Alaskan Fire (36 page)

The few times she’d set foot in
the Bush before stepping off of Bruce’s plane, she had been on a chartered
fishing trip with her father, led around by the hand by two well-paid guides,
sleeping in well-appointed cabins rented for the purpose, ushered around in
luxury river boats, and deposited back in Anchorage before the week was up. 
And the renaissance fair?  She only had some vague contact in Washington,
insisting that if she could create the right place, he could dredge up the
right people.  She’d trusted him on his word alone, and had poured hundreds of
thousands of dollars into finding a suitable place to meet all her goals.  She
had been stupid, and stubborn, holding onto her dream even after she realized
that the people in the wilds around the Yentna River weren’t what they
appeared.

Her grandmother, in her
innocence, had said it best… 

A woman?  Running a fishing
lodge?  Why, who would pay for that?

Blaze’s chest was a tangle of
hurt, self-pity, and loss.  She felt like she had had her dream in her palm,
had actually
grasped
it and held it close, only to have it break into a
thousand pieces and scatter to the winds.  She felt tears stinging her eyes
like hot, caustic acid, and flung them from her face in bitter violence.  As
she did, the fey man jerked away from her with a look of horror.

“I told you to take the feather,”
Blaze told him.  “It’s yours.  Just get the hell off my land and don’t come
back.”

He cringed, but didn’t move.  He
almost looked like he expected her to raise the gun, aim it at his nearest
pointy ear, and pull the trigger.

She glanced at Jack, whose
breathing had seemed to go strangely calm. 

He’s close,
she thought,
tears welling up again.  She bit her lip and looked away as her eyes stung like
hot coals.  She blinked, and they fell into the ground near the fey man’s feet. 
He jerked, eyes fixed on the place where they had fallen, then looked up at
her, wide-eyed.  Seeing her face, he stumbled away from her like she suddenly
had sprouted horns.

Blaze rubbed her forearm across
eyes and wiped it on her pant leg, but the burning in her eyes continued. 
Already, the exhaustion was unfurling in her chest, pushing outward like a void
swallowing the flames of the sun, leaving her numb.  “Look,” she said, trying
to keep her words from cracking apart, “I’m new here, and the guy who was helping
me figure all this out is over there dying in my yard, and there’s not a medic
in the world who could help him.  I’m about a fraction of an inch from taking
this damn gun and blowing my own brain tissue all over the place.  If you could
please just get off my land and leave me in peace, I’d really appreciate it.” 
She sniffled again, and again, she caught the tiny Athabascan man staring up at
her face in horror.

Like I’m a ten-foot-tall
monster,
Blaze thought.  She felt tears threatening again, and reached up
to brush them away.

“You can’t!” the fey man cried,
arm flung out like he meant to stop her.

Blaze hesitated.

Seeing that she had paused, the
fey man swallowed, hard, and looked in all directions.  Then he began babbling
nervously and started fumbling with the pouches on his belt.  He found a tiny
blue vial, uncorked it, and dumped out the contents on the ground.  Then Runt
was kneeling beside her, holding the tiny blue jug under her face.  “If you
would allow…” he whispered, his words tinged with awe.  Then, his hands moving
like lightning, he began catching her tears.

It was so ridiculous, so utterly beyond
her comprehension, that Blaze just watched him do it, grateful for the company. 
She closed her eyes and cried for Jack, for herself, for her father and mother,
for the critically endangered breeds she had failed to give a home, for the
pretty greenhouse she was going to leave to rot in the woods…

When she was done and opened her
eyes, the fey man was still there, looking at her with anxious concern.  He
reached up, slowly, and when she didn’t stop him, he carefully wiped the rim of
the jug against each of her bottom eyelids, then capped the contents and handed
it to her.  “Your tears, Lady,” he whispered, his voice soft with what almost
sounded like respect.

Looking down at the thing, Blaze
had to squash the sudden urge to hurl it across the lawn.  “Thanks,” she
managed, though she didn’t know what she was thankful for.  She felt utterly
spent, every ounce of energy wept from her body, her limbs barely even
functioning enough to hold her upright.

As thoroughly as she always did
when she cried, she felt
exhausted
.

It was all she could do to keep
from slumping over right there in the yard and close her eyes.  A few yards
off, she heard Jack moaning, his body jerking against the gravel. 
I’m
sorry,
Blaze thought, as her awareness even then started to fade. 
I
can’t help you.

