Alaskan Fury Read online

  The Fourth Lander already had breakfast cooking on the stove, and she smiled when Kaashifah crested the steps. “Morning, Kimber,” Blaze said. The tall woman’s fiery red hair was braided and wrapped around the back of her head in a Greek-style headdress. A wig, of course. Her real hair was cropped short and tucked underneath, a necessity of dealing with the public. Phoenixes, once awakened, carried sunfire in their hair and eyes. With a wig and contacts, however, none had been the wiser.

  Tapping her spatula on the griddle, the phoenix looked over her shoulder with a small frown. “Where is ‘Aqrab?”

  They act as if he’s my mate, Kaashifah thought, in agony. She hadn’t yet managed to bring herself to tell them the truth, though she had the feeling the wereverine suspected. Indeed, Jack was sitting at the bar, watching her with narrowed eyes, his nose to the wind. Ares damn her body for its betrayals, but her glands gave her fears away easier than if she had written them in a book and handed it to the man.

  Avoiding the wereverine’s gaze, Kaashifah said, “‘Aqrab is indisposed.” She sat down on a stool at the kitchen’s island counter, pointedly ignoring Jack. “Are there any last amendments to our plans for tonight’s guests?”

  “Playing ‘capture the babe’ seems to be workin’ pretty damn good so far,” Jack said, grinning to show his fangs. “I say we just stick to that. Hell, they already got the tabloids cookin’ up all sorts of stories about the ‘lonely beast on the Yentna.’ Why disappoint?”

  The wereverine, as always, seemed to be rather short-sighted about the whole affair, but Kaashifah was being fed from the phoenix’s own grounds, and the abundance of food, after starving for so many years due to ‘Aqrab’s handicraft, was a blessing she was not willing to give up over a ‘difference of opinions,’ as the wereverine so politely put it. Out of sheer desperation, she had given him her word to obey his rule whilst on his domain, and she knew the score. To break that oath was to be sent away.

  …Away to starve; weak, hungry, and alone to face the djinni’s torments. She had done it before, and only barely survived. To do it again, she knew, would finally shatter that tentative hold she had on sanity.

  A hold that, with his every breath, the djinni was weakening.

  “Very well,” Kaashifah said. “Am I to take up the usual position with Blaze?”

  “I’ll come to grab the girl when you two are just finishing up dinner,” Jack said. “Lead them on a merry goose-chase around the lodge, then boogie off into the woods to drop her in the hole.”

  “The last group had GPS,” Blaze warned, serving Kaashifah two pie-plates full of eggs and fruit. “Remember to check her for a beacon.”

  “What if there are no females?” Kaashifah asked. “What is our plan in that case?”

  Jack chuckled. “Oh, honey, you ain’t heard?”

  Kaashifah glanced at Jack, then up at Blaze. The tall woman sighed and rolled her eyes, then went back to making breakfast.

  At the bar, Jack said, “They’re all girls this time, baby. I got the whole damn world wantin’ ta crawl up my chimney.”

  The djinni’s daily abuse left Kaashifah loathing the crass wereverine’s casual references to the physical act of union, but she managed to keep her face from twisting. After all, countless people found it an amusing enough pastime. Jack and Blaze were two of them. The scent of their pheromones was particularly strong this morning, which only made her gut clench. The Djinn, as beings of the Fourth Lands, were notoriously crippled by the carnal needs of procreation. And sure enough, ‘Aqrab reeked of desire, whenever he got close to her, and had spent much the last three thousand years stinking much like the little wereverine whenever he so much as looked at his mate.

  Except, with the djinni, there were three thousand years of hatred behind his carnal desires. He wanted to make her suffer, wanted to desecrate her body once and for all, wanted to condemn her in the eyes of her Lord and seal her from her Fury, wanted to take her wings forever in that ruinous and sinful act that a man could do to a woman. He wanted these things, and he spent every waking moment making sure she was aware of that fact.

  “You’re not eating, Kimber,” Blaze said, looking at Kaashifah’s plate worriedly. “Are you all right?”

  Kaashifah swallowed and lowered her hand, realizing she had unconsciously lifted it to her Lord’s tiny winged sword upon her neck.

  “She had another spat with her slave,” Jack said, wrinkling his nose.

