"Valerius lives on Cedarbrook Estates."
I pull the shears from the railing and a finger-sized splinter comes with them. Junia's porch looks like a war zone. Smells like one too—copper and sage and the green-sap tang of shredded orchids.
"There are more."
Junia's pointing past me, toward the back of her property where a greenhouse leans against the rear fence like a drunk against a lamppost. The glass panels catch the afternoon sun. They also catch the reflection of a second wave.
A black cloud. Dense. Humming. Rising above the tree line from the direction of the drainage easement that runs behind both our properties. The sound reaches me a half-second later—a drill-press whine that sets my tusks vibrating in their sockets.
Fifty. Maybe seventy. Three times the first wave.
"Get inside."
"Absolutely not."
"Junia—"
"That greenhouse has four hundred dollars worth of propagation stock, six heritage rose cultivars I grew fromcuttings my grandmother gave me, and a Ghost Orchid that took me three years to coax into bloom." She's already moving, bare feet slapping down the porch steps. "I'm not going inside."
The swarm crests the fence line. They pour over the top in a chitinous waterfall, and the formation is tighter this time. Tighter and faster. The perimeter guards lead the charge, carapaces angled forward like riot shields, and behind them the cutters hold position in clusters of eight, mandibles already working, already hungry.
I shift the shears to a two-handed grip. Widen my stance. Weight on the balls of my feet, knees soft, shoulders square to the incoming line. The stance comes back like breathing. Like it never left.
The first beetle hits my kill zone and the shears take its head clean off.
Then there's no time for counting.
They come in waves. I sweep the blades in horizontal arcs, right to left, left to right, each pass clearing a three-foot corridor of airspace. Carapaces crack against carbon steel. Ichor sprays in copper-bright ribbons. A beetle lands on my shoulder and saws through my t-shirt—through the 'D' in 'DAD'—before I crush it against my collarbone with the heel of my hand.
Two more latch onto my calf. I stamp. Twist. Feel them pop under my boot sole.
But there are too many. For every beetle I split, three more bank around my flanks and streak toward the greenhouse. Glass panels won't stop those mandibles. Glass is nothing to them.
"JUNIA! THE GREENHOUSE?—"
A cannon blast of water punches through the swarm six feet to my left.
Junia stands at the side of the house, legs braced wide, both hands wrapped around the nozzle of her industrial garden hose. The pressure washer attachment—the one she uses to stripold paint off terracotta—is cranked to full. The stream hits the beetles at what has to be two thousand PSI, and the effect is spectacular.
They don't get knocked aside. They disintegrate. The water shreds wings, cracks carapaces, and sends the copper ichor scattering in a fine mist that rainbows in the sunlight. Five beetles. Eight. Twelve. She sweeps the stream like a turret gunner, tracking the swarm's movements with a precision that borders on professional.
"LEFT SIDE!" I roar.
She pivots. The water stream scythes across a flanking cluster headed for the greenhouse, atomizing them into a spray of chitin fragments and enchanted ichor. The mist settles on the glass panels and immediately sprouts tiny ferns from the putty between the panes.
I push forward. The shears sing. A beetle dives for my face and I catch it on the upswing, launching both halves in opposite directions. Two more come from my blind side. Mandibles punch into the meat of my left forearm, and this time I do hiss—sharp, through my teeth—because they've hit the nerve cluster near the elbow and my fingers go numb for one horrible second.
I slam my arm against the fence post. The beetles crumple. Feeling floods back in a wash of hot pins.
"BEHIND YOU, FLYNN!"
I drop to one knee. A cluster of six screams through the space my head occupied and meets Junia's water stream head-on. The impact sounds like gravel hitting a windshield. Wet chitin fragments rain down on my back.
We're moving in sync now. She drives them low, I cut them down. She pushes them into corridors, I close the corridors with steel. No words needed. Just instinct and geometry and the kind of wordless coordination that takes warbands years to develop.
She picks it up in minutes.
The swarm thins. Fifteen left. Ten. The survivors lose cohesion—their military formation dissolving into panicked individual flights, banking and rolling, searching for escape routes. Junia picks them off one by one, her hose tracking each beetle with a patience that is genuinely frightening.
