Alaskan Fire (47 page)

“Finish it,” Kimber growled. 
Then she turned back to face the door and half-shifted, becoming a hunched mass
of muscle and fur and talons.

She’s…
helping
…me?

Trying to process that, Blaze
stared at the ebony werewolf, who was braced against the porch like a Floridian
expecting a hurricane, then glanced at the shop, and the tiny lever Jack had
installed.

“
Now
,” Kimber shouted,
jerking as something smashed into the door yet again, splintering the 4x4.  An
instant later, something shattered the portal and leapt through.  Kimber caught
it by the throat and, though it seemed to be three times her size, flung it
back inside the lodge as if it had been a toy.

Spurred by the horrible sounds
behind her, Blaze stumbled off of the porch and into the shop.  She fell to her
knees beside the tiny lever, which led to the huge new hot-water tank that Jack
had requisitioned for the purpose. 
Here goes nothing,
she thought,
reaching out and yanking the lever down.

Inside the lodge, she heard the
tinny sound of the alarm going off, and the subsequent screams of the
werewolves.

Colloidal silver, it seemed, when
applied in the form of a high-intensity shower, did not a happy wolfie make.

Blaze collapsed back against the
red metal sheeting of the boiler and closed her eyes.  The rest was up to Jack.

Agony wracked Jack’s soul as he
watched Blaze stumble across the back yard, weaving like a drunkard, staggering
in her exhaustion, yet doggedly aimed for the back porch.

She carried your sorry ass
seven miles through the woods,
Jack thought, anguished. 
Because you
weren’t man enough to put a damn bullet in your head when you had the chance.
 
He kept the muzzle of the rifle aimed at the door, but his breath was coming in
quick pants, now. 
Great Roots of Yggdrasil, you should be down there with
her, but you’re hiding in a tree like a goddamn coward.  You’re a
warrior
and
she’s a
healer
and you’re forcing her to her death.  She’s going to
die
because you—

Out of the corner of his eye, he
saw a black shape slip out of the brush near the edge of the clearing and start
loping across the yard, following Blaze’s progress.

Jack jerked his rifle to level it
on the wolf that followed her, his heart rate spiking so suddenly that it drove
the moon-magic out through his flesh.  He felt his eyesight sharpen, felt the
punctures in his fingers as his talons pushed through his fingertips, felt his
body grow and strain against the straps holding him in place.

Come on,
Jack thought,
Just
hold still…

On the ground, Blaze stopped and just
stared at the ground in between her feet for a minute, panting.  Behind her, her
stalker hesitated, giving him a clear shot.

Jack caught a whiff of gold and
sun and sand just before a big, black, African hand appeared out of nowhere and
grabbed the barrel of his gun, yanking it up to point at the sky.  Violet eyes
met Jack’s in warning, and the rest of the djinni appeared, seated casually in
the tree right beside him.

“There will be none of that,” the
djinni said softly.  “Tonight, Northman, our goals are the same.”

Jack, whose every hackle always
went up around the crafty, word-twisting djinn, yanked his gun free of the
massive man’s muscled arm to once more peer through the scope.

Indeed, the tiny black wolf
continued to creep behind Blaze almost tentatively, as if she knew she had a
gun sighted on her flank.  “She’s turning on her own kind?” he demanded.

“She is helping to correct a
mistake,” the djinni said.  “One she does not intend to make again.”

Suddenly, Jack understood.  “She
made
them, didn’t she?  Amber.  And Travis.  And Michael.  All of them.”

“She only made one,” the djinni
said.  “One who turned on her the moment she made her.”

Thinking of the petty white bitch
that had stabbed him in the
gut
, Jack’s fingers tightened on the gun.  “Amber.” 
It came with a wave of fury, realizing that he’d
assumed
it had been
Michael and the others leading the pack.  And he’d left her
alive
. 
Damn
it.

The djinni simply nodded,
watching the wolf’s progression.

