Alaskan Fire (8 page)

Blaze made it a good mile
straight through the woods, staying
well
off the trails, getting as far
away from the Sleeping Lady and her attacker as possible before she stopped,
panting, and pulled out her cell phone.

Except her cell phone, she discovered,
with growing horror, had been tucked inside the front pocket of the soggy wet
shirt that now lay on the floor in her abandoned bedroom, conveniently
protected from ‘accidental submersion’ by a handy little hundred-and-fifty
dollar case.

I am so totally dead,
Blaze thought, staring at the woods around her in horror.  It being early May,
the snow had mostly melted and there were buds on the trees, but there wasn’t
even
grass
yet.  Temperatures still had the nasty habit of dropping
below freezing at night, and she hadn’t even brought a coat.

Or, gee, a pack of matches and a
cooler of hotdogs.

She was on the run, stumbling
through God Knew Where in the first week of May, and she didn’t even have a way
to build a fire.

Hell, she wasn’t even entirely
sure exactly which direction she was headed in.  Once she’d been walking long
enough, all the fallen birch trees, the scraggly white spruce, the twisted
willow, the alder thickets, and the towering cottonwoods looked the same.

Damn it,
Blaze thought,
briefly considering backtracking to retrieve her phone, but deciding that she
would simply tough it out, instead, and hope she made her way to a river or
some other waterway that she could follow to its confluence with something
bigger.  People, she knew, congregated on flowing water.  The more water, the more
people.

She had stumbled through the
woods for at least four or five hours before Blaze happened into a small
clearing, seemingly in the middle of nowhere.  A squat little cabin sat in its
middle, and beyond, she could see the open area of a lakeside.  Thinking maybe
she had taken some crazy and convoluted path back to Lake Ebony, Blaze stumbled
out into the clearing and down towards the lake.

Looking over the shallow,
mud-bottomed lake, however, it was pretty obvious to Blaze that she’d found one
of the thousands of other lakes, ponds, and swamps dotting the wilderness in
all directions from the Sleeping Lady.  Tentatively, knowing that she probably
wasn’t going to find a better place to spend the night, Blaze went up the steps
of the quiet little cabin and knocked on the door.

When no grungy old fart with a
six-foot beard yanked the door open and shoved a shotgun up her nostril, she
gently twisted the knob and pushed the door inward.  “Hello?” she called,
softly.

No answer.  Of course not.  Most
of the cabins in the area were recreational quarters for wealthy doctors,
lawyers, and businessmen in the Lower 48, only used during a couple weeks for
fishing in king season, then again when the silvers were running.  Sometimes,
the real diehard outdoorsmen came out in late fall to fish the streams for
trout and dolly varden, and a few went canoeing through all the lakes, looking
for that fifty-inch pike.

Somehow, however, by the
abandoned look of the dilapidated structure, she doubted it had seen an
occupant in at least a couple years.  She stepped inside and shut the door.  The
place smelled of mosquito coils and woodsmoke, and she was pretty sure that
whoever owned the building had a penchant for tobacco.  She was also pretty
sure he hadn’t visited in something nearing a decade.

A quick inspection of the dusty interior
told her that the cabin had no phone, which wasn’t very surprising, considering
that it was mostly only the lodges and full-time residents who could afford the
cost, upkeep, and long-term maintenance of a full-fledged satellite phone
system.  The only thing the little cabin
did
have, she discovered, was a
pretty complicated radio.  The cabin’s owner, it appeared, liked his music.

After discovering the pantry and
its meager supply of expired canned goods, Blaze slumped into the main couch
with a can of tuna and, after cracking the lid with the temperamental
old-school can-opener that she had found hanging from a nail nearby, ate fish
from the can with her fingers, reveling in how wonderful it tasted after such a
long, chilly hike through the woods.

Can demolished, she sat there
trying to figure out what to do next. 

She had a…
thing
…occupying
her lodge, convinced it was a werewolf.  Or a wereverine.  Or something. 
Something really big and ugly and with lots of teeth.  God, she needed the
authorities.  That, and about six different guns each with a thousand rounds of
ammunition, all strapped to her chest in her best impression of Rambo.  Let the
little twit fuck with her then.

