Chapter 8
FLYNN
The tree falls and my body moves before my brain catches up.
I shove Junia sideways, hard, and pivot into the path of the hemlock. A hundred years of growth, three feet of trunk diameter, coming down through the canopy like a battering ram. Branches snap and cartwheel ahead of it. A widow-maker buries itself in the mud six inches from my boot.
I plant my feet. Widen my stance. Dig my heels into the saturated hillside until I hit something solid underneath the muck.
The chopping block stance. Same foundation I set when splitting seasoned oak, except the oak doesn't weigh four thousand pounds and isn't accelerating toward my skull at terminal velocity.
My hands go up.
The trunk hits my palms and the world compresses into a single point of contact.
Bark shreds against my skin. The impact drives me down three inches into the mud, my knees buckling, my spine compressing, every tendon in my shoulders screaming a language I haven't spoken since the warbands.
My boots slide. I dig harder. The heels catch on a buried root and hold.
The sound that comes out of my throat isn't a word.
It's old. Older than language. A roar that starts somewhere below my diaphragm and tears upward through me, vibrating the runic tattoos along my arms until they pulse with a faint green phosphorescence.
The hemlock pushes. I push back. Sapwood splinters against my palms, driving fragments into the meat of my hands, and the pain is clean and bright and nothing compared to the thought of what this trunk will do to her if it reaches the ground where she's scrambling.
My left boot loses purchase. Slides two inches downhill.
I adjust. Shift my grip. Find the balance point of the trunk where the weight distribution changes from impossible to merely catastrophic, and I redirect.
Not lift. I'm strong, but I'm not stupid.
You can't catch a falling tree. You can change where it goes.
I torque my hips, driving the trunk sideways like sweeping a heavy bar off a squat rack.
The hemlock groans, pivots on its shattered base, and swings wide.
Branches rake across my back, tearing the shirt clean off my left shoulder, and the crown of the tree crashes into the hillside ten feet to our right with enough force to shake loose a secondary mudslide.
The root ball, still half-attached to the stump, snaps free. The whole mass settles, shudders, and goes still.
I stay standing. Hands out. Palms bleeding. Rain hammering my bare skin where the shirt hangs in tatters.
"Flynn!"
Junia's behind me and below. Safe.
My knees unlock. I don't sit so much as my body decides it's finished holding me upright, and I drop onto the fallen trunk like it's a park bench.
My hands are shaking. Not from fear. From the adrenaline dump, the chemical aftermath of channeling more force through my skeleton than orc bones are rated for.
Blood mixes with rainwater and runs off my fingers in pink rivulets.
She's climbing back up the trail. Covered in mud from hairline to boots, one sleeve of her floral overalls torn at the seam, wild curls plastered flat against her skull. She looks like something the ravine chewed up and spit out.
She looks incredible.
"Your hands." She grabs my wrists before I can pull away. Turns my palms up. The splinters are deep, some of them two inches long, buried in the callused pads below my fingers. She makes a sound in her throat that's half gasp, half growl.
"Surface damage."
"There's a piece of tree inside your hand, Flynn. That's not surface damage. That's a medical event."
"I've had worse."
"From what? Catching other trees?"
"Siege warfare, actually."
She stops. Stares up at me through the rain. Water runs down the bridge of her nose and drips off the tip, and her eyes are wide and dark and searching my face for the joke. There isn't one.
"Sit still," she says.
She pulls a small canvas pouch from her overalls.
Gardening kit. The tweezers she produces are meant for removing aphids from delicate root systems, but they work fine on wood splinters.
She bends over my right hand, her grip firm, her fingers warm despite the cold rain.
The first splinter comes out clean. She flicks it away and moves to the next.
I see her head. The part in her hair, off-center, revealing a thin line of pale scalp beneath the dark curls. Potting soil still clings there. She carried dirt from her own garden into this ravine, into this storm, and it's still with her.
The lightning flashes again, farther away. The spiral in the clouds loosens. The rain shifts from vertical assault to a steady, soaking downpour.
Twelve splinters. She removes every one. Wipes my palms with a clean rag from the kit. Wraps them in strips torn from her ruined sleeve.
"You caught a tree."
"Redirected."
"You caught a whole tree. With your hands."
