Alaskan Fire (28 page)

Blaze was still staring at the
lumber, slack-jawed.  Jack glanced over at her and frowned.  “You listening?”

“Just give me a second,” she said
as she struggled to think.  The owners hadn’t listed a sawmill on the equipment
list, and her logical mind was frantically coming up with reasons why the
fortune in lumber wasn’t rightly hers.  She glanced around, looking for
property landmarks.  “You sure this belonged to the Olsons?”

“Helped Bill move it out here,”
Jack said.  He pointed down the trail.  “That heads out to state land along the
Yentna, where they’d gotten their logging permits.  Earned some pretty good
cash helping Bill haul spruce logs back here, for Susan to cut up.”  He
pointed.  “See that little tractor over there?”

Blaze glanced at the little red
machine, barely visible against the brush that was overtaking it.  “Yeah?”

“She used that to load logs onto
the mill.  Pretty slick.”  He grunted and started pulling the tarp completely
off of the stack.  “So yeah, it’s yours.  Help me load it onto the trailer and
we’ll go start building you a barn.”  As he spoke, he grabbed a big armload of
boards—six to eight times what Blaze could lift—and hefted them over his
shoulder like they weighed nothing at all.

Blaze glared as she watched him
show off.  “Looks like you got things covered,” she muttered, when he laid them
out on the trailer and came back for more.

“Yeah,” Jack winked, “But I love
to see your face when I put all this lean meat to good use.”  He flexed an arm
for her and kissed his bicep, grinning.

Blaze’s mouth fell open.  “You’re
an arrogant prick, you know that?”

“Maybe,” he said, picking up
another load, bigger than before, then split it into two halves so he could
flex each of his massive shoulders, “But with a body like this, who’s to blame
me?”  Still grinning up at her, he delivered the bundles to the 4-wheeler. 
That time, the trailer’s tires actually squatted under the weight.

He made two more trips, strapped
the lumber down with a handful of bungee cords, then mounted the four-wheeler,
giving her a wonderful presentation on the form and function of the gluteus
maximus, then started the machine and spun the cart around.

“You coming?” Jack asked, slowing
beside her.

Blaze eyed the cart anxiously. 
“It already looks like it’s gonna pop a tire.”

“That’s why you’ll ride up here
with me.”  He patted the seat behind him.

Peering at the overgrown trail,
remembering what happened last time she had gone off in the woods alone, Blaze
decided she really didn’t want to walk.  Reluctantly, she climbed aboard the
four-wheeler with him.

“
Whoa
,” Jack whistled, as
the four-wheeler squatted precipitously.  “Just how much do you weigh, woman?” 
He gave the tires a concerned look.

Blaze reddened and started to get
off.

“I’m joking,” Jack laughed,
grabbing her knee, “I built this thing solid, to hold my heavy ass.  A few
hundred extra pounds isn’t gonna make much difference.”

A few hundred…?
she
thought, shocked.  She stared at the back of his head as they started moving
down the trail, imagining it imploding, sucked inward by the inescapable vacuum
that was his brain.  “You want to learn how to spell your name?” Blaze asked,
through gritted teeth.

Jack frowned over his shoulder at
her, his green eyes suspicious.  “Why?”

“No reason,” Blaze said.  “Just
bored.”

His eyes flickered nervously
across her face.  “Maybe later,” he said slowly.

“Begins with ‘A,’” Blaze offered.

Jack glanced back at her again,
uncertainly.  “‘A,’ Huh?”

She smiled and nodded.

“I’ll have to keep that in
mind.”  Then he was paying close attention to the trail, and Blaze couldn’t
help but notice where his nice, hard body was tucked up against her—and where
his ridiculous reproduction sword was thoroughly getting in the way.

Blaze grabbed it by the handle
and yanked it free.

Jack let off the throttle with a
cry of, “Hey, now!”  He stood in the stirrups and turned, frowning at her. 
“Just give it back, honey.”

The way he said it, she was
holding some sort of holy relic from the days of King Arthur.  Blaze rolled her
eyes and tried to figure out what kind of enamel they’d used on the blade.  Whatever
it was, she wouldn’t mind trying to replicate the process, once she had her
renaissance resort up and running.  When she looked closely, though, the
void-black coating was probably too deep to be cost-effective.  Even scratched,
she couldn’t see any silver shining through from underneath.  Blaze tested the
sword’s edge.  And cut herself.  She jerked her hand away.  And cut herself
again, when the blade slid through her denim jeans and bit into her thigh.

