine.”

She raised an eyebrow down at
him.  “Piss you off?  Who said anything about pissing you off?  I thought you
didn’t
care
about this ‘gibberish.’”  She moved to toss it into the fire
anyway.

Growling, Jack yanked her hand
away from the fire and took the papers from her.  He snatched up the pencil
with his other hand, then slapped it all down on the seat of his chair and
squatted beside it, glaring at her.  Then, huffing like an angry bear, he took
the pencil up in a fist and started scratching at the words.  When Blaze immediately
stepped closer to correct him, his back hunched in a flood of fur and he
sprouted teeth.

Blaze quickly found something
else to do.

A few hours later, there was a
knock at her door.

 “So, uh…”  He had his big
fingers wrapped around the pencil in a fist.  He hadn’t made more than a
half-dozen of the letters on the page, and they all looked like someone had
been trying to write the alphabet with a wrench.  “I can’t…”  His voice
cracked.

For the first time, Blaze
realized the big baby was about to cry.

She also realized that, if she
made a big deal of it, things were about to get really, really ugly.  “Okay,”
she said, quickly putting down her book, “Well, you’re holding the pencil
wrong.  It’s gonna be tough, but you gotta train yourself to hold it like this…”

She took his huge, calloused,
somewhat-resistive hand and forcibly shaped it around the writing instrument. 
“Like that.”  She grabbed him by a meaty shoulder and pulled him back over to
the chair and set the paper down on it.  “There.  Copy them.”  She tried to
push him into a squat, but it was like trying to bend the knees of a granite
statue.

“Oh, for Chrissakes!” Blaze
cried.  She grabbed his hand and pulled it down to the paper.  “There.  See
that?  Draw them like that.”

Reluctantly, the wereverine did. 
As Blaze watched and helped with minor corrections here and there, he scratched
out all twenty-six letters of the alphabet.

“See?” Blaze cried, happily
slapping him on the shoulder.  “You
did
it!” 

Immediately, the wereverine’s jaw
went slack, and the pencil slid back into a fist.  Seeing that, Blaze frowned,
leaned in close, and re-adjusted his hand.  “Gotta remember that position,”
Blaze said.  “Can’t write like a ham-fisted mechanic, okay?  Gotta use
finesse.”

Instead of looking down at the
way she had positioned his fingers, however, the wereverine was staring up at
her, mouth open again.  He looked like a fox that had just realized there was a
new chicken in the coop…

…or a nerdy pervert imagining her
in leather armor and broadsword.

Blaze slapped the papers onto the
chair in irritation.  Growling, she got to her feet.  “I don’t do the barbarian
thing,” she growled, glaring down at him.

Jack blinked up at her, the
moment gone.  “Huh?”

“I like sex just as much as the
next girl,” Blaze gritted, “But the moment you try to get me to put on a
breastplate and chainmail, we’re done.”

Jack dropped the pencil and
lunged to his feet.  “Now hold on a second,” he babbled, “I really don’t know
what you’re—”

“I’ve seen that look,” Blaze
snorted.  “I know what it means.  It means you’ve got some creepy part of your
brain tellin’ you you wanna be dominated by a big Amazon with a battleaxe.” 

When he didn’t deny it, merely
stared up at her, Blaze made a disgusted sound and pushed past him, back to her
room.  She slammed the door behind her and locked it.

Then, quietly, she slid to her
knees beside the bed and concentrated desperately on keeping her tears in check.

When Blaze crawled out of bed the
next morning, her handyman was nowhere to be found.  Stumbling, still groggy
from lack of caffeine, Blaze was settling the coffee pot on the woodstove when
she caught sight of the sheet of letters on the chair, right where she had left
it.

Disgusted, she took out the
filter, tapped the grinds into the compost, and refilled the percolator.  She
was yawning, trudging past the chair on her way back from the bathroom, when
she realized the page looked different than before.  She paused, frowning down
at the letters.

Jack had filled the page with a
crude alphabet, upper and lowercase.

When she picked up the page, she
saw that the back, too, was covered with painstakingly-etched letters, as was
the next two pages.  Every square inch of surface area, he had filled with
letters.

Blaze was still staring at it
when she heard someone step onto the porch.  She quickly put the papers back
and arranged them roughly as she had found them, then hurriedly moved to the
stove, pretending to warm herself as the coffee percolated.

A moment later, Jack yanked the
door open and stepped inside with a bundle of firewood in one big arm.  “Morning,”
he said as he shut the door behind him.  “Boiler’s been going since six, so
there’s hot water for a shower.”  His eyes flickered to the papers on the
chair, then away again.

