Chapter 15 #2
We burst out the other end onto Maple Court.
Our street. The familiar shapes of our houses sit side by side in the dark, the shared garden archway a black silhouette against the stars.
Flynn's garage light is on. My porch light is on.
Everything looks exactly like we left it, peaceful and suburban and completely insane.
Flynn stops at the property divider. Green blood runs down his arm in thin rivulets, dripping off his fingertips onto the grass he mowed fourteen hours ago. He stares at the drops on his perfect lawn.
"Don't you dare care about the grass right now."
His head comes up. His eyes find mine in the dark. Gold irises, bright with pain and something wilder.
"I care about the grass."
"Flynn."
"And I care about you holding my rosebush like it matters."
My throat closes. The root ball presses warm and alive against my ribs. His blood is on the burlap. His blood is on my hands.
The siren wails three streets over.
We crash through my front door in a tangle of limbs and burlap and desperation. The rosebush lands on the kitchen table, scattering a week's worth of seed catalogs and dirty coffee mugs. Something ceramic hits the floor and breaks. No one looks.
Flynn kicks the door shut behind him. The deadbolt turns under his massive green hand, and the sound of it clicking home is the loudest thing in the sudden silence.
The adrenaline is a living creature under my skin, clawing, screaming, demanding an outlet that running can no longer provide.
Glass glitters in the cuts across his shoulder.
Dark green blood has soaked through what remains of the tee shirt, which is essentially a collar and two strips of cotton clinging to his torso by sheer stubbornness.
His gold eyes burn in the dim light of my hallway, pupils blown wide, and every runic tattoo on his body pulses with a faint emerald glow that matches his racing heartbeat.
"You're still bleeding."
"Junia."
"Let me get the first aid..."
His hand catches my wrist. Not hard. Never hard. But absolute. The way he grips things that matter.
"I don't want the first aid kit."
My back finds the hallway wall. His forearm braces above my head, and the other hand still holds my wrist, pressing it gently against the plaster beside my hip.
He fills the entire corridor. Green skin and glowing tattoos and the copper-salt smell of his blood mixing with fresh earth and the ghost-elm sap still clinging to my fingers.
"Your shoulder..."
"Cosmetic."
"You keep saying that word. I don't think it means what you..."
His mouth finds mine.
Not gentle. Not careful. Not the tentative, almost-reverent kiss against the trellis. This is the kiss of someone who just ran through glass for you. Who is done, completely and permanently done, pretending that order matters more than this.
My hand loops through the ruins of his shirt and pulls.
The cotton surrenders without a fight, tearing away from his body in a sound that zips through the dark hallway.
His skin is hot under my palms. Furnace hot.
The tattoos pulse faster under my fingers, responding to touch, and a low rumble builds in him that I feel in my teeth.
"Bedroom," I manage against his mouth.
He picks me up. Both hands under my thighs, lifting me off the ground like I weigh exactly nothing, and I wrap my legs around his waist because gravity has stopped being relevant.
My back leaves the wall. The hallway tilts.
He carries me through the doorway I point at, ducking his head to clear the frame, and we spill into my bedroom.
My bedroom is a disaster. Clothes on every surface.
Three half-finished terrariums on the dresser.
A stack of botanical journals sliding off the nightstand.
Potting soil ground into the rug. The sheets are a tangled nest of mismatched patterns because I never learned to make a bed and never wanted to.
Flynn looks at the chaos.
Flynn does not care about the chaos.
He puts me down on the unmade bed and follows me onto it, and the frame groans under the combined weight of one full-grown Orc and whatever reckless magic is pulling us together.
My hands find the cuts on his shoulder. He hisses through his teeth.
I pull a sliver of glass free. Then another.
His forehead drops against mine, eyes closed, breathing ragged.
"This is going to get blood on your sheets."
"My sheets are already covered in potting soil."
A breath of laughter against my mouth. "Disgusting."
"You love it."
His hands slide into my wild hair, tilting my head back, and his mouth drags down my throat.
His tusks graze the soft skin below my ear, not breaking it, just present, a reminder of exactly what he is.
The sound I make is not dignified. The sound I make belongs in the magical ravine, or the deep woods, or anywhere that isn't a suburban bedroom with a novelty cactus lamp on the nightstand.
The floral overalls have too many buckles. His thick fingers fumble with the first clasp, then the second, and a frustrated growl vibrates against my collarbone.
"Who designed these?"
"They're vintage."
"They're a siege fortification."
I reach down and pop the third buckle myself.
The straps fall. His breath catches. The growl shifts into something lower, something reverent, and his hands slow down.
Gentle now. Impossibly gentle for hands that caught a falling tree.
That shattered a glass wall. That grip edging shears like holy weapons.
We are dirt and glass and blood and adrenaline and I pull him closer, closer, into the mess of my sheets and my life and everything he spent years building walls against. His weight settles over me, heavy and warm and real, and the glowing tattoos cast green light across the ceiling like we're underwater, like we've sunk to the bottom of something vast and quiet where HOA citations and lawn ordinances and tyrannical Elves cannot reach.
The bed frame protests.
We don't stop.
Dawn comes through the crooked blinds in gold stripes.
I'm sprawled across Flynn, my cheek pressed to the space between two glowing tattoos.
His arm is heavy around my shoulders. The cuts on his deltoid have already started to close, Orcish healing knitting the skin in slow green threads.
My bedroom looks like a garden center exploded inside a laundromat.
Clothes everywhere. Soil everywhere. A terrarium has tipped over on the dresser, spilling moss across a stack of Flynn's neatly folded cargo shorts that he apparently retrieved from his house at some point during the night and then immediately abandoned on the floor.
His heartbeat thuds under my ear. Slow. Steady. The heartbeat of someone deeply, catastrophically at peace.
My phone buzzes.
Then buzzes again.
Then buzzes nine more times in rapid succession.
Flynn's arm tightens around me. "Ignore it."
"It's judging day."
His eyes snap open. Gold. Alert. Every ounce of peace vacuumed out of his expression in a single breath. He sits up so fast I tumble sideways into the pillow nest, and he's already on his feet, scanning the room for his shorts, finding them, pulling them on with military efficiency.
"What time is it?"
"Seven twelve."
"Judging starts at eight. We have forty-eight minutes to prep the front beds, stake the climbing roses, and..."
The ground shakes.
Not a tremor. Not a truck passing. A rhythmic, concussive impact that rattles the windows in their frames and sends the tipped terrarium rolling off the dresser to shatter on the floor. The walls vibrate. The cactus lamp topples. Outside, a car alarm begins to wail.
Flynn goes still.
Another impact. Closer. Heavier. The bedroom mirror cracks from corner to corner.
We hit the front door at the same time. Flynn shoves it open with one hand, shirtless, barefoot, cargo shorts unbuttoned, and we stumble onto the porch into pale morning light.
The garden archway is gone. Flattened into splinters and twisted wire. The shared flower beds, the rare blooms, the trenches we dug with our own hands, all of it churned into raw brown earth under a foot made of stone and clay and ancient, ugly magic.
The earth-golem stands thirty feet tall in our combined lot.
Its body is packed soil and river rock, its arms are gnarled root systems thick as sewer pipes, and its head is a featureless boulder with Valerius's HOA crest carved deep into the forehead.
It raises one massive foot and brings it down on Flynn's rebuilt rose bed.
The impact cracks the sidewalk.
Across the street, Valerius leans against his luxury car with a porcelain coffee cup in one manicured hand, watching.