Alaskan Fire (6 page)

Then he was
right there
,
the light of the window above her head illuminating the rabid features, the
slitted eyes, the carnivorous teeth, the long, silky fur.  Whatever it was, it
wasn’t drugs.

“Oh my God,” she whispered, her
head slamming into the wall behind her as she tried to work her spine through
the masonry.  “Please…”

The beast opened its mouth and
pointed a long brown talon at its teeth, “See the fangs?” it demanded, its
words an otherworldly snarl.  Then it pointed out its slitted eyes, clawed
fingers, and slicked a hand down its fur and yanked on a patch of whiskers like
some tour-guide giving a demonstration to a class of eighth-graders.  “Okay,”
the
thing
said, “Now watch this.”  He jabbed a hairy finger back at his
mouth.

As she watched, two more layers
of teeth sank down through the gumline in both the top and bottom jaw, pointed
backwards toward its throat.  Crimson started dripping from the teeth from
where they had punctured flesh as more teeth-rows built up behind them, leaving
its mouth with the general likeness of a shark’s multi-layered jaws.

“Oh my
God
!” Blaze
screamed, once again feeling her chest locking up with terror.  She squeezed
her eyes shut, trembling against the bindings that held her in place, so
frightened she couldn’t breathe.

She felt the creature move
backwards, heard Jack clear his throat.  His normal, somewhat gruff, yet
human
voice said, “All right.  You satisfied I’m not on drugs yet?”

When she looked, he was wiping
his mouth with the back of his arm.  His hand came away bloody.  As she
watched, he indifferently wiped it on his shredded pants, then pulled his legs
into a cross-legged position across from her, and waited.

It took Blaze several minutes to
get her breathing and her heart rate back under control.  “You’re not on
drugs?” she finally whispered, her eyes fixed to the dark red stain on his
jeans.

“Nope,” Jack said.  “Don’t touch
the stuff.  Less control, which is deadly for someone like me.”  Then he
winced.  “Well, deadly for other people.”

Blaze got a cold chill.  “Please
let me go.”

He frowned at her.  “I told you
I’m not gonna kill you.  I don’t make a habit of hurting women, okay?”

“I won’t tell anyone,” Blaze
babbled, eyes still on the stain.  “I promise.  I’ll just pack up everything
and leave, no questions asked.”

Jack was beginning to get agitated. 
“No one’s telling you to leave, sweetie.  I just thought you were horning in on
my territory, but looks like I was, uh, wrong.”  The way he frowned at her,
though, made Blaze wonder if he wasn’t so sure.

After a moment, Jack delicately
offered, “Is there anything…special…about yourself that you wanna tell me,
considering what I’ve shown you?”

Blaze stiffened, thinking of the
feather her father had willed to her. 
For you, Blaze.  May you someday
discover its true value.
  A hundred different
priceless
artifacts in
her father’s house, and he had given her a damn feather.

Jack tensed, his big shoulders
tightening in muscular knots as his knuckles whitened on his knees.  “What is
it?”

Blaze bit her lip and glanced at
the stove again.

“Lady,” Jack warned, “I got all
damn week.”

In a desperate, sarcastic sneer,
Blaze said, “Well, gee, let’s see.  I’m six feet four inches tall, I generally
don’t need a bra because I’ve got A-cup tits, my hair’s the color of
carrot-filled babyshit, and my feet are somewhere between a Size Fourteen and a
Size Seventy-Two, as you so thoughtfully pointed out this afternoon.”  She
laughed, a wretched cackle of despair that tore at her chest, and then looked
away.  Staring at the wall, because staring at
him
was scaring the shit
out of her, she whispered, “What do you want?”

Jack’s chuckle sounded just as miserable
and full of despair as her own.  “Truthfully?  To be able to take back the last
hour and pretend it never happened.”

“I can do that,” Blaze said,
quickly swiveling to face him.  “Just let me go, I’ll go get on a plane, and
you’ll never see me again.”

Jack gave her a flat look.  “Do I
look stupid to you?”

Blaze looked him up and down. 
“You look like you could use a few thousand dollars to buy groceries.  Let’s
say…ten?”

Jack hesitated, still out of
kicking range.

“I can make it fifteen,” Blaze
whispered.  “That’s as much as I can afford.”  She had already dumped massive
quantities of her capital into the state-of-the-art sprinkler system that the
bank financing her pretty new fishing-lodge had made as part of the requirement
to signing the loan.  If she dumped any more than fifteen thousand on this
bastard, she wouldn’t have enough to get the lodge running.