“You’re hers, then?” Jack said,
following the small wolf through his scope.  “Others aren’t old enough.”

The djinni’s black face twisted
in disgust.  “The others are possessed infants.”

Jack bristled at the word
‘possessed,’ his knuckles whitening on the gun.  Following Blaze’s movement
across the yard, he growled, “What’d she do to claim you, slave?  Found a treasure
hoard from the Old Country?  Paid a witch-doctor?  Sputched a few Romani? 
What?”

“We dueled,” the djinni said. 
“Soul-for-soul.”

Jack froze, every hair on his
body pulling up from his skin.  “She’s a
magus
?”

“One of the only First-Lands magi
who still exists,” the djinni said, his violet eyes watching the wolf as it
slunk across the yard behind Blaze.  “Hence why you really don’t want to pull
that trigger.” 

She’s a magus,
Jack
thought, raking his brain.
  Not a wolf, then…
  Then he tensed when the
small black wolf suddenly darted up after Blaze and ripped the 4x4 from her
hands.  His hands tightened on the gun as he watched the wolf through the
scope.

“Careful, moon-child,” the djinni
warned.  “She means your little bird no harm.”

“Why the fuck do you care if I
kill her?” Jack demanded.  “It’ll set you free, right?”

Jack saw pain in the djinni’s
eyes before the man looked away.  “All you have to understand,” the djinni said
softly.  “Is if you kill my mistress, you will die tonight.  You have my word.”

Jack frowned as the wolf yanked
the door shut and slammed the 4x4 into the brackets.  Then the wolf grabbed
Blaze by the front of her shirt and dragged her down as she sprouted fur and
fang, and with the wolf half-transformed and snarling at Blaze, it was
everything that Jack could do to stay his hand.  “When this is over,” Jack
gritted, watching the altercation through his scope, “I’m going to have a sit-down
chat with your owner.”

It was the djinni’s turn to
stiffen.  “She is not my ‘owner’.”

“Are you soul-bound?” Jack demanded.

The djinni looked away, violet
eyes dark.

Sensing a weakness, Jack pressed,
“Can you weave the Wyrd, do
anything
without her permission?”

“Harm the wolf, you will regret
it.”  With that warning, the djinni vanished.

Jack laughed.  He’d never liked
djinn.  The tongue-twisting assholes always said one thing, then did another,
then blamed
you
for not understanding their words. 
His
general
thoughts on the common magus pastime of trapping djinn in the First Realm was
that if someone managed to beat the word-weavers at their own game, more power
to them.

A moment later, Blaze stumbled
off of the porch and into the shop.  At the same time, the front door exploded,
and a flash of blue fire made the wolves inside the lodge stagger backwards.

A magus,
Jack thought,
stunned. 
Mighty Thor, she doesn’t need our help.

Yet for all the little wolf’s
flashy lights and pretty pyrotechnics, Jack didn’t see the bodies falling that
he would have expected.  He began to frown. 
Why isn’t she just killing
them?

And then he heard the sprinkler
system engage inside the Sleeping Lady, and boarded-up windows began to shatter
as the wolves leapt through, screaming.  The little black wolf, for her part,
vanished like a fey.

One after another, wolves came
pouring from the lodge in full throes of the moon-magics, the pain of the
silver having drawn it out.  Snarling, angry, locked into moon-form by the
sprinkler system, they formed a tense, uneasy knot in the back yard as they
regrouped.  Saying a prayer to Zeus, Jack brought his rifle up to bear and
fired at a wolf in the center of the mass.  Aiming for the haunches, he hit the
wolf in the hip, then chambered another round as the injured creature turned on
its already pissed-off packmates and delivered a painful blow to the chest.

Sorry I can’t get down there
and join in the fun, boys,
Jack thought, firing again. 
Guess I’ll just
have to watch.
  He chambered another round, again aiming to create more pain
than to kill, and fired.  As Blaze had so thoughtfully pointed out, while a
cripple Jack may be, those in the grips of the moon-magics were fully capable
of doing Jack’s job for him, given enough provocation.