Blaze leaned back, feeling the
first warm tingles of exhaustion dragging at her chest.  It was
hard
to
walk through the woods.  Like trying to keep your balance on an ever-changing,
never-level earthquake reproduction machine with built-in tripping mechanisms.

God, she was tired.  Until now,
she’d never really liked tuna, but as it had been the only choice aside from
canned Great Northern beans and baby onions, the little pack of fish had tasted
better than anything she’d ever eaten before.  Blaze knew that was probably just
the exhaustion speaking, but at the moment, she was too tired to critique
culinary merit in the middle of the damn woods, on the lam from a guy who
thought he was a medieval monster, born again to terrorize some really tall
chick on her own property in the wilderness.

 
I really have to find a way
back to town,
Blaze thought, as she started drifting off.  She had seen
other cabins from the lakeside, when she had gone down to figure out where she
was.  Tomorrow, she would spend the day circling the lake, hoping to find a
permanent resident with a telephone.

Blaze had only been asleep an
hour, maybe an hour and a half, before the door slammed inward, imbedding
itself in the little stove that marked the beginning of the cabin’s tiny
kitchenette.  Blaze screamed and tried to scramble to her feet.

“All right,” the fanged, taloned,
drooling
monster in the doorway roared, “since you seem to be intent on
doing things the hard way, wench, I’m thinking I should just bury you in the
damn hill and be done with it!”  He stepped inside and slammed the door behind
him, making the windows rattle in their frames, trapping Blaze in the tiny room
with the wereverine.

Blaze cried out and backed up
until her spine was pressed up against the back wall.

Growling, the wereverine strode
towards her—

—and yanked a chair off the
middle of the floor, dragged it back until it was positioned directly in front
of the only exit, and sat down hard enough to make the wood squeak.

“You,” the wereverine growled at
her, pointing a taloned hand at the window over the lake, “almost made it off
my territory, you long-legged pain in the ass.”  As he spoke, his form shifted
back to something more human, until the only bit of monster showing was the way
his canines extended past his lips in a snarl.  “Do you
know
what
would’ve happened to you if the fauns caught you on their land?”

“Accost me, tie me up, fling me
over their shoulder,
lick
me, and try to convince me not to tell the
police?” Blaze snapped.

He gave her a flat green stare. 
“They would’ve eaten you.”

Her mouth formed a little O as
she tried to think of some way he could be joking. 

“Probably with mushrooms and wine
sauce,” he added.  “The creepy bastards are all about fungi.”

I’m in a stranger’s cabin,
having a chat about fairy-tale culinary preferences with a man who’s claiming
to be a wereverine,
Blaze thought.

“So,” Jack growled, “You use the
CB?”

“The what?” Blaze demanded.

“The CB.  The
radio
?”  He
gestured at the black monstrosity taking up an honored spot beside the
woodstove.

Blaze just stared at him.  “Why
would I use the radio?”

Jack narrowed his pretty green
eyes at her.  “You’re trying to tell me you just spent five hours running from
me through the woods, but you didn’t even try to use the CB?”

This has to be some sort of
nightmare,
Blaze thought.  “I wasn’t really in the mood for music, thank
you,” Blaze gritted, showing teeth.  “Getting
kidnapped
kinda put me out
of the mood.  Now if you would just
get out of my head
and let me wake
up, I’d be much obliged.”

He cocked his head at her, making
his black curls twitch against his scalp.  “I can’t fucking believe this.  You
still
don’t believe me, do you?”

Blaze gave the wereverine a long
glare.  “All right,” she gritted finally, when he didn’t vanish in a puff of
mental exhaust.  “Let’s say your argument has some merit.  What now?”

“That’s what I was gonna ask
you,” the man bristled.  “
You’re
the one who seemed to be getting
butt-hurt about the whole thing.”

Blaze considered repeating the
fact that he had
kidnapped
and
assaulted
her, but then decided
not to waste her breath on a creature that obviously had less mental acuity
than a vole.  “You,” she said carefully, “have obviously got some
misconceptions about me, and—thanks to you—I now have some less-than-welcome
revelations about you.”  She took a deep breath, using all of her tact in an
attempt to punch through this man’s thick skull.  “It seems to me that we need
to come to an understanding before one of us gets hurt.”

