Alaskan Fire (23 page)

Behind the bench, Blaze heard
Amber begin to bail out the bloody rainwater from the bottom of the boat.  A
moment later, Amber paused.  Her voice was low and dangerous when she said, “I
told you to go get the pack.”

Kimber’s voice was a timid
whisper when she said, “Amber, I think we should let her go.  When I look at
her, she’s wreathed in—”

The boat jolted as Amber leaped
its length.  A moment later, Blaze heard the sound of choking.  “Did I
ask
you for your opinion?” Amber sneered.

“No,” Kimber whimpered.

“Then
go,
” Amber snarled. 
Blaze heard the sound of something heavy hit the sand.  “Do as I told you. 
Next time, I won’t waste my time leaving your head attached.”

“Sorry, mistress,” Kimber
whined.  “So sorry.”  Then there was the sound of running feet, and Blaze was
alone with the werewolf.

“So,” Amber said.  Blaze felt the
boat rock as she stepped back into it with her.  “I’m sure you’re wondering by
now what you did to deserve to be buried alive.”  She stepped over the front
seat, then squatted beside Blaze, her ice-blue eyes cold.  “Well, nothing,
really.”  She smiled.  “Except maybe have really bad choice in men.”  Amber
reached out, wiped a dribble of blood from Blaze’s lip, brought it to her
mouth, and tasted it.  Smiling over her finger, Amber said, “See, the
wereverine killed my mate, and six of my best friends.  Every once in awhile, I
gotta remind him why weasels don’t play with wolves.”  She reached out and
patted Blaze on the head, then got up and started bailing the boat once more.

She’s going to bury me alive?
Blaze thought, the idea taking a clammy hold in her gut.

A few minutes later, several
heavy footsteps came running.  Blaze, crammed as she was between the benches,
couldn’t raise her head to see who had approached.

“You get the cage dug up?” Amber
demanded.

“Was right where we’d left it,
mistress.”  A deep male voice.  Low and submissive.

“Then throw the blanket over her
and take her to the pit,” Amber said.  “I’ll be along in a bit to see her off.”

Then there were big bodies moving
in the boat beside her, lifting Blaze off the ground, carrying her from the
boat, shielded from the rest of the world by a tattered old quilt.  Hanging
from her shoulders and ankles, shrouded by a blanket, Blaze could only see the
thin dirt track in the forest floor as it passed beneath her.

After a few hundred paces, the
forest floor became littered with loose dirt and they dropped her suddenly
amidst the soil-strewn bushes.  Blaze, her sight completely cut off when the
blanket fell around her, thrashed to get it off of her head.

A heavy boot slammed into her
ribs, and suddenly it was all Blaze could do to breathe, each gasping lungful
of air lancing jagged spikes of pain through her spine.

She felt movement around her, and
heard voices.  “That’s a
girl
?” a man asked, sounding incredulous. 
“Why’d she pick
that
thing up?”  A toe nudged Blaze through the
blanket.  “She’s gotta weigh, what, a couple hundred pounds?”

“Boss said she’s a rich brat,”
another replied.  Blaze could
hear
the shrug in his voice when he said,
“Got some sort of inheritance.” 

“And she’s been fucking Jack
Thornton,” a third voice, female, piped in. 

“Inheritance, huh?” the first
voice mused.

A third male voice snorted. 
“What’d you
think
?  A figure like that, Amber sure as hell ain’t goin’
for the sex appeal.”

Blaze lowered her face to the
ground and squeezed her eyes shut against the humiliation.  Even before it
killed her, Life was going to serve her one last dish of shame.  For old times’
sake.

A few yards away, she heard what
sounded like something heavy and metal being dragged through the dirt, but with
the blanket covering her head, she couldn’t identify it.

The commotion seemed to build
around her, with more and more people showing up and adding their opinions to
the conversation.  The general consensus was that Blaze was definitely an
eyesore, but Jack needed a wakeup call and the pack could use the extra money.

I’m not rich!
Blaze wanted
to scream.  She had the Sleeping Lady Lodge, and that was it.  She had been
able to secure a two hundred and fifty thousand dollar loan with her lodge as
collateral, using every ounce of her knowledge as a Business major to convince
the loan officer to sign on the dotted line.  She was going to have to pay back
three hundred and fifty thousand dollars, by the time she’d paid off interest.