“Holy
shit
that’s sharp!”
she cried, jamming her thumb into her mouth, holding the blade at arm’s length
as she stared at it, wide-eyed.

Jack snatched it from her and
rammed it back into its sheath, scowling.  “I could’ve told you that.”

“Where’d you
get
that
thing?!” Blaze cried, hastily examining her leg to see how deep the blade had
sunk into her thigh.  Not far, thank God, though it was starting to bleed like
a stuck pig.

“Told you,” Jack said, sitting
back down, “Made it.”  Then they were moving again, the 4-wheeler bouncing them
down the overgrown trail as if Blaze were not sitting on the seat behind him,
bleeding.

“I need a Band-Aid,” Blaze
muttered, looking at the split in her thumb.

“Could try the first-aid kit
upstairs,” Jack offered.

Blaze stared at the ebony hilt,
bouncing under her chin.  Now that she was looking, the scrollwork on the guard
and pommel were much too elaborate to belong to something that was stamped out
in a factory at thirty cents a blade.  “Did you really make that?” she asked
softly.  “It looks like a masterwork.”

“Someday,” Jack said, “I’ll show
you my collection.”

“So you
collected
it?”
Blaze demanded.

“Yes,” Jack said.  “From a
void-titan’s thighbone.”  He grinned over his shoulder at her.  “The dragon I
was with at the time got everything else—greedy sonofabitch—otherwise I’d
probably have made a suit of armor out of the stuff.”  He shrugged and went
back to driving.  “As it is, I got a couple longswords and a dagger hilt, so
I’m happy.  Trellyn did most of the work, anyway.  I just kinda stood around
and hacked at his feet when he was distracted.”

“You know a dragon?” Blaze
whispered, her heart making an extra excited thump.

“Several of them,” Jack said. 
“And if any of them set foot on my territory again, I’m going to drive a
crow-bar through their skulls and twist.”

“That’s…brutal,” Blaze said.

“They’re snooty, higher-than-thou,
two-faced thieving bastards,” Jack said.  “About as interesting as a cardboard
cutout, and as selfish as a troll.”  He waved a disgusted hand at the north. 
“Thunderbird pretty much keeps them at bay, I’d say.  I haven’t heard of any of
them heading south out of the Brooks Range, and good riddance.”

“I’d like to meet a dragon,”
Blaze said, biting her lip at how ridiculous that sounded.

Jack twisted in his seat to give
her a long look.  “Missy,” he said, “If you survive the next couple of years,
I’m pretty sure you’re going to.”  He pulled the four-wheeler around the big-diesel
lot, then rolled to a stop in the churned earth beside her bulldozer.

Blaze frowned.  “Why’s that?”

Jack glanced at her and
dismounted.  This close, he clinked as he moved, and Blaze realized that he was
wearing some sort of chainmail underneath his shirt.  Jack started freeing the
bungees from the lumber pile.

“You didn’t answer my question.”

“What question, sweetheart?”  He
tucked the bungees away on the back of the 4-wheeler and started kicking out an
even patch of ground.

“Why do you think I’m going to
meet a dragon?” Blaze demanded.

“You’re out in the woods,” Jack
said vaguely.  He threw down a few blocks to keep the lumber off of the ground,
then started taking the rest from the cart and laying it out in rows.

Irritated at his evasiveness,
Blaze climbed off the 4-wheeler.  She was about to start helping him when her
eyes caught on a green shape a few yards off.  An abandoned life-jacket. 
Frowning, she walked over and picked it up.  Something hard and lumpy against
her hand caught her attention.  She turned it over.

The jacket was melted inside,
almost like someone had dribbled burning kerosene on it.

Blaze had just the faintest
tantalizing memory before it was gone, buried back under the surface of the
Void.  Frowning, Blaze held it up so Jack could see the burn marks.  “You know
what did this?” she asked.

Jack looked up, then stumbled. 
Righting himself quickly, he made a nonchalant shrug.  “Caught on fire, probably.”

“Well, that’s obvious,” Blaze
growled, tossing it aside.   

“Then why’d you ask?”  He
finished unloading the lumber, then climbed back aboard the 4-wheeler.  He
started the engine, obviously waiting for her.

Muttering, Blaze stalked over
and, after a brief deliberation over whether to ride on the
vertebrae-shattering cart or the soft, padded, shock-absorbing seat of the
4-wheeler, she climbed up behind Jack.

