Poison Ivy: Vines of Vengeance by Jade Gretz

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Poison Ivy: Vines of Vengeance ANIMATION

Glassroot Heist

Felicia Hardy arrived at the greenhouse in black gloves and moonlight, which was fitting because the building itself seemed to have been planted there by night. It rose from the ruins of an abandoned conservatory at the edge of Gotham’s industrial riverfront, but no architect had ever filed a permit for the place. Vines had wound through iron beams and glass ribs until the structure looked less built than grown, a cathedral coaxed from chlorophyll and old blood. Even before the doors opened, Felicia could smell damp earth, orchid perfume, and something older underneath—an animal sweetness, as if the soil had been fed on secrets.

She smiled to herself and touched the cat mask at her temple. “All this for one little jewel,” she murmured. “Or one very large trap.”

A voice drifted from within the dark. “Not a jewel.”

The doors opened without a hand.

Poison Ivy stood beneath hanging lanterns of bioluminescent moss, a queen in a living throne room. Her red hair fell like a warning over bare shoulders, and the green-gold dress she wore was woven from leaves so delicate they trembled when she breathed. Her skin held the pale radiance of moonlit petals. Behind her, the greenhouse spread in concentric chambers—ferns, carnivorous blooms, trees whose roots sank through cracked tile and into the buried city below. A thousand leaves rustled at once, and Felicia had the sudden, uneasy feeling that the room itself was listening.

“That is rude,” Felicia said. “I was promised hospitality.”

“I host insects with better manners.”

Felicia stepped inside anyway. “Then I’m honored to rank above an insect.”

Ivy’s smile was slow and terrible, as beautiful as a knife laid on velvet. “You’re not here for the nectar. You’re here for the Glassroot.”

At the center of the room, suspended in a lattice of thorned vines, hung a crystal sphere the size of a human heart. Inside it floated a seed no bigger than a fingernail, translucent as bone and threaded with green light. It pulsed once every few seconds, and with each pulse the surrounding plants bent their leaves toward it, hungry as worshippers.

Felicia’s eyes narrowed. “That’s a seed?”

“That is a beginning,” Ivy said. “And the end of several very bad men.”

Felicia folded her arms. “Funny. The briefing said it was a weapon.”

“Everything the greedy cannot grow becomes, in their minds, a weapon.”

The greenhouse answered with a shiver. Somewhere deeper in the structure, metal clinked against metal, and something scrabbled softly inside the walls. Felicia noticed then that the shadows between the vines were not empty. They moved in patient, synchronized breaths.

“You’ve got company,” she said.

Ivy tilted her head. “No. I have guardians.”

Felicia’s smile sharpened. “That’s a very expensive word for teeth.”

Ivy lifted one hand, and a dozen white blossoms opened along the walls in a single hush. Their petals glistened with dew. Then the room changed. The air thickened. The scent turned sweet enough to numb the tongue. Felicia’s pulse stumbled.

“Pollen,” she said.

“Sedative,” Ivy corrected. “A courtesy. I dislike violence more than I dislike thieves.”

“That’s good, because I’m only a thief on my worst days.”

Felicia sprang sideways as ivy tendrils lashed from the floor where she had been standing a heartbeat earlier. They struck the glass behind her and left webbed cracks. She rolled, landed lightly, and flicked a grapnel from her wrist. The hook snapped into an overhead beam just as a cluster of flytraps unlatched from the wall and lunged at the space she had occupied.

Ivy did not move. She simply watched, amused and dangerous.

Felicia swung up and over a table of surgical-looking terrariums, boots skimming past glass jars full of amber fluids and curled roots. Something hissed beneath the table. A vine shot up, wrapped her ankle, and yanked. She cut it with a hidden blade and dropped into a crouch.

“Okay,” she said, breath steady, “that is new.”

“Most thieves are more concerned with what can be stolen,” Ivy said. “You are concerned with what might bite back. I appreciate that.”

Felicia’s eyes flicked toward the suspended seed. “You really think I’m here to take your plant?”

“I think you were hired to.”

That made Felicia pause for half a second, which in a room like this was an act of faith or stupi
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