But they weren’t taking the
gas-soaked rag out of her mouth, and every time Blaze grunted or moved, she got
kicked for the effort.

I’m not rich,
she thought,
in misery. 
I’m not.
  Why they thought they could somehow access her
accounts by making her disappear, she didn’t understand.  She hadn’t brought
out planeloads of cash, or buried a thousand pounds of gold bullion in the
basement.  She had
nothing
but a few hundred under her pillow, a couple
debit cards, a credit card, and the deed to the Sleeping Lady.  If they would
only take the gag out and let her
talk
to them, she could explain the
situation.

But they continued to talk around
her as if she didn’t even exist.  By the number of voices, Blaze estimated twenty,
maybe even thirty.

This is where all the moose
have been going,
Blaze thought, ridiculously.  Human hunters were issued a
permit for a single bull moose a year.  Werewolves—especially werewolves who
were willing to kidnap a woman and bury her alive—probably weren’t going to
bother applying for permits.  They probably also weren’t going to be selective
on how old the moose was, or whether they brought down a bull or a cow.

They were like a cancer, Blaze
thought, listening to more arrive.  At least thirty, now.  The dozens of voices
around her were beginning to reach a roar.  If what Jack had told her could be
believed, six years ago, there had only been a few werewolves left.  Now, she
would have been surprised if there weren’t forty of them gathered around her.

Maybe they’re not all
werewolves,
Blaze thought hopefully. 
Maybe the rest are just groupies.

“She doesn’t smell rich.”  It was
a deep, husky voice, very near her head.  She heard the sound of a match, then
the acrid tang of cigar smoke swept under the blanket, powerful even through
the smell of her own blood.  She heard puffs, then choked as a cloud of smoke
drifted under the opening between the quilt and the ground, directed there by
whoever was squatting beside her.  The same voice said, “She smells like that
rat fuck who killed Raul.”  Whoever he was stood up and walked off.

As the talking grew louder and
even more began to show up, even through the blanket, Blaze began to smell
alcohol.

“Hey, get off me!”  A woman’s
voice.  Native.  Slurred.  Somewhere to Blaze’s right.

“C’mon, baby,” a man said, his
voice also slurred.  “It won’t kill you to put out once in awhile.”

Blaze heard what sounded like a
sack of potatoes slamming into a tree, followed by a snarl.  A drunken brawl
followed, and she flinched as it neared her head.

“Come on, you idiots!” the deep,
husky voice of the cigar-smoker growled.  “Knock it off ‘fore I rip off your
damn heads.”

That seemed to settle them a bit.

The crowd, however, had just
gotten started.  Conversation peaked, and it seemed like Blaze had been dropped
in the middle of a cocktail party, not in the dirt and mosquitoes of the
Alaskan Bush.

Finally, she heard the crowd go
silent and instinctively knew that the approaching footsteps on the trail behind
her belonged to Amber.

“So,” Amber said, coming to a
stop beside Blaze, “I see everybody’s arrived.”

“Everyone except Derek and
Megan,” someone piped.  “Couldn’t get the druggie bastards out of bed.”

Amber sighed.  “I thought I told
you fools to stop feeding them.  If they can’t stop using, then we got no use
for them.”

“We did,” another woman
complained.  “Derek went out last night.  Dragged back half a moose calf and
fed it to her.”

Amber made a disgusted sound. 
“Tell those two if they don’t get clean, they’re going in the cage with the
wereverine.”

There was raucous laughter at
that, and Blaze’s attention sharpened. 
The wereverine?
  Then Jack’s
girlfriend was still alive…

Amber jerked the blanket from
Blaze’s body and smiled down at her, looking amused. “So, my very large
heiress, perhaps you’re still wondering why we’re going to bury you alive.”

But Blaze’s eyes had already
locked onto the squat metal cage sitting at the top of an incline leading down
into a gaping dirt hole.  The cage was about five feet square in any direction,
and looked to be built of something resembling welded railroad track.

“It’s because,” Amber said,
squatting down beside her, “We don’t want you to do anything stupid after we’ve
welcomed you into the family.”

