Cardio with the Easter Orc (Hulking Holiday Helpers #1)

Chapter 1 A Bunny’s Secret

A Bunny’s Secret

Brok

The forest air tasted of pine resin, wet soil, and the distinct, sour metallic tang of a client giving up. It was a scent I knew better than my own. It was unacceptable.

“Lower! Ass to grass, Barnaby! If your hamstrings aren’t screaming, they aren’t listening!”

Barnaby let out a noise like a squeaky toy being strangled. Maybe he’d meant it to be cute. But the Herald of Spring had currently become the single greatest threat to my professional record. And I found nothing cute about that, no matter how fluffy he was.

The Easter Bunny now stood in the center of The Iron Grove, a medium-sized log trembling across his shoulders. His knees were shaking so violently his white tail vibrated into a blur.

“I can’t do it.” His long ears drooped, a pathetic shield against my glare. “My quads… Brok, I think my quads have detached. Is that possible? Can muscle groups just… resign?”

If I’d been anyone else, I might have cried. But orcs didn’t cry. Orcs feasted on the tears of their enemies. Or, in my case, the tears of my clients.

A hot knot of frustration tightened at the base of my skull.

“Muscle groups do not resign. They surrender to the will of the mind.” I shot a look at the stopwatch on my wrist. Custom-built for the expanse of my forearm, it had been with me for decades.

It might very well break out in sobs too, if Barnaby’s training continued at the same pace.

“You have fifteen seconds left,” I told my protesting client. “Don’t you dare drop that log.”

“It’s heavy.”

“It is twenty pounds of birch, Barnaby. The basket of eggs for the Miller family in Chicago weighs forty. Do you want to disappoint the Miller children? Do you want to be the reason little Timmy cries on Sunday morning?”

Barnaby groaned. “I hate Timmy. Timmy has a Rottweiler.”

“Exactly!” Finally, a motivation I could work with. “Can you outrun a Rottweiler with those calves? No. You are slow. You are soft. You are a chew toy waiting to happen.”

I paced around him, the ground shuddering slightly under the heavy tread of my boots.

Most of my kind chose to stay in the clan lands, away from the human world.

They wasted their potential fighting petty wars, or rotting in dank corridors to guard chests of gold for wizards who didn’t pay overtime. I had chosen a higher path.

I built temples.

And right now, Barnaby’s temple was a condemned structure held together by marshmallow fluff and bad intentions. But it wasn’t too late.

I adjusted the waistband of my compression shorts.

The custom-stitched spandex bit into my skin, barely containing the explosive potential of my lower body.

I felt the pump from this morning’s drop sets tightening the quads, a dull, glorious ache that confirmed I was still alive.

This was the result of discipline. This was the result of refusing to be mediocre.

Barnaby, by contrast, looked like a throw pillow dragged through a hedge.

“Time!” I slapped the trunk of the nearest oak, the sound cracking through the grove as a definitive end to the set.

Barnaby didn’t rack the weight. He crumpled. The log rolled off his back as he hit the dirt with a wet thump. He lay spread-eagled, his pastel blue workout shorts riding up to reveal fluffy white thighs that had never known the glory of a true burn.

“Up.” I nudged his trembling side with the reinforced toe of my custom training shoe, refusing to acknowledge the theatrics. “Rest periods are sixty seconds. Active recovery. Walk it off.”

“I’m dead.” The muffled reply rose from the dirt. “This is the afterlife. It smells like mulch.”

I pinched the bridge of my nose, the sharp tips of my tusks scraping against my knuckles. It took a monumental effort not to shout. “Barnaby. Look at me.”

He rolled over, gasping for air, practically radiating misery. “Why are you like this, Brok? Why can’t we just… do yoga? Or stretches? Why must we lift heavy things only to put them back down?”

I crouched next to him, a position I’d taken too many times since he’d hired me.

“Because the job requires it, Barnaby. You came to me because last year you got stuck in a cat door in Poughkeepsie. Do you remember the fire department having to grease you up to pull you out? Do you remember the shame?”

The shame, and the potential endangerment of our world. If not for the powerful glamor of the Easter Bunny, we would be having a very different conversation right now.

Barnaby shuddered, tucking his head between his knees as if he could hide from the memory itself. “Don’t speak of the butter incident.”

“Then do the work. We are four weeks out from Easter. Four weeks. That is barely enough time to build a base level of cardio, let alone the explosive power required for the rooftop jumps.”

That was putting it lightly. In his state, Barnaby would more likely roll down a roof than jump on it. But that was why I was needed, to fix this ridiculous mess he was in.

