Page 52 of Wild Heart

He moved with an urgency that came not just from the fire but from something deeper, rage, confusion, betrayal, love. His limbs burned, but he didn’t slow down. He worked beside volunteers, beside Natalie, though they barely exchanged words. At one point, he handed her a tool kit. Their fingers touched briefly. She glanced up.

“Thank you,” she said.

He didn’t reply.

Later, as the fire crept closer, Olivia and Mason crossed paths near the east trail. Mason’s face was streaked with soot, a gash on his arm from a broken branch. He looked at her but didn’t stop moving.

“Davey’s working the supply line,” Olivia said, matching his pace. “He’s not speaking to me. Or to you.”

Mason nodded. “We don’t deserve his words right now.”

“He’s terrified,” she whispered.

“So am I.”

Their eyes met just long enough for pain to flash between them.

“I need to know we’re not going to lose this place,” Olivia said.

“We won’t,” Mason answered. “Not while we still have hands and legs.”

Smoke clung to everything. Natalie’s lungs burned, but she kept moving. A falcon shrieked in her arms, its wings tremblingas if sensing the flames. She whispered to it, nonsense, comfort, anything to fill the roar of fire with something human. Each breath was a prayer. Then, as they loaded the final crates, Mason found her.

“We’ve got to go,” he said.

She turned, hair wild, ash streaked across her cheek like war paint. For a heartbeat, she was still. Then she nodded. As they made their way down the lower trail, Olivia and Davey joined them, the four of them walking through the haze together. Their shadows merged and stretched long and dark across the scorched path. No one spoke. There was too much to say. Too much they hadn’t said.

The fire reached the sanctuary fence as the last vehicle pulled away. Behind them, the trees blazed like ghosts reclaiming the land. And ahead, the uncertain road stretched into the smoke-choked night.

22

The scent of smoke lingered long after the flames had passed. By dawn, the fire was mostly contained. The sanctuary’s perimeter was scarred, blackened soil, charred tree stumps, and patches of melted fencing lay like the skeleton of a battle lost. But the main buildings had survived, and miraculously, not a single life had been lost. The animals, sheltered in makeshift care stations set up in the community center and a handful of borrowed barns, were calm but disoriented. The humans weren’t much different. Natalie stood dazed, taking it all in, going over it all in her head.

The fire had come fast. A dry lightning strike had ignited a long-dead pine on the eastern ridge, and within minutes, the flames had leapt across the treetops, fed by underbrush that hadn’t seen rain in weeks. The wind turned cruel, gusting southeast and driving the fire directly toward the sanctuary’s eastern perimeter.

Volunteers had only a few minutes to mobilize. Olivia had sounded the alarm and activated the emergency protocols, but the smoke had already begun creeping in by the time the first calls were placed. The old water tanks couldn’t pump fastenough, and though the local fire team had scrambled, the remote nature of the property meant delays.

Inside the sanctuary, Mason and Natalie had coordinated triage. Olivia had overseen animal transfers, and Davey, angry and withdrawn until that moment, had thrown himself into the work like a man possessed. They formed a chain of motion, a rhythm of rescue. One team rounded up the larger mammals, foxes, deer, raccoons, guiding them into transport trailers. Another group tended to the birds, each one sedated and wrapped gently before being carried to safety.

For hours, it was chaos.

The eastern fence was the first to go, a wall of fire devouring it in seconds. The sound of it, the snapping, groaning, the furious hiss of oxygen surrendering, was something none of them would forget. Animals shrieked and bellowed. Radios crackled. People shouted over the roar of heat.

And yet, no one fled. Even as trees collapsed, even as sparks rained down like hell’s snow, they stayed. They worked. They carried cages and poured water and shouted each other’s names.

It was Davey who saw the last fox kit, cowering in a drainage pipe. He dove, belly-first, and dragged the creature out, shielding it with his body as Mason hauled them both to safety. It was Natalie who administered oxygen to a hawk that had stopped breathing mid-transport. It was Olivia who guided a blinded owl by touch alone.

When the last trailer rolled through the western gate and onto the road, the fire was less than ten yards behind them. They didn’t look back.

Now, standing at the edge of that devastation, Natalie stared out at the scorched remains of what had once been the raptor flight zone. Her boots crunched over brittle debris, and her hands trembled from exhaustion, though she hadn’t slowed since sunrise.

Behind her, a chorus of voices rose from the sanctuary grounds, volunteers and neighbors who had arrived before dawn to help. Some brought shovels, others wheelbarrows and chainsaws. Some brought casseroles and coffee. The community had come. And they had come in force.

And yet, even in the quiet buzz of rebuilding, there was a current of something else, of tension and unfinished conversations. The fire had scorched the land while history had exposed wounds. The revelation about Mason being Davey’s father still hung over them like an unspoken storm cloud. The fire had forced them to act, to respond, to focus on survival. But now, in the moments between hammer strikes and wheelbarrows rolling past, it resurfaced.

Natalie had spent the night after the evacuation in a borrowed cot at the community center, sleepless and staring at the ceiling. Mason had been across the room, curled in a blanket, eyes closed but she could tell he was awake. In the dim light, she had studied his face and wondered if trust could ever grow again in the burned place where love had once sparked.

Olivia, meanwhile, had tried to keep herself busy. But every time she looked at Davey, who avoided her gaze, it was like a knife turning in her chest. She knew she had been wrong not to tell him. She knew she had given him reason not to trust her.

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