Alaskan Fire (46 page)

Blaze narrowed her eyes.  “We’re
getting close.  I think we should continue the rest of the way in silence.”

Jack just laughed.

* * *

The last mile took Blaze an hour
and a half.  Her feet had never hurt this bad in her life.  Every step left her
feeling like she was tearing her arches from the bone.  Her thighs and calves
had long ago ceased their intended function and had just become throbbing
masses of pain strapped to her legs.  Her shoulders and back hurt so bad it
felt like the wereverine was driving a stake through her spine.  Every few minutes,
she had to stop, entire body shaking, to cling to the closest tree and catch
her breath.  Jack, probably in the interest of his own safety, kept his quips
to a minimum.

When Blaze finally reached their
modest weapons-cache at the base of one of the large cottonwoods overlooking
the lodge’s spacious backyard, she slumped to the ground, legs finally
collapsing under her.  She stared at the snow underneath her in an exhausted
fugue as she felt the wereverine unbuckle himself from the harness on her back.

“Perk up, sister,” Jack
whispered.  “We still need your legs.”

Blaze groaned inwardly and fought
tears.  She didn’t think she could get back to her
feet
, much
less
cross the entire backyard. 

Can’t cry,
she thought, in
panic. 
Don’t you dare cry.  That would put you out for a week, and Jack
needs you right now. 
At Jack’s raised eyebrow, she just nodded numbly, the
entirety of legs from the thighs down a hot-tingly buzz of liquid gelatin.

She heard the muffled snaps as
the wereverine buckled himself to the harness at the base of the tree, then the
shuffle of undergrowth as he shouldered the guns and ammunition at the base of
the cottonwood.

“You gonna be able to do this?”
Jack demanded softly.

Blaze, who had been feeling the
need to vomit for the last hour, tightened her lips against the impulse and
just nodded again.

Beside her, the wereverine
grunted and she heard the faint squeak of a pulley as he started hauling
himself up the tree.  In their practice-runs, Blaze had enjoyed watching the
wereverine’s muscular back work as he pulled himself hand-over-hand up the
tree.  Now, she didn’t even have the strength to turn her head.  She had
never
been this exhausted before.  She didn’t think she would have been able to keep
breathing
,
if it weren’t an automatic response.  

And the worst part of it was that
she wasn’t
tired
.  If she was just tired, she could simply close her
eyes and sleep it off, and it wouldn’t have been so bad.  But Blaze was so
beyond
tired that all she could do was stare at the blueberry and lowbush cranberry
bushes peeking from under the white between her knees, her mind replaying the
hike through the woods in a monotonous, never-ending reel.  Time, she realized,
no longer seemed to exist except to be measured by her intermittent breaths.

Plunk.
  A tiny cottonwood branch
landed in the thin layer of snow beside her right hand.  Blaze’s eyes twitched
towards it dazedly. 
Plunk.
  Another one, this one hitting the brim of
her hat.  With enormous effort, Blaze lifted her head and looked up the grooved
bark of the cottonwood tree until she found the wereverine, who was sitting in
the massive crotch of three gigantic branches about fifty feet off of the ground,
strapped to the trunk.  He was frowning at her in question.

When she didn’t reply, he made a
walking gesture and pointed at the lodge.

Deliver the payload, lock ‘em up,
set off World War III.  Easy-peasey.  Just like they’d planned.  Except, when
they’d been planning it, Blaze had been leaned back in a soft, cushy chair, a
clean towel wrapped around her freshly-washed hair, her bare feet up beside a
hot woodstove, a beer in her hand.

He wants me to walk across the
yard,
Blaze thought, in horror.  Back when she’d been making the plans,
she’d assumed that her biggest fear, at this point in the game, would be
getting eaten by werewolves, but now that she was actually
here
,
experiencing it, her biggest concern was that the backyard was four or five
hundred feet from the treeline to the lodge, and that she had as much control
over her knees as if someone had sliced her hamstrings.

She lowered her head back to
stare at her legs.  The muscles were twitching in funny places, little jolts
here and there, and everything from the waist down felt like it’d gone through
a chemical reaction that somehow melted the cell walls of her muscles into
electrostatic pudding.

