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jump as he tensed his muscular
body and pushed off of the wall.
    “Maybe you didn’t hear me,
sweetheart,” he snarled, pointing a finger at the floor, “But this is my home territory, and anyone with any brains knows to check out who’s claimed
what before putting six hundred thousand of their ‘hard-earned’ dollars into a
few acres right in the middle of someone’s home range.”
    Blaze just stared at him.  “What
are you talking about?” she finally managed.  “This is America.  Nobody
can ‘claim’ ten square miles of land.”
    He grinned fiercely, and Blaze
once again thought she saw the flash of teeth.  “That’s where you’re wrong,
sugar.”  He took a step towards her, and Blaze suddenly realized why it seemed
like she had been seeing his hackles raise every time he got angry.  His back,
unlike his face, was hairy.   Almost inhumanly hairy.  And the hair was
standing on end, so that it pushed up over the shoulders and up his neck,
puffing up his shirt.  “So,” Jack growled—and this time, the growl was
definitely not human, “Tell me what you are and stop fucking around.”  It was
his eyes, though, that finally made Blaze take a nervous step backwards.  As
she watched, they started to glow.  The black pupil elongated, becoming a
narrow slit.
    “Listen,” Blaze whispered,
“Whatever you’re on, I’m sure it’s wonderful, but I really have no idea what
you’re talking about.”  She took another step backwards, into the bedroom.  She
glanced down at the doorknob, saw the lock.
    “Don’t even try it,” Jack
growled.  In the flickering light of the fire, she thought she saw his teeth lengthening
to points.
    Blaze ducked out of the way and
slammed the door shut.  An instant later, she twisted the lock and dove for her
duffel bags.
    Which one’s got the gun? she thought, panic clawing at her brain.  She had an insane woodsman in her
home, and he was obviously on some pretty expensive medication.  Blaze found
the duffel and had just knelt beside it when the door exploded off of its
hinges, the shattered bits of wood and paint so tiny that they drifted around
her like feathers.  Seeing that, Blaze’s body locked up all at once, her
frantic mind thinking that the door had somehow been hit by a shotgun—or a
small thermonuclear device.  She looked up, half-expecting to see the black
barrel of a gun pointed at her.
    What stood on the other side,
however, was much worse.  Over six feet tall, it seemed to be a mixture of man
and beast—bearlike, but with more delicate features.  It stood hunched on hind
legs and was snarling, its compact body covered in four-inch-long brown and
blonde fur.
    Those places, of course, that
weren’t still sporting ripped jeans and a shredded flannel shirt.
    Blaze screamed and scrambled
backwards, away from her duffels.
    The creature followed her into
the room, easily tossing aside the seventy-pound duffels as if they were made
of Styrofoam.  The eerie rumble was still coming from its chest, magnified now,
its snarl bearing long, saliva-soaked ivory fangs, its glowing green eyes fixed
on her with deadly purpose.
    Blaze’s back hit the far wall
before she realized she’d left herself trapped.  She cringed as the thing
rushed her, then screamed as it pounded a taloned fist into the brickwork
beside her head, powdering it to dust.
    “Answer me!” the creature
snarled, hellish green eyes only inches from her own.  “What the fuck are you?!”
    “I don’t know,” Blaze whimpered,
hiding her head with her arms.  “Please.  I don’t know what you’re talking
about.”
    The creature grabbed her arm and
pulled it from her face as easily as if she had been a reluctant toddler.  It
peered at her, searching her face with its slitted eyes.  When Blaze tried to
protect herself from its gaze with the other arm, it, too, was removed with a
powerful, clawed hand and held above her head.  Blaze cringed, utter terror
leaving her struggling for