And, true to form, after six or
seven shots intended solely to wound, the knot of werewolves had devolved into
a wild, roaring blood-fest.  It was then that Jack re-loaded and started aiming
for the head.

Her pack was dying.

Amber felt her power lessen as
their lives slipped away, one after another.

Someone’s killing them,
Amber thought, frantically.  She threw open the door of her family’s Wasilla
ranch, looking to the north.

More fell, one after another. 
She felt their cords snap tight, then dissolve.  One by one.  Only seconds in
between.

Someone is killing my famil—
 
Amber froze, suddenly realizing why she had been able to find no trace of the
wereverine’s stench in Wasilla, Palmer, or even Anchorage.

The weasel had gone back.  He and
his six-foot ape were killing them all.

Amber knew, then, that she should
run.  She had stabbed the weasel right in the gut with the necromantic dagger,
and somehow he had survived.  On that fact alone, Amber knew that she should
take the three weapons she carried with her and the fifty grand in her bank
account and flee to Siberia, where she could start a new pack, a new family, a
new life.  Yet not only was there the fact that Jack survived a
dread horn
,
but he was being protected by some sort of flame-slinging monster, something
that Amber had never seen before.

Add that to the fact that Jack
had survived the un-survivable and it meant he had powers beyond what she
herself possessed, even with her pack at her feet.  Powers of healing…

Amber frowned, remembering the
column of fire that had killed so many of her family in her last encounter with
the weasel.  She had thought it had been a trick of her imagination, but she
had almost thought it looked like a
bird
.

Something tingled at the edges of
her memory, and Amber scrabbled to categorize the creature she was dealing with,
suddenly certain discovering its identity was more important than saving what
remained of her incompetent family.  Not a djinni, like the pathetic creature
Kimber carted around with her wherever she went, but certainly a similar
denizen of the Fourth Realm.  Something made of sunfire…

Amber’s eyes narrowed when she
remembered the greenery around the Sleeping Lady, when she and her pack had
gone to claim it.  There had been animals everywhere.  Rabbits overflowing
their cages.  A
mango
tree in the greenhouse…  She’d been too excited by
the prospect of a few decent meals to really
think
about it, but that
just wasn’t possible.  Not even a feylord’s green thumb could grow
mango
trees in
Alaska
.

As Amber felt the last family
strands snap, leaving only the ones between herself and the annoying runt
Kimber in place, it dawned upon her what she was dealing with and she smiled. 

She didn’t need to flee to
Russia.  She had everything she needed right here.

She remembered back to her times
as a younger were, when she would gather everyone around the fire each night
while the family told stories.  The djinni, especially, had told interesting
stories.  Stories of a legendary bird that tantalized emperors with its ability
to heal, whose feathers had astonishing powers to nourish, to grow…

A bird who flew on wings of
sunfire, who could bring the wrath of the heavens upon its enemies with a
single thought.  A bird that died only once every five hundred years, to be reborn
again with a single feather as a keepsake.  A single feather that was its key
to awakening…

…or its capture.

A bird of the Fourth Lands who,
just as mortals in the First Lands were to mercury, as the fey in the Second
Lands were to iron, and as the moon-kissed of the Third Lands were to silver, was
deathly allergic to gold.

Blaze listened to the werewolves’
chaos outside and shakily pulled out her Desert Eagle from the holster on her
hip.  Careful to avoid the pipes leading out of the boiler, Blaze pushed
herself deeper into the crevice against the wall of the shop.  Almost
immediately, she felt the uncomfortable heat near her lower ribcage.  Instead
of starting a wood fire in the furnace—which, when the pumps were switched on inside
the lodge, would supply hot water to the flooring of the lodge—or simply
lighting a fire in the woodstove in the basement, the wolves had lit the diesel
boiler—usually used only in the coldest part of winter, Jack had told her—and
had left it running as high as it would go, pumping a continuous stream of
extremely hot water through every floor of the Sleeping Lady.

