Like a root ball.
I bag a soil cast of the print and keep moving. Two feet further east, another impression. Same boot, same depth. And beside it, in the grass, a faint shimmer. I wouldn't have caught it without the loupe. Tiny crystalline particles dusted across the blades. I lick my thumb, press it to the grass, bring it to my nose.
Silverleaf pollen.
My blood goes cold.
Silverleaf doesn't grow in this climate zone. It's a cultivated ornamental, native to the high elven arboretums of the western provinces. Expensive. Rare. Decorative.
Exactly the kind of plant that fills Valerius's competition-winning front garden.
I bag the pollen sample. My hands shake. Not from fear. From the slow, tectonic shift of rage relocating from the wrong target to the right one.
The boot prints lead northeast across my lawn, through the hedge wall, and out toward the street. Dress shoes. Smooth soles. The gait is long and light, precise. Elvish.
The security cameras.
I installed them fourteen months ago. Four units. Hardwired. Motion-activated infrared with full-spectrum magical detection overlay. Hidden inside decorative birdhouses mounted at each property corner, because even surveillance should be aesthetically appropriate.
The monitoring station lives in my garage, behind the pegboard wall. I swing the panel open on its hidden hinges, revealing the screen array and the recording drives. The system runs on a seventy-two-hour loop.
I rewind to 0300.
Grayscale footage. My front yard, bathed in infrared silver. The rosebush stands perfect and whole, its canes swaying in a light breeze.
A figure enters the frame from the northeast hedge gap.
Tall. Lean. Moving with the fluid, theatrical precision of someone who has never carried anything heavier than a wine glass. He wears a dark overcoat and dress shoes with smooth soles. His pointed ears catch the ambient light.
Valerius.
He crosses my lawn in eight strides, stops at the rosebush, and produces something from inside his coat. A shovel. But not a shovel. The blade glows with pale blue elven enchantment, runes crawling along the handle like living script. He drives it into the soil at a forty-five degree angle. The magical blade slides through the root zone like a hot wire through butter, severing anchor roots, destabilizing the base. He grips the canes with gloved hands andpulls.
The bush comes free in one clean, savage motion. Root ball and all. He drops it, stamps on the root ball with his heel until it splits, then kicks the halves apart with the casual precision of someone adjusting a crooked picture frame.
The whole operation takes ninety seconds.
He brushes soil from his gloves. Adjusts his collar. Walks back through the hedge gap and disappears.
The footage loops to static.
I sit in my garage, in the dark, watching the empty screen. The playback timestamp blinks at me. 0314. While I slept on a canvas tarp with Junia's hair across me and her heartbeat against my ribs, Valerius walked into my yard and destroyed the only thing I'd ever grown from nothing.
And I blamed her for it.
The screen blinks.
My fist goes through the drywall beside the monitor array.
CHAPTER 13
JUNIA
The door shakes on its hinges.
