Alaskan Fire (24 page)

“You think he already claimed
her?” the man asked, grinding his cigar out on the trunk of a birch tree.  He
came over to squat beside them.

“She’s only been out here a couple
months,” Amber growled.  “And he’s got those fucking ‘standards’ of his.”

“Maybe she’s already a were?” the
Italian man asked.  He held his half-burned cigar in one hand, and was lowering
a big palm to Blaze’s forehead with the other.  Blaze’s vision was going hazy,
her lump of coals dying in her chest.

“She didn’t shift when we caught
her.”

From the group of wolves, the little
black one whined, “Please put her in the cage, Amber. 
Please
.”

“I don’t want the rich bitch to
die on me,” Amber snapped.

“That’s the least of your
concerns, now, demonkin,” the black man laughed.  He had stepped away from his
tree, towering over all the wolves in the area.  Even through Blaze’s stupor, she
knew his laugh was filled with bitterness.  “Next time, listen to my mistress
when she tries to tell you something, puppy.”

“‘Aqrab!” the tiny black wolf
hissed, even as Amber stood up in a roar, teeth and talons bared.  “This is
my
pack. 
I
turned them, asshole.  They answer to
me
.  You try start
giving orders round here, slave, you’re gonna end up in the hole with the
wereverine.  Same for you, Kimber.”

The huge black man narrowed his…
purple?
…eyes. 
“It may be your pack, but it will crumble to dust before I see my next decade.” 
Turning his big back to her, he turned to stalk away.  Over his back, he
called, “Mon Dhi’b, when you fools are done with this stupidity, I’ll be
wandering the dunes.”  Then he vanished completely.  Blaze didn’t have time to
think on that, though.  Her heart had been utterly still for an entire minute.

“What’s wrong with you?” Amber
snapped, slamming her fist back into Blaze’s spine again.  Blaze felt more ribs
snap under the abuse.  “You already been claimed by the magic, girl?”

Blaze’s heart stumbled back into gear,
and she found her vision going fuzzy around the edges.  Her chest was aching
with the searing flow of molten metal with each combustive blast of her core. 
She vomited into the gag, then struggled to swallow it back down so she could
breathe.  She nonetheless saw silver dribble from around the rag, onto the
ground beneath her head

“What’s wrong with her?” one of
the werewolves asked.  She had shifted back to a human state, apparently unable
to hold the half-state that Amber and Jack seemed to acquire so easily.

“Huh,” Amber said, dragging a
talon through the blood seeping through Blaze’s punctured shirt.  Peering at
the silver-red mixture, she said, “Weird reaction.”

“Looks like she’s spitting out
the magic,” another suggested.

“Maybe she’s part fey,” another
said.

Amber poked Blaze in the side. 
“You part fey, girl?”

Blaze groaned and tried not to
feel the way the fire was arcing through her body with every beat of her heart.

“If you’re fey, you better tell
us.  Moon magic’ll kill an earth-bound.”

Blaze’s heart was still pounding,
but she felt like she was panting out scorching gas with every breath.

“You turned Jen just last week.” 
A man’s voice.  Nervous.  “Maybe you ran outta venom.”

Amber bristled at that, and Blaze
felt her stand.  “Put her in the damn cage and close the hole.  She lives,
fine.  She doesn’t, well, we can throw her in with the wereverine, for when we
finally get Jack.”

Blaze felt jolts of liquid fire
race down her elbows and into her shoulders as two big men came up beside her
and lifted her off of the ground.  They lowered her to the heavy barred floor
inside the cage.  It took two of them to pull the massive steel door shut and
affix the padlocks into place.  Then a group of them was shoving her, cage and
all, into the hole, the whole contraption moving on smooth metal sliders much
like snow skis.

As Blaze neared the darkness of
the hole, still struggling to breathe against the searing heat enveloping her
body, she was assaulted with the overwhelming stench of rot.

The wereverine,
Blaze
thought, reeling at the brink of sanity as the second cage and its occupant
came into view.  This cage did not have metal sliders.  This one was welded
into place, with fused rebar jammed into the walls and a concrete pad to hold
it in place.  The corpse was resting in one corner, huddled against the bars. 
It was wrapped in rusty, putrid chains.