Beside it, the generator matched
pace, left on despite the inverters on the wall both having switched to float,
indicating, as Jack had so politely informed her, that the generator was no
longer charging the batteries.

Yet for once, Blaze was grateful
for the loud roar of the generator drowning out all other sound.  As Jack had
demonstrated, those touched by the Third-Lands seemed to have an uncanny set of
predatory senses, and at the moment, Blaze’s heart was doing approximately a
thousand beats a minute, her breaths were coming in ragged, choppy pants, and
she was pretty sure she stank of fear and sweat.  At least, with the generator
roaring beside her, the smell of grease and diesel thick inside the shop, she
figured she had a better chance of going unseen until Jack had finished
cleaning up.

Oh God,
Blaze thought,
listening to the inhuman sounds outside,
Please let this work.
 The
screams were getting fewer and further between, the commotion quieter in
general, but Blaze knew it would only take one survivor to rip her into tiny Yeti
pieces.  She had seen the kind of power these creatures had in a single swing,
and knew she didn’t stand a chance against that kind of devastating strength.

Gun clutched in trembling hands,
Blaze waited.  She’d gambled everything on this night.  Her farm, her lodge,
her
life
.  Hell, she’d even gambled Jack’s life on it, and not given him
a choice in the matter.  Now, listening to the horrible sounds outside, feeling
the reverberations through the walls as five-hundred-pound bodies slammed into
the woodpile or the thumps in the concrete pad under her ass when they were
driven into the gravel driveway, she began to wonder what the hell she had been
thinking.

Just
one
of them needed to
survive, and both she and Jack were dead.  Just
one
.

She heard something heavy land on
the roof, then long metal screeches as something scrabbled up the eaves,
doubtlessly rending huge holes in her tin sheeting as it climbed towards the
peak.

Another something hit the roof,
and then the very walls of the shop shook as the creatures above her screamed
and thrashed, making the ceiling above her bow, their weight and struggles
threatening to collapse the structure.

Then the scream ended in a sudden
gurgle and one of the combatants above thumped to the sheeting and started
rolling down the roof.  Roaring, the survivor launched himself from the shop,
making several of the rafters crack from the sudden weight.  Little bits of
sheet-rock fell from the ceiling and landed on the 4-wheeler Jack had pushed
inside to repair back in August, speckling the handlebars with white plaster. 
On the yard outside, something landed with a
thud
that Blaze felt
through the concrete floor.  Blaze flinched, clinging to the gun, adrenaline searing
through her veins as her heart radiated fire in her chest.

Outside, she heard the sounds of
heavy canine feet loping between the firewood stacks, towards the door of the
shop. 

I didn’t close it,
Blaze
realized, with sudden horror. 
I never latched the door!

She drew her knees up tight
against her chest, gun clenched in trembling hands as the loping stride paused
outside the entrance.   A moment later, a crimson-stained muzzle pushed through
the crack, sniffing at the dimly-lit air inside the shop from the darkness beyond.

Go away,
Blaze pleaded,
her hands tremulously lifting the gun. 
Please just go away.

But the nose pushed inside
further, revealing a huge lupine head, gray but with strips of black.  It
sniffed again, its blue eyes focused a bit of sheet-rock that slipped off of
the 4-wheeler to crunch against the floor.  Blaze saw it glance up at the break
in the ceiling, then step fully into the room, a massive beast the size of a
tiger, trailing a line of intestines through the sawdust on the floor behind
it.

Oh God,
Blaze thought,
seeing the streak of blood it left on the grease-stained concrete as it limped
through the shop.  Even then, the creature’s innards were pulling back into its
body, ropes of pinkish intestine flipping back and forth unnaturally as it
returned to the stomach cavity.

