Alaskan Fire (25 page)

He could
not
go through
that again.  It would end him, as thoroughly as the dread blade on his hip. 
Yet every time Jack got near Blaze, he felt that growing tug in his chest, felt
himself aching for that shared link, that part of him that Oethynna had
awakened when the ancient dragon took him to mate, so many ages ago…

…the part of him that she had
left abandoned and so totally alone, the moment the royal hunters had severed
her cord, dropping him to the forest floor at the agony within.  It had been
devastating.  Like losing the other half of his soul.  He hadn’t been able to
move for days, just wept into the mosses.  When he finally found himself able
to crawl back home, he had found her corpse stretched out upon the floor of his
cabin, naked, the place stinking of a witch’s-brew and sweat, and Jack had lost
his mind. 

The days that followed had grown
so dark, so abysmal, that he became the monster the humans feared he was.  He
would have never done it again, had Mae Lae not simply hunted him down and
made
the link, not giving him a choice.  After the fey princess’s death, grief had
once again driven Jack to solitude, and once again the Cosmos had wrenched him
back from isolation with a pretty, innocent human peasant girl who got lost in
the woods and needed his help.  After two prior connections, that part of
himself that the dragon had awakened had been starving, hungry for the
companionship he’d lost.  Like a fool, he’d formed the third link to Tavva almost
instantaneously, and had spent years following her around like a puppy-dog
until he finally got the balls to tell her he was a wereverine.  Out of fear
that she would grow old, he had given in to her demands that he turn her.  And
when he felt her body pierced by the iron maiden, slowly drained of its fluids
for Inquisitional blood-magics, Jack had died inside. 

When Henrietta had come sniffing,
he had managed to keep his head on straight, had managed not to let that part
of himself make the bond, and it was probably the only thing that had kept him
from losing his mind all over again when the wolves killed her, becoming that
beast of nightmare and legend.

…But Blaze was different.  He
didn’t have the
control
around her, and something about her was tugging
on him more strongly than anything he’d ever known,
demanding
that link,
commanding
it.

Jack let out an unsteady breath,
the pull having become almost unbearable of late.  It had reached the point
where he was having trouble
thinking
around the long-legged vixen.  He
was playing a dangerous game, he knew.  If he managed to get her out alive
tonight, it would be all he could do not to simply surrender to the dragon-bond
and claim her right there on the spot.  Some deep and carnal part of Jack,
after eight hundred years without that mating-connection, was desperate to make
that link.  He knew himself well enough to understand that the relief might
overwhelm him, and he might seal the link just by accident. 

Can’t do that, buddy.  She’s
outta your league.  Top-tier to your vermin possession.  The moment she figures
it out, you’re just the handyman again, bud.
  If she even hung around.  If
she stayed, Blaze was going to do for the area in a couple years what Fish and
Game regulators had been struggling to do for twenty.  He knew a dozen friends
who would gladly pay cash money for a couple goats or a few chickens a week.

If she hung around.  If he could
find
her.  If she wasn’t already
dead
. 

Damn Amber
, Jack thought
again.  She obviously didn’t understand he’d left her alive out of
mercy
. 
‘Cause he couldn’t hurt a damn woman.  Damn it.  Couldn’t she see he was being
nice
? 
All he’d been able to bring himself to kill had been the males in charge of
that clusterfuck, the ones that had led the girls astray.  Seein’ the girls all
huddled together, scared to death of him after he’d ripped apart all their
mates, had been too much.  He’d felt something snap in his head and he’d just
growled something about minding their manners and let them all live.  Now she
had some stupid
grudge
…

Once Jack reached the far edge of
the Yentna, he shut off the throttle and drifted into shore.  He set anchor,
then slipped into the woods.  The next three miles, he took slowly, weaving
through the trees, every sense alert, looking for guards.

The stench of wolf was
everywhere, and Jack was more than a little disturbed to find trash, empty
whiskey bottles, and syringes scattered throughout the forest, becoming more
prevalent the deeper he went into the wolves’ territory.

