Chapter 13 #2
"He destroyed my rosebush. He's trying to take our homes. He sent the beetles, the storm, probably the amended ordinances." Flynn's lip curls back from his lower tusks. "Tonight, we take the fight to his lawn."
I grin so hard my cheeks ache.
"I'll get my pruning shears."
We raid my closet first. Bad idea.
Every piece of clothing I own is either neon, floral, or both. I hold up a tangerine-orange hoodie covered in embroidered daisies and Flynn looks at it like I've offered him a live grenade.
"Absolutely not."
"It's the darkest thing I have."
"It's visible from space."
He disappears through the fence gap and comes back four minutes later with two sets of clothes.
Black cargo pants. Black long-sleeve compression shirts.
His pair could double as a camping tent for a family of four.
Mine pools around my ankles and hangs past my fingertips.
I roll the sleeves six times. The shirt still hits mid-thigh.
"I look like a toddler wearing her dad's pajamas."
Flynn's eyes track down my body. The compression shirt clings in the middle where it cinches against my waist, loose everywhere else. His throat bobs once.
"You look fine."
"Fine like acceptable or fine like—"
"We're losing moonlight."
He hands me a balaclava. Also black. Also enormous.
The eye holes sit somewhere near my forehead.
I readjust it three times while Flynn smears dark potting soil across his cheekbones in two precise lines, and honestly the tactical face paint over those angular green features does something to my cardiovascular system that should require medical attention.
Focus. Stolen rosebush. Evil elf. Right.
We slip out my back door at eleven fifteen.
The neighborhood is silent. Porch lights glow amber along Sycamore Lane, each house a tidy rectangle of beige siding and compliant landscaping.
The only sounds: crickets, a distant sprinkler system clicking through its programmed rotation, and my heartbeat hammering so loud Flynn can probably hear it with those pointed ears.
He moves like smoke.
That's the only word for it. Nearly seven feet of orc gliding between shadow pools with the fluid economy of something that spent its formative years hunting in places where noise meant death.
His bare feet make zero sound on the asphalt.
He told me to leave my boots behind too.
The pavement is cold and gritty under my soles.
First drone appears at the corner of Magnolia and Third.
A silver sphere hums at a frequency that vibrates in my molars. Blue light pulses from its underside in slow, sweeping arcs. Elven surveillance tech. Of course Valerius patrols the neighborhood like a dictator monitoring a border crossing.
Flynn's hand catches my shoulder. Pulls me flat against a brick retaining wall. His body presses over mine, blocking me completely from the drone's scanning arc. Green skin. Potting soil war paint. The compression shirt stretched across a body that could stop traffic.
The blue light sweeps past.
The drone drifts east.
"Move."
We sprint.
Three blocks in sixty seconds. Flynn's stride covers eight feet per step and I'm running two for every one of his, bare feet slapping the pavement, lungs burning.
He grabs my hand at the halfway point and basically tows me through the darkness like a tugboat pulling a dinghy, and I'd be offended if I weren't so grateful my legs are still attached.
Second drone. We drop behind a dumpster outside the community pool.
The metal reeks of chlorine and old sunscreen.
Flynn wedges me between the wall and his ribcage, one arm braced overhead, the other across my back.
The heat radiating off him is absurd. Like crouching next to a furnace someone wrapped in moss and muscle.
The scanning light creeps along the pool fence. Pauses. Circles back.
My breath stops.
Flynn's hand tightens on my back. His pulse thuds against my cheek where it's pressed to him. Steady. Controlled. Warband training overriding whatever adrenaline pumps through those veins.
The light moves on.
"Third row of hedges," he breathes. "Forty meters east."
We run again. Past the tennis courts. Past the community mailbox station. Past Valerius's front yard, which even at midnight gleams with an unnatural luminescence, every blade of grass precisely one and three-quarter inches tall and probably individually blessed by a woodland sprite.
The hedge wall looms. Nine feet of dense boxwood, trimmed into a solid green barricade that separates Valerius's private greenhouse compound from the rest of the neighborhood. Flynn counts sections under his breath, fingers trailing along the leaves. Seven. Eight. Nine.
"Here."
The irrigation pipe punctures the hedge at ground level, a four-inch PVC tube feeding through a gap where the root systems never fully closed. Flynn drops to his knees and wrenches the gap wider with both hands, boxwood branches snapping like gunshots in the quiet.
I squeeze through first. Branches rake my arms. Leaves stuff themselves inside the balaclava. I tumble out the other side onto manicured grass and roll sideways as Flynn forces his shoulders through the opening, wood cracking and popping around his massive frame.
He stands. Brushes a branch from his hair.
The greenhouse rises in front of us.
It's enormous. Three stories of arched glass panels and wrought-iron framing, glowing faintly green from whatever bioluminescent nightmare Valerius cultivates inside. The front entrance is sealed with a ward lock that shimmers like an oil slick across the double doors.
Flynn bypasses it entirely. Side panel. Ground level. His fist punches through the glass in a single controlled strike, the sound swallowed by the thick hedge wall behind us. He reaches in, flips the manual latch, and slides the panel open.
Warm air billows out. Humid. Thick with pollen and something sharper underneath. Something chemical.
We step inside.
"Oh my God."
Rows and rows and rows of plants. Hundreds.
Crammed into racks that stretch floor to ceiling across the entire first level.
But these aren't normal specimens. A sunflower the diameter of a car tire swivels its head toward us, petals twitching.
A rosebush with thorns the length of steak knives strains against wire restraints.
A fern in the corner pulses with visible veins of blue magic, its fronds swelling and contracting like lungs.
Flynn's rosebush sits in the aisle. Roots submerged in a glowing nutrient tank. Already twice its original size. Already sprouting thorns that weren't there yesterday.
But it's the back wall that locks my legs in place.
Dozens of labels. Handwritten. Elegant elven script.
Each one tagged with a name and address from our neighborhood.
Mrs. Ashworth's award-winning hydrangeas.
The Patel family's Japanese maple. Old Karl's heirloom tomato vines.
Every prized plant that mysteriously "died" over the past two years, alive and grotesquely mutated under fluorescent grow lights.
"He's not just cheating," I whisper.
Flynn's hands curl into fists at his sides. The sunflower bandana on his knuckles glows yellow against the greenhouse dark.
"He's been stealing from every house on the block."