The wolf slunk to the far corner
of the shop—only ten feet from Blaze’s hiding place—and settled against the
wall, whining.  She could see several rows of teeth glistening red behind its
fangs, and its slitted yellow eyes glowed like twin flames against the dimness
of the shop’s single overhead light.  As Blaze watched, the last of its woodchip-covered
innards slipped back into its abdomen and the huge gash in the flesh there
began to seal.  Still whining, the nightmare-wolf began to lick the blood from
its stomach in long, slow swipes with its tongue.

Blaze’s eyes flickered toward the
darkness beyond the door.  Could she make it back outside before the wolf was
fully healed?  The sounds of fighting were dulling, now, and she was pretty
sure there were only a handful left still standing, and they were probably too
distracted to make much note of a helpless mortal bolting across the yard…

Who was she kidding?  Every kid
in Alaska got taught in grade-school that you don’t run from predators. 
Running triggered something in their minds, completely wiped out the
uncertainty that came with the smell of human, leaving raging instinct in its
place.  It was like offering yourself up on a silver platter marked PREY: 
PLEASE EAT.

Not daring to move more than her
eyes, Blaze glanced down at the gun in her hands.  Sweat was making the grip
slick in her palms, and her own paranoia kept feeling the Desert Eagle sliding,
like it was going to drop onto the concrete at any moment.

Outside, the last howls went
silent.  The werewolf curled against the inside wall pricked its ears forward,
listening, but kept panting and whining, shaking its head and intermittently
and scratching at its face, neck, sides…

The silver,
Blaze thought,
stunned that the colloidal sprinkler system had worked.  She thought about the
gun in her fingers, and how Jack had emphatically told her not to shoot a were
if she could avoid it, because most shots would just ‘piss it off,’ even with
silver.  And she had shot Jack in the
head
with a
shotgun
and he
had still tried to rip off her face afterwards.  What was one little bullet
going to do if a
shotgun
blast to the
head
didn’t kill them?  She
swallowed, her heart hammering as she tried to decide what to do.  She heard no
sounds outside, so she assumed that the fight had ended.

Unfortunately, that also meant
that Jack, up in his tree, thought the situation was under control.  She could
already imagine him lowering himself from the cottonwood, rifles slung over his
shoulder, so that he could crawl across the yard and come figure out why she
hadn’t at least taken a few pot-shots at wolves from inside the shop.

The werewolf whined again,
rubbing its nose against the shelves behind it, making the loose chainsaw
chains jingle where they dangled from a peg.  Then it lifted its big head
toward the door and growled, an unearthly rumble in its chest that left the
hairs on Blaze’s arms and legs prickling.

Still growling, it began licking
itself again.

“Blaze?” Jack’s voice called from
outside.  “Where’d you go, sweetie?”

Blaze flinched as the werewolf
froze, its ears pricking forward, its unnatural eyes narrowing as its lips
pulled away from ivory fangs.  Though Blaze was close enough to hear the low
growl that issued from its tensing chest, she knew that the noise from the
generator would keep the wereverine from hearing it.

Still moving only her eyes, trying
desperately to keep her breathing under control, Blaze glanced again at the
door. 
Could
she get outside before the wolf caught her?  At least if
she was outside, Jack would have a chance to shoot the thing, if it came after
her.

“
Blaze!
” Jack shouted, sounding
worried, now.

I can’t answer you,
Blaze
thought, agonized,
There’s a monster curled up beside me.

Even as she had the thought, she
watched the drool drip from the werewolf’s fangs to puddle in the
metal-shavings and woodchips covering the shop floor.  It got up slowly,
unfolding with an easy grace of a quarter-ton predator, head low, facing the
door.

You have a gun, you coward,
part of her snapped. 
Use it.

Blaze felt her heart rate
skyrocket with that thought, and suddenly the blood sizzling in her ears was
drowning out even the sound of the generator.

“Blaze!” Jack called, getting
closer, “Where are you, you damn Yeti?”  She heard the scuffling of the
wereverine dragging himself between the woodpiles to the door.  Inside the
shop, the werewolf was moving closer to Blaze, putting its back to her, getting
into the shadows furthest from the door.