He was even more unnerved at the
lack of guard.  The last mile into the wolves’ territory, and
no one
stepped out to stop him.  Surely, after doing something as brazen as kidnapping
Blaze, Amber would have posted a watch.

She’s utterly without fear,
Jack thought, astounded.

Then, as he came within sight of
the den, he realized why.

The old, ramshackle cabin that
the wolves had used as cover for their burrow was crawling with weres.  Most
were slumped on the front porch drinking whiskey or vodka or some other form of
hard alcohol straight from the bottle.  A few were playing cards on a rickety
little table off to one side, most smoking cigarettes or pipes or, in the case
of one large black fellah leaning against a far tree, reading a book.  Several
looked to be smoking bongs, tainting the entire area with the bitter smell of
cannabis.

Jack sniffed for Blaze.  Her
scent was here, but it was muted by the stench of a few dozen wolves.  He
grimaced, looking at the front door of the cabin.  He had been in it once
before, and he would rather not crawl down that tunnel again, if he could avoid
it.

Carefully, Jack angled himself
back toward the water, deciding he would pick up Blaze’s scent where she had
stepped onto shore and follow it that way.

There were no guards posted at
the beach.  Jack drew one of his black longswords and quietly began cutting the
anchor-lines, sending the boats drifting downriver.  He stopped at the boat
that still stank with the smell of Blaze’s blood.  Someone had spent quite a
bit of time trying to rinse the vessel clean, but Jack would recognize that
scent anywhere.  It smelled of desert sunshine and earth-fire, and it had been
burned into his memory during his time in the East.

The puppies,
Jack thought,
his anger rising. 
They have absolutely no idea what they’ve got on their
hands.
  Hell, the impulsive bitch had probably kidnapped Blaze for the
simple fact that Blaze had hired Jack, and Amber didn’t like Jack.

She needs to die,
Jack
thought again, remembering the cesspool that Amber had been building up around
her.  Even as he had the thought, however, his gut quailed.  The last time he
had killed a woman, she had already been dead, and the taste of her fear was
still a filthy stain in his mind.

Jack cut the final anchor line
and set the boat adrift.  Then, carefully, he eased himself up over the
riverbank and sheathed his longsword.  He pulled a katana in either hand, then
slowly moved down the path, every sense alert.

The first wolf saw him and
shifted—his body growing to approximately double that of Jack’s before he lost
control and sank into full-wolf form. 

Puppies,
Jack thought, as
the creature didn’t even bother to raise an alarm, merely charged, in full
throes of the moon-magic.

Jack, while smaller than a wolf
in the half-form, was much faster than a wolf, and stronger.  Wolves gained
their strength in numbers—the more wolves belonged to a pack, the stronger they
became.  Wolverines gained their strength from age, pure and simple, and Jack
was
old
.

Jack swung to the side just as
the wolf left the ground, jaws wide to clamp shut around his throat.  Twisting,
he brought his katanas down almost distractedly, severing head from body and
cutting the torso in half without even slowing down.  He kicked the head aside,
to seal the boy’s fate.  As he stepped over the corpse, Jack watched the silver
moon-magic bleed out of the creature even as it tried in vain to piece himself
back together.

The rest of the path was clear up
to a split.  One fork went towards the ramshackle cabin and the main den, while
the other went to the left, deeper into the forest.  From that direction, Jack
smelled turned earth and…fire.  He frowned, and took that path.

The trail took him deep into the
woods, up to a large, half-dug tunnel buried into the side of a hill.  A new
den?  Though Blaze’s smell was everywhere, Jack didn’t see her. 

Instead, a tiny woman was sitting
on the churned earth outside the hole in the hill, rocking back and forth,
staring at the half-made tunnel.  Jack recognized her as one of the survivors
from six years before, one of the ones that had cringed away from him as he’d
come out of the den, covered in her lover’s blood.

Keeping low and quiet, Jack crept
closer, katanas ready.

She sensed him just as he was
getting ready to lay a katana against her neck, and, with a startled sound, she
jumped backwards, away from him.  She didn’t, however, run or try to change.