  Damn him. Kaashifah felt her fists clench with shame as she fell under the phoenix’s pitying stare. “I would appreciate it, Shadowkiller,” she said softly to Jack, “If you would keep your…observations…to yourself.”

  Jack shrugged and went back to devouring his mixing-bowl of eggs. For Kaashifah, the phoenix had served up a similar portion, size-wise, though she had made a certain effort at presentation, for which Kaashifah was deeply grateful. The curse of the wolf may force her to eat like a monster, but she tried in all ways to maintain her decorum and civility. It was one of the only things she had left of her true nature. The djinni had taken everything else.

  “The kids are arriving around noon,” Jack said a few minutes later, already having downed the full bowl of eggs and wiping his egg-stained fingers on the wet rag that the phoenix handed him. “We’ll get them settled in, feed ‘em dinner, then let the festivities start.”

  “No blood, no pictures,” Blaze reiterated. “And no chasing them into the river.” She’d had to add the last one after a young man from one of the latest ‘werewolf-hunter’ groups had fallen into the glacial waters of the Yentna River and Jack had had to go in and rescue him, once it was clear that the boy had gone into shock. Only, of course, adding to his legend.

  The Yentna River Werewolf. Kaashifah didn’t know who were the bigger fools—the idiots that paid thousands of dollars to spend a week running screaming through the woods, or the wereverine and his mate, who blithely took their money and let his reputation build. As ‘Aqrab had noted to her many times before, the extra attention did not seem wise, in the phoenix’s case. But then, they had slaughtered the last Inquisition recovery group to come for her and had buried them—helicopter and all—in an enormous pit in the woods, so Kaashifah had grudgingly gone along with the plan.

  Besides, the phoenix was the key to her next meal, and chronic hunger did something strange to one’s thinking, when one thought they were about to be dumped on their ear, for raising a voice of dissent.

  Afraid to open her mouth for the pain in her stomach, Kaashifah thought. When did the Handmaiden of Ares become such a coward?

  The answer was simple: When the djinni bound himself to her, while kneeling under her blade. Surrender. The word was still bitter on her lips, an acrid taste on her tongue. The djinni had not surrendered. He had merely prolonged his life in exchange for three thousand years of torment. And a curse.

  She had accepted his surrender, fool that she was. She had allowed him to get to his knees before her, present his sweaty black neck for her sword. She had lifted her blade, prepared to cut his lying head from his massive body.

  And his big hand had reached out, like a snake, and he had cursed her. A blood-curse, the curse of a doomed man, the last wish of a djinni on his death bed. May you never kill. A Maiden of Death, follower of Ares, and she dropped her sword as if it had been afire, the very steel burning like coals in her hands, searing her fingers to the bone. And the look of victory in the djinni’s violet eyes, the triumph…

  He’d won their duel of souls. They both had known it, right then, him kneeling before her in the sands of the oasis, her standing, swordless, sun beating down on her blistered hands from above. By surrendering to her blade, he would ultimately win. Eventually, the strain would be too much. Eventually, she would crumble. Eventually, with time, he would get that third wish, and when he did, he would be free to spend his last hours in the First Realm showing her real torment before he killed her and returned to his homeland, her soul in tow. All it would take was time.

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nbsp; And, as immortals of their respective realms, both of them had all the time in the world.

  After Kaashifah forced down her eggs on a queasy stomach, she spent the rest of the morning washing dishes and making beds. ‘Aqrab still hadn’t made an appearance, though she knew he was close. Either in his own realm, in the half-realm, or in the First Realm, he had to remain within five hundred cubits of her body. The tether only stretched thus far, one of the many Laws of the Fourth Lands. It had started as fifteen hundred cubits, but with each of Kaashifah’s wishes, it had shortened by five hundred. Reminding her, of course, that if she made that last wish, there was nothing standing between the two of them, no bindings of djinni law to keep her safe.

  Around eleven-thirty, while vacuuming the upstairs floors of the lodge in preparation for the guests’ arrival, Kaashifah heard Jack and Blaze start up two of the 4-wheelers out back and head down the dirt path to Lake Ebony. She shut off the vacuum cleaner and tucked it away in a closet, biting her lip. ‘Aqrab still had not shown himself, and, as his only ‘entertainment’ within five hundred cubits, the djinni usually could not resist taunting her with his presence. That he refused to appear now left the little hairs along Kaashifah’s spine tingling with unease.

