Page 19 of Guard Bear (Return To Fate Mountain #5)
Chapter
Seventeen
Joy dozed against Andre's shoulder, her body still humming with satisfaction from the night before. His arm wrapped around her, holding her close as he navigated the familiar mountain road in the predawn darkness.
The words floated between them like a gift. I love you. They'd both said it. Meant it. Her mountain lion purred with contentment, for once perfectly aligned with her human heart.
Then the scent hit.
Smoke. Not wood smoke from a chimney or the clean burn of a campfire. This was different. Acrid. Wrong.
Joy's eyes snapped open as her mountain lion surged to alertness. "Do you smell?—"
"Yes." Andre's arm tightened around her as his foot pressed harder on the accelerator. The truck's engine growled with the increased speed.
The smell intensified as they drew closer to her property. Joy straightened, hands gripping the door handle. Her heart hammered against her ribs. They crested the final hill, and Joy's world shattered.
Columns of smoke rose against the lightening sky, thick and black. Orange flames danced where her hives should be sleeping. The careful rows she'd tended for years were transformed into pillars of fire.
"No!" The word tore from her throat.
Andre barely had the truck in park before Joy wrenched open the door and ran. Her boots slipped on the dew-wet grass. The heat hit her face twenty feet away, but she kept running.
Twenty-four hives. Years of work. Generations of bees she'd raised from packages and splits. Burning.
The sound was the worst part. Not just the crack of wood splitting in the heat or the whoosh of flames consuming wax. Beneath it all, desperate buzzing. Thousands of bees trying to escape through entrances blocked by flame and warped wood.
Joy grabbed her work jacket from where she'd left it hanging on a fence post. The nearest hive hadn't fully caught yet—flames licked at the back but hadn't reached the entrance.
She wrapped the jacket around her hands and wrenched at the entrance reducer.
It came free, and bees poured out in a frantic cloud.
"Get out! Go!" She moved to the next hive where flames hadn't fully engulfed the front.
Andre appeared beside her with a shovel from her tool shed. "Tell me what to do!"
"The entrance reducers—pull them out!" She pointed to the small wooden pieces. "Give them room to escape!"
They worked in desperate tandem. Andre used the shovel to knock entrance reducers free from hives she couldn't safely reach. Joy cleared the ones she could, ignoring the heat that made her eyes water. Clouds of bees erupted from each opened entrance, confused and smoke-drunk but alive.
A hive in the middle row suddenly collapsed inward with a horrible crash. The buzzing from that one stopped instantly. They were running out of time.
"Three more in the back row!" Joy's voice cracked. But as they rounded the corner, those hives were already fully engulfed, flames shooting from every opening.
Andre caught her arm as she stepped forward anyway. "Joy, those are gone. There's nothing more we can do."
She sagged against him, the jacket falling from her numb fingers. They'd saved maybe a few thousand from tens of thousands. Clouds of confused bees circled overhead, homeless and disoriented, while their sisters died trapped inside burning boxes.
Andre pulled out his phone with one hand, keeping his other arm around her. "Fire at Timber Bear Ranch. Send trucks now."
His voice sounded distant, muffled by the roar in Joy's ears. A full year's worth of income, sixty pounds per hive on a good year. Liquid gold her bees had worked all summer to create.
Gone.
Her knees buckled. Andre caught her, lowering them both to the grass a safe distance from the inferno. Joy pressed her face against his chest, but she couldn't escape the smell. Burning honey. The death of twenty thousand tiny souls who'd trusted her to keep them safe.
The tears came hard and fast. Not pretty crying but ugly, body-shaking sobs that tore from somewhere deep in her chest. Her mountain lion keened inside her, recognizing the destruction of their partners.
These weren't just insects. They were her girls.
Her workers. Her dancers who told stories with their movements, who brought her gifts of pollen and nectar.
"I'm so sorry," Andre murmured against her hair. His arms tightened around her as another hive collapsed in a shower of sparks. "I'm so fucking sorry."
Joy's hands throbbed where she'd touched the burning wood. Blisters were already forming on her palms, but the physical pain felt distant compared to the grief crushing her chest.
"My girls," she whispered. "Andre, they were in there. Thousands of them. They couldn't escape."
Something changed in Andre's body. The muscles against her went rigid, his chest expanding with a deep breath. When she pulled back to look at him, his eyes had gone golden in the firelight. His bear pushed at the surface, claws extending from his fingertips where they pressed against her back.
"I will find who did this." His voice came out more growl than words, rumbling from somewhere deep in his chest. "I will end them."
The promise vibrated through her bones. This wasn't his everyday overprotectiveness, the suffocating need to control every variable around her. This was primal. A predator's oath to avenge his mate's pain.
For once, Joy didn't push back against his protective rage. She wanted blood too. Wanted to find whoever had done this and make them pay for every tiny life lost.
Sirens wailed in the distance, growing closer. Dawn was breaking properly now, gray light revealing the full devastation. Dead bees carpeted the ground around the hives, their bodies forming drifts like horrible snow. Some still twitched, wings burnt away, dying slowly.
Above them, the saved bees circled in confused clouds.
Hundreds of them, maybe a few thousand, flying aimlessly where their homes once stood.
They landed on the scorched ground, crawled over the ruins searching for their queen, for their sisters, for the familiar scent of home that no longer existed.
Some clustered on Joy's shoulders and arms, recognizing her scent, seeking comfort she couldn't give them.