Runt glanced nervously at the Sleeping
Lady.  “Do you need to sleep?”

How could he know?
Blaze
thought.  She had always gotten so extremely tired after crying—so much so that
her over-protective parents had often taken her to the Emergency Room whenever
she’d experienced a particularly painful heartbreak—and until now, her
adrenaline had been thrumming through her veins, its fire keeping her conscious. 
Now her exhaustion was all hitting at once, and suddenly she wasn’t sure she
could even make it to the house.

Fist wrapped around the tiny blue
jar, Blaze started crawling to the back door.  Somehow, she made it onto the
mattress, and was grateful when the fey man flipped the blankets over her and
tucked them around her gently.  Like a sleep-deprived narcoleptic, Blaze slid
into oblivion immediately.

She never felt the little fey man
take the vial from her open hand.

Blaze woke up the next morning
feeling about as bone-tired as she had felt falling asleep that night, except
maybe more so.  She groaned and flipped the blankets off of her.  She peered at
the open door, frowning at the yellow cast to the trees through the far
window.  The golden color was such that she had either slept very little—which
was what she felt like—or much too late—which was what the sinking feeling in
her gut was telling her.

After one of her particularly bad
crying spells, she’d fallen into a near-coma for five days afterwards, and
nothing the panicked doctors had done had dragged her out of her stupor. 
Judging by the loud mewling of the farm animals outside her window, she guessed
that they were missing a meal…

…or three.

Reluctantly, she crawled out of
bed.  Jack’s sword was propped into a corner of her room, in its intricately-tooled
sheath.  After taking a moment to try and remember how it had gotten there—and
how she had fallen asleep—Blaze slipped on her shoes and went outside. 

She’d always had trouble with
sleep.  A random native medicine woman had stopped her in the streets of
Anchorage, on one of Blaze’s quick shoes-shopping trips in the Northway Mall in
between classes, and had told her that the doctors weren’t going to find a
cure, and oh yeah, while you’re at the mall, you should invest in an
extra-large swimsuit and spend more time sunbathing, getting that all-important
Vitamin D.  This had been back in her late teens, when she’d been struggling
with heartbreak and class deadlines, and the random three-day comas were
wreaking general havoc on her grades.  The native lady’s prediction had come
true the next morning, when the CAT-scan results had come in the mail: 
Negative.  Absolutely nothing wrong with her.  Oh, and by the way, here’s a
twenty-thousand-dollar bill for your dad.  Thank you, do come again.

Outside the lodge, the ground was
soaked, the grass covered with glistening moisture, probably from the dark
thunderclouds that were even then sweeping to the northeast.  The air smelled
of rain, and there were puddles in the yard.

Blaze went to the barn and
started feeding her animals, carefully ignoring the corpse lying in her driveway
beside the shop.  She was walking back, past the greenhouse, when she noticed
color inside that hadn’t been there before.  Frowning, she opened the door and
peeked inside.

The tomato and pepper seeds that
she and Jack had planted were already three inches high, and sprouting their
fourth and fifth leaves.  The hole she and Runt had dug in the center of the
greenhouse had been filled in, the shovels removed, the seedlings re-planted.

And the trees were flowering.

Blaze stared at them, sure she
would have remembered flower buds, when Bruce had dragged them out of his
plane.  Further, it looked like the branches had spread out, the trunks a good
half inch thicker than when she had collapsed in her bed. 

How many days was I asleep?
 
Blaze thought, horrified.  She remembered the five-day comas of her youth and
swallowed hard.

Blaze shut the door, too early in
the morning with too little coffee to think about that.  Finally, deciding she
had to face the inevitable, she turned towards Jack.  Upon seeing his hair and
clothes soaked by the storm, lying in a puddle of runoff from the roof, she
grimaced.  She hadn’t even bothered to pull his corpse out of the rain.  She’d
just crawled to
bed
.

She lowered her head in misery, taking
a moment to collect herself.  She had two options.  She could call the police
and try to explain to them why there was a man with a half-rotted hole in his
gut in the middle of her yard, wearing ripped-up chainmail, and then spend the
rest of her life in jail.  Or she could try to get rid of the evidence and
maybe
save her farm from werewolves.  Half of her wanted to call the police.  But,
reluctantly, she picked up the shovel from where it leaned against the
greenhouse.  It was her fucking farm, damn it, and she wasn’t going to let one
sexy little corpse get in the way of that.