Smart girl,
Jack thought. 
It meant that, unlike the majority of the fools around here, her fear-response
didn’t automatically throw the moon-magic into control.  Which meant she was
probably old enough to know that, without her pack around her, she didn’t stand
a chance.

“Where is the woman your alpha
took today?” Jack asked softly.

The tiny woman’s brown eyes went
wide and she pointed at the half-finished tunnel.

It took Jack a moment to
comprehend.  “You
buried
her?”  He took an angry step forward, his
hackles lengthening down his spine.

“I tried to tell Amber,” the
woman whispered, “I tried to get her to leave her on the river.”

She’s terrified,
Jack
thought, stunned. 
And still she doesn’t shift.
  That took a lot of
control, especially for a wolf.  He frowned at the woman.  “You aren’t a were,
are you?”  He sniffed, and wasn’t sure if the smell of wolf was coming from her
or from one she had simply been spending a lot of time rubbing up against.  For
a brief instant, he thought he caught a whiff of feathers, but it passed.  Her
latest meal, perhaps?  Older weres got better about hiding their scent, but by
the way she was cringing, she probably hadn’t had time to master that
particular talent.

She licked her lips nervously and
gave the forest behind her a calculating glance.

“Don’t,” Jack growled.  “You’re
much too young to outrun me, girl.”

She twisted back and Jack saw
irritation in her brown eyes.  She stood a little straighter and her voice was
cold when she said, “She almost died from the initial bite, Shadowkiller.  I’ve
been monitoring her.  She’s rejected the Third Lander poison and is still
alive, but barely.  You want your pet back alive, you’ll need to dig her out
before it gets dark.”

Then she shifted—as smooth and
quick as polished glass—and Jack took a startled step back, again catching the
scent of…
wings?
  When he placed the
kind
of wings, he stumbled
backwards.  No.  No way. 

After giving him a long, weighing
look with eyes that glowed yellow in the half-light, the small black wolf
turned and bolted into the trees, flickering from tree to tree, so fast it
might have been made of shadow itself.

That,
Jack realized, his
gut clamping,
was not a puppy.

The last time he’d heard someone
refer to him as ‘Shadowkiller,’ he had been working as the personal blacksmith
for a sheikh during the construction of Baghdad.

He glanced up at the treeline. 
The sun was just at the edge of the horizon, and would probably dip beneath the
trees within the next half hour.

Swallowing, he glanced back at
the path back to the den.  He wondered if the little black wolf was even then
looping around, telling her kin of the wereverine on the property.  If she did,
and they caught him in the entrance to the tunnel, all the swords in the world
weren’t going to do him any good when they surrounded him.

Jack got the gut-wrenching
feeling, however, that the little black wolf wanted Blaze alive just as much as
he did, and, though she wasn’t going to risk helping him free her, she wasn’t
going to betray him, either.

His gut was also telling him that
the little black wolf was telling the truth, and that Blaze was going to die if
he didn’t get her back into the light before the sun went down.

Making his decision, he slid the
katanas home through the cleaning-cloth and, with one last nervous look at the
path, rushed to start flinging dirt out of the tunnel.

The scent of death hit him before
he’d gone more than a foot.  Jack’s heart immediately clenched at the thought
that he had been too late, but as he dug deeper, the smell grew so great that
he knew it had to be coming from another source.

They put her down here with a
corpse?
he thought, disgusted.  As he broke through the final few inches of
soil, the blast of death and decay almost knocked him over.  He smelled wolf—dozens
of wolves had spent some time down here—and the overpowering scent of sunshine
and fire.  The rot, however, while definitely carrying the tinge of moon-magic,
didn’t smell like wolf. 

It wasn’t until he pulled away
the last clods of dirt and looked into the vaulted chamber inside that he
realized where the smell was coming from.

Blaze heard thumps as something
clawed at the dirt, and in her delirium, Blaze thought that the rotting
wereverine was still alive.  She screamed a long, miserable wail into her
gasoline-soaked gag, and tried again not to vomit at the streaks of ember-hot
fire that laced through her body with the motion. 