  Forty-five minutes later, the group of girls—eight in all—arrived on the back of the 4-wheeler cart out back, giggling, asking Blaze questions about the Yentna River Werewolf. Kaashifah reluctantly went down the stairs to meet them.

  When Kaashifah got down to the second story, Jack was grinning like an idiot as he carried the girls’ luggage up the stairs to the guest bedrooms. The guests themselves were dressed in various states of casual attire, from a brunette in jeans and a half-buttoned flannel shirt reeking of mosquito repellant, to a blonde Nordic-looking woman in tight black leather, showing a good portion of her smooth, trim stomach. A pretty gemmed belt, its golden plates studded with large pieces of what looked like turquoise, topped the ensemble. Blaze sat them at the bar and served them iced tea while they chatted, obviously excited out of their tiny minds.

  Seeing that there were no men in the group, Kaashifah stepped up and offered her hand to the blonde delicately. “My name is Kimber,” she said softly. “Welcome to the Sleeping Lady.” She had learned long ago that it was better to just give people a name they were familiar with than try to get them to pronounce the name of her homeland.

  The blonde gave Kaashifah a dubious look down her long nose, and Kaashifah found herself caught a bit off-guard by the agelessness of her face, where she could not say, with certainty, which decade of life the woman was in. Her black leather outfit reminded Kaashifah of something she had seen on TV, a show about hunting vampires, so she guessed the woman was rather young. Possibly just out of her teens.

  Yet there was something almost familiar about her steely gray eyes when the blonde woman sniffed and said, “You’ve got an accent. Where are you from?”

  Of course. So many in this country looked at her with distrust, simply for her appearance. Like Kaashifah was going to randomly poison their tea and louse their beds because her skin was darker than theirs.

  “Arabia,” Kaashifah said, giving another courteous nod. “Though it’s been many years.”

  She thought she saw the blonde’s eyes sharpen, but the woman sniffed and flung her impressive, knee-length braid over a shoulder. As thick as it was, Kaashifah wondered if the woman had used hair extensions. “And what’s your job here, Kimber?”

  “I cook and I clean,” Kaashifah said softly. It was an answer that they could hardly argue with. After all, in America, the darker the skin, the easier it was to be ignored as a servant.

  Blaze, bless her, seemed at least a bit taken aback by the woman’s abruptness. “Kimber got here as an exchange student,” the phoenix said, smiling. “Decided to stay once she had her degree.”

  “Degree in what?” the blonde asked. “Bedmaking?” It was almost a sneer. Faced with such outright disdain, Kaashifah bit her lip and stepped back, deciding to let the lady of the house do the talking. After all, she was as much a guest in this place as the rest of them.

  “Public relations,” Blaze said. The phoenix’s smile had cracked. “Would you like more lemon in your tea?”

  “I’m good,” the blonde said, oblivious. “So where can we find this werewolf?”

  The conversation went on from there, Kaashifah thankfully forgotten. She slipped to the side, listening as they discussed potential ‘lairs’ and recent ‘sightings’ as Jack made his last trip in from outside, carrying the final pieces of luggage over his shoulder.

  “You have an amazing place, here,” the quiet brunette in the back of the group said to the phoenix, once Jack had returned from depositing their luggage in their rooms and plunked down on a seat at the bar, “Fishing lodge, yes? What made you turn to cryptid tourism?” Which launched Blaze into a pre-packaged spiel about how the Sleeping Lady Lodge was everything she’d ever wanted, come true, and how one nightmarish winter, she and Jack had been forced to defend it against forty mutant wolves.

  “And you used silver bullets.” The brunette sounded enthralled. “Werewolves, then.”

  The ageless blonde in leather rolled her eyes and walked over to the bay window, glancing out at the pens of livestock out back. Oddly, it didn’t seem as if the woman were rolling her eyes at the idea of werewolves, but rather, at the brunette herself. Some corporate power-struggle? Kaashifah idly wondered where Blaze had gotten her latest batch of clients.