Oh, wait.  That’s what strenuous
exercise
did
.  Hell, she’d heard of guys in prison squat-competitions who
experienced necrosis of tissue in their legs because they’d overdone it.  Like
pouring the contents of a car battery over their thighs.  Mmmm, yeah.  Feel
that burn.

Except Blaze couldn’t really feel
anything
except how wonderful it was that she was sitting down, instead
of walking across the yard.

Another stick plopped in the
snow-covered cranberries beside her, making Blaze twitch.  Above her, Jack was
giving her the What The Hell gesture, and pointing at the sky.  It was, Blaze
noticed, definitely starting to get darker out.

Seeing her lack of response, the
wereverine’s face became a thunderhead and he reached for a much larger stick.

Damn the cranky little old monster. 
Before he could snap off the branch and lob it at her, Blaze crawled to the
cottonwood, used the fissures in the bark to drag herself back to her feet, and
stood there, dizzy, as her head stopped swimming.  Her knees felt like ionized
gelatin, completely unresponsive to her commands, and the sweat that had soaked
through her jacket was now like ice against her back and belly. 

She shrugged off what was left of
the backpack and let it drop in the snow.  Ahead of her, through the last ten
feet of brush, she could see the general open area of the back lawn.  Beyond
that, the barn loomed like a nervous giant, guarding its flock.  Outside its
walls, she could see dozens of goats and fowl in the muddy, trodden area beyond
the fences.

Seeing that her stock was still
alive, Blaze frowned.  Had the werewolves not even shown
up
yet?  She
had made sure to call all the neighbors and let them know she was heading back
to town until the disappearances could all be sorted out.  And, with the speed
with which word traveled along the river,
something
should have gotten
to Amber.

Unless she had already eaten all
the neighbors…

Blaze was just about to curse and
go stomping across the yard for a hot bath when she saw the dark shape exit the
basement door of the lodge, go over to the goats huddled inside the fence, and
grab one of the cowering animals by the neck.  She heard a sickening popping
sound as the shadow twisted the goat’s head by the horns, then watched as it
slung the limp carcass over its shoulder and carried it back inside the lodge
to shut the door.

Blaze quickly shrank back against
the side of the cottonwood, her own survival once more taking precedence over
the numbness in her legs.

This is suicide,
she
thought. 
Total suicide.

Something small hit her in the
skull, dropped from a height.  Blaze narrowed her eyes and looked up at the
weasel, who made an insistent jab at the lodge.

Already, night was falling.  It
had to be like seven-thirty.  She didn’t have much time, and they both knew it.

Oh God,
Blaze prayed,
watching the back of the lodge,
please let me get out of this alive.
 
Then, reconsidering, she amended,
Then again, if I
have
to die today,
at least deliver me to a place with a hot bath and a masseuse.

Another stick hit her in the top
of the head, this time bigger than the others.

Bristling, telling herself that
she could get the weasel back later, Blaze stumbled forward through the brush. 

What if they have guards?
she thought, in panic. 
What if they rip me apart the moment I step into
sight?

Somehow, she made it out into the
open.  She took three tentative steps across the lawn…

And then her legs collapsed and
she went down on her hands and knees, staring at the snow under her head,
wondering how it had gotten there.

I can’t do this,
Blaze realized,
looking up at the distance to the back of the lodge.  Then she glanced over her
shoulder at the wereverine, who was securely settled in his cottonwood tree,
rifle in hand, homemade silencer fitted over the barrel and affixed there with
a wad of black electrical tape.

 Looking up, seeing the
anxiousness in the wereverine’s face, Blaze realized she
had
to do it,
because no one else could.  She pushed one knee under her, lodging an aching
foot on the ground, then used both hands on her thigh to prop herself up to a
one-legged kneeling position.  Gritting her teeth, using her own knee as
leverage, Blaze forced herself to stand.

Just four hundred feet,
Blaze thought, stumbling forward. 
You can make four hundred feet.
  With
each transfer of weight, her knees kept trying to dump her on her face.  Up
ahead, she could hear the rowdy roar of merrymaking reverberating against the
inside of the lodge.  Listening to it, she staggered across the open area of
the backyard like a corpse, knowing that, at any moment, the wolves inside were
going to throw open the back door and see her there, yet she had reached the
point where she was just too exhausted to care.

