One arm. Just the one. The other is braced against a boulder, fingers dug into a crack in the granite. The muscles in his forearm don't tremble. They bunch and release in a single, hydraulic motion, and I come up out of the void fast enough that my stomach drops.
I slam into him.
His arm locks around my back. My face presses into the worn cotton of his tee shirt, which smells of cedar shavings and clean sweat and something deeper, something green and mineral that might just be the way orcs smell. My hands grip his shoulders because there's nothing else in the world to hold onto, and underneath my palms his body is a wall of dense, living heat.
His heartbeat against my cheek. Steady. Not fast. Steady.
"You good?"
I nod into his shirt. Don't pull back. Don't want to.
His arm doesn't move either. His chin rests on top of my head, and for three full seconds, we stand on a disintegrating goat trail above a magical ravine, and we don’t breathe.
Then the sky splits open.
Not sunrise. The canopy above us goes white. A crack of thunder hits so hard the boulder under Flynn's hand vibrates, and the pressure change sucks the air from my lungs. Rain follows, instant, vertical, cold enough to sting. But it's wrong.The drops fall upward in patches, reversing direction mid-air, and the clouds visible through breaks in the canopy are the color of an old bruise, spiraling in a tight, unnatural rotation directly overhead.
Lightning. Close. The flash burns blue afterimages into my vision.
The ancient hemlock forty feet uphill takes the bolt dead center. The trunk detonates. A hundred-foot column of wood and bark and smoking heartwood tips, groans, and falls directly toward us.
CHAPTER 8
FLYNN
The tree falls and my body moves before my brain catches up.
I shove Junia sideways, hard, and pivot into the path of the hemlock. A hundred years of growth, three feet of trunk diameter, coming down through the canopy like a battering ram. Branches snap and cartwheel ahead of it. A widow-maker buries itself in the mud six inches from my boot.
I plant my feet. Widen my stance. Dig my heels into the saturated hillside until I hit something solid underneath the muck. The chopping block stance. Same foundation I set when splitting seasoned oak, except the oak doesn't weigh four thousand pounds and isn't accelerating toward my skull at terminal velocity.
My hands go up.
The trunk hits my palms and the world compresses into a single point of contact. Bark shreds against my skin. The impact drives me down three inches into the mud, my knees buckling, my spine compressing, every tendon in my shoulders screaming a language I haven't spoken since the warbands. My boots slide. I dig harder. The heels catch on a buried root and hold.
The sound that comes out of my throat isn't a word.
It's old. Older than language. A roar that starts somewhere below my diaphragm and tears upward through me, vibrating the runic tattoos along my arms until they pulse with a faint green phosphorescence. The hemlock pushes. I push back. Sapwood splinters against my palms, driving fragments into the meat of my hands, and the pain is clean and bright and nothing compared to the thought of what this trunk will do to her if it reaches the ground where she's scrambling.
My left boot loses purchase. Slides two inches downhill.
I adjust. Shift my grip. Find the balance point of the trunk where the weight distribution changes from impossible to merely catastrophic, and I redirect.
Not lift. I'm strong, but I'm not stupid. You can't catch a falling tree. You can change where it goes. I torque my hips, driving the trunk sideways like sweeping a heavy bar off a squat rack. The hemlock groans, pivots on its shattered base, and swings wide. Branches rake across my back, tearing the shirt clean off my left shoulder, and the crown of the tree crashes into the hillside ten feet to our right with enough force to shake loose a secondary mudslide.
The root ball, still half-attached to the stump, snaps free. The whole mass settles, shudders, and goes still.
I stay standing. Hands out. Palms bleeding. Rain hammering my bare skin where the shirt hangs in tatters.
"Flynn!"
Junia's behind me and below. Safe.
My knees unlock. I don't sit so much as my body decides it's finished holding me upright, and I drop onto the fallen trunk like it's a park bench. My hands are shaking. Not from fear. From the adrenaline dump, the chemical aftermath of channeling more force through my skeleton than orc bones are rated for. Blood mixes with rainwater and runs off my fingers in pink rivulets.
She's climbing back up the trail. Covered in mud from hairline to boots, one sleeve of her floral overalls torn at the seam, wild curls plastered flat against her skull. She looks like something the ravine chewed up and spit out.
She looks incredible.