They buried me alive with a
ghoul,
a terrified corner of Blaze’s mind babbled, when the thumps in the
utter darkness got closer.  Blaze’s heart, disrupted from the weak-but-steady
groove that it had etched for itself over the long hours of drifting in and out
of consciousness, started to hammer, lacing concussive blasts of coals
throughout her body.

Each weak explosion in her chest
seemed to bring the sounds closer, until they seemed to be right on top of
her.  Blaze babbled her terror into the vomit-crusted rag, and her fear only
made the pain searing her body more intense.  She felt every throbbing pulse
like someone had injected a canister of jet-fuel into her veins and the
electrical charge of her contracting heart was setting it on fire.

Blaze rolled back and forth in a
struggle to get away from the sounds, but her motions were weak.  What took a
monumental effort on her part resulted in only an inch or two of movement, and
it was utterly exhausting.  Worse, Blaze knew that her panic was only making
her bleed faster.  She could see the glowing silver spreading outwards on the blackened
dirt beneath her body, and as the flow increased, so did her delirium.  It must
have been her imagination, but it almost looked like there really
was
fire mixed in her blood.  It seemed to swirl against the silver, orange-gold in
the absolute darkness, except for little pops of flame here and there, where
the blood came into contact with a root or twig.

No air,
Blaze realized, in
explanation for the strange visions. 
They shut off my air.
  She
remembered the hallucinations of miners, trapped deep within the earth, and
knew that she should probably try to slow her breathing, if she ever expected
to survive this place.

The sounds near her elbow,
however, were too close.  The ghoul was wakening, and was slowly crawling
towards her in the flickering darkness…

Blaze screamed again and felt her
heart erupt against her chest, and panic made her vision dim.  More blood
dribbled forth, but this time, the flame lasted longer, eating at the very soil
like someone had spilled diesel over the floor of the cavern.

Then light burst into her world,
searing her eyes, leaving her blind.  She saw a shadow, outlined against the
sun.  She peered at it, trying to make out the features…

A taloned fist wrapped around the
heavy door of her cage and ripped it off its hinges.  Blaze laughed in despair
at this new vision, for her panicked, dying mind had given her that which she
had most wanted—but not allowed herself to hope—to see. 

The wereverine stood at the
entrance to her prison, wearing pretty black scaly armor and a dozen different
weapons, staring at the other cage beyond.

Weaving in and out of
consciousness with the stuttering of her heart, Blaze turned her head.  She saw
the zombie, jumped back into the same position it had been before, pretending
to huddle against the back of its cage, head tilted back, mouth hanging open,
several rows of teeth showing in the roof of its open mouth.

Tricky zombie,
Blaze
thought, a part of her giggling hysterically.  The other part of her was
incredibly tired, and as each space between heartbeats grew longer, her humor
faded and her sleepiness grew. 
Don’t trust the zombie,
Blaze thought,
as the wereverine-hallucination grabbed her and tugged her from the cage. 
She’s
faking it.  She was alive a moment ago.  She was eating me.

Even then, she could remember the
zombie crawling across the floor, lapping up the silver and gold juices flowing
from her body as it watched her with its evil, rotted white eyes catch fire
behind its bone-white skull. 

…Couldn’t she?

Blaze didn’t think she’d ever
been so tired in her life, and the warm heat of the sun against her face seemed
to calm her heart just enough that the pain wasn’t keeping her awake any longer. 
She closed her eyes.

She almost didn’t hear the, “Gods
have mercy,” almost didn’t feel the way her hands seemed to fall free, her huge
Yeti toes slamming numbly into the dirt behind her.

Something strong rolled her over
and tapped her face.

Blaze heard the flesh slapping
from a distance.  It was an irritation, but she was more concerned with her
heart.  She had thought she had felt it move, but couldn’t remember the last
time when her body had shuddered with a full convulsion.

