If I had a shovel, I probably would have dug myself a nice little pit just for a place to sleep. I felt like I had been awake for days, a seat cushion left outside to mold—mentally. Physically, I probably would have filled the pit with lube just to give myself a wet hole to fuck. There were good odds my dick might soon fall off just from the weight of my swollen balls.

  Xhinn’s tits but… well, I had just seen Xhinn’s tits! In the rain! If Mia had not been enrobed, I was sure she would have been waving a blue card in my face right about now, telling me all about the new fetish I had just unlocked.

  Sadly, my senses of guilt and responsibility would let me pursue neither release nor rest until I had freed my companions from their torment, even for the sake of increasing my Wisdom so I could deal with some of this crap. And their torment—Lynnria’s, at least—was only making me hornier. It was a vicious cycle.

  “Hnn~ …crazy. Someone, please…”

  “Would you shut up already?!” I yelled. “I’m here! I’m right here! Just give me a minute to figure this out.”

  Lynnria only continued her moaning. Don’t look at her. Don’t… look at her…

  “I doubt she can hear us, my lord,” Mia informed me unnecessarily. That point that had been made exceedingly obvious by now. “Whatever magic our kin has worked must be shielding the girl from outside stimuli, else the Fifth’s presence would have long rendered her unconscious.”

  “And we can’t have that, now can we?” I returned.

  Oh, no. Xhinn wanted me to hear Lynnria carrying on. The magic was probably even shielding her from the rain to keep everything nice and gelled up. Bitch.

  Coincidentally, this scenario was really driving home what the term ‘hate fuck’ was all about. Because yeah. If only I had the power…

  “Care to weigh in on this, Jax?” I asked, scrubbing my fingers through my now mysteriously dry hair in some vague effort to calm my pounding… everything. There was not even a puddle left behind to mark the event of our shared trauma.

  The redhead turned to blink at me owlishly. My normally garrulous companion seemed to have been rendered mute since tumbling from the tree, and had spent the last few minutes apparently lost in thought.

  “Huh?”

  “The puzzle?” I filled in. “Penny for your thoughts.”

  “Oh, er… sorry.” Her gaze drooped back down to stare at the ground between her legs. “I were just, well… The Queen… she wants ye so bad. Clear as day, she does, but she be stuck here, can scarce get ye to look at her. What must it be like to be so bonnie as that—so fair, even yer most precious beau could nay stand to turn his eyes upon ye? I’d sooner scar me own face again than suffer it.”

  What a weirdly empathetic take on the situation. But then, making herself attractive to me was kind of high on Jax’s list of priorities. Seeing… that must have made her feel inadequate. Hell, it made me feel inadequate, and I was a dude!

  “I don’t think you have to worry about that,” I said, though it was more of a grumble. The Demon Queen and empathy were two concepts I was not in a hurry to marry. “You literally can’t out-Layer me. And as long as your Charisma and my Wisdom aren’t too out of proportion, you’re not about to send me into gibbering fits.”

  She seemed to take that in stride and gave the dirt between her legs a solemn nod—only to jolt upright in sudden panic. “Now, wait a scanty! Yer Charisma be jumping leagues, too, ye know. What if my Wisdom gets too low?”

  I sighed. This was not what I wanted to be thinking about right now, but it was a legitimate concern. Wisdom was even less useful for a Warrior build than was Intelligence.

  “I don’t know. Mia, what—” I stopped myself just in time. More temptation was the last thing I needed. I was just glad everyone was too stunned to think about taking advantage of me right then. I would have let them and been more than grateful for the attention, but it only would have pissed me off afterward. “Just… help us out here.”

  “If you are asking for specific ratios, I cannot help you. Few of the kinds investigate Attribute disparities. Fewer still spread their knowledge for posterity. All I can say is that someone with a high Charisma will find it increasingly simplistic to influence someone of low Wisdom the greater the mismatch becomes. But to fully neutralize someone on sight?” She chuckled. “You would need a skill to accomplish that.”

