The violet beacon pulses behind us. A second siren joins the first, this one deeper, and the ground trembles as something heavy and stone begins to grind awake near the greenhouse entrance. Gargoyles. Valerius keeps gargoyles on the property like other people keep motion-sensor lights.
Flynn cuts hard right, vaulting a low boxwood hedge without breaking stride. I hurdle it a half-second later, catching my shin on a branch, and the pain barely registers because adrenaline has turned my blood into rocket fuel. We tear across the immaculate common green, past the decorative fountain with its tasteful water feature, past the community bulletin board with its laminated announcements about acceptable mailbox colors.
Behind us, stone wings crack open. The grinding gets louder.
Flynn glances back. His jaw sets. He shoves the rosebush into my arms without slowing down, and the weight of it nearly buckles my knees. The root ball is dense, packed earth and magic, at least forty pounds of living history wrapped in burlap. I clutch it against my stomach and keep running.
"Don't you dare stop to fight those things."
"Wasn't going to."
"Your face says otherwise."
"My face is wrong." He grabs my elbow and steers me left, through a gap between two identical beige houses, down a narrow service alley that stinks of recycling bins and lawn clippings. The gargoyle sounds fade. The alley is too narrow for stone wings.
We burst out the other end onto Maple Court. Our street. The familiar shapes of our houses sit side by side in the dark, the shared garden archway a black silhouette against the stars. Flynn's garage light is on. My porch light is on. Everything looks exactly like we left it, peaceful and suburban and completely insane.
Flynn stops at the property divider. Green blood runs down his arm in thin rivulets, dripping off his fingertips onto the grass he mowed fourteen hours ago. He stares at the drops on his perfect lawn.
"Don't you dare care about the grass right now."
His head comes up. His eyes find mine in the dark. Gold irises, bright with pain and something wilder.
"I care about the grass."
"Flynn."
"And I care about you holding my rosebush like it matters."
My throat closes. The root ball presses warm and alive against my ribs. His blood is on the burlap. His blood is on my hands.
The siren wails three streets over.
We crash through my front door in a tangle of limbs and burlap and desperation. The rosebush lands on the kitchen table, scattering a week's worth of seed catalogs and dirty coffee mugs. Something ceramic hits the floor and breaks. No one looks.
Flynn kicks the door shut behind him. The deadbolt turns under his massive green hand, and the sound of it clicking home is the loudest thing in the sudden silence.
The adrenaline is a living creature under my skin, clawing, screaming, demanding an outlet that running can no longer provide.
Glass glitters in the cuts across his shoulder. Dark green blood has soaked through what remains of the tee shirt, whichis essentially a collar and two strips of cotton clinging to his torso by sheer stubbornness. His gold eyes burn in the dim light of my hallway, pupils blown wide, and every runic tattoo on his body pulses with a faint emerald glow that matches his racing heartbeat.
"You're still bleeding."
"Junia."
"Let me get the first aid..."
His hand catches my wrist. Not hard. Never hard. But absolute. The way he grips things that matter.
"I don't want the first aid kit."
My back finds the hallway wall. His forearm braces above my head, and the other hand still holds my wrist, pressing it gently against the plaster beside my hip. He fills the entire corridor. Green skin and glowing tattoos and the copper-salt smell of his blood mixing with fresh earth and the ghost-elm sap still clinging to my fingers.
"Your shoulder..."
"Cosmetic."
"You keep saying that word. I don't think it means what you..."
