The back of my neck prickles.
Not danger. Something else. A vibration, like a string being plucked in the hollow space beneath my sternum.
I lower the axe. Sweat drips from my jaw onto the chopping block.
I turn my head.
Junia is leaning against the cedar fence that sadly only partially separates our properties. Both arms folded on top of the rail, chin resting on her wrists. Her coffee mug sits forgotten on the fence post beside her. The potting soil on her cheeks has been joined by what appears to be dried comfrey paste—she made the salve anyway—and her eyes are not on my face.
They're tracing the runes.
Slow. Deliberate. Following the lines across my body, down my ribs, along the curve of my obliques where the war prayers spiral into older symbols. Protective wards. Names of the dead. My mother's clan sigil, right over my heart, pulsing with soft green light.
Her lips are parted.
Her pupils are wide.
I'm holding an axe and I've forgotten how arms work.
"Those glow," she says.
"Yes."
"All the time?"
"When I'm—" I stop. The answer is "when my blood runs hot" and absolutely no version of that sentence leaves my mouth while she's looking at me like that.
"When you're what?"
I set the axe down on the chopping block. Pick up my shirt from where I draped it over the fence.
"Exerting myself."
Her mouth twitches. That same twitch from this morning. The one that does unauthorized things to my stomach.
"Must be a lot of exertion."
"I'm chopping wood."
"I can see that."
She hasn't looked at my face once.
CHAPTER 5
JUNIA
The runes pulse.
Green-gold light rolls under his skin like bioluminescence in a midnight tide, tracing pathways across muscle groups I don't have names for. Anatomy class covered human bodies. Nobody prepared me for whatever is happening across this orc's obliques.
I'm staring.
I know I'm staring.
My mouth is open and my coffee is getting cold and a small, rational part of my brain is screaming at me to say something clever or at minimum close my jaw, but the larger, louder part of my brain has been completely reformatted by the sight of Flynn Danger's torso and is now running a single background process labeled LOOK AT THAT.
The heat starts at my collarbone and races upward. Cheeks. Ears. The bridge of my nose. Full-body betrayal, the kind of blush that turns my entire face into a stoplight, and I can't even hide behind my coffee mug because my hands have apparently unionized and refuse to move.