“How old are you?” Jack asked,
completely ignoring her question.

Blaze frowned.  “Twenty-five. 
Why?”

He winced.  “Around the same time
as that last Mount Redoubt eruption, right?”

“How the hell would I know?”

Jack took a deep breath, then
sighed and tilted his head back against the wall.  “Shit.”

“Shit what?” Blaze growled.  “And
are you gonna untie me or keep me here all damn night?”

He lifted his head to look at her
suspiciously.  “You gonna run?”

“You gonna
rape
me?” Blaze
snapped back.

Jack jerked as if she’d hit him. 
“Fuck that shit.”

…As if she’d asked him if he were
going to fornicate with a Clydesdale. 
Well,
Blaze decided,
Sometimes
being as sexually attractive as a mastodon has its bennies…

“So what do we do now?” Blaze
growled.  “You’re obviously not bent on assault, and I’m pretty well stuck here
until Bruce drops off his next load tomorrow.”  That wasn’t
quite
true,
since she had this handy-dandy little thing called a ‘cell-phone’ tucked into
her front pocket, but the rabid little creepy-crawly certainly didn’t need to
know that.

Jack seemed to consider that for
a long moment.  “No hard feelings, then?” he asked, tentatively.  He gestured
at the way he’d trussed her up like a turkey.  And in case she hadn’t fully
understood his meaning, he considerately added, “For tying up your hippo ass?”

“The only hard feelings,” Blaze bit
out, “are gonna be the ones directly preceding the chunks of lead going through
your brainpan if you call me a ‘hippo’ again.”  She may be tied up and
helpless, and roughly the size of Paul Bunyan, but as her mother had often
insisted, there were some things that a woman simply did not tolerate said to
her.  By the anger suddenly coursing through Blaze’s veins in hot, fiery waves,
giving her the sudden desire to wrap her manly hands around the creep’s neck
and choke the life out of him, ‘hippopotamus,’ it seemed, was one of them.

Jack gave her a long look, then
got up, turned his back to her, and went through the beastie-sized hole in the
wall into her room.  A moment later, she heard thumps and rustling as he went
through her things.

“What are you doing?!” Blaze
shouted.

She heard a metal
snap
,
then Jack came back carrying two pieces of her revolver.  He dropped them on
the floor beside her feet.  Gesturing at the ruined weapon, he said, “We don’t
have a problem with bears in the area—they stay outta my territory—and I don’t
really feel like being shot.”  He bared his teeth at her when he added, “It
hurts, and I’m often like to return the favor.”

Blaze’s mouth was hanging open. 
The metal hadn’t snapped at a weak point.  He had broken it in half in the very
middle of the gun, cylinder and all.  She could still see the finger
impressions left in the steel. 

All she could think to say was,
“That was a Colt.”  Her father had assured her that nothing—not even getting
kicked around in the woods—would hurt a Colt.

“Good gun,” Jack agreed.  “But
like I said.  I don’t like getting shot.  I’ll buy you another one when I’m
sure you’re not gonna point it at my head and pull the trigger.”

“Oh, don’t worry about that,”
Blaze muttered, staring at the finger-prints in her gun.  “I was really looking
forward to living in the Bush.  Dreamed all my life of being self-sufficient, went
into Business, had pretty big hopes.  But you convinced me, okay?  I’m getting
the hell out of here just as soon as you let me up.  I’ll have the realtor put this
back up for sale and move on.  There’s plenty of other places in the woods. 
I’ll just find a spot that doesn’t have something…” her eyes locked at his
bloody pant leg, “…nasty in it.”

“Good luck finding one of those,”
Jack said.  “Alaska’s one of the only wild places left.  Our kind have started
gathering around here, and you’re just as likely to run into someone else like
me at the next place, but a guy who’s got a few less scruples, if you know what
I mean.”

