Page 2 of Prospect’s Curvy Beekeeper

PROSPECT.

Broken Halos MC. The local one-percenter club situated three miles north of here. The reinforced iron gates, the razor wire, the lethal reputation. Everyone in Pine Valley knows about the club. We leave them alone; they leave us alone. Except, lately, the whispers say the club is gearing up for a bloodbath with the Crimson Hollow Syndicate.

And now one of their unpatched members is walking through my wild clover, heading straight for the hive line.

He gets closer, and the details snap into sharp, brutal focus. His arms are bare, corded with muscle and dark ink. His skin is crisscrossed with faded scars. His face looks like it was chiseled out of granite by someone angry at the stone. Sharp jaw, broken nose, flat black eyes that don't reflect light. They scan the meadow with cold calculation. He radiates an unhinged energy. A man with a lit fuse and no off-switch.

He’s walking into the flight path of two million highly agitated insects.

"Hey!" I shout, my voice muffled slightly by the mesh veil. I wave the steel hive tool in the air. "Stop right there! You're in the flight path! Back away from the boxes!"

He doesn't stop. He doesn't even break his stride.

He keeps walking, his boots crushing the clover, his flat black eyes locking onto me.

Panic spikes hot and sharp behind my ribs. He’s a walking target. Bees are highly sensitive to carbon dioxide, to erratic movement, to adrenaline, and to the color black. He’s wearing a black shirt and a leather vest, marching right up to a colony of aggressive Russian hybrids that I just tore the roof off of. He’s going to get lit up. Hundreds of stings. Anaphylactic shock. A dead biker in my clover field.

"I said stop!" I yell louder, abandoning the hive and stomping toward him. "Are you deaf? They’re going to swarm you!"

He ignores me completely. He steps right up to the row of white wooden boxes, stopping barely two feet from the entrance of Colony D.

I brace myself. I grip the hive tool, fully preparing to drop it, grab this idiot by his leather vest, drag his three-hundred-pound frame all the way down to the honey shed, and stab him in the thigh with the emergency EpiPen I keep in the first-aid kit.

The guard bees surge out of the entrance of Colony D. A dark, furious cloud of venom and wings.

They hit him.

But they don't sting.

I stop dead in my tracks, my boots sinking into the damp earth. The breath leaves my lungs in a sharp, stunned rush.

The bees swirl around him. They drift toward his bare, tattooed forearms. Dozens land on his skin. They crawl over the dark ink, navigating the veins of his wrists, settling on his knuckles.

He doesn't swat them. He doesn't flinch. He doesn't take a sharp breath. He doesn't move a single muscle.

He stands there, terrifyingly still. The rage radiating off him is internal. Physically, he’s a statue. He’s a mountain. The bees read the stillness, the absence of elevated carbon dioxide from panic, the lack of fear, and they accept him. They land on his bare hands like he’s just another wooden lid. Like he belongs here.

I stare at him, baffled. In my thirty years on this earth, twenty of them spent working these hives alongside my grandfather, I’ve never seen a colony of Russian hybrids swarm an unprotected, black-clad stranger and simply... accept him.

I close the distance between us, my canvas suit rustling loudly. I stop a few feet away, right in the thick of the swarm.

"Are you insane?" I demand, my voice dropping into a harsh, breathy scold. The mesh of my veil separates us, but his dark, bottomless eyes slice right through the netting. "You don't walk into a hive line without a veil. You don't wear black. You’re practically begging them to put you in the hospital."

He says nothing. He just watches me. The silence stretches, thick and heavy, competing with the aggressive hum of the wings around us.

His stare is a physical weight. It presses down on my shoulders. It pins my boots to the dirt. It’s the most intense, unblinking focus I’ve ever been subjected to. It makes the back of my neck burn. It makes my hands tighten instinctively on the steel hive tool.

"They react to carbon dioxide," I say, my mouth moving just to fill the dangerous, stretching silence between us. I sound clinical. Authoritative. It’s the only defense mechanism I have against the sheer size and presence of the man standing in my meadow. "They react to panic. To adrenaline. When a threat approaches, an animal breathes heavier. The bees track the CO2 to find the face. To find the eyes. You... you aren't doing any of that."

A worker bee crawls up his thumb, navigating the ridge of a white scar near his knuckle. He doesn’t even look at it. He keeps his eyes locked on mine.

"You're barely breathing," I continue, my voice softening involuntarily. The science of it is fascinating, even if the man executing it is terrifying. "You aren't giving off any fear pheromones. You’re perfectly, impossibly still. They think you're a tree. Or a rock. Something inanimate. Something that belongs here."

He tilts his head, just a fraction of an inch. The movement is slow, deliberate. The bees on his shoulders don't even lift off.

The worker bee reaches the very tip of his right thumb. It stops, hovering right over the pad of his thumb, its stinger millimeters from his bare skin.

He doesn't flinch. He doesn't shake it off. He allows the bee to claim the space.