Both carry stun batons.
The batons crackle to life. Blue-white arcs of magical current jump between the contact points, spitting and popping in the humid greenhouse air. Not lethal. Not meant to be. Designed to drop a full-grown Orc to his knees and keep him there while the authorities arrive.
"Flynn!"
The guards fan out, cutting off the aisle between me and the exit, batons humming, boots crunching through the dead thornvine debris.
I roll my shoulders. Six-foot steel tube. Still on the floor. Three feet to my left.
CHAPTER 15
JUNIA
The window frame bites into my ribs as I haul myself back through it.
Flynn doesn't see me. He's already moving. His hand closes around the neck of a fifty-pound bag of enchanted bone meal and he swings it like a warhammer, releasing at the apex of the arc. The bag hits the Elf guard square in the middle with a heavy thwack that sends the guard pinwheeling backward into a rack of stolen orchids. White powder erupts. A cloud of calcium and ground dragon bone fills the aisle, thick as fog, and the Elf disappears into it, coughing, his stun baton carving wild blue streaks through the haze.
The Dwarf doesn't flinch. Dwarves never flinch. He ducks under the cloud, stays low, and charges Flynn's knees with the baton extended like a lance.
My boots hit the greenhouse floor.
Flynn catches the Dwarf's wrist. The baton crackles an inch from his thigh, close enough that the static lifts the hair on his forearm. He squeezes. The Dwarf's face goes purple. But the little tank is strong, absurdly strong, and he twists his whole body like a corkscrew, wrenching free and rolling backward with the baton still in his grip.
The Elf is back on his feet. Bone meal coats him head to toe, turning him into a furious white ghost. He spits powder, raises his baton, and both guards advance from opposite sides. Flanking. Professional. The kind of coordination that says Valerius pays well and trains his people better.
Flynn grabs the steel tube from the floor. Six feet of galvanized pipe. He holds it across his body, horizontal, the stance of someone who learned to fight with a weapon before he learned to read.
Two stun batons against one pipe. Bad odds even for an Orc built like a fortified wall.
My hand is already in my vest pocket. The vial is small, no bigger than my thumb. Amber glass, cork stopper, the contents swirling with a pearlescent sheen that catches the grow lights. I brewed it last Tuesday for the root system that kept attacking the drainage trench. Slick-sap concentrate. Organic lubricant derived from ghost elm cambium, pressurized with a binding spell that activates on contact with any hard surface.
I designed it to make aggressive roots slide harmlessly off stone.
On tile, it will turn the floor into an ice rink.
"Flynn! Eyes up!"
He doesn't question it. Doesn't hesitate. His gaze snaps to mine and he jumps. Straight up, both feet leaving the ground, one hand grabbing the overhead irrigation pipe. The steel groans under his weight. His legs swing clear of the floor.
I throw the vial.
The amber glass shatters on the tile between the two guards. The sound is small. A pop. A tinkle. Nothing dramatic.
Then the slick-sap hits air and blooms.
It spreads like spilled mercury, coating every tile in a three-foot radius with a film so frictionless that light slides off it. The Dwarf's right boot hits the slick patch mid-stride and keepsgoing. His left boot follows. His legs split in a direction legs aren't meant to split, and he goes down hard on his back, the stun baton flying from his hand and skittering across the floor in a shower of blue sparks. His helmet cracks against tile. His eyes roll.
The Elf sees it happen. Too late. His momentum carries him forward one more step. His boot touches the slick zone and his foot shoots out from under him so fast he actually becomes airborne for a fraction of a second. Horizontal. Parallel to the ground. The bone meal cloud puffs off him like a soul departing a body.
He lands face-first in a pile of shattered terracotta and stolen begonias.
Neither guard moves.
Flynn drops from the irrigation pipe. His boots land on dry tile, just outside the slick zone. He looks at the two crumpled guards. Looks at me. Looks at the spreading pool of iridescent sap.
"What IS that?"
"Slick-sap. Ghost elm extract." I'm already stepping carefully around the spill, testing each footfall. "I use it for aggressive root systems."