Jack set down the latest pages
that he had torn out of the city-slicker’s binder, glaring at the door in
irritation.  Still no sign of his boss.  He checked the enormous timepiece that
she had insisted on setting up prominently in the main room the moment she got
to the Bush, then frowned.

Eight o’clock.  He sniffed and
went back to work scrawling out the letters she had made for him.  His hand
hurt from gripping the pencil, and his head hurt from concentrating.  Even with
all this practice, his still looked like poor imitations in comparison, and it
was frustrating him.  Aside from the ones he recognized from her galling
rendition of ‘diesel,’ he still didn’t even know what any of them meant.

Finally, at eight-oh-nine, he
shoved the papers aside and scowled at the sun outside.  Unless she’d somehow
squirreled away some snacks inside her room, Blaze had missed breakfast, lunch,
and dinner.

Jack thought of all the many
dangerous things that could befall a city girl in the woods, then remembered
her strict warning not to follow her.  Feeling torn, he got up and started to
pace.

What if she’d fallen in the
river?  Or broken an ankle?  Or gotten lost?

There
was a fun idea. 
Hunting her down at night, finding her wandering aimlessly in the middle of
nowhere, utterly disoriented, yet utterly
determined
she knew where she
was going, then having her bite, kick, and scream at him all the way home.

Jack felt the surge of liquid power
as his hackles pushed through his skin and he quickly forced the prickly
sensation back down.  After a few millennia of practice, it was almost
second-nature to him now. 

She told me not to follow her,
he thought, eyes on the clock.  He’d screwed up everything
else
he had
tried to do or say around the woman, and he was pretty sure if he screwed up
again, she was going to make good on her word and go back to town, and he
really didn’t want to have to go sniff her out in the big city.

Still, he couldn’t help but
worry.

Muttering, he glanced again at
the clock.  Eight-twelve.  He snatched up the book she had brought with her and
started pawing through it, trying to recognize the letters she had outlined. 
Some of them seemed similar, but others seemed utterly foreign.  Growling in
frustration, he threw it aside and started pacing again.

She had told him not to follow. 
She’d made that clear enough, by cracking the door in half on her way out. 
Jack still needed to patch it.  He glanced at the clock.  Eight-fifteen.

He decided to go out to the shop
and grab some carpentry supplies for another temporary patch-job.  He went out,
rummaged around for some scrap lumber and good nails, then strapped on his
toolbelt and took the whole mess back to the door.

He paused on the porch, looking
at the broken portal, calculating how many hours it would take him, then at the
book he had discarded against the wall, the pages even then half folded-in on
themselves from the fall.  The clock said eight-thirty-two.

Jack dropped the carpentry
supplies, went to the 4-wheeler, yanked the cart off the hitch, and fired it
up.  “You can kill me later,” he muttered, kicking it into gear.  He spun out
of the yard and hurtled down the path to the lake, then along the lakebed, not
even bothering to look for tracks, following her smell.

She had made for the channel, and
he had to ditch his machine at the creekbed and walk in order to get over the
fallen trees and down the very narrow beach.

He followed the channel all the
way back to the Yentna River at a jog.  The gray, slow-moving water was
extremely low for this time of year, and had left five feet of beach to walk
on, at the narrowest point.  He found the marks in the sand where she had
passed, disturbed that the scent really wasn’t getting stronger.

Damn that woman can move,
he thought, trotting down the beach.  She must have been moving fast, not
stopping to smell the roses as he had assumed.

Then another thing occurred to
him.  She had headed south, down the Yentna.  Could she be trying to
walk
home?  The more he thought about it—and the further he ran—the more obvious it
became that that’s exactly what she had done.

He felt the Third Lander’s feral
growl start again in his chest at the thought.  He had offered his protection,
damn it, taken her under his wing, and she was acting as if she hadn’t even
noticed—or cared.  Like his protection was meaningless to her.  What was worse,
she was yet again ignoring him, aiming to put herself square into the wolves’
territory.

“Zeus and Ares
damn
that
woman,” Jack growled.  She was smart—hell, he could
smell
that much—but half
the time she didn’t seem to have any common sense.