Jack laughed.  “Let’s hear it,
tootz.”

“You’re fired, for one.”

He raised a brow.  “Who said I
was letting you fire me?”

“…letting you…” Blaze stammered,
shocked.  “Look, you
cretin
, just because you’re
starving
, I
don’t have any obligation to pay you for trying to eat me.”

“Already told you,” Jack growled,
“if I’d tried to eat you, I’d be shitting a really big Yeti turd right now,
instead of sprawled over a chair, listening to her bitch.”

Blaze’s mouth dropped open.  She
stared at him in silence for a long, horrible minute, then glanced at the
nearest window, wondering if she could wriggle through it and make it to the
lake before the wereverine caught her. 

Immediately, Jack lazily unwound
himself from the chair and got to his feet.  “All right, girlie, seein’ as how
you’re still not going to be reasonable, I’m just gonna take your ass back home
and give you a couple days to think about it.”

Blaze hastily backed away from
him, stumbling into the far corner of the cabin, rapping her head on an iron
frying pan that had obviously been hung there out of head-reach by the previous
occupant.  Immediately, she yanked it off of the wall and held it up between
them.  “Back off,” she growled, swinging it back and forth.  “I will bash your
brains all over the goddamn walls, I swear it.”

Jack’s eyes darkened.  “Put that
down.”

Blaze gave him her best
impression of a confident laugh.  “Not a chance, buster.  I know six different
forms of judo, and I could kick your teeth out through the back of your skull
with just my big toe.”

He crossed his huge arms over his
burly chest.  “That so.”

“Uh-huh,” Blaze said, grinning in
her best impression of a crazy martial artist on the edge.  “Just try me,
asshole.”

“You know judo, huh?” he said,
eying her dubiously.

“Sure do,” Blaze growled.  “Been
doin’ it since I was old enough to walk.  Eight different black belts.”

“Eight, huh?” Jack said.  “Just a
minute ago it was six.”

“Uh…” Blaze said, scrambling for
an excuse, her face flushing.  “I double-majored.”

A grin actually twitched the
corner of the bastard’s mouth.  “Double-majored, huh?”  He gestured at the
frying pan.  “And what’s that?  A form of kendo?”

Blaze didn’t have the first idea
what ‘kendo’ was, but she went with it, “Sure as fuck is, asshole, now back the
hell off before I kendo your skull into the next lifetime.”

Jack sighed and stepped forward, completely
indifferent to the iron skillet.  Gasping in panic, Blaze put as much upper
body strength into her swing as she could, aiming for his left ear.

Jack reached up and caught the
handle of the skillet with one hand, without even looking, and held it there as
if there were a cement statue suddenly fused to the frying pan.  “Kendo,” Jack
said, as he stood there, only an arm’s-length from her, looking up into her
eyes, “is a relic of the time of the shoguns, and is based off of the kenjutsu
of the samurai, a form with which I am intimately familiar.  It means Way of
the Sword.  Not,” he twisted the skillet suddenly, making her lose her grip in
a spasm of pain, “Way of the Frying-Pan.”  He blithely dropped the pan at his
feet, looking utterly unconcerned that she might bend and retrieve it.

For a long moment, they stood
like that, with Jack much too close and Blaze backed up against the wall, her heart
a pounding inferno in her chest.

“So,” Jack said, as he peered up
at her, “I think maybe we got off to the wrong start.”

When Blaze glanced down at the
frying-pan, she saw divots in the handle where he’d held it.  Finger-prints in
the
cast iron
.  Realizing then that the man in front of her could simply
reach out, take her face in his big hand, and squeeze her brains out through
her eye-sockets, Blaze swallowed and lifted her chin, fighting down sheer
animal terror.  “I’d say,” she managed, “you’re probably right.”

Jack grunted and held out his
skillet-crushing palm.  “My name is Jack Thornton.  I’ll be working for you as
your mechanic while you’re running the Sleeping Lady.”

Blaze swallowed, fighting a
sudden, gut-wrenching terror that her hand was about to become a crunched
fleshy puree in the man’s callused fist.  She didn’t want to be within the same
room
as that hand, much less put her
palm
in it.  If she could
have backed further into the wall, she would have, her heart ratcheting up to
minor white-hot explosions in her ribcage.