His hands won't stop shaking.
CHAPTER 12
FLYNN
The roots are still warm.
I kneel at the crater's edge and press my palm flat against the raw, exposed earth. Heat radiates up through my fingers, unnatural and sharp, like the soil itself has a fever. My prize rosebush lies in two halves beside me. The root ball, split clean down the center, bleeds dark sap into the grass. Eleven years of careful cultivation. Precise watering schedules. pH-balanced amendments. Hand-selected organic mulch, applied in exactly two-inch layers, raked smooth every Sunday at dawn.
Gone.
My jaw aches. My molars grind so hard the sound fills my skull. The runes along my forearms pulse bright, throwing green light across the devastation, and I can't make them stop. Haven't lost control of the glow since the warbands. Since the blood trenches outside Korvash where everything was mud and screaming and nothing stayed where you put it.
I pick up half the root ball. It crumbles in my fist.
Warm soil. Accelerated decomposition. Explosive upward force strong enough to launch a mature root system clean out of the ground.
I know what does that.
"Flynn?"
She speaks from behind me. Soft. Careful. The way you talk to something dangerous.
"Flynn, what happened? I heard you from the kitchen and I-"
"Your fertilizer."
The words come out flat. Dead. I don't turn around. Can't. If I look at her right now, standing there with her wild hair and her potting-soil freckles and those ridiculous bright pink clogs, I'll either break something or breakdown, and neither option is acceptable.
"What?"
"The magical slow-release compound. The one in the bag against your refrigerator." My hand tightens around the ruined root clump. Sap oozes between my fingers. "The one you mixed into the border beds last week without testing it. Without measuring it. Without reading a single label."
"I don't... Flynn, I didn't put anything near your rosebush."
"You didn't have to." I stand. My knees pop. The crater stares up at me like an open mouth. "Magical fertilizer doesn't stay where you dump it. It leaches. Migrates through the water table. Seeps through the root networks underground. Every gardener with a basic certification knows that."
Silence behind me.
"Feel the soil." I point at the crater. "It's hot. The microbial activity is off the charts. Something supercharged the root zone until the pressure had nowhere to go but up. Like a bomb. A rosebush is only ever going to get so big, so when it reached full growth? Boom."
"You think my fertilizerexplodedyour rosebush."
"I think your untested, unlabeled, magically unstable fertilizer leeched into my root system and created a catastrophic exothermic reaction, yes."
"That's insane."
I spin.
She stands six feet away in soaked socks and a sleep-wrinkled tank top, coffee stain on her knuckles, hair flattened on one side from the tarp. Her eyes are wide. Not guilty. Confused.
Doesn't matter.
"Insane." The word tastes like ash. "You moved in three weeks ago. Since then, I've had animated flamingos destroy my turf, fist-sized beetles attack from the sky, rogue root systems assault my foundation, and now myrosebushhas been blown out of the ground like a mortar round. What's the common variable, Junia?"
Her mouth opens.
"You."