I stood and tugged him along with me. The past didn’t matter. Only the deadline, the now, and the discipline he needed to have. “You are soft. You are doughy. When I look at you, I don’t see a legendary guardian of the season. I see a liability.”

His nose began to twitch uncontrollably. There it was. The tell. Good. He wasn’t paying me to be his friend. He was paying me to chisel a warrior out of… whatever this was.

I walked to the bench press, a flat rock I’d sanded smooth.

Forked branches flanked it, supporting a heavy ironwood trunk.

A clean station was a sign of a clear mind.

I grabbed a rag and wiped down the bark with methodical precision.

Hygiene was the first law of the gym, even if the gym was a magical forest.

“I can’t,” Barnaby wheezed from where he was swaying on his feet, clutching his chest like a dying Victorian waif. “Brok, I can’t do another set. My soul is bruised.”

I let out a deep sigh. Proper recovery was as critical as the exercise itself.

An exhausted muscle was a useless muscle.

He needed fuel and a reset, whether his soul was bruised or not.

“Grab your bottle.” I hooked a thumb toward the bright pink, ridiculously oversized water bottle hanging from a low branch.

“Hydrate. You have sixty seconds to pull yourself together. Then we hit the burpees.”

“Burpees?” Barnaby’s eyes widened, showing the whites all around. “You said today was Leg Day. Burpees are… everything day. It’s a full-body assault.”

“It’s metabolic conditioning.” I snatched my clipboard from the rock. Time to document the suffering.

Barnaby’s numbers worried me. They were an insult to the very concept of cause and effect. His endurance was still barely registering above ‘comatose,’ and his strength gains had plateaued weeks ago.

I tapped the charcoal pencil against my tusk, the sharp click-click-click a rhythm for my building suspicion.

The math didn’t lie. For two weeks, I had ramped up the intensity and doubled the volume. I had put him on a strict caloric deficit. By every rule of the flesh I knew, he should have dropped three pounds of fat.

He hadn’t. Why?

I lowered the clipboard, my gaze narrowing on the subject himself. Barnaby was guzzling the water, the liquid spilling down his chin to mat the fur on his chest.

It wasn’t just that he failed to get leaner. I squinted. The curve of his midsection seemed to be actively mocking my efforts, defying gravity and logic simultaneously. It confirmed the theory that had been forming in the back of my mind for days. He seemed… denser.

“Barnaby.”

“What?” He wiped his mouth with the back of a paw, panting.

“How is the diet going?”

He froze. A tiny tensing of the shoulders. A flicker of the left ear. The exact same microscopic flinch a marsh vole makes just before the hawk strikes.

My new client was a terrible liar. It was almost disappointing.

“Great,” he squeaked. “Fantastic. I love kale. Can’t get enough of it. Big fan of roughage.”

“And the cravings?” I lowered the clipboard, careful not to make any sudden movement that might startle him. “Any desire for… sweets?”

“Pfft.” He waved a paw, a gesture too wide, too performative. “Sugar is a mirage. I have transcended flavor. I ate a raw carrot for breakfast. It was… spiritually fulfilling.”

I let the clipboard fall from my hand. It hit the rock with a sharp crack that cut through the rest of his performance. The time for talk was over.

“Explain something to me, Barnaby.” I closed the distance between us in a single step. “If you are eating nothing but roots and leaves, and we are crushing two hours of cardio a day, why is your waistline expanding?”

“Muscle confusion?”

The excuse was so fundamentally stupid, it was the fitness equivalent of claiming a troll could be reasoned with. “That is not how muscle works. You don’t confuse your abs into turning into a spare tire. That is soft tissue. That is stored fuel.”

His gaze darted past my shoulder, toward the mossy stones that marked the edge of the grove. If I hadn’t known any better, I’d have thought he was mapping an escape route. I took another half-step, cutting off his line of sight.

“Lift your arms.”

“Why?”

“Because I said so.”

Barnaby’s hesitation was a confession in itself.

He slowly raised his paws in a gesture of pure surrender.

I leaned in, closing my eyes for a moment to focus my entire being on a single sense.

My nose could track a goblin through a swamp in a rainstorm.

Tracking a confectionery treat on a nervous rabbit was an insult to my skills.

I took a slow, deep breath, filtering the information. First, the surface layer: sweat, the byproduct of fear, and the dusty, dry scent of his own fur. This was expected, and irrelevant.

I pushed past it, searching for the anomaly. Then I found it: rich, dark, and utterly damning, layered underneath. The heavy aroma of warm butter and roasted beans. The stink of dietary ruin.

“You reek of cocoa.”