Chapter 6
FLYNN
The hose hits the concrete. Water fans across the floor in a sheet I'll have to squeegee later, and that thought fires and dies in the same synapse because Junia is already running, bare feet slapping the driveway, and the sound coming out of her mouth isn't a word.
It's the sound a person makes when something they built with their hands is being eaten alive.
I shove the steel edging shears off peg fourteen.
Six pounds of carbon steel, thirty-two-inch handles, blades I sharpen every Sunday to a tolerance of point-three millimeters. They're hedge tools. Gardening implements. But the grip sits in my palm the way a waraxe used to, and muscle memory is a traitor that never sleeps.
The fence between our yards is six feet of cedar planking. Pressure-treated. Sunk eighteen inches into poured concrete footings because I don't do anything halfway. I planted that fence. I know its weight, its flex, its exact height down to the quarter inch.
I clear it in one vault.
My left hand hits the top rail. The shears swing wide in my right. My cargo shorts catch a nail head and tear at the pocket—a problem for future Flynn—and then I'm in her yard, boots crushing something purple and fragrant, and the beetles are everywhere.
They're wrong. Every instinct bred into me by twelve generations of Orcish hunters screams it.
Natural beetles scatter. Natural beetles flee from vibration and shadow and anything larger than themselves.
These hold formation. They work in coordinated waves, six to eight per orchid, mandibles scissoring through stems with mechanical precision while a perimeter ring faces outward, carapaces raised like shields.
Military patterns. Someone trained these things.
"My Cattleya! Flynn, they're killing my Cattleya—"
Junia grabs a terracotta pot and swings it into the nearest cluster. The pot shatters. Three beetles tumble sideways, recover midair with a buzz like a circular saw, and latch onto a hanging basket of white Dendrobiums.
I'm already moving.
The shears open. Close. A huge beetle splits clean down the dorsal line, and the two halves hit the grass trailing something that carries the idea of hot copper and burnt sage.
Magic. The ichor isn't blood. It's liquid enchantment, and it sizzles where it contacts organic matter, leaving black spots on Junia's lawn like cigarette burns.
Second beetle. Third. I pivot into the swarm around the Cattleya, and the perimeter ring breaks formation to meet me. Four of them launch at my face. Mandibles wide. Iridescent wings throwing prismatic light that's almost beautiful if you ignore the razor anatomy.
I swat two out of the air with the flat of the shears. One hits the fence. The other hits a gnome statue and decapitates it.
The remaining two land on my forearm.
They bite.
Their mandibles punch through my skin like carpet tacks, and green blood—my blood, dark and thick as pine sap—wells up around their heads as they saw deeper. Pain lances from wrist to shoulder. I grunt. Don't scream. Screaming is a warband luxury I trained out of myself before my tusks came in.
I crush them. One in each fist. The carapaces crack like walnuts, and the copper-sage smell intensifies until my eyes water.
"The Vanda! Flynn, the blue Vanda on the post—"
I spin. A cluster of nine beetles has engulfed something on a wooden post near the porch—a flower I don't know the name of, blue as deep water, petals already shredded to confetti. Junia sprints for it. A beetle detaches from the swarm and dive-bombs her face, mandibles aimed at her eye.
No.
The shears leave my hand.
Thirty-two inches of carbon steel spinning end over end, and the throw is ugly, graceless, nothing like the precision a warband captain should produce, but the blade catches the beetle three inches from Junia's cheekbone and pins it to the porch railing with a wet crunch.
She freezes. Stares at the quivering shears embedded in her railing, the bisected beetle twitching around the blade.
"Duck."
She ducks.
I barrel past her, rip the shears free, and lay into the remaining cluster on the Vanda with both hands.
Overhand chops. Fast, brutal, ugly. Beetle parts spray across the porch in a rain of chitin and copper-scented ichor.
The wood planks smoke where the liquid lands.
Her welcome mat—a pink thing that reads BLOOM WHERE YOU'RE PLANTED—catches a splatter and immediately sprouts a six-inch mushroom.
The last beetle tries to flee.
It lifts off the ruined Vanda, wings buzzing, and banks hard toward the street. Toward Valerius's end of the neighborhood. I track its trajectory. File that information in a very specific mental drawer labeled EVIDENCE.
Then it's quiet.