  I quirked an eyebrow. “Go on.”

  She just looked at me. “What? Interested?”

  “No.” I paused to reconsider. “Okay, yes. Some. But I was hoping you would elaborate on how the goddesses accomplish it.”

  I wonder if it’s to do with presence. Didn’t Xyn say something about helping me with that?

  “Well, divinity helps,” Mia explained unhelpfully. Then, noting my prompting glare, she went on, “Think of it as something of an… aura. That they cannot turn off?”

  My face fell. “Oh.”

  Jax clapped her hands together in sudden recognition. “Ye mean like how the master makes us super lucky and horny all the time?” She started bouncing her seat excitedly, her previous woes forgotten—which was all I needed. A bra-less supermodel hopping about would have probably made me ‘spring to’ from a dead sleep, never mind now. “Makes ye wonder, don’t it? How strong could that get?”

  Mia only looked at me, favoring me with a smile that did not reach her eyes. “Very.”

  Well, isn’t that alarming? I pointedly ignored the subtext.

  “Plea… …so s-swollen, I’m… …my chest… ugh~”

  Lynnria’s coincidentally topical wailing had devolved to the point of being near incoherent. Which was a relief to me, but was probably a bad sign.

  I waved my hands in front of myself like I was shooing away a mass of bothersome gnats. We were getting off-topic again… which was as much of a meme for our group as my desire for a fireball spell. We could probably have even made a drinking game out of it.

  Off-topic! Take a shot.

  “I was actually asking about Lynnria, Jax.” I gave her a condensed version of what I had figured out already, seeing as she had been preoccupied at the time, ending with, “so if Poison frees Arx, what frees Lynnria?”

  “Dunno how much sense it makes to say Lynnria’s thing be poison. She ain’t used it once,” she observed. “I’d’ve said her thing be chucking dirt.”

  “Only because of her wand,” I countered dismissively. “What we really need to figure out is Arx’s thing. I’m certain that’s the key to all of this.”

  Jax shrugged. “Telling whoppers? Bad jokes? Laughing when she should nay?”

  “Fantasizing about our lord dominating her?” Mia continued, listing off on her fingers. “Masturbating?”

  Jax scowled. “Go easy, now. Wanna add breathing next? Masturbating… I’d like to see ye watching from the side without giving the ol’ bean a flick.”

  “I could. I’ve done it plenty of times.”

  “Not in a body, y’ain’t.” Jax grinned. “Ye been swimming in Master’s aura a while now, too. Won’t be long afore yer panting fer it.”

  Mia sniffed. “Easily dispelled. You forget, I am fully capable of—”

  “Take a shot…” I muttered.

  They both looked at me. “Huh?”

  “Sorry. Just…” I sighed. “I was playing a little mental drinking game is all.”

  Jax perked up. “Oh, I love them! What be the rules?”

  “It’s… whenever we get off-topic. But—”

  “Aren’t we off-topic right now?” Mia observed.

  I nodded with some exasperation. “Uh huh, which is why—”

  “—we gotta take a shot!” Jax filled in—correctly enough, but entirely missing the point. “Shame we ain’t got a bevvy to pass round.”

  Mia stared at her. “You don’t even like alcohol.”

  “Hold yer wheesht! Me not like alcohol?! Why—” She paused to reconsider. “Alright, maybe not recent-like. Lost the taste fer it somehow…”

  I held up a hand. “O-Okay, seriously—”

  “It’s no wonder,” Mia explained, heedless. “The fermentation process destroys what little Life might have been contained within the beverage, so it’s of no use to us… though it might help if you were to add some back in.”

  Jax brightened. “Hey, now yer thinking! A drop or two of lady froth’d do just the trick. Eh, Master?”

  I started to respond, then paused, mouth working soundlessly. It shamed me to admit I actually considered it, but in my defense, my dietary restrictions had somewhat changed my perspective on that sort of thing. Also, I was still riding a pretty high from Xhinn flashing us.

