Chapter 5
JUNIA
The runes pulse.
Green-gold light rolls under his skin like bioluminescence in a midnight tide, tracing pathways across muscle groups I don't have names for. Anatomy class covered human bodies. Nobody prepared me for whatever is happening across this orc's obliques.
I'm staring.
I know I'm staring.
My mouth is open and my coffee is getting cold and a small, rational part of my brain is screaming at me to say something clever or at minimum close my jaw, but the larger, louder part of my brain has been completely reformatted by the sight of Flynn Danger's torso and is now running a single background process labeled LOOK AT THAT.
The heat starts at my collarbone and races upward. Cheeks. Ears. The bridge of my nose. Full-body betrayal, the kind of blush that turns my entire face into a stoplight, and I can't even hide behind my coffee mug because my hands have apparently unionized and refuse to move.
Flynn's heaves. One breath. Two. The runes flare brighter.
He drops the axe.
The blade bites three inches into the chopping block with a sound like a bone snapping, and the handle vibrates, humming in the afternoon air. He doesn't look at it. Doesn't flinch. Just releases his grip and lets the maul stand upright in the stump like Excalibur buried in stone.
Then he walks toward me.
No. Walk is wrong. Stalks. Covers the distance between the chopping block and the fence line in four strides that eat the ground, each footfall deliberate, his bare shoulders rolling with a predatory economy of motion that makes my hindbrain light up like a switchboard.
Six foot seven. Moss-green skin sheened with sweat.
Cargo shorts riding low on hips that have no business being that defined on a man who mows lawns for spiritual fulfillment.
He stops at the fence.
Twelve inches of cedar plank between us.
This close, the runes aren't just glowing.
They're warm. I can feel the heat radiating off his skin, cutting through the afternoon sun like a second source, and the light shifts and pulses in rhythm with something I'm pretty sure is his heartbeat.
The sigil over his sternum—the one shaped like a coiled serpent eating a crescent moon—burns the brightest.
His jaw works. Tendons flex in his neck.
"You have comfrey on your face."
My hand flies to my cheek. Dried paste flakes off under my fingertips.
"It's a poultice. For the flamingo bites."
"You treated flamingo bites with comfrey."
"Comfrey promotes cell regeneration. It's basic herbalism."
"You could have used a bandage."
"Bandages don't have antioxidants."
A muscle jumps in his jaw. His eyes—amber, deep amber, with vertical pupils that contract and expand like a camera aperture adjusting to light—drop to the scratches on my forearms. The ones from this morning's wrangling. Red welts crisscrossing my skin where animated plastic beaks drew blood.
His nostrils flare.
"Those need cleaning."
"They're fine."
"They're not fine. Animated constructs carry residual enchantment particulate. You need to wash them with a saline solution and apply a neutralizing—"
"Did you just march over here to lecture me about wound care?"
His mouth opens. Closes. The runes over his ribs flicker.
He grips the top fence rail. The wood groans under his hands. Each knuckle is the size of a walnut, scarred across the ridges, and his fingers wrap so far over the cedar plank that his fingertips nearly brush my side of the rail.
"I marched over here because you were staring."
The blush comes back. Thermonuclear. I swear the comfrey paste on my cheeks starts to cook.
"I wasn't staring."
"You've been standing at this fence for four minutes."
"I was checking on my vine. The one I gave you. Where is it, by the way?"
"Quarantine."
"You quarantined my gift."
"It had aphids."
"It did not have—"
"Seventeen aphids. I counted."
"You counted individual aphids."
"Pest management requires accurate data."
I grip my side of the rail. My fingers land two inches from his. The cedar is warm where his hands have been holding it, almost hot, and the wood grain is slightly compressed under the pressure of his grip.
"Flynn."
"What."
"Your tattoos are still glowing."
His eyes snap down to his front. The runes pulse.
Bright. Brighter. The serpent-and-moon sigil over his heart flares like a coal being blown on, and the green-gold light catches in the sweat on his collarbones and turns his skin into something luminous, something almost sacred, and he's close enough now that I can smell cedar shavings and steel oil and underneath it all a dark, woody musk that bypasses every rational circuit in my brain and plugs directly into my lower spine.
He doesn't step back.
His fingers shift on the rail. One inch closer to mine.
"They do that."
"When you're exerting yourself."
"Yes."