She wondered if the authorities
would even come looking for Jack, considering he probably hadn’t registered in
any of their systems.  Hell, in all likelihood, he hadn’t even acquired a
drivers’ license. 
Could
he, if he was illiterate?  Still, the neighbors
would know who he was, and where he had last been seen, and it could probably
get ugly pretty fast, especially if they brought out cadaver-sniffing dogs…

Which made her glance around the
yard, looking for the other bodies.  She had been sure she had seen at least
seven or eight before she’d checked out.  Had the werewolves come back to claim
their losses?  Or did their bodies disintegrate over time, and she was just
panicking for nothing?

Yet she couldn’t leave a body
lying out in the middle of her backyard, waiting to test that theory.  What she
decided to tell the authorities afterwards, she could decide later.  Right now,
she needed to get it out of sight before Jennie Mae Hunderson came over to
borrow a dozen eggs and gawk at her yaks.

Blaze went and got the 4-wheeler,
hitched it to the trailer, then backed it up to the wereverine’s corpse.

When she reached down to pick him
up, however, Blaze was stunned to find the wereverine’s wrist was still warm. 
When she put a hand on his chest, she realized he was still breathing, his torn
chainmail shirt rising and falling in even breaths, a certain rosiness to his
waterlogged face.  She fell to a crouch beside his rain-matted head, frowning. 
“You’re
alive
?”

Blaze pulled Jack’s hand away
from his stomach—she actually had to fight him, this time, so strong was his
resistance—and was stunned to find the hole in his abdomen closing, the
blackness gone, leaving just healthy muscle and organs throbbing in its place. 
She stared down at the wound, utterly sure that she
should
have been
examining a dead body.

Staring at Jack’s face, she
managed, “You stubborn, lucky shit.”

She didn’t know much more about
magic than what she had overheard in those brief snippets of snickering Dungeons
and Dragons nerd-fests in passing between the fridge and her room in between
writing business papers, but she could have
sworn
that the feather
hadn’t worked.

Yet she was looking at pretty
convincing evidence that it had.

Change in plans,
Blaze
thought, looking at the 4-wheeler.  She had to get him
inside
.  …All
four hundred and fifty pounds of his heavy ass.

She went into the shop and pulled
out the little wheely-thingie that Jack had used to crawl underneath the big
machinery to do his repairs.  Lining the path between the wereverine and the
door with boards, she settled the wheely-cart on the boards and began the
frustrating task of rolling the wereverine onto the roller.

She had to grunt and strain for
every inch.  He was unnaturally heavy, like he carried lead in his bones.  Four
hundred and fifty pounds was a low estimate.  For his part, instead of doing
anything to aid the process, the wereverine had once again slapped his hand
over his wound and held it there, eyes shut, groaning.

Well, at least he’s not
mauling me for the effort,
Blaze thought, tugging him over the cart as best
as she could.  It was a struggle.  She had to rope him down, just to keep the
weight of his legs from pulling him back off the cart.

Once Blaze had finally gotten him
up the ramp she’d made over the porch steps, she paused to catch her breath. 
Panting down at Jack, she cried, “Why do you
weigh
so much?” 

“Depends on who you ask.” 

Blaze cried out and turned.

The fey man was standing behind
her, giving Jack a disgusted look.  “You ask him, he will tell you it is
because he is carrying the magic of the moon in his blood.  And it is true,
moon magic is heavy.  Just look at the tides.”  The tiny man gestured to the
west.

Blaze struggled to remember what
had happened the night before.  The man was named Runt, she remembered.  But
why was he still hanging around?

“But,” Runt said, “if you ask the
Folk, it’s because they carry their demons within them.”

Blaze’s eyebrows went up. 
“Demons?”

“Surely you’ve seen the beast,”
Runt offered.

Blaze remembered the slitted eyes
and the hypodermic teeth.  “That thing’s a
demon
?”

“Not in the Christian sense,”
Runt said quickly.  “Consider it more of a possession from the Third Lands.  A
supernatural entry-way created by the creatures’ bite, that gives the
Unmentionables access to the victim’s body.  The younger ones are usually controlled
by it.  They get small-minded and violent and dangerous and generally take on
the personality that possessed them from the Third Lands.  The older ones…”  He
looked down at the wereverine.  “Well, sometimes the possessed becomes the
possessor.”

“You think he’s
possessed
?”
Blaze cried.

