Page 7 of Prospect’s Curvy Beekeeper

She feels it too. Her breath hitches. Her eyes widen slightly in the dark, the pupils blown wide, turning her irises black. She stares at me, the air between us suddenly charged.

She doesn't back away.

She takes a sip from her own mug. The steam curls around her face.

She doesn't say thank you for standing guard. She doesn't apologize for the cold. She doesn't offer a blanket or a guest room or a single concession to my comfort. She accepts my presence as it is. A weapon on the porch.

I don't say you're welcome.

I lift the chipped mug to my mouth and drink. The coffee is pitch black, scalding hot, laced with a dash of cinnamon. Her percolator brew, strong enough to strip paint. It burns all the way down into my stomach.

I drink it, and I watch her.

She sits down on the wooden steps, wrapping both hands around her mug to steal the heat. She looks out over the dark meadow, toward the invisible line of wooden boxes humming in the cold.

I stay on the cot. Guarding her back.

The wind howls. The Syndicate waits in the dark. The war is coming to Pine Valley, and I’m the wall it's going to crash against.

I drink her coffee. I stare at the curve of her neck.

Mine.

3

Susan

The biting chill of the pre-dawn mountain air seeps through the floorboards, curling around my ankles like ice water.

It’s five-thirty. The sky outside my bedroom window is a bruised, indigo purple, right on the bleeding edge of morning. My boots hit the worn hardwood with a dull thud. A thin gray tank. The stiff canvas suit zipped up over it, then Grandpa's oversized, wax-coated jacket that still faintly smells of old pipe tobacco and propolis. I yank the zipper up to my chin.

An hour and a half ago, I stood outside and handed a mug of black cinnamon coffee to a giant who sleeps with a knife under his pillow. We didn't speak. He just took it, his fingers brushing mine, the heat of his skin ignoring the cold.

I step out of the kitchen and push the front door open, expecting to find him sitting on the edge of the military cot, radiating that terrifying, coiled-spring violence.

The front porch is empty.

The cot is made. The wool blanket is folded with a sharp, ninety-degree military precision that looks absurdly out of place against the peeling paint of my farmhouse. The ceramic mug sits on the railing. Washed clean.

He’s gone.

A sharp, irritating prickle flares under my skin.

Disappointment? Please. I don't get disappointed over brooding mountain men who communicate exclusively in glares and silent intimidation. I have two hundred boxes of stinging insects that require my attention, the armed Syndicate using my south trail as a scenic byway, and a farm that will swallow me whole if I stop moving for five seconds. I don't have time to pine over a man who disappeared before the sun came up.

I grab my smoker from the hook by the door and trudge down the frost-crunched grass toward the honey shed.

The wind off the northern ridge is a living thing in October. It howls down the mountain face, slicing across the twelve acres of my property, dropping the temperature by ten degrees the second it hits the meadow. For two years, ever since I was left alone on this farm, I have fought that wind. I’ve dragged frozen tarps, stacked rotting hay bales, and tied down ratchet straps with numb, bleeding fingers just to keep my girls from freezing inside their boxes.

I brace my shoulders, ducking my chin into my collar, waiting for the familiar, ice-pick blast of the downdraft as I crest the small rise overlooking the hive line.

The wind never hits.

I stop dead.

The air around the hive line is still. It’s cold, yes, but the slicing gale is gone. A gentle, diffused breeze rustles the dry meadow grass, soft and harmless.

My boots stop moving. My jaw goes slack.