Point the gun and pull the
trigger!
a part of her screamed. 
It’s right there…
kill
it.

Watching the creature’s haunches
bunch as Jack pushed the door open, Blaze slowly raised her gun to the back of
its head, now only inches from her.  Her sweat-slickened finger tightened on
the trigger.  Her hands started to shake.

The werewolf backed further into
the shadows with her, until its bristly gray fur was brushing Blaze’s face and
chest.

Jack crawled into the shop on his
elbows.  He paused, lifting his nose tentatively to the air and sniffed. 
“Blaze?”

Blaze wanted to scream, wanted to
shoot, wanted to
warn
him, yet all she could do was sit there in
complete terror, the creature’s fur brushing her face, as it waited in the
shadows to ambush Jack. 

“You fall asleep in here, girl?”
the wereverine demanded, frowning.  Blaze saw his eyes catch on the bloody
smear leading into the shop before he started crawling further into the room…

The werewolf leapt.

Jack rolled to meet it,
transforming in the span of a single heartbeat, talons out, fangs bared, his
blonde and brown fur puffing up his shirt and ripping apart his pants.  The
werewolf landed with the wereverine’s hand around its throat, and they tumbled
in a ball of snarling teeth and claw, slamming into the 4-wheeler and
scattering bits of drywall across the floor.

It didn’t last long.  Throughout
it all, the wereverine kept a firm hold on the wolf’s throat, talons digging
bloody red holes into the sides of the wolf’s red neck.  After a few moments,
the wolf’s movements grew weaker, its struggles less violent.  Eventually, Jack
took a second grip on the wolf’s skull and Blaze heard the snapping of bones as
he twisted.

Knowing what would come next, she
winced and looked away.

She heard a wet popping
crunch
,
then a wet thud as something the size of a watermelon hit the back end of the
shop.

“So,” the wereverine said, not
even sounding winded, “You all right over there, sister?”

When Blaze looked, Jack was
leaning against the front tire of the 4-wheeler, wiping blood from his mouth
and depositing it on what remained of his pants.

Blaze looked down at her gun,
still clutched between trembling fingers, and felt a huge wave of guilt settle
deep in her gut. 
You’re such a damn cowar—

“Don’t worry about it,” Jack
said.  “Your kind…hell…they don’t kill ‘less it’s important.”

“My
kind
?” Blaze managed,
self-loathing embittering her words.  “You mean
women
?”

“Women?”  Turning to level his
green eyes on her, Jack snorted.  “Girl, you obviously ain’t never heard those
proverbs about a woman scorned.”  He shook his head, seeming to find what she
had said highly amusing.  Turning his head to the side, he spat a gob of red
onto the dusty floor of the shop, then turned back to peer at her, something
akin to concern in his emerald eyes.  “He rough you up some, then?”

“No,” Blaze bit out, “I was
perfectly functional and unharmed the entire time.  I just couldn’t find the
balls to pull the trigger.”

Jack grunted.  “Don’t take balls
to pull a trigger.”  Casually flicking a shred of flesh off of his arm, he
said, “Besides.  You’da pulled that trigger and he’d’ve sliced you up like a
birthday cake ‘fore I could get to him.”

“Instead, I just cowered in my
corner and let him ambush you,” Blaze bit out.  “This was
my idea
, just
like the lodge, just like the farm and everything else, and once again,
you
did all the work.”

Jack shrugged.  “I knew he was in
here.  There was a damn blood trail leading in from outside.”  He gestured at
the dark smears on the concrete floor, giving her an irritated look.  “Why the
hell you think I made so much noise coming in here to get you?”

Suddenly, it dawned on Blaze… 
“You
knew
he was in here waiting for you?”

“Watched him walk inside,” Jack
said.  “Was just hoping you’d manage to keep your head down ‘til I could come
rescue your pretty behind.”