Runt gave her a wry look.  “You
can see why it is not a popular theory amongst the moon-blooded.”

“He said it was just a magical
plague, of sorts.”  The thought that Jack was possessed was making her
uncomfortable.

“Well, there is magic to it,”
Runt said.  “The Third Lands are ruled by moon magic—bathed in it, even.  It is
a place that is locked in perpetual darkness, the light of the moon taking
center stage in the sky, never moving.  Everything there is similar to the
plants and animals we have here, but more…vicious…and most are desperate to
leave.” 

“So they possess people?”

Runt shrugged.  “It is the only
way for a Third Lands creature to withstand the light of the sun.  They need
the body of a First Lands creature to protect them, otherwise they will simply
turn to dust.”

“Like a vampire.”

Runt winced.  “Yes, actually.  A
vampire is a very good example of a Third Lands creature that has found passage
into the world.  Probably a great magus who opened a portal.”  He looked back
down at Jack and shrugged.  “The rest, though…  They’re not willing to take
that chance.  They opened a gate, but they sent an animal through, instead, one
that was linked to their own blood, trained to bite only humans.  When the
animal bit and deposited the moon-magic in a victim’s system, they and all of
their kin suddenly have access to the body, so it’s usually snatched up
immediately.”

Blaze thought of Amber’s ice-blue
eyes as she sank her teeth into her shoulder, remembered the oozing silver
liquid as it hit the ground beneath her.  “So how long does it take to show
symptoms?” she asked softly.

“Of possession?”  Runt shrugged. 
“A few minutes to a couple hours.  With so few of the demonkin still passing on
the plague, every opening is fought for.”  He glanced again at the wereverine. 
“Like I said.  The Third Landers are desperate.”

Blaze was about to ask ‘why,’
then she remembered the otherworldly thing that Jack transformed into when he
was angry.  She looked at the wereverine, sleeping peacefully on the willow
mat.  She tried to imagine a world filled with those creatures, where the light
of the sun was only a myth, and her gut clenched.

“I would have let him die,” Runt
continued, following her gaze, “But you looked as if you wanted very much to
see him live.”

“I did,” Blaze admitted.

“I admit that I broke a rule of
my people,” Runt said, his words coming out hesitant.  “The Second Landers have
no love of the Third Landers, and would like to see the Unmentionables’ plague
stopped for good, because it upsets the balance.”

She glanced at him warily, once
again beginning to get the sense of a malignant voice recording.  “What does
that mean?”

“It means, Lady,” Runt said,
“That if you value my life, you will not tell the feylords I helped him survive.”

“Feylords.”  Blaze snorted and
waved a dismissive hand.  “Yeah, I think we’re safe from that.”

Runt bowed again.  “Then you have
my gratitude.”  And just like that, he was gone again.  Probably once more spying
on her from afar.

Blaze was beginning to understand
why Jack had claimed to hate the meddling little bastards.  The irritating shit
had stood around watching for hours as she struggled with Jack’s body, then
popped in just long enough to spout irrelevant nonsense that only served to
creep her out, then disappeared again, making no offer to help her get the
wereverine the rest of the way inside.

Though,
Blaze decided
reluctantly,
If he healed Jack like he said he did, I guess I can’t begrudge
him a few hours dragging the ornery old prick around.
  In fact, she
probably owed him a pretty big favor, and if anything she knew about the fey
was actually true, that was a Very Bad thing.  She got a sick taste in her
mouth when she wondered when he was going to try and collect.

Blaze spent the next hour trying
to hoist the wereverine’s roller-cart up and over the doorway and into the
lodge.  She got him as far as the foyer before Blaze realized that it would be
about ten times easier to move the
bed
to
him
, and she went and
got a mattress and slapped it down inside the basement door.  Then it was a
struggle to roll the wereverine onto it, and when he fell, belly-down, all but
crushing the mattress to the floor, Blaze decided not to attempt the
frustrating task of trying to flip him back over.  She waited just long enough
to make sure he was still breathing, then stalked back to her room, grabbed her
best rifle and a box of shells, and went to the 4-wheeler. 

In light of recent events—and the
fact that Jack couldn’t stop her—she needed to make a phone call.

Blaze took the long, winding
trail to Jack’s home at a breakneck pace, trying to fight down that little
fear-instinct that something inhuman could be on the trail behind her, catching
up.  She came to a stop in the grassy driveway outside Jack’s house and her
breath caught.