A heavy weight slammed into her bruised
chest, hard enough to crack more ribs.  Blaze gasped and her eyes flashed open
at the feeling of another detonation throughout her body.  The wereverine was
hunched over her, still wearing the ridiculous armor.  Didn’t he know he looked
like something out of a nerd-convention?  That black scaly stuff was so
obviously fake, too.  It wasn’t even chipped, like
real
armor would have
been, had it ever been through a
real
battle.  And the weird,
crescent-shaped blue-white hatchety-looking things on his belt…  She couldn’t
even place an era in history where anything like that had actually ever been
used in war.

He looks so damn pitiful,
Blaze thought, giggling inwardly. 
He really should study his history,
rather than buying plastic crap off of Ebay.
  She was getting sleepy again,
and her eyes were sliding shut.

Something crashed into her chest
again, and this time, the explosions rocking her ribcage continued in a
panicked frenzy, arcing streaks of pain throughout her body.  Blaze moaned, and
was surprised to find she wasn’t trying to breathe through vomit and gasoline. 
She opened her eyes again, and she saw Jack’s deep green stare peering back at
her, his face etched with concern.

“You gonna be okay there,
sweetie?”

“You look ridiculous,” Blaze
managed.  “What era is that?”

But Jack was shifting back into
his hairy wereverine self, looking over his shoulder, and he was grabbing a big
two-handed sword from where it was slung across his back.

When the blade slid free, the
ringing sound got Blaze’s attention.  She frowned up at the randomly filigreed
blue-black pattern on the metal. 
Is that
Damascus steel
?
she
thought, peering at it.  Then her eyes caught on the katana he slid out in his
second hand, and the rippled edge of the blade made her breath catch.

That’s
real
,
she
thought, horrified. 
That’s a
master’s
blade.  And he’s wearing it
around like a toy.

The toy proceeded to cut through
a werewolf’s skull, depositing half of it, jaws still twitching, on Blade’s
chest.

Blaze rasped a scream and weakly crawled
backwards, trying to fling the snapping, biting thing off of her.

“Stay here, sugar,” Jack said,
distractedly bending down to grab her by the ankle with his katana-hand.  He
dragged her backwards, his eyes were on something behind her.

Blaze flipped the truncated
cranium off of her chest and twisted to see what he was looking at.

Forty werewolves stood a few
yards off, their slitted eyes glowing in the hazy light.

One of them, with silver-white
fur and ice-blue eyes, stepped forward, body massive and monstrous in
comparison to the wolverine hunched over her, swords dripping crimson-silver
blood down their antique blades.

Very slowly, Jack slid the katana
back into his sheathe.  When he removed the twisted black spiral horn from his
belt, its razor tip dribbling blackness that seemed to settle onto the ground
in a void-like mist, Blaze knew she was dreaming.

Dreaming…or dead.  Though, when
Blaze swallowed, she was pretty sure that dead people didn’t have to deal with
the burning taste of bile.

“I’m taking her home with me, Amber,”
Jack said.  “Don’t try to stop me.  You really don’t want to deal with the
consequences if you do.”

“You actually think you’re
getting out of here, don’t you, weasel?” Amber snarled, her blue-white eyes
glowing like twin moons in the dimming light.  She took another step forward,
just out of range of the huge Zweihänder.

At the edge of the pack, the big
black man boomed, “I’d let him go, if I were you, wolf pup.”  His violet eyes were
focused on the strange black dagger, and his whole ebony body looked tense,
ready to bolt at any second.

“Listen to the slave,” Jack
snapped.  “I spared you once, you miserable bitch, but I’m not going to do it
again.”

Amber snarled a challenge and
leapt.

Almost as if she were watching a
slow-motion replay, Blaze watched as Jack stepped out of the way and slashed
the tip of the darkness-dripping black dagger across the werewolf’s face.

He didn’t stab her,
Blaze
thought, frowning.  If this were a
decent
dream, he would have
stabbed
her.  And he also wouldn’t be wearing such ridiculously stupid armor.  Who did
he think he was trying to imitate?  The infamous Black Knight?

