Free Alaskan Fire by Sara King

hippo ?”  That seemed to have
worked rather well to get her attention last time, so he thought he could
expect a similar response.
    Instead, the lodge all but hummed
with silence.
    Narrowing his eyes, Jack decided
it was time to go make sure his new neighbor hadn’t asphyxiated herself on that
pretty orange hair of hers.  He got to the bottom of the stairs, turned the
corner, and said, “All right, tootz, you’ve just about pissed me—”
    Aside from a few strips of cloth
laying abandoned on the spark-guard beside the woodstove, the basement was
empty.
    Cursing, Jack was sprouting fur
and fang before he even reached the back door.

Chapter 3:  On the Lam
     
    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