"You're not chopping wood anymore."
The silence stretches. A bead of sweat tracks down his temple, catches the light of his runes, and rolls along the hard edge of his jaw. His pupils are wide. His breathing has changed. Something raw and magnetic crackles in the twelve inches of cedar between us.
His pinky finger touches mine.
His pinky is a furnace. One square inch of contact and my entire nervous system recalibrates around it, every nerve ending in my body rerouting to that single point where rough green skin presses against my dirt-caked knuckle.
Then he pulls his hand back like the fence bit him.
"I need soil."
I blink. "What?"
"Organic soil. Mine is synthetic-nutrient-optimized.
Valerius will have his grounds enchanted with fae-grade amendments.
I can't compete with synthetic against magical.
" He crosses his arms over him, which does catastrophic things to his biceps and absolutely nothing to dim the runes still pulsing across his ribs.
"I need living soil. Heavy mineralized compost with active microbial cultures. "
"You're asking me for dirt."
"I'm asking you for consultation on biological soil composition."
"That's dirt, Flynn."
His jaw tightens. The serpent rune flickers. "I have seventeen forty-gallon barrels in my garage that need mixing. The base compound is clay-ite aggregate. It requires manual integration with worm castings and volcanicite powder. The barrels weigh approximately two hundred pounds each when loaded."
"And you need help."
The words physically pain him. His whole face contorts like he's passing a kidney stone made of pride. His arms uncross, cross again, drop to his sides. He looks at the fence. Looks at the sky. Looks at a spot roughly six inches to the left of my ear.
"The ergonomics of solo barrel mixing are suboptimal."
I should say no. Every sane instinct screams it.
This orc cited me for fertilizer dust. He quarantined my gift plant and counted its aphids like a census taker.
He's rigid and infuriating and his stupid glowing tattoos are still doing that heartbeat thing and my pinky is still tingling where he touched it and I am in so much trouble.
"What time?"
His garage is a cathedral of organization.
Pegboard walls with shadow outlines for every tool.
A rolling magnetic strip holding wrenches in descending order by millimeter.
Shelving units labeled with a label maker that has its own labeled shelf.
The concrete floor is so clean I could eat sushi off it, and the air is filled with motor oil and linseed and the faintest trace of that dark woody musk that keeps hijacking my prefrontal cortex.
Seventeen barrels line the back wall. Massive. Steel-rimmed. Packed tight with grey clay-ite aggregate that looks like compressed moonrock.
Flynn hands me a pair of heavy rubber gloves. They're three sizes too big and flop past my wrists like clown accessories.
"Those are rated for chemical splash protection."
"I'm mixing compost, not enriching uranium."
"Volcanicite powder has a pH of eleven point four. It will strip skin."
I shove my hands into the gloves. They make sad flapping sounds. Flynn's mouth does something—a micro-twitch at one corner that's gone before I can catalog it—and he turns to the first barrel.
He lifts the lid with one hand.
I grab the worm castings. A ten-pound bag, dense and black and smelling exactly like you'd expect a bag of worm excrement to smell. I hoist it to the barrel's rim and rip the top.
"Three point seven pounds per barrel. I've marked the line."
"You pre-measured worm poop."
"Precision is the difference between soil and mud."
I dump the castings in. He plunges a massive steel paddle into the barrel and starts turning the aggregate, shoulders flexing, runes dim now but still faintly visible under the garage's fluorescent tubes.
The mixture resists him. Clay-ite is dense, packed, stubborn.
His arms strain. Veins surface along his forearms.
"Let me get to the other side."
I grab a second paddle from the pegboard—it's exactly where its shadow outline says it should be—and jam it into the opposite side of the barrel. We push in counter-rotation, and the resistance is immediate, brutal, like stirring concrete with a canoe oar. My shoulders burn within thirty seconds.
"Faster."
"I'm going as fast as—"
"The microbial cultures activate on aeration. Slow mixing creates anaerobic pockets."
"God, you're bossy."
"I'm accurate."
We fall into rhythm. Push, pull, rotate.
The clay-ite breaks apart in chunks, darkening as the castings fold in, and Flynn adds volcanicite powder from a sealed container with hazard diamonds on the label.
Grey dust plumes into the air. My gloves flap.
His paddle clangs against mine and he grunts, adjusting his angle so our strokes interlock instead of collide.
One barrel.
Two.