Chapter 3
JUNIA
The flamingos are the funniest thing I've ever seen in my life.
I sit on my steps with both hands wrapped around a mug of coffee so strong it could strip paint, and I see a seven-foot orc in cargo shorts and unlaced boots try to grab a plastic bird off his lawn.
The flamingo dodges. Actually dodges. It sidesteps on its wire legs with a jerky, mechanical grace, and Flynn's hands close on empty air.
He stumbles. His bare foot finds one of the divots the birds have already pecked into his grass, and his ankle rolls, and for one glorious second this massive green wall of a man windmills both arms like a cartoon character on a cliff's edge.
He doesn't fall. Of course he doesn't fall. Orcs don't fall. He catches himself, straightens, and his jaw does that thing where the muscles flex so hard the tendons in his neck stand out like bridge cables. Even from thirty feet away, the cords are visible.
I sip my coffee.
"Morning, Flynn."
His head snaps toward me. Those amber eyes, bright as a wolf's in the grey dawn light, lock onto my face with the precision of a targeting system.
"You."
"Me."
"Your flamingos are eating my lawn."
"They're not my flamingos."
"They appeared in MY yard after YOU moved in."
"Correlation isn't causation. I learned that from a podcast."
He grabs for another one. This flamingo is faster.
It ducks under his arm, skitters three feet to the left, and drives its beak into a fresh patch of turf.
The sound is obscene. A wet, crunchy pop, like someone biting into a really crisp apple.
A plug of sod launches into the air and lands on Flynn's shoulder.
He stares at the grass on his shoulder. Then back at me.
I'm grinning. I can't help it. The mug is warm against my palms, the morning air smells of dew and dirt and the jasmine I planted along my porch railing yesterday, and the most uptight orc in the continental United States is losing a war to lawn ornaments. This is the best Friday of my entire—
A flamingo pecks my foot.
Hot coffee splashes my knee. I jerk backward, mug sloshing, and stare down at the bird standing on my bottom step. Its wire legs scratch against the wood. Its painted eye rotates toward my herb garden.
Three more emerge from Flynn's fence. They move in formation. Single file. Purposeful.
"Oh no."
They break rank. One veers toward my lavender. Another beelines for the rosemary bed I spent six hours building over the weekend, the one with the reclaimed brick border and the hand-mixed soil and the copper plant markers I bent myself with pliers and a blowtorch.
"No, no, no, no—"
I'm off the steps. Barefoot. Coffee abandoned. The first flamingo reaches my lavender and pecks. The stem snaps clean. A six-month-old English lavender, the Hidcote variety, the one I babied through a root fungus in April, reduced to a headless stalk in a single mechanical bite.
"HEY!"
The flamingo ignores me. It pecks again. Another stem gone. Tiny purple flowers scatter across the mulch like confetti at the world's worst party.
I grab it. Both hands around its plastic body. The thing is light, hollow, cheap, and it writhes. The wire legs kick against my forearms, leaving thin red scratches. The beak swivels backward and snaps at my fingers.
"Ow!"
I fling it. The flamingo sails over my fence, hits Flynn's yard, lands on its wire legs, and resumes pecking his grass without missing a beat.
Behind me, the rosemary bed. The formation of three has reached it. They work systematically. Peck. Strip. Peck. Strip. Rosemary needles rain down.
"Stop! Those aren't grass, you idiots, those are HERBS—"
A shadow falls over me. Not a cloud shadow.
A Flynn shadow. He stands at our fence, and he's breathing hard, and there's a streak of dirt across his shirt, and he's holding two flamingos by their wire legs, upside down, beaks snapping uselessly at the air.
His hair is wild. His boots are still unlaced.
"They're spreading."
"I can see that!"
"Into YOUR yard."
"I KNOW."
He drops the two captive birds. They right themselves instantly, wobbling upright like those inflatable punching clowns, and waddle back toward his lawn.
"We need to stop them. They've breached the property division. This is no longer a single-yard containment issue."
A flamingo decapitates my tallest rosemary plant. The one I named Gerald.
"Gerald!"
Flynn looks at the rosemary. Then at me.
"You name your plants?"
"You have a quarantine zone behind your garage."
His mouth opens. Closes. Fair point acknowledged. He steps through the fence gap into my yard, and the proximity hits me all at once. The sheer mass of him. The way the porch overhang barely clears his head. Soil and cut grass and something warm underneath, like cedar, maybe sandalwood.
"Truce?"
One of his flamingo captives pecks his ankle. He doesn't flinch.
"Truce."