Blaze didn’t like the way he said
‘our’ kind.  “Gathering how?” she growled

Jack gestured to the woods.  “To
the south, we’ve got a young wolf pack.  Really full of itself.  Always trying
to grab a bit more territory, expand to the north.  They’re currently claiming
about eight miles.  To the west, there’s an ursine couple.  Don’t really want
to be disturbed.  Nobody messes with them, not even the upstart wolves. 
They’ve got about four miles.  To our east is a group of fawns.  They’re
holding down a tween zone, gathering fares from passing fey and guarding it
against human invasion.  Sixteen miles, there, and I wouldn’t touch them with a
ten foot pole.  Likely as not they’ll witch your tail afire, or leave you
barking like a seal the rest of your life.  Ornery little bastards.  To the
north there’s Thunderbird.  Real uppity snot—”

“A Thunderbird?” Blaze
interrupted.  It was the first thing he’d said that made any sense to her.

Jack shrugged.  “That’s what the
natives called him.  You ask me, just a glorified raven with a few bennies.”

“Bennies?” Blaze felt like she’d
stepped into the Twilight Zone.

“Weather-witching, that sort of
thing.”

Blaze nodded, having absolutely
no idea what he was talking about.

“North of
him
, we’re not
really sure, ‘cause the arrogant shit won’t let anyone cross his territory, and
it covers like fifty square miles.”  He frowned.  “As far as I know, though,
the south is claimed all the way to Anchorage, and the east and west is spoken
for all the way to the ocean in either direction.  I know the land in and around
the Brooks Range is taken, too.  Mostly dragons up there, though.  They like to
stay away from humans as much as possible, and caribou tastes real nice roasted.”

“Dragons.”  Blaze wondered if
she’d swallowed some bad lakewater.  Could she have gotten sick that quickly?  Alaskan
water
did
have some nasties in it to put Mexico to shame.  Beaver-fever,
baby…  She wriggled, trying to judge just how bad off she was.  She didn’t
feel
like she had a temperature, but then again, she couldn’t really check with her
arms tied behind her goddamn back.  She ended her struggles irritatedly,
settling on glaring at him, instead.

Jack peered at her, looking
thoughtful.  “You said you didn’t get cold?”

“Don’t change the subject,” Blaze
snapped.  “You said
dragons
?  And untie me, damn it.  My wrists hurt.”

He shrugged, completely ignoring
her complaints.  “Of course there are dragons.  Where you think the myths come
from?”

Blaze laughed, but she really
didn’t find it funny.  “I think I need a drink.”

“Can’t help you there,” Jack
said, glancing at the staircase to the next level, “But I could go take a
look-see upstairs, see if the last owners left any booze.  Weren’t big
drinkers, though.  The husband had heart problems.”

Blaze peered at her gigantic
feet.  For a long, long time, neither of them talked.  Then, finally, she
whispered, “You’re serious, aren’t you?”

“Serious as a heart-attack,” Jack
replied.  “You probably picked one of the only non-urban areas where you
wouldn’t be killed on sight.” 

She jerked her head up and squinted
at him.  “
Why
would I be killed on sight?”

Jack sniffed at the air between
them again, then just shook his head and frowned.  “Never mind.  Must be
wrong.”

“Wrong about
what
?” Blaze
cried.  “
Please
let me up.”

He squatted back beside her and
peered directly into her face, his green eyes penetrating.  “Blue eyes,” he
muttered.

Blaze felt a little heart-stab
when she realized he was seeing the color of the Johnson & Johnson eyewear
products hiding her freakishly-colored irises from view of the general populace.

“That is
so
weird,” Jack
growled, pulling back and rubbing goosebumps from his arms.  “I could’ve
sworn
…”

Blaze was about to blurt out that
her mom had helped her hide the color of her eyes back in grade school, when
kids started calling her ‘Carrotbrain,’ when Jack grinned and said, “Well, I
guess I don’t have to eat you, at least.”

A cold sweat washed over her and
Blaze clamped her mouth shut. 
Now might not be such a good idea to tell the
lycanthropic woodsman you’re wearing contacts,
Blaze thought, cringing back
against the wall behind her.

She flinched when he rubbed his
hairy arms again,
sure
he was going to figure it out, revert back to
that
thing
, and eat her.  Still peering her like a guy in the park
puzzling over a chess board, Jack growled, “But shit.  A smell like
that
… 
You
sure
there ain’t nothing ‘bout you that I need to know about, sister?”

Blaze thought again of the
feather.  Delivered in a heavy, locked metal case that could have withstood a
nuclear bomb detonating on top of it, it had been like nothing she had ever
seen before.  Definitely avian, but with no air-catching capabilities
whatsoever, the red-orange-yellow tendrils had seemed to float on the wind,
much like an ostrich’s.  And the color…it almost shimmered.  A dye-job, maybe?