Now that he mentioned it, Jack
looked…
cleaner
…today.  When he grew close, Blaze thought she smelled
cologne.

“A shower sounds great,” Blaze
said.

Jack paused in unloading the pile
in his arms.  “What, you think that was a suggestion?”  He snorted and dumped
the rest of the wood to the metal spark-guard surrounding the woodstove.  “You
stink like diesel fuel, and you
look
like you went rootin’ around in the
yard with those pigs you keep talking about.  I got tired of smelling your
grimy ass.”  He took something from his pocket and shoved something against her
stomach.

When Blaze blinked down at it,
her hands came away with a bar of soap.

Then Jack went back to stacking
wood like he’d said absolutely nothing out of the ordinary.

Suddenly, something profound
occurred to Blaze.

“You’ve never
had
to live
with a woman before, have you?”

Jack hesitated in piling wood. 
“Don’t know what you’re talking about,” he said, without looking up.

“This really long life you claim
you’ve had,” Blaze insisted, gesturing at him with the soap.  “Throughout it
all, you never had a woman, did you?  You were too much of a crass, grumpy,
egotistical prick.  You ran them all off.”

Jack deposited the last of the
wood on top of the stack a bit harder than was necessary.  Glaring up at her,
he growled, “I’ve had women before.”

“Oh yeah?” Blaze laughed,
crossing her arms over her chest.  “Like when?”

Bristling, Jack got to his feet
and said, “Like ‘bout six years ago, right before I found pieces of her scattered
all over my yard.”

Blaze froze, her blood running
cold.  “I thought you didn’t know if she survived.”

Jack shrugged.  “Never found any
particularly important pieces.”

“You found
pieces
of her
and you think she might have…?”  Blaze thought she might be ill.

Jack gave her a flat look.  “It’s
hard to kill a were.”

Blaze glanced out at the verdant
trees through the window.  Suddenly, the alders and other low-laying bushes
seemed to take on a new, more sinister, purpose.  She wondered what kinds of
things could be hiding behind the screen of leaves, just out of sight.  Immediately,
she shied a bit closer to Jack, swallowing hard.

“They’re not coming onto my land
again without a special invitation,” Jack said, following her gaze.  “I made
sure of that.”

“How?” Blaze asked, suddenly very
much craving to hear how much of a badass her new business partner was.

“Sputched the pack leader and six
of his lieutenants,” Jack said, turning to look at her.  “Sent the rest of them
off to lick their wounds.”

“How’d you survive?” Blaze
whispered.

He grunted.  “They’re just
puppies.  As old as I am…it was like slapping around some toddlers.

Blaze squinted at him.  He looked
to be in his late-twenties, maybe as old as thirty.  “Just how old
are
you?”

He gave her a wary look.  “Might
wanna use the upstairs bathroom.  I’m gonna be re-grouting the floor on this
one in the next few days and I don’t want it wet.”  Then he turned his big back
on her again, heading for the door.

“Hey!” Blaze snapped.  “I already
know you’re a
wereverine
.  What’s it gonna hurt?”

Jack hesitated at the door.  When
he looked back at her, his green eyes were cautious.  He sniffed, then rubbed a
greasy wrist across his face, then fidgeted with some wood-chips clinging to
his shirt.  Finally, he said, “You know those barbarians you keep talking about?”

It took Blaze a minute to realize
he meant Vikings, then she nodded, slowly.

“I was on the raid on Lindisfarne
Abbey.”  The way he said the name sounded foreign, almost like he wasn’t
speaking English.  Then he yanked the door open, leaving her frowning after
him.

Blaze puzzled on that all through
her shower, racking her brain as she tried to remember her freshman European
History class.  By the time she’d gotten out and toweled off, she had narrowed
it down to one of two major attacks, both perpetuated by Vikings.  Depending on
which one, that meant he could be anywhere from a nine to twelve hundred years
old.

She was laughing when she stepped
out of the bathroom.

Head still wrapped in a towel,
she stuck her feet into a pair of shoes and went marching out to the shop,
where she found him bent over the innards of another chainsaw.  He turned when
he heard her coming.

“Do you actually mean to tell
me,” Blaze said, jabbing a finger into his thick chest, “That you were born a
millennium
ago?”

Jack didn’t even flinch.  “Never
said I was born then,” he said.  “Just said I went on a raid.”  He went
unconcernedly back to the chainsaw.  “Not actually sure when I was born, but
I’d guess five or six times that.  Hard to tell.  Never really kept track. 
Think I was made somewhere in Russia, though.  Remember being a trapper’s son,
and he came home covered in blood one day.  Bit me a couple months after, I
think.  Then the village killed him, chased me out into the woods, and I began
my life on the fringe of society.”

