Chapter 14
FLYNN
Every label. Every tag. Every grotesque, swollen specimen pulsing under those lights.
I grasp the phone from my cargo shorts and start shooting.
Flash off. Screen brightness killed to a sliver.
The camera struggles in the low green glow, but the images are clear enough.
Mrs. Ashworth's hydrangeas, roots thick as garden hoses and veined with purple magic.
The Patel maple, bark split and weeping golden sap into a collection tray.
Old Karl's tomato vines coiled around their rack like pythons, fruit bulging with something that isn't lycopene.
Thirty-seven plants. Thirty-seven theft victims. Two years of Valerius standing on that stage at the annual competition with his smug elven cheekbones, accepting trophies he built on a foundation of larceny.
My thumb jabs the capture button again and again. Wide shots of the full greenhouse interior. Close-ups of the name tags. The nutrient tanks with their branded Elven Botanics logos, the kind that cost four hundred dollars per gallon and aren't available to non-elf buyers.
"Flynn."
Junia crouches at the center aisle, her pruning shears out.
Between her and my rosebush, a wall of Venus flytraps blocks the path.
Not normal flytraps. These things stand waist-high on thick, fleshy stalks, their jaws wide enough to clamp around a forearm.
Mucus drips from serrated pink edges. The nearest one lunges at her knee. She sidesteps it clean.
"Little busy here," she hisses.
I pocket the phone and move toward her, but she waves me off with the shears.
"Keep documenting. I need you to have so much evidence that Valerius chokes on it."
The nearest flytrap strikes again. Junia brings the shears down in a diagonal slash that severs the stalk six inches below the jaw. The head drops to the concrete floor, still snapping. Mucus spatters her dark clothing in thick ropes.
She doesn't flinch.
Second stalk. This one comes from the left, whipping sideways with surprising speed. She ducks, plants her back foot, and drives the shears upward into the joint where jaw meets stem. The blade punches through with a wet crunch. Fluid sprays. The stalk goes limp.
I should help her.
I take another photo instead, because she told me to and because watching her carve through mutant vegetation with a pair of eight-dollar pruning shears from the hardware store is doing something to my cardiovascular system that has nothing to do with adrenaline.
Third flytrap. Fourth. She works through them like she's deadheading petunias, efficient and brutal, each cut placed where the tissue is softest. Plant anatomy knowledge weaponized. The severed heads pile up around her boots, still twitching, jaws clicking against the concrete.
A thick stalk shoots from beneath the rack, wrapping around her ankle. She stumbles. Goes down on one knee.
Two steps. I cross the distance and stomp the stalk flat with my boot. The pressure splits it open lengthwise. She yanks her foot free, rolls forward, and buries the shears into the last flytrap standing between her and the rosebush.
Silence. Just the drip of plant fluids and the hum of grow lights.
"Your rosebush." She straightens up, blowing a curl from her face. Flytrap mucus streaks her cheek. Her eyes burn with something feral and satisfied. "Go get it."
My rosebush. My Crimson Glory hybrid tea rose.
Twelve years of selective pruning. A root system I mapped by hand in a leather journal.
Valerius jammed it into a nutrient tank full of whatever magical slurry he's pumping through this place, and already the canes are wrong.
Too thick. Too dark. Thorns curved like fishhooks where they should be straight and elegant.
I reach into the tank. Warm liquid closes around my forearms. My fingers find the root ball and cradle it, gentle as I'd hold anything I've ever loved. The roots have tripled in mass. Tangled. Aggressive. But alive.
I lift it free. Nutrient solution streams off the roots in phosphorescent ribbons, pooling on the concrete between my boots.
"Can you fix it?" Junia stands at my shoulder, close enough that her breath warms my bicep. She knows what this plant means.
The root ball sits heavy in my palms. Corrupted growth. Forced mutation. Magic residue threaded through every cell.
"I can stabilize it. Flush the magical compounds over a few weeks. Prune back the forced growth." I turn the root ball, examining the crown where the main canes branch. Still structurally sound. Still the architecture I built over a decade of patient work. "It'll survive."
"Good."
She squeezes my arm once, hard, then moves to the back wall. Starts photographing the remaining stolen plants from different angles. Insurance shots. Backup evidence.