  “Well,” Blaze said, “not according to the Alaska Department of Fish and Game.” Which launched the whole group into another long discussion about werewolves, the government, cryptids in general, and the Yentna River Werewolf, who was a ‘lonely survivor’ of the massacre on the Sleeping Lady’s back steps.

  Throughout it all, Kaashifah kept her attention on the brunette, finding something strangely off about her seemingly polite nature in the face of the blonde’s unabashed arrogance. The woman had an accent of the southern states, though it was tinged with something else. Mexico, perhaps? And, while her voice had the commanding tone of a businesswoman, someone used to getting her way, neither her looks nor her attire set her apart. She had a professional short-cropped haircut, as was common with the lodge’s career-oriented clientele, tight blue jeans, hiking boots, and a button-up flannel shirt, the sleeves casually rolled up her arms. She had been holding her temples off and on during the conversation, as if she had a headache, and she had a gaunt look, like someone who wasn’t getting enough food or sleep. And sure enough, halfway through the conversation, she popped two small white pills from a tiny prescription bottle and swallowed them down as the phoenix had regaled them of stories of heritage livestock and her ridiculously green thumb.

  Eventually, after listening at length to the phoenix’s ramblings about near-extinct livestock breeds and the rapidly dwindling genetic diversity of humanity’s food supply, the brunette woman put her pill-bottle away and glanced up at Kaashifah with curious, glacial-blue eyes. “I heard you guys had a staff of four. Are we missing somebody? My friend said he was a real big guy. Pro wrestler or something.”

  Something didn’t seem right about the question, and, cautiously, Kaashifah said, “He left on vacation.”

  “Oh,” the brunette said, scratching at her forearm. “Then this is everybody? You guys are all alone out here?”

  “This is it,” Jack said, grinning proudly. “What you see is what you get, ladies. The Sleeping Lady. Last bastion of civilization out in werewolf territory.”

  The brunette reached up and fiddled with the sleeve of her shirt. “Good.”

  Good?

  But even as Kaashifah was digesting the strange taste to that, the woman flicked something forward in a practiced gesture, and a tiny dart hit the wereverine in his muscular chest. His eyes widened and his mouth fell open in a wet wheeze, then he slid to the floor suddenly, his heavy body hitting the hardwood beneath his stool with a thump that shook the lodge, not even sprouting fangs. />
  Oh no, Kaashifah thought, stumbling backwards, trying to slam up a shield.

  “Jack?” the phoenix asked, moving forward, frowning. She obviously hadn’t seen the brunette’s gesture.

  Kaashifah, who had seen it, was nonetheless unable to stop it. Her shield, having gone unused and unpracticed for so long, fizzled in the face of her fear, leaving her staring at the Inquisitors in horror. Whereas she could have ended it all with a single thought before the djinni’s curse, now all she could do was turn and run.

  She felt a sharp pain in her spine, then her legs collapsed out from underneath her.

  “Got the bitch,” the blonde woman chuckled.

  Kaashifah’s vision dimmed, her entire body going numb within a couple of heartbeats.

  A steel-toed boot stepped within sight, and the blonde woman in black leather squatted down in front of Kaashifah, a sneer on her face. She grabbed Kaashifah by the hair and yanked back, so that Kaashifah was staring up into the woman’s pretty Nordic face. “Guess what, beastie?” She yanked something out of Kaashifah’s back and held it out where she could see. A tiny hypodermic needle, connected to a silver vial. “Basilisk venom’ll put even a wereverine’s lights out.”

  “I don’t think that one’s a wereverine,” the unassuming brunette in jeans said. “My guess is a wolf, but something is off…” Spanish, Kaashifah realized, ridiculously placing the accent as her body failed around her. The woman was a Spaniard.

  “Save your guesses, Imelda. Once I get her on the rack, I will tell you what she is.”

  Even as she heard the words, Kaashifah found herself losing the battle with her eyelids, her world blackening, swallowing her from the outside.

  Suddenly, like the fires of heaven suddenly raining down upon her, the world came alive with heat and flame and people screamed. The last thing she saw, before she lost consciousness, was the leather-clad Nordic woman above her stand up with a startled cry, eyes wide, scrabbling for something on her gold-and-turquoise belt.