Flynn's plan is simple. Military. He explains it in clipped sentences while a flamingo chews on his ankle strap.
"Herd them to the center. Circle formation. Grab and contain."
"Contain them in what?"
He pauses. Looks around my yard. His gaze lands on the wheelbarrow I left tipped against the porch, the one overflowing with empty terracotta pots and a tangle of twine.
"That."
"My wheelbarrow is not a prison."
"It is now."
He grabs it, dumps the pots onto my porch with a crash that makes my teeth ache, and flips it upright. His forearms flex. The veins run like rivers under moss-green skin.
I look away. Focus. Gerald is dead. This is war.
We split. Flynn takes the left flank, circling wide around my herb garden where four flamingos are systematically dismantling my oregano. I take the right, where two more birds have discovered my marigold border and are pulling up flowers like they're bobbing for apples.
"On three," Flynn calls. "Push them toward the birdbath."
"One."
A flamingo rips out a marigold and flings it sideways.
"Two."
Flynn drops into a crouch. An actual tactical crouch. Knees bent, weight forward, arms spread wide. He looks like a linebacker. A seven-foot green linebacker in a dad shirt preparing to sack a plastic bird.
"Three."
We charge.
The flamingos scatter.
Not toward the birdbath. Not toward each other.
Every single direction that isn't useful.
Two bolt under my porch. One launches itself into my jasmine trellis and hangs there, wire legs kicking, beak snapping at the vines.
Three sprint for the fence gap back into Flynn's yard.
The remaining four split into pairs and execute flanking maneuvers that would make a chess grandmaster weep.
"They're organized!" I lunge for the nearest one. My fingers close around its neck. The plastic is sun-warm and unnervingly smooth, and the bird pivots its entire body like an owl, beak jabbing at my wrist. I yank my hand back. A bead of blood wells on my thumb.
"Stop grabbing the neck. Grab the base."
"You grab the base! They bite!"
Flynn scoops one up from behind. Both hands around its midsection, pinning the wire legs against its body. The flamingo goes rigid. Then it starts vibrating. A low, mechanical buzz, like a phone on a table, and Flynn's expression shifts from determination to alarm.
"It's—"
The bird explodes out of his grip. Not literally. But the force of its escape sends Flynn backward into my rosemary bed, and the sound that comes out of my mouth is not a word. It's a noise. A primal, plant-mother noise.
"My ROSEMARY!"
"I didn't—the bird—"
"You're SITTING on it!"
He scrambles up. His shorts are streaked with dirt and crushed rosemary needles, and the smell fills the entire yard. Sharp. Clean. Herbal. Mixed with his cedar-whatever scent, it creates something that makes my brain short-circuit for half a second.
He brushes rosemary off his thighs. "I'll replace it."
"You can't replace a two-year-old rosemary bush, Flynn."
"I'll find one."
"They don't sell—watch out!"
A flamingo dive-bombs from the jasmine trellis. It clips Flynn's ear, and he swats at it, and the motion brings his arm swinging backward into my shoulder. Not hard. But enough to knock me off balance, and I grasp the nearest solid thing.
His shirt.
The shirt bunches in my fist. Underneath, his stomach is a slab of warm stone. My knuckles press against actual abdominal muscles, and my brain catalogs this information against my will: ridged, firm, radiating heat like a furnace behind cotton.
His hand catches my elbow. Steadies me. His palm wraps all the way around my arm with room to spare. Every finger is a thick, calloused pressure point against my skin.
We're close. Too close. His body blocks out the sky. I have to tilt my head back to find his face, and when I do, those amber eyes are right there, wide, fixed on mine with an intensity that has absolutely nothing to do with flamingos.
A rosemary needle is stuck in his hair. Right above his left ear. The wild, dark strands hold it in place like a boutonniere.
His jaw works. The tendons flex.
My fist is still on his stomach.
"You— You should let go of my shirt."
"You should let go of my arm."
A flamingo pecks his calf. He flinches. I flinch. The spell shatters, and we spring apart like teenagers caught behind the bleachers. My cheeks burn. His ears, which I now notice are pointed and expressive, have turned a shade darker green at the tips.
He grabs the offending flamingo without looking. One hand. Base grip. Stuffs it into the wheelbarrow.
"We need a better strategy," he says to the wheelbarrow.
"Yeah." I press my palms to my cheeks. Cool them down. Fail. "Yeah, we do."
Fourteen flamingos remaining. My herb garden is a crime scene. And I can still feel the heat of his skin on my knuckles like a brand.
This is going to be a problem.