Blaze stared at the ground
beneath her as she trudged onward, trying not to think about how glacially slow
the inches of churned snow and gravel were passing under her feet.  Her world
became a monotony of step after struggling step.

Somehow, she made it to the back
porch.  She only became aware of this fact, however, because suddenly she ran
out of snow-packed gravel and her foot thumped against the elegant 2x6 ramp
that Jack had made for himself.

Looking up blindly, she found
herself staring at the partially-open door of the back of her lodge.

Clinging to the post holding up
the porch roof, Blaze climbed the last two steps and stumbled to the back
door.  Her breath coming in little pants, now, she reached out, took the latch
in a gloved hand, and yanked it shut. 

“We said
leave it open
you
fucktard!” someone called from the inside.  “It’s too hot in here!”

Blaze stared at the door, her
heart beginning to hammer fiery blasts of liquid metal through her veins.  She
glanced up at the huge iron brackets that Jack had welded together and bolted
to the door and the wall, then her eyes fell on the huge 4x4 that they had left
leaning against the wall, amidst a pile of scrap lumber.  In that
heart-pounding moment, she recognized the second huge miscalculation that she
and the wereverine had made, in their final plans three days before.

While Blaze had been able to heft
the 4x4 into the brackets and dance off of the porch with practiced ease back
in their trial-runs, to her current eyes, the board looked approximately the
same size as a Sitka Spruce, and the porch was approximately the same height as
Denali.

Inside, she heard a curse and
heavy footsteps headed her way.  It was sheer terror that spurned her to yank
the heavy 4x4 from the pile and struggle to lift it up to the door.

Arms trembling, she couldn’t make
it.  Her body just didn’t have the
energy
…  She felt her arms drooping,
heard the nearing footsteps, and Blaze knew that her life was over.

An ebony shape flitted past her
from behind and suddenly a petite woman was wrenching the 4x4 from her grasp
and shoving Blaze away from the door.  The warning in the woman’s deep brown
eyes was clear.

Oh God,
Blaze thought,
recognizing the tiny, Arabic-looking woman as Amber’s second hand.  She knew
she had failed, then, and Jack would spend the rest of his short life plinking
away at wolves until he ran out of ammo and they cut him out of his tree with a
chainsaw.

“I guess we’re about to find out
if you’re as lucky as the gods are making it appear,” Kimber finally said to her,
hefting the 4x4. 

Blaze cringed, instinctively
protecting her head with her arms.

Then, as Kimber’s clansman tried
to pull the door open, the black wolf turned and yanked the door back shut and
dropped the heavy length of board into the brackets Jack had made for it.

Blaze stared at the woman,
stunned. 

“
Finish the job
!” the tiny
woman roared, bearing slender white fangs.  Though she couldn’t have been more
than five feet tall, her voice sounded like the thunderous bellow of a big
predator, and Blaze instinctively took a step backwards.

Seeing her stumble, Kimber
reached up and grabbed Blaze by the front of the jacket and jerked her back. 
Like she was made of solid titanium, the woman yanked Blaze down until their
faces were only inches apart.  Hair sprouted from the skin of the woman’s
nose.  Saliva dribbled from the woman’s fangs.  Her brown eyes, close enough
that her lashes almost touched Blaze, were so dark that Blaze had trouble
seeing the slits.

“You,” the woman snarled up at
her, “are going to help me finally right my wrong. 
I’m
cursed, but
you
aren’t.  You must finish what the weasel started and kill them all.  Do you
understand?”

Something slammed into the other
side of the door, making it rattle against the bar.  Kimber released her
suddenly, shoving her towards the shop. 

Towards the…shop?  Immediately,
Blaze’s mind remembered the little lever that Jack had installed inside the shop,
near where the pipes out of the boiler connected to the pressure-tanks and the
lodge beyond.  She remembered the little black wolf, darting away as she and
Jack discussed strategy. 
She’d been
watching
,
Blaze realized, in
shock.