"Technically my hands, my legs, and approximately forty percent of my core stabilization muscles, which I'll be feeling for the next week."
Her fingers tighten around mine. She doesn't let go.
The storm doubles down. What was a downpour becomes a wall of water, the kind of rain that doesn't fall so much as occupy the air.
Visibility drops to six feet. The trail we hiked in on is now a creek, brown water rushing over the bootprints we left an hour ago, carrying sticks and leaves and a single animated flamingo head that must have survived the earlier purge.
"We need to move." I pull my hands free from hers. The cloth bandages are already soaked through, pink at the edges. "The ravine floods fast. This whole shelf we're standing on will be underwater in ten minutes."
"My orchids. The magical loam. We didn't get enough."
"We got plenty." I yank up the canvas sack of loam I'd packed before the tree tried to kill us. Sling it over my shoulder. Heavy. Good weight. The kind of burden that keeps you grounded on slick terrain. "Go. I'm right behind you."
She doesn't argue. She moves.
Credit where it's due: Junia Erikkson scrambles up a muddy hillside like something feral.
She grabs roots, jams her boots into gaps between rocks, hauls herself over a fallen log I have to step around because my center of gravity is too high to risk the same vault.
Her torn overalls snag on a branch. She rips free without slowing down.
Leaves a scrap of fabric behind like a flag marking conquered territory.
The subdivision fence appears through the rain. Six feet of cedar planking, stained weatherproof gray, the HOA's approved perimeter barrier. The gate is two hundred yards south. We don't have two hundred yards of dry time left.
I drop the loam sack, grab the fence, and haul myself over. Land hard on the other side. My right knee absorbs the impact and files a formal complaint.
"Pass it over!"
The loam sack comes sailing over the fence. I catch it against my body. Then Junia's hands appear at the planking, fingers gripping the edge, and her face follows, mud-streaked and grinning like this is the best evening she's had in months.
She drops. I catch her. Same motion as the mudslide, same instinct, except this time she's falling toward me on purpose and her arms go around my neck and her weight settles against me and we still for two full seconds longer than necessary.
I set her down.
"My garage. Thirty yards."
We sprint across my back lawn. My perfect, emerald-green, freshly aerated back lawn, which is currently absorbing more water per square foot than its drainage grade is designed to handle, and I can't think about that right now because thinking about standing water will slow me down.
The side door to the garage. I keep it unlocked because this is a good neighborhood and my tools deserve easy access. I wrench the handle open, and shove Junia through ahead of me. Duck inside. Pull the door shut against the wind.
Darkness. Complete.
The overhead LEDs don't activate. The motion sensor doesn't trigger. The backup strip lighting along the baseboards, which I installed myself with marine-grade waterproof connectors, stays dead.
"Power's out."
"I can see that. Well. Can't see that. Can't see anything."
The grid blew. The whole subdivision runs on a shared magical power relay that Valerius insisted on installing three years ago because it was "aesthetically superior to those brutish transformer boxes.
" One good lightning strike on the relay tower and every house in the neighborhood goes dark.
I told the board this would happen. I submitted a twelve-page analysis with graphs. They voted to table the discussion.
I reach for the wall panel to trigger the manual release on the heavy electronic garage door. My fingers find the housing. Flip the override switch.
Nothing.
I flip it again. Push the manual engage button. Pull the emergency cord.
The motor housing clicks. Whines. The door shifts half an inch, then locks with a heavy magnetic clunk. The electromagnetic failsafe. When the power relay dies mid-cycle, the door defaults to locked position. Anti-theft protocol. Another feature Valerius mandated.
"The door's jammed."
"Jammed how?"
"Electromagnetic lock. Engages when the power drops.
Can't override it manually." I yank the emergency cord harder.
The mechanism doesn't budge. "I'd need to physically disconnect the mag-lock housing from the track assembly, which requires a number four hex driver and a headlamp, both of which are on my workbench six feet to the left, except I can't see my workbench because we have no power. "
"So we're trapped."
"Temporarily secured."
"In your garage."
"In my very well-organized garage, yes."
Silence. Rain hammering the roof. The garage is insulated and sealed, so the sound is muffled, a constant low roar like being inside a drum. The air is full of motor oil, cedar shavings, and the faint chemical bite of the wood stain I used on the fence last Tuesday.