The anger drains out of Leo's face. He runs both hands through his blond hair and turns away, staring at the elm.
Sarah moves to his side. She says nothing, just stands there, close enough that their shoulders touch. I notice Mora watching them, the way Sarah anchors Leo without grabbing him, without demanding he calm down.
Mora catches me looking and raises an eyebrow.
I clear my throat. "Right. So. Plan?"
Raskel opens his mouth, presumably to deliver some biting remark about my intelligence, when the ground shudders.
The whole garden heaves, like the earth itself just inhaled. Every plant in the yard moves at once.
The rose bushes along the fence line surge upward, thorns lengthening, canes whipping through the air. Dead weeds in the flower beds claw out of the soil, black and slick, twisting together into ropy vines. A sunflower erupts from the bed nearest theporch, with a ring of yellowed teeth where the seeds should be and a thick stem that flexes and coils. Two more burst up behind it, then three more.
"Oh, come on!" I shout. "We just dealt with this!"
"The boundary's still fracturing!" Raskel yells, backing toward the house. "The gate's collapse destabilized the anchor point! Every corrupted thing within range of the Rootline is going to come through!"
"How many is 'every'?" Mora asks, pulling the long knife from her belt.
"More than we want!"
A vine wraps around my ankle and yanks. I go down hard on my back, the air punching out of my lungs. The vine drags me toward the flower bed. Kevin dives at it, stinger-first, jabbing at the thick green casing, but the vine barely flinches.
"Get off me, you overgrown—"
I fire a sonic pulse into the ground. The shockwave tears through the root system. The vine goes slack. I kick free, roll to my feet just in time to see one of the toothy sunflowers lunge at Sarah.
Leo is already moving. He grabs the broom leaning against the porch rail. His weapon of choice, apparently. Honestly, he's gotten disturbingly good with it. He swings into the sunflower's stem.
The stem cracks but doesn't break. The flower snaps its teeth at him. He swings again, harder, catching it just below the head. It goes tumbling across the yard, still snapping.
"Mora! Behind you!"
She spins. A knot of black vines is creeping across the ground toward her, and she plants her feet and starts cutting. Clean, fast strokes that sever vine after vine; her face set in that grim determination that makes my chest do somersaults.
I fire another pulse, wider this time, catching a cluster of vines trying to climb the porch steps. They shatter and fall, twitching. Kevin buzzes past my ear, diving at a sunflower that's gotten too close to Raskel's position near the back door.
And then I see something that stops me dead.
Raskel, tiny, ancient, hatted Raskel, comes charging out from behind the garden stool, and he is riding a rabbit.
A regular brown cottontail rabbit, roughly the size of a large house cat, that clearly did not consent to being mounted by a gnome. Raskel is on its back, his little legs gripping its sides, one hand fisted in the fur at the scruff of its neck and the other holding his walking stick above his head like a lance.
The rabbit looks as surprised about this arrangement as I am.
"CHARGE!" Raskel screams, and the rabbit, either too confused or too terrified to do anything else, bolts forward.
He barrels straight into a sunflower, whacking it across the stem with his stick as the rabbit zigzags through the garden in blind panic. The sunflower topples. The rabbit careens left. Raskel nearly falls off, catches himself by grabbing an ear, and the rabbit shrieks in a way I didn't know rabbits could shriek and changes direction, heading straight for a cluster of vines.
"FORWARD, BEAST!" Raskel bellows.
The rabbit plows through the vines. Raskel's stick is a blur, whacking everything in reach—vines, stems, a toad that happens to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. The toad goes airborne and lands in the rose bushes, and I briefly consider that this might be the bravest or most insane thing I've ever seen in a life that has included a lot of both.
"Is he—" Leo starts.
"Yes," I say.
"On a—"