You were young once, too,
a voice chided him.

Jack scowled at the tracks in the
sand. 
Not this young.
  He really needed to take her aside and have a
long, sit-down chat with her, explain to her just what she needed to do if she
wanted to stay alive out here. 

He was halfway around a curve in
the river when the smell of wolf suddenly hit him, carried on the breeze.  The
smell instinctively made the liquid power surge within him.  Jack froze, heart
hammering. 
Oh no. 
He felt his fangs instinctively settle, felt the
painful pricks as his talons pierced his fingertips. 
Oh gods no.

His eyes followed the line of
tracks up the river, disappearing around another bend.  The stench of the she-wolf
was unmistakable.  Amber.  The current pack alpha.  And she had shifted.

Jack lunged into a sprint, his
feet hitting the ground hard enough to shatter stones.  Trees and water became
blurs on either side, and he felt the moon’s silvery current roaring within
him.  The wolf-bitch would hear him coming, but at this point, he didn’t
rightly care.  He didn’t like to hurt women—hence why he made the idiot mistake
of leaving Amber and her packmates alive when he had annihilated the males he
had assumed were leading them—but if Amber had harmed the city-girl, he would
gut the wench and be done with her.

Jack came to a sprawling stop at
the scuffed sand at the end of the footprint trail, all four limbs gripping the
earth to slow himself down.  His heart began to hammer as he smelled the
unpleasant tang of Blaze’s fear.

Oh no,
he thought, his
gaze catching the ribbed indentations of a river-boat’s hull, where it had
rested in the sand.  Beside it, he saw droplets of blood. 
Blaze’s
blood. 
No, no no…

He got down and smelled it.  Not
heartsblood, he realized, with a pang of hope.  Then his nostrils clogged with
the scent of Amber’s triumph.  Unbidden, an image of the scene spread out in
his mind; Blaze’s terror, the poor girl trying to run, struggling, getting
dragged to the boat by the she-wolf; Amber’s cruel, tiny mind compelling her to
detail out the horrible things she was going to do to Jack’s latest plaything.

Jack dropped his head to the
sand.  He felt the old sorrow come rushing back, threatening to overpower even
his millennia of control.  He thought of the others, remembered how being close
to him had brought them their deaths.

He would
not
let it happen
again.  Not again.

He lunged to his feet.

Amber would have taken Blaze back
to the den.  She would have tried to turn her.

And, more than likely, if he
didn’t find her in time, come morning, Blaze would be dead.

You just fucked with the wrong
wereverine,
Jack thought, anguish and rage building at the thought of
Blaze, scared and alone, dying as the moon-magic worked its way through her
system.  He felt the sharp, sliding pain as his second teeth punctured the roof
of his mouth.  Seeing no one else on the river, he turned and bolted back for
his home, lunging boulders and leaping fallen trees like they were pebbles and
twigs.  

As he ran, images of the past
came to him, unbidden.

Six thousand years. 

Six thousand years, and only four
women.  His companion for three millennia, a dragon with a taste for
adventure.  Sniffed out his little cabin in the woods and discovered his true
nature.  Dead for the other three, killed while he was off cutting firewood.  A
spritely fey girl, looking for a rough tumble.  A thousand years of joy,
companionship, and love.  Killed by her own kind, for being impregnated by a
human.  One of his own kind, lithe and lovely, his first attempt to turn
another, at her request.  A whirlwind romance, ended only when the Inquisitors
caught her, hunting for him.  She’d died in a bewitched iron maiden, her magic
bled out to power the Inquisition as they tried to get her to betray him.  This
latest wereverine—just a girl in comparison to him, but the start of something
special.  Killed by the wolves to try and lure him into doing something stupid.

Now Blaze.  The tall, lovely Fourth
Lander with the sunfire coursing through her veins.  The first one in centuries
who had offered to teach his cranky ass something he desperately wanted to
learn—the one thing he had never managed to master, the development he’d had to
watch from afar, as scholars and monks in their towers and abbeys created
masterpieces while he loped at the fringes of society, shunned by humanity.