Junia stands in the wreckage of her garden. Shredded petals. Smoking ichor stains. Terracotta shrapnel. The Cattleya is destroyed—nothing left but a gnawed stump weeping clear sap. The Dendrobiums are half-eaten. The blue Vanda is confetti.
Her hands hang at her sides. Soil under her nails. A smear of copper-bright ichor across her cheek.
She isn't crying. Her jaw is set in a way that reminds me of soldiers who've just lost a position but haven't lost the war.
"That last one flew toward Cedarbrook Estates."
Her eyes snap to mine.
"Valerius lives on Cedarbrook Estates."
I pull the shears from the railing and a finger-sized splinter comes with them. Junia's porch looks like a war zone. Smells like one too—copper and sage and the green-sap tang of shredded orchids.
"There are more."
Junia's pointing past me, toward the back of her property where a greenhouse leans against the rear fence like a drunk against a lamppost. The glass panels catch the afternoon sun. They also catch the reflection of a second wave.
A black cloud. Dense. Humming. Rising above the tree line from the direction of the drainage easement that runs behind both our properties. The sound reaches me a half-second later—a drill-press whine that sets my tusks vibrating in their sockets.
Fifty. Maybe seventy. Three times the first wave.
"Get inside."
"Absolutely not."
"Junia—"
"That greenhouse has four hundred dollars worth of propagation stock, six heritage rose cultivars I grew from cuttings my grandmother gave me, and a Ghost Orchid that took me three years to coax into bloom." She's already moving, bare feet slapping down the porch steps. "I'm not going inside."
The swarm crests the fence line. They pour over the top in a chitinous waterfall, and the formation is tighter this time.
Tighter and faster. The perimeter guards lead the charge, carapaces angled forward like riot shields, and behind them the cutters hold position in clusters of eight, mandibles already working, already hungry.
I shift the shears to a two-handed grip. Widen my stance. Weight on the balls of my feet, knees soft, shoulders square to the incoming line. The stance comes back like breathing. Like it never left.
The first beetle hits my kill zone and the shears take its head clean off.
Then there's no time for counting.
They come in waves. I sweep the blades in horizontal arcs, right to left, left to right, each pass clearing a three-foot corridor of airspace.
Carapaces crack against carbon steel. Ichor sprays in copper-bright ribbons.
A beetle lands on my shoulder and saws through my t-shirt—through the 'D' in 'DAD'—before I crush it against my collarbone with the heel of my hand.
Two more latch onto my calf. I stamp. Twist. Feel them pop under my boot sole.
But there are too many. For every beetle I split, three more bank around my flanks and streak toward the greenhouse. Glass panels won't stop those mandibles. Glass is nothing to them.
"JUNIA! THE GREENHOUSE—"
A cannon blast of water punches through the swarm six feet to my left.
Junia stands at the side of the house, legs braced wide, both hands wrapped around the nozzle of her industrial garden hose.
The pressure washer attachment—the one she uses to strip old paint off terracotta—is cranked to full.
The stream hits the beetles at what has to be two thousand PSI, and the effect is spectacular.
They don't get knocked aside. They disintegrate.
The water shreds wings, cracks carapaces, and sends the copper ichor scattering in a fine mist that rainbows in the sunlight.
Five beetles. Eight. Twelve. She sweeps the stream like a turret gunner, tracking the swarm's movements with a precision that borders on professional.
"LEFT SIDE!" I roar.
She pivots. The water stream scythes across a flanking cluster headed for the greenhouse, atomizing them into a spray of chitin fragments and enchanted ichor. The mist settles on the glass panels and immediately sprouts tiny ferns from the putty between the panes.
I push forward. The shears sing. A beetle dives for my face and I catch it on the upswing, launching both halves in opposite directions.
Two more come from my blind side. Mandibles punch into the meat of my left forearm, and this time I do hiss—sharp, through my teeth—because they've hit the nerve cluster near the elbow and my fingers go numb for one horrible second.
I slam my arm against the fence post. The beetles crumple. Feeling floods back in a wash of hot pins.
"BEHIND YOU, FLYNN!"
I drop to one knee. A cluster of six screams through the space my head occupied and meets Junia's water stream head-on. The impact sounds like gravel hitting a windshield. Wet chitin fragments rain down on my back.
We're moving in sync now. She drives them low, I cut them down. She pushes them into corridors, I close the corridors with steel. No words needed. Just instinct and geometry and the kind of wordless coordination that takes warbands years to develop.
She picks it up in minutes.