As she spoke, the werewolf’s face
lengthened, her teeth growing longer and more predatory.  Her blue eyes became
slitted, her body growing the silvery-white fur.  All around them, men and
women whooped and hollered, and then, as Blaze watched in horror, they, too,
began to change.  All of them.  At least forty.  While Amber only went
half-way, staying in a semi-human form, the rest shifted completely into huge,
four-legged wolves of every size and color.  All of them staring at her, all of
them waiting.  The only one who didn’t was a hulking black man who was leaning
against a tree, at least seven feet tall, his violet eyes watching her with commiseration.

…violet eyes?

Then Blaze blinked, remembering
what the woman had said. 
Welcome me into the family?
her startled mind
thought.  Then she saw Amber’s extra rows of teeth as they pushed through the
roof and floor of her mouth, making blood well up against the woman’s tongue
and spill over her gumline.

“Oh my
God
!” Blaze tried
to scream into the gag.  She struggled, yanking at her bound hands as hard as
she could.

“You have no right to do that,
pup,” the big black man interrupted, his voice coming from over Amber’s
shoulder.  He had closed the distance, and had put his hand on Amber’s
shoulder.

“‘Aqrab, shush!” the little black
wolf snapped.

“But mon Dhi’b, she’s a—”

“Control your slave, Kimber,”
Amber growled, without even looking up.  Her slitted eyes were fixed on Blaze,
bloody saliva dribbling from her open jaws.

Above Amber, the black man
stiffened.  “I am a
sheik’s
son, you pustulent camel penis.”

“Do you want to meet with the
shadow again, ‘Aqrab?” the tiny black wolf demanded.

“They break the
Pact
!” the
huge black man snarled.  “That doesn’t
bother
you, Justicar?!”

“Open your mouth again,
flamekin,” the little black wolf retorted, “and you will be choking on
darkness.”

Towering above them, the black
man looked like he would say more, then his violet eyes met Blaze’s and she saw
a twist of misery before he looked away.  Without another word, he walked off
to lean against a tree and cross his arms defiantly over his chest, watching
the scene from afar.  And, when Blaze desperately scanned the faces of the
monstrous wolves gathering around her, no one else in the group seemed willing
to help her.

Squatting beside her, Amber was
grinning, enjoying Blaze’s terror, her long ivory teeth glistening with mingled
saliva and blood.  “All right, then.  Seeing how there are no other objections,
here we go.  Struggle all ya want, big girl.  It’ll only make the magic work
faster.”  And then, like she was easing into a lover’s embrace, she leaned
forward and clamped her big jaws down on Blaze’s shoulder.

Blaze screamed as a hundred
needle-like teeth punctured the skin and muscle of her chest and back, then
felt an odd rush as
something
raced outward from the wound, spreading in
a icy, searing wave through her body.  Suddenly, her heart was a thundering
mass of fire, each vein a pounding coal, each capillary an individual inferno
as hot and cold streaks started warring in her chest.

Blaze gasped, sucking in a
chestful of gasoline-choked air, then emptied her lungs into the gag as the
fires spread throughout her body, blazing through her blood and bones in angry surges. 
It felt like she’d been thrown into a vat of liquid nitrogen, dunked in diesel
fuel, and lit on fire.  Blaze screamed again, this time because her skin felt
as if it were burning away, leaving bones and dust in its place.

Somewhere in the group of wolves,
a small black one started backing away from the group.

When Amber yanked her jaws from
Blaze’s shoulder and pulled away, smiling, there was an odd silver luminescence
to the werewolf’s inner teeth, mingling with the blood, dripping down her jaw
to glow in red-streaked silvery puddles on the forest floor below.

“There,” Amber said, patting her
wound.  “Welcome to the family.”

All around her, wolves began to
howl.

Blaze shuddered and lowered her
head to the ground, every beat of her heart a fiery blast of anguish.  She felt
her heart stutter, try to fail.  Something kicked it back into gear, but then
it stopped again, this time for good.  For several long seconds, Blaze had the
distinctly unreal feeling of stillness within her chest.

“Her heart stopped,” the Italian-looking
man with the cigar said, frowning.

Amber scowled and slammed a fist
into Blaze’s spine.  “Why would her heart stop?”

The sudden jolt made the lump of
fire within her chest shudder and thump again.  The werewolf hit her again,
harder, and Blaze began to feel dizzy as her heart staggered and thudded.