Damn the wolf.
  Jack had
let them keep the territory, feeling bad about killing all the girls’ mates. 
But now, as he fought every carnal instinct to go full Third-Lander, he realized
it had been a mistake.  He’d known that Amber had been the kind to hold a
grudge—he had seen it in her icy blue eyes, when he was walking away, covered
in her mate’s blood.

Still, to inflict their feud on
an innocent girl…

Such behavior was unacceptable,
and had just been her death-warrant.

Jack knew that Amber was trying
to bait him into doing something stupid.  He also knew that the poor she-wolf
didn’t have enough experience to realize that a wereverine didn’t last six
thousand years by letting his anger control him.  Fearless, he may be.  Stupid,
he was not.

Jack rushed up his front steps
and threw open the door.  Going to the living-room, he yanked the rug off of
the floor and tore the hidden hatch from its hinges, revealing a dark room
below.  He dropped inside and started yanking weapons and armor from the
shelves he had bolted to the masonry walls.  Two rippling katanas, made by a
master.  Two patterned black longswords, made by himself.  Riveted-link,
fey-bewitched chainmail tunic, made to fit around his altered form.  Breastplate
of dragonhide, studded with a gargoyle’s teeth.  Chain and dragonhide pants to
match.  Dwarven-steel bracers, metal with a slightly greenish hue, marked and
scarred from a thousand battles.  Two axes, with the same greenish glint.  A
couple shimmering blue hatchets, tucked on either side of his belt.

Then, from the velvet-lined case
in the back, he lifted out a Zweihänder.  The weapon weighed in at fourteen
pounds—six and a half feet of undulating Damascus steel.  He slid it into a
sheath over his back, then went for the smaller case inside the locked silver
chest.  Opening it with a cloth, careful not to touch the silver, Jack held his
breath as the light in the room seemed to dim somewhat.  Inside lay a dagger of
void-titan bone, centered with the horn of a dread unicorn.  Even then, the
black spiral was leaking curls of misty darkness into the room, as if the owner
were still trying to find and punish Jack for killing it.

Looking down at the dagger, Jack
hesitated.  He hadn’t had to use it for centuries, and never on anything so
common as a few wolf pups.

Still, he had smelled the growing
stench of werewolf coming from downriver over the last six years.  He had heard
the tales of campers gone missing, of homeless and millionaires alike vanishing
off the streets of Anchorage.  He had seen the moose population stagger yet
again.  He knew she was building her army.

Yet he hesitated.  Some gut
instinct was saying to leave the weapon behind, that his problems would only
get worse if Amber saw it.

Amber’s not going to survive
seeing it,
Jack thought stubbornly.  He was going to bury it in her skull
and do the whole damn neighborhood a favor.

Jack carefully took the black dagger
from its case and tucked it into the padded sheath on his belt, careful to
avoid the razor-sharp tip.  One scratch would create an instant necrotic
reaction in a were, instant death in a mortal.  A good plunge into the brain
would cancel out the moon magic entirely, negating the very power that had made
the were.  It was as effective as silver, except its effects were
instantaneous, on any creature.

You don’t need it,
part of
him argued. 
They’re just puppies.

But the puppies had pissed him
off, and Jack intended to do some spring cleaning, starting with Amber’s bad
apple.

He turned and lunged out of the
hole, then bolted through his living-room, leaving a good four-dozen weapons
and armor still hanging upon the walls behind him.  He ran down to his boat,
shoved it into Ebony Creek, and hopped onboard.  By the time he hit the gas and
roared out onto the river—somewhere around ten-thirty—the sun was finally
starting to edge towards the horizon.

Hold on, sweetheart,
Jack
thought, fighting a growing sense of unease at how long Blaze had been in the
werewolves’ paws.  Holding tight to the upright drivers’ console, he slammed
the throttle all the way forward, putting the sleek boat up onto step and
skipping across the river at about forty-five miles an hour.  At this point, he
didn’t care if anyone saw him half-changed, motoring around in strange, scaly
armor, bristling with swords and axes.  He wanted—no,
needed
—to find the
girl and bring her back safe.  He’d offered his protection to too many women
and failed.