Chapter 7
JUNIA
The ordinance is still warm from Flynn's blood when I snatch it out of his hands.
I read it twice. Three times. The language is airtight, every loophole pre-sealed with subordinate clauses that nest inside each other like those cursed Russian dolls my aunt collects.
Valerius didn't draft this overnight. This was waiting.
Pre-loaded. A bullet in the chamber for the exact moment someone dared to fight back on their own property.
"He sent them."
Flynn's jaw works. Green muscle cords along his neck.
"The beetles. Valerius sent the beetles, then sent the ordinance banning us from killing them." I crumple the cardstock into a ball. "He's boxing us in. He wants us to lose the garden competition by default because we can't even defend what we grow."
Flynn takes the crumpled ball from my fist, smooths it against his thigh with the same care he'd give a topographic survey map, and folds it into a precise square. Tucks it into his cargo shorts. Left pocket, third from the top.
"Evidence."
"Evidence of what? That he's a sociopath with a landscaping fetish?"
"That he's violating the Fair Pest Sovereignty clause in the county agricultural code. Section 12, paragraph—"
"Flynn."
He stops.
"I don't need paragraph numbers right now. I need a plan."
The sun is dropping behind the roofline of his house, throwing his yard into that golden-hour glow that makes everything look like a home improvement commercial.
His lawn. God, his lawn. It stretches in an unbroken sheet of emerald from the foundation to the sidewalk, each blade precisely two and three-quarter inches tall—he told me this while we mixed soil, unprompted, with the reverence most people reserve for prayer.
The edging along his flower beds cuts geometric lines so clean they look printed.
His hedges form a wall of dense boxwood, trimmed to military specs, no branches out of formation.
It is perfect.
It is also boring as hell.
I turn to look at my own yard. The beetle carnage has left craters in the raised beds.
Copper ichor pools between the flagstones.
Three of my hanging baskets are shredded, their contents spilling down the porch columns in tangles of green and violet.
But underneath the damage, the bones are wild and alive.
Moonflower vines have already begun reweaving themselves through the trellis.
The jasmine along the south wall is putting out new shoots, pale green fingers reaching for the last of the light.
And in the corner, under the makeshift shade cloth, the Ghost Orchid sits in its humidity tent, untouched.
The beetles didn't reach it. Flynn reached them first.
His yard has structure. Mine has soul.
Separately, Valerius will pick us apart.
His magical enhancements, his pre-loaded ordinances, his stone gargoyles and bottomless HOA budget—none of it matters if he's only fighting one front at a time.
He'll suffocate Flynn's precision with some enchanted topiary that rearranges itself into the Mona Lisa.
He'll bury my wildflowers under a citation avalanche until there's nothing left to judge.
But together.
"Your yard and mine share a property line."
Flynn's eyes narrow. "Thirty-seven linear feet of six-foot cedar privacy fence."
"What if it wasn't?"
His left tusk catches his bottom lip. A tell. I've cataloged exactly one of his tells so far, and it's this: the tusk thing happens when he's considering something that violates a rule he loves.
"The competition is scored by individual lot."
"The competition is scored by curb appeal, structural integrity, botanical diversity, and overall aesthetic impact. I read the flyer. None of those categories specify lot boundaries."
He unfolds his arms. Folds them again. The puncture wounds on his forearm have already started clotting, dark green scabs forming in neat rows like rivets on a hull.
"You want to tear down my fence."
"I want to tear down your fence."
"That fence is pressure-treated western red cedar. Hand-selected. Each board planed to—"
"Flynn. Your fence is gorgeous. Your fence is the Sistine Chapel of fences. But Valerius isn't going to lose to a fence."
He stares at me. I stare back. Beetle guts are drying on my face. My overalls are soaked through with hose water and ichor and probably some of his blood, which means I look like I crawled out of a compost heap that fought back. But I hold his gaze because this matters.
"Your structure. My chaos. His gardens are all magic—illusion and enhancement spells layered so thick you can smell the artifice from the street.
We give the judges something real. Geometric precision that breaks into wildflower meadow.
Clean lines dissolving into living color. Order and disorder in conversation."
"Conversation."
"That's what good design is. A conversation between control and surprise."