Blaze’s mouth fell open.  “You
mean you can do stuff like…” she raked her brain for something completely
absurd, “…make a sword?”

“What kind you want?” Jack said
distractedly.  “Bastard sword, longsword, rapier, Zweihänder, cutlass, saber,
claymore?”  He started fiddling with the greasy parts on the table in front of
him.  “Even spent some time in the Orient, so I can make a decent katana or
talwar or jian, though I’m by no means a master at those.”  He plucked a little
plastic piece from the mess and fit it back into the chainsaw.  “Even tried my
hand at Damascus steel, but that was a real pain in the ass.  Had to get the
mixture just right, and only about half of them turned out good in the end,
anyway.”

Blaze narrowed her eyes.  “The
process of making Damascus steel was lost in the seventeen-fifties.”  She knew,
because she had done her European History term-paper on the subject.  Several
modern-day swordmakers claimed to make ‘Damascus’ steel, but none could compare
to the real thing.

“Was it.”  He flicked a bit of
grime off of a circular rubber ring and fitted it back into the chainsaw.

“You are
not
six thousand
years old.”

He gave her an irritated look as
he replaced a screw into the main compartment.  “Six thousand is nothing,
dearie.  You wanna be blown away, take a vacation up to the Brooks Range and go
find yourself a dragon.  They don’t die of old age.”

“And you
do
?” Blaze
scoffed.

He grinned at her, and she saw
fangs.  “Not old age, per se.  More like ‘differences of opinion.’” 

Blaze glared at him, still not
sure he wasn’t completely pulling her leg.  “And dragons?”

He shrugged and wiped his greasy
fingers on his pants.  “Dragons are a bit harder to drag into a fistfight. 
Lots of posturing, very little fang.  Well, the old ones, anyway.  Would rather
look down their noses at you and quote poetry and hold grudges than settle it
like men.”  He slapped the cover on the chainsaw, used a screwdriver to cinch
it down, then hefted it off the table.  Grabbing the pull-cord in one hand, the
front handle in the other, he said, “Stuck-up pussies.”  He yanked the chainsaw
cord, and suddenly the machine came to life in his hand.

Blaze took a nervous step
backwards, watching as he started the blade running along its track in a
high-pitched whine.  “So I take it you haven’t had any differences of opinion?”
she asked, when he made a satisfied nod and shut it off.

Jack dropped the chainsaw back to
the table.  “None I lost.”

Blaze peered at him.  “Six
thousand years and you’ve never lost a fight.”

Jack went to the wall and pulled
down a set of what looked like cowboy chaps.  These he cinched around his
waist, then clipped around the backs of his legs.  He found a set of yellow
headphones hanging on a nearby peg and grabbed those, too.  Then, picking up
the chainsaw, he walked out of the shop.

“
Never
?!” Blaze demanded,
following him.

He glanced over a big shoulder at
her.  “I’m still here, ain’t I?”

She caught up to him.  “You ever
fight a
dragon
?”

He gave her an irritated look. 
“Do I look stupid to you?”

“Uh…”  Blaze grinned.

Jack stopped, halfway across the
yard toward the jumble of downed trees she had put there, and smirked up at
her.  Way too confidently, he said, “That’s not the general idea I get every
time I catch you starin’ at my sexy ass, honey.”

Blaze flushed crimson.  She
hadn’t realized he’d noticed.

Jack got a smug look.  “Thought
so.”  He turned and walked away, and made a show of flexing his jeans as he
went.

Before meeting the bastard, Blaze
would have been so horrified that she probably would have hidden in her room
and stayed there for a few days out of utter, humiliating shame, but after
almost two months of dealing with his shit, she only narrowed her eyes and
jogged to catch up.

“And what about you?” she asked,
keeping stride.

Jack gave her an uncertain look. 
“What do you mean?”

“I’ve caught you staring,” Blaze
said.  “Caught you staring last night, in fact.  Twice.”

Jack’s face reddened to a faint
purple.

“See?” Blaze cried, in triumph. 
Two
can play at this game, bastard.
  “I totally turn you on, don’t I?”

“Lady,” Jack growled, setting the
chainsaw down on a fallen tree while he adjusted his headset.  He smiled at her,
and it was vicious.  “Seein’ how you wanna play this game an’ all, I should
prolly clue you in a little bit.  Only fair.”

Frowning, Blaze said, “What do
you mean?”

“I don’t go for the tall chicks,”
Jack said, yanking the cord on the chainsaw.  “Yeti isn’t my style.”  He gunned
the engine, then, as she stared at him, horror wreaking cold, twisting tendrils
of shame through her stomach, he unconcernedly started driving the blade
through the tree.