The howl of pain from the
werewolf, however, made Blaze hesitate.  As she watched, Amber changed form in mid-air
and fell to the ground in a human ball, clutching her face.

“Anyone else?” Jack snarled,
turning his attention to the forty wolves.  Behind him, the woman was shrieking
and clawing at her face.

“Take good care of that one,” the
big black man said, though if he were speaking to the wolves or the wereverine,
Blaze wasn’t sure.

The other wolves exchanged uneasy
glances between the decapitated werewolf still twitching on the ground beside
Blaze, the two halved wolves even then in their death-throes in the woods
behind Jack, and their leader, screaming like she was being eaten alive. 
Several took uneasy steps backwards.

Slowly, Jack slid the Zweihänder
back into its sheath and reached down to grab Blaze.  He pulled her into a
sitting position, then, his eyes still on wolves, hefted her over his shoulder,
the dripping black weapon between him and the others.

As Jack started backing into the
woods, Blaze yet again face-down over his shoulder, she heard him say, “Anyone
who follows me is gonna get the same.”  Then he turned, and Blaze felt her
world blur and her body press into his as he lunged forward with more Gs than an
F-15.

A couple minutes later, Jack leapt,
and Blaze heard the soft sound of sand thumping under his feet.  When she
looked, the gray swirls of the Yentna River was moving along beside them.  She
heard a branch snap on the bank above them.  Felt Jack tense and turn.

She heard the black man say, “You
should kill her.”  A few yards off, at Jack’s back, a little black wolf was
standing beside the river under an overhang, watching them.  Pretty wolfie. 
She was pretty sure that Jack didn’t see the wolfie, because he was listening
to the black man.

Then Blaze’s heart started to hammer
as she realized what the black man had said. 
Kill me?
her fragmented
brain cried. 
But he just dressed up to rescue me.
  Then she chittered inwardly,
thoroughly amused by her joke.  She dimly felt a line of silver and gold run
down her neck and drip off of her chin, staining the driftwood…black?  Was that
smoke
?

She felt Jack hesitate under her,
meet the black man’s gaze.  “I don’t kill women,” Jack said. 

 “This time, it would be a mercy,
Shadowkiller,” the black man boomed.  “She’s lost her mind.”

Shadowkiller?
  Blaze
pushed off of Jack’s back enough to turn her head and look.  The effort
required to see their visitor was monumental, and she was left panting at the
big man leaning against the tree.

“Or maybe you’re just craving a
bit of freedom, eh?” Jack growled.  He pulled a boat close and waded out to it. 
“She the one who bound you, slave?”

“I can only offer my advice,” the
black man replied softly.  He uncrossed his arms and shrugged.  “Whether you
heed it is up to you.”

Then Jack was lowering Blaze into
the boat, still watching the man on the bank.  “I don’t deal with your kind,”
Jack growled.  “Get the hell outta here, slave.”

He’s racist, too,
Blaze
suddenly realized, disgusted. 
I really need to get myself a new handyman.
 
Someone suave and charismatic and helpful, not an ornery little shit with a bad
attitude.

Then a disturbing thought
occurred to her.  What if
all
of this was a nightmare, not just the last
few hours?  What if she hadn’t really received an inheritance from her
estranged and eccentric father?  What if she was still grinding away at an
accounting job with the State of Alaska, aiming for that coveted full-time
position?  What if she really was going to burn to death in a fire, as that
wide-eyed fortune-teller had told her?

Then again, a logical portion of
her brain told her, she had actually
increased
her chances of burning to
death in a fire by moving to the Bush, what with the open stoves and diesel
fuel and cooking propane and barrels of gasoline.

The bottom of the boat was
cold,
she realized, as a wave of shivers overtook her.  She heard her teeth chattering,
felt her body start to tremble.

Then the boat jerked and began to
drift on the current.  A moment later, there was a wereverine standing over her,
his bestial face somehow conveying concern despite his jagged, ivory teeth and
his snakelike emerald eyes.  “You gonna be okay there, honey?”

“Cold,” Blaze whimpered.  She
felt like they were
in
the river, not floating down it.