  “Well… hmm.”

  “Oh! I got an idea.” Flapping her hands excitedly, Jax reached for the giant pink egg she had been lugging around. “What if we went in fer a jug and spiked it with a drop o’ this?”

  Mia sucked in a breath through her teeth. “I don’t know about a jug—slut! I’m a horny girl! Maybe a cask, though.”

  “Even better! If we can figure a way to carry it about.”

  I worried at my lower lip for a moment, seriously considering the problem. This whole thing was sounding like a fantastic idea, the logistics of which needed to be solved immediately. Diluting the Demon Queen’s essence to the point where we could actually drink it? In booze?

  Give me a ‘hell.’ Give me a ‘yeeeeeeah!’ Stand up right now!

  Cue the music. Why had I not thought of this before?!

  But then the train car of my mind jumped back onto the tracks, and I had to wonder whether ramming my head into the tree might have been a better use of my time.

  “Okay, we’re about three shots deep into this tangent,” I said hotly.

  Jax shook her head. “Right ye be. Sorry, Master. No use worrying on that ‘til there be a cask to buy. So, er… what was we talking about?”

  Finally. “Arx’s thing.”

  “No, no.” Jax held up a claw. “That were before. We was figuring a tempera-tory substitute fer taking a shot!”

  My eyes could have been daggers. “I swear… to fucking…”

  “Ye said we was three shots deep,” she reminded me. “How’s we to play without a substitute?”

  Mia folded her arms. “More like four shots now.”

  “Exactly.” Jax tapped at her lip, thoughtful. “Ye would nay let us give yer knob a lick, would ye, Master?”

  “Let you—I am not rewarding you for getting off-topic!” I growled. Why was I even catering to this crap? I probably could have solved the puzzle on my own by now! “Besides, it’s not like getting a blowjob is a challenge around here.”

  “Wish I could say the same,” Jax grumbled.

  I stared, agog. The audacity. The absolute disrespect.

  “Excuse me?! I eat you out every day! Sometimes multiple times a day!”

  “Ye should be tonguing me flaps right now,” she countered. “Honest-like, putting on airs like ye do… who’s yer suffering helping? Ye’d think ye was Lynnria, the way ye carry on.”

  I rose to my feet, full of self-righteous ire—which would have come off a lot better without a certain protrusion tenting my robe. “If I let you have your way, we’d be here all day! Now can we please focus on rescuing Lynnria from out of this motherfu—”

  Jax snapped her fingers. “Got it! If ye get off-topic, ye gotta give me fanny a good lick.”

  “Wha—bu—” I sputtered. “My ass!”

  “Now, wait just a hot second,” Mia cut in. “Why does he have to lick your fanny? What about me?”

  Jax tilted her nose skyward. “I be First.”

  “And?!” Mia stomped her foot a little too hard and almost bounced herself into the fountain. “He should—whoa! Ack! He… He should at least have to take turns!”

  Jax cackled. “Oh, Ms. High-and-Mighty be wanting a turn? And here I thought the itch were easily dispelled.”

  “That has nothing to do with—eating pussy!” Grimacing, Mia made to splash some of the foul-smelling water she had almost landed in at Jax before thinking better of it. “It’s only fair!”

  “Fah! Based on what? Next, ye’ll be saying Fekinell deserves a turn.”

  “She isn’t even—a carpetmuncher—here!” Mia balled her hands into fists. “Blast it! Watch your phrasing!”

  “Alright, that’s it!” I clapped my hands together sharply.

  This was getting us nowhere. It was stupid, but it seemed I was going to have to make a decision about this before anyone could concentrate. And I could not concentrate until we got Lynnria down. It was not like she had stopped moaning so we could argue, and the urge to rub one out to the dulcet tones of her begging for someone to nail her had my nails digging into my palms.

  I have to invest in a resistance skill. There’s nothing else for it. This is intolerable!

  “Any time anyone gets off-topic… you have to thump your own nipple! With claw!”

