Chapter 6 #2
The swarm thins. Fifteen left. Ten. The survivors lose cohesion—their military formation dissolving into panicked individual flights, banking and rolling, searching for escape routes. Junia picks them off one by one, her hose tracking each beetle with a patience that is genuinely frightening.
The last beetle hovers above the greenhouse. Wings stuttering. Mandibles clicking in what sounds almost like a distress signal.
Junia adjusts the nozzle. Narrows the stream to a pencil-width lance.
One shot. The beetle explodes against the glass in a starburst of copper light.
Silence.
Junia drops the hose. Water pools around her feet, mixing with ichor and wing fragments and the mulched remains of her flower beds.
Her arms tremble. Her curls are plastered to her forehead.
She's soaked from the hose's backspray, overalls clinging to her frame, and potting soil has mixed with the water into dark streaks across her forearms.
I'm bleeding from seven different places.
She looks at me. I look at her.
"You fight like a Warchief's daughter."
Her laugh breaks through the battle silence like sunlight through a storm cloud. Short, breathless, slightly unhinged. The laugh of someone who just pressure-washed seventy magical beetles into confetti and hasn't fully processed that information yet.
"A Warchief's daughter." She pushes a wet curl off her forehead with the back of her wrist. "My grandmother grew roses in a drainage ditch behind a tire shop in Bakersfield. Close enough?"
Green blood drips from my forearm onto her flagstone path.
Seven puncture wounds, three on the left arm, two on the right, one on my calf, one on my shoulder where the beetle chewed through the 'D' in 'DAD.
' The shirt is ruined. I loved that shirt.
Found it at a Goodwill in Tucson, size XXXL, the only human garment I've ever owned that fits across the torso without splitting at the seams.
I catalog the damage because cataloging damage is what I do. It's how I process. Count the wounds. Assess the structural integrity. File the repair order.
But Junia isn't cataloging anything.
She drops the hose nozzle. It clatters against the flagstone and spins, spraying a weak arc of water across the beetle carnage.
Two steps. Three. Her bare feet splash through puddles of copper ichor and wing fragments, and she doesn't slow down, doesn't hesitate, doesn't do any of the reasonable things a person should do when approaching a bleeding orc holding six pounds of carbon steel garden shears.
She walks straight into me.
Her arms wrap around my waist.
Her forehead presses against my sternum, just below the ruined 'W' in 'World's Best.' Her hands lock together at the small of my back.
She squeezes. Hard. The kind of hard that says this isn't a thank you, this isn't politeness, this is a person holding onto something solid because the ground just shifted under their feet.
I stop breathing.
Not on purpose. My lungs simply lock. Every muscle from jaw to ankle goes rigid, shears still raised in my right hand, left arm hovering six inches from her shoulder blade like it belongs to someone else. Someone who doesn't know what arms are for.
She's warm.
That's the thing my brain fixates on. Not the ichor soaking through what's left of my shirt.
Not the seven throbbing puncture wounds.
Not the fact that her cheek is pressed against bare green skin where the beetle tore the fabric away.
She is warm. The warmth starts at the point of contact—her forearms against my lower back, her temple against my body—and spreads inward, bypassing muscle and bone, hitting something deeper.
Something I bricked over a long time ago and mortared shut and posted with a sign that read NO ENTRY BY ORDER OF MANAGEMENT.
Her curls smell like potting soil and hose water and the faintest trace of something floral that survived the carnage. Her shoulders rise and fall with rapid, adrenaline-fueled breaths. Each exhale ghosts across my skin.
My left arm descends. Slowly. The way you lower a flag you're not sure you're authorized to strike. It hovers over her shoulder blade.
Lower.
Contact.
My palm settles between her shoulders. Her spine is a ridge of small, hard knots under the wet denim of her overalls, and her back expands against my hand with each breath, and the warmth doubles, triples, becomes a thing with actual weight pressing against the inside of my ribs.
I don't know how long we stand there. Long enough for the hose to drain to a trickle. Long enough for the copper ichor to stop steaming on the flagstones. Long enough for a tiny fern, sprouted from the enchanted residue on the porch railing, to unfurl its first frond.
She tilts her chin up. Brown eyes. Huge. Still bright with adrenaline, pupils blown wide, and there are copper-bright flecks of beetle ichor caught in her eyelashes like the world's most disgusting glitter.
"You're bleeding everywhere."
"Seven puncture wounds. Superficial."
"Your arm is literally dripping on my head."
I glance down. She's right. A steady patter of dark green blood is falling from my elbow onto her curls. She doesn't move away. Just blinks up at me with those enormous eyes, her chin resting against the remnant of the word 'Best,' and the corner of her mouth twitches.
"Sorry."
"Don't apologize for bleeding. You bled on my behalf." Her arms tighten. "That's the most romantic thing anyone's done for me, and I once dated a guy who wrote me a sonnet."
"Sonnets are easy. Fourteen lines, iambic pentameter, predictable rhyme scheme."
"Did you just critique poetry while dripping blood on me?"
"The rhyme scheme is objectively—"
A high-pitched whine cuts through the yard. Electric. Ascending. The kind of sound a dentist's drill makes if you scaled it up to lawnmower proportions. Both our heads turn toward the street.
A scooter. Hovering three inches off the pavement on a cushion of pale blue magical energy, its chrome fenders polished to a mirror finish, its handlebars wrapped in what appears to be sustainably sourced elven leather.
The rider wears a uniform I recognize immediately: dove-gray polo shirt, pressed khakis, a peaked cap embroidered with the Cedarbrook Estates HOA crest in silver thread.
A courier.
The courier dismounts without the scooter touching ground. Steps over the curb. Walks up the driveway with the mechanical efficiency of someone who delivers bad news eight hours a day and has stopped caring about the human cost. Or the orc cost. Or any cost.
Junia's arms are still around my waist.
The courier doesn't acknowledge this. Doesn't acknowledge the beetle carnage, the smoking ichor stains, the ferns sprouting from the porch railing, the decapitated garden gnome, or the seven bleeding holes in my body.
He pulls a cream-colored envelope from his satchel. Breaks the wax seal—embossed with a holly leaf, Valerius's personal sigil—and withdraws a single sheet of heavy cardstock.
He slaps it against me.
The cardstock sticks to my blood.
"Cedarbrook Estates Homeowner's Association, Emergency Ordinance 7-14-B.
Effective immediately, all unapproved physical pest-control methods are prohibited on association grounds.
Approved methods must be submitted in triplicate to the Aesthetics and Wildlife Harmony Committee no fewer than fourteen business days prior to implementation.
Violations are subject to fines, property liens, and immediate review by the Enforcement Board. "
He turns. Walks back to the scooter. Mounts it. Hovers away.
The whine fades.
I peel the ordinance off my body. My blood has soaked through the cardstock, turning the cream paper a mottled green-black.
The text is still legible. Every word. Every clause.
Every meticulously crafted sentence designed to make what just happened—the defense of her home, the defense of her grandmother's roses, the defense of a Ghost Orchid three years in the making—a punishable offense.
Junia's chin is still on me. Her eyes drop to the document.
"Fourteen business days."
"Fourteen business days."
"So if those beetles come back tonight—"
"We file paperwork and watch them eat."
Her jaw tightens. That soldier's jaw. That Bakersfield-drainage-ditch jaw.
"The hell we do."