It took several trips to relocate
the pile of lumber from the abandoned clearing in the middle of the forest to
the fresh new dirt pad out behind the lodge.  Then, as Jack dragged her around
gathering up concrete sacks from yet another abandoned clearing to the west, various
tools and supplies from the shop, and began to set it up beside the pile of
lumber, Blaze had that funny, world-shifting realization that he was serious.

He’s gonna build me a barn,
Blaze thought, stunned to tears.  Realizing she was about to put herself into
another coma, she quickly took several deep breaths and held a palm over her
eyes to calm herself, thinking about her last Business Statistics exam in order
to keep from falling into another ‘grief-triggered psycho-emotional collapse.’ 
Fucking overpaid hack doctors and their ‘self-induced psychosomatic’ bullshit. 

When she lowered her hand, she
realized Jack had been watching her.  He cleared his throat, his face
reddening, and he glanced up at the sky, “So, uh, we should probably start
dinner.”

Blaze looked out at her parched
garden and winced.  “You really called
Thunderbird
for my
garden
?” 
She peered at Jack.  “You really think he’s coming over?”

“He better,” Jack said, “as many
times as he’s called me over as his home-fucking-repairman, he better be here
right on time, a smile on his face, or he’s gonna be swimming in his own crap
for a few centuries.”  At her stare, he said, “What, you think the North
American rain-god uses an
outhouse
?  As full of shit as he is, he’s
lucky he only overloads his septic tank twice a decade.”  He made a disgusted
sound.  “Come on, I’ll never hear the end of it if we don’t feed him. 
Hospitality and all that.”

North American rain-god.
 
Blaze suddenly had a flutter of worry that she and Jack had the audacity to bother
such an entity with something as silly as her
garden
.  Then a bigger, more
pressing matter occurred to her.  What
did
you feed a North American
rain-god?

“I hear he likes spaghetti,” Jack
said, when she asked.  “And nachos, on game nights.”

Blaze peered at him.  “He watches
football?”

Jack shrugged.  “Flies in to his
place in Chugiak once a week to watch the game.”

“So you
have
been to town
before,” Blaze cried.  Chugiak was smack-dab between Anchorage and Wasilla, and
as far as she knew, there weren’t any Bush-plane charter services operating out
of Chugiak.

Jack gave her a funny look.  “No,
I don’t give a rat shit about his place in town.  He hires someone for that. 
The place in town is just so he can watch the game.  His main place is a cabin
upriver.  Drags my ass out of bed at the crack of dawn—he’s an early riser—a
few times a year to take a miserably cold boat-ride up the Yentna to fix
whatever he busted.”  At Blaze’s stare, Jack shrugged.  “When he works on
engines and batteries, he tends to make stuff explode.”

They decided to make spaghetti
with the last of Blaze’s precious fresh vegetables, and Jack insisted on
dumping a whole palmful of oregano into the sauce as it simmered, despite the
recipe’s listed ‘one tablespoon.’  They spent two hours preparing, cooking the
noodles, simmering the sauce, filling the entire lodge with the delectable
scent of fresh-cooked Italian food.

“Okay, now,” Jack said, as he
stirred the sauce, “a couple things you should probably keep in mind ‘fore you
do something stupid.”

Blaze knew he wasn’t talking
about putting too much olive oil in the spaghetti noodles.  “Like what?” she
asked, nervous, now.

“It’s like this, sister,” Jack
said.  “This guy’s like a walking powerhouse.  He gets pissed at you, you’re
dead,
capiche
?  Not even the dragons will fuck with him.  Well, not the
smart ones.  Younger ones still have pissing contests and shit, but he could sputch
‘em dead if he really wanted to, you understand?”

This was reminding Blaze of his
previous lectures about How To Not Sputch Yourself Running A Fishing Lodge. 
“Um,” Blaze said, looking down at the strainer of noodles, “are we sure we want
him over?”

“He’s mostly harmless,” Jack
said.  “But, uh, yeah.  Watch your step around him.  He’s already a bit
touchy.  I think I might’ve pissed him off the last time I chased him through
the woods.  Said some pretty unkind things about his sexual orientation, and I
think maybe he took offense.”

His
sexual orientation
?  Suddenly,
the lack of rain made a lot more sense to Blaze.  She narrowed her eyes.  “Are
you saying this place has been a desert because you—”