The golden light catches his runic tattoos. They pulse once, faint, like a heartbeat under the skin. His amber eyes drop to the fence line between our yards, and he does the math. Linear feet. Board count. Labor hours. The cost of dismantling something he built with his own hands.
"I have conditions."
"Of course you do."
"The pergola stays. The boxwood border stays. And we use my grid system for spatial planning."
"Deal. But I pick every single plant."
His tusk catches his lip again. He extends one massive hand.
I grab it. His palm swallows mine whole, calloused and warm and solid as packed earth.
"We start at dawn," he says. "Bring your worst."
The ravine behind Cedarbrook Estates doesn't appear on any official map.
The subdivision's glossy brochures show a gentle slope of native grasses tapering into a decorative creek, which is a lie so aggressive it should qualify as a felony.
What actually exists back here is a sixty-foot gash in the earth where raw magical runoff from the old ley line junction has been pooling since before the neighborhood was built.
The trees grow sideways. The moss glows.
And the soil at the bottom, according to Flynn's dog-eared copy of Practical Geomancy for the Home Gardener, contains the only naturally occurring vein of shimmerloam within forty miles.
"We need shimmerloam," he'd said at 4:47 AM, standing outside in his shorts and a headlamp, holding a laminated trail plan he'd drawn sometime between midnight and now.
"We need coffee," I'd said.
"Shimmerloam is a pH-neutral magical binding substrate that will fuse your acidic orchid soil with my alkaline turf base without chemical amendment. Coffee is a diuretic that will compromise our hydration on a Class Three terrain descent."
So here I am, pre-dawn, no coffee, following an orc down a goat trail that exists only in his imagination.
The headlamp on Flynn's forehead bobs with each precise step.
He moves through the undergrowth like something that was raised in it.
Each footfall lands on root or rock, never loose soil, never the thick carpet of luminescent fungi that lines the trail margins.
His machete hangs from a carabiner on his belt loop but stays sheathed.
The path he's chosen threads between the magical growth zones with surgical accuracy.
I, on the other hand, am being actively consumed by the landscape.
A vine wraps my ankle. I yank free. Another one snakes around my wrist and tugs me toward a bush covered in berries that pulse with a soft, inviting lavender light.
"Don't touch the gloamberries."
"Wasn't going to."
"Your hand is six inches from a gloamberry."
I jerk my hand back. The bush rustles, offended.
The trail steepens. Dew-slick rock replaces packed earth, and the trees close overhead until the pre-dawn sky vanishes behind a canopy of branches that twist and interlock like knotted fingers.
Bioluminescent lichen paints everything in shades of cold blue and chemical green.
The air tastes like copper pennies and fresh rain.
Flynn stops at a ledge. Below, the ravine floor opens into a shallow basin where a creek runs silver-black over stones that hum. The sound isn't water. The stones themselves vibrate at a frequency that buzzes in my molars.
"The shimmerloam deposits are along the north bank." He points. "Between the quartz outcrop and the fallen oak."
"That's a thirty-foot drop."
"Twenty-seven." He pulls a coil of heavy-gauge climbing rope from his pack and loops it around a boulder with a knot so complex it looks like origami. "I'll anchor this before going down."
He ties several complicated knots in the rope as he wraps it around the boulder.
Thankfully, the rope is nearly the size of his forearm, so I’m confident it will hold him.
The climbing harness is military surplus, orc-sized, and he steps into it with ease.
He cinches the straps with quick efficiency.
"Secure?" I ask.
"Secure."
He steps backward off the ledge. The rope goes taut.
His boots dig into the granite, and despite my previous confidence in his knot-tying skills, I glance at the rope to make sure it’s not fraying or coming undone.
He walks easily down the rock face, boots skidding only slightly on lichen, until the slope levels out and his feet hit the soft creek bank.
The shimmerloam is unmistakable. A two-inch layer of iridescent substrate that shimmers between gold and silver depending on the angle, sandwiched between the dark clay and the topsoil like geological frosting. He drops to his knees and pulls the trowel from his belt.
"Cut around the edges first,” I call down. “Twelve-inch squares. Don't breach the lower clay or you'll—"
A crack. Not from the loam.