I wrap the rosebush in my dark overshirt, cradling it against me. The nutrient solution soaks through the fabric and against my skin. Warm. Tingling slightly where the magic residue contacts bare flesh.
Junia finishes her documentation loop and jogs back to me. Her phone screen shows forty-six additional photos.
"We have enough to bury him."
A mechanical click echoes through the greenhouse. Then another. Then a cascade of them, sharp and metallic, rippling across the far wall.
Every grow light in the building snaps to full brightness simultaneously.
The front doors grind open.
Valerius doesn't walk through those doors.
Something worse.
The nutrient tanks along the back wall rupture simultaneously, glass cracking in jagged lines, and the magical slurry hits the floor in a phosphorescent flood.
It reaches the root systems of every stolen plant on the racks.
The reaction is immediate. Violent. Stalks thicken.
Leaves unfurl with audible pops. Branches extend like grasping fingers.
But the worst of it channels through the drainage grate directly beneath my feet, pooling around the base of the largest specimen in the greenhouse.
A thornvine. Not a garden variety climber.
A Blackspire thornvine, the kind that grows in contested orcish territory where the soil drinks blood and the plants learn to fight back.
I know this species.
I fought through thickets of them during my warband years. Lost two squad members to a mature specimen outside Khar'vol. The thorns aren't just sharp. They're barbed, serrated, designed to hook flesh and pull prey deeper into the canopy.
This one is four feet tall and growing fast, its main trunk already thick as my thigh, canes whipping outward in spiraling arcs. The slurry supercharges it. Six feet. Eight. The canes hit the ceiling struts and change direction, fanning horizontally across the greenhouse like a net closing over us.
"Door. Now." I grab Junia's shoulder.
A cane slams down between us and the exit. Thorns as big as steak knives punch into the concrete. A second cane sweeps low, and I jump it, pulling Junia with me. A third blocks the side window.
Trapped.
The rosebush is still cradled against me in my bundled overshirt.
I back against the far wall, shielding it.
The thornvine doesn't care about us specifically.
It's expanding outward in every direction, drunk on magic, claiming territory the way its wild cousins claim forest clearings.
But anything caught in the expansion gets shredded.
A cane whips toward Junia. She drops flat. It passes over her head and buries six inches of thorn into the aluminum rack behind her. Seeds and soil explode outward.
"Give me the rosebush," she says.
"What?"
She's already on her feet, shears up, circling the main trunk. Studying it. Reading the growth pattern the way she reads every plant that crosses her path, with that terrifying botanical intuition that turns taxonomy into combat intelligence.
"The main root cluster is feeding from the grate. If I can get underneath and sever the primary taproot, the whole thing collapses." She holds out her hands. "But you can't fit under there. I can. And I can't fight my way in while holding your rose."
She's right. The gap between the trunk base and the floor is maybe eighteen inches. My shoulders are thirty-two inches across. The math is brutal and simple.
I hand her the rosebush.
She doesn't take it.
She tucks it inside her jacket, zips the jacket to her throat, and wraps both arms around her own torso. The root ball presses against her stomach, cradled in fabric and flesh. Protected by every inch of her body.
"Junia."
"Shut up and clear me a path."
I grab a fallen rack support. Steel tube.
Six feet long. Heavy enough to matter. I swing it two-handed into the nearest cane and feel the impact shudder up through my wrists, my elbows, my shoulders.
The cane cracks but doesn't break. Sap sprays.
I swing again. The cane snaps and recoils, whipping back toward the trunk.
Junia moves.
She's low, shears in her right hand, left arm locked across the rosebush at her belly.
A cane drops from overhead. She doesn't dodge.
She takes it across the back of her shoulder, and I hear the fabric tear, hear the thorns rake across skin, and she doesn't even slow down.
Blood wells through the ripped jacket. She keeps moving.
Three feet from the trunk. A secondary cane sweeps her legs. She goes down hard on her hip, and the concrete rings with the impact. The rosebush stays pinned against her. Protected. She curls around it as thorns drag across her forearms, leaving parallel red lines that bead immediately.
She doesn't drop the plant.
She rolls under the sweeping cane, comes up on her knees, and jams the pruning shears into the trunk where it meets the grate. The blades sink in. She twists. The trunk shudders. Sap gushes over her hands, hot and glowing, and she pulls the shears free and stabs again, deeper. Twists harder.