  Mia winced. “Ooh…”

  “Kinky,” Jax agreed, thinking it over. “With the sharp end?”

  “Of course, with the sharp end!” I snarled in a rush.

  “But what if it bleeds?” Mia whined. “It’s a nipple, my lord. They’re not meant for such… aggressive stimulation.”

  “I guess you’ll have to think about that before getting off-topic!” I ground out. “And as for me… fine. I agree to give one of you a lick in order, depending on who’s here or currently alive, starting from Jax and down according to whatever pecking order you’ve decided on for the day. And that’s the last I want to hear about it!”

  “…the Five, it’s so… mmm~”

  A certain malcontent aside, the garden was silent for a moment, giving me enough time to realize I had probably just set something into motion that I would live to regret, even if I could not work out precisely how in my addled state.

  Then Jax’s eyes drifted to my throbbing midsection.

  “Ye sure ye’d nay like a quick handie, Master?” she offered lightly. “Ye’d feel better.”

  “I’m sure I would,” I agreed, voice dripping venom. “Now, shut up and help me think.”

  “But we’s, er… four… five shots owed? And yer down at least—”

  “Game starting now!” I yelled. My voice may have cracked a bit out of sheer frustration. “We’re all at zero.”

  That pronouncement was met with immediate protest, with arguments about fairness to demands for further rules clarifications coming in from all sides.

  My hands flew up to grip my scalp. “Watcher’s hairy ball sack. I’m glad we’re not playing with alcohol. You two would have me puking my guts out before noon.”

  Mia slumped onto a nearby bench. “Oh, very well. I still say our punishment disproportionately favors certain kinks over others, but so be it. This problem should be a simple proportional analogy: Lynnria is to poison as Arx is to… what?”

  After so much effort to wrestle them to the relevant topic, the actual shift to it was something of a shock to my system. Still, proportional analogies? That sent me back. I had not done one of those since middle school.

  Jax leaned forward. “I dunno what ye mean by proportions, but… poison be one of the wean’s skills, do it nay?”

  “It is.” I glanced from her to Mia, apprehensively. Was this real? Could we actually work on solving the problem now, or were they baiting me? I snapped my fingers a few times, relaxing into the problem and trying to remember the skill in question. “Uh… w-what was it called?”

  Mia inhaled sharply and thrust her chest toward me. “Finger of Corruption,” she supplied in a purr.

  And my mind immediately blanked. Why had I turned down that hand job again? It sounding a superb idea. It would sort me out and let everyone refocus on the task at hand. I was sure Lynnria would understand.

  Right?

  This would be so much easier if I was just dealing with a simple Lust Ailment. I had tools for dealing with that, but it would probably require magic for something so extreme to trigger.

  “Do that count as a shot?” Jax asked.

  “No,” I said quickly. Shit. “We just need to figure out which of Arx’s skills is most similar here.”

  Unauthorized usage: this narrative is on Amazon without the author's consent. Report any sightings.

  Mia sat back and crossed her legs at the knee. “I shouldn’t think it’s to do with her arrows.”

  “Why not?” Jax asked. “She shoots ‘em, same as Lynnria’s skill.”

  “For one thing, we don’t have any arrows,” I filled in, attempting to waddle back and forth in some semblance of pacing to calm myself, but all I accomplished was to drag a pair of lustful stares about. “If that’s the answer, it would be impossible to free Lynnria without having first rescued Arx. If we need one to rescue the other and vice versa, the puzzle becomes unsolvable, so we can discard that. But if the only way is by rescuing Arx first, the bet we made would be inherently rigged. I don’t think Xhinn would tolerate that sort of thing.”

  She might have been a cruel temptress from the depths of hell, but her schemes were never designed to back you completely into a corner.

  Jax pulled her eyes away from my midsection to glance at Mia. “Can we add people over explaining shite to this game?”

  “We may as well add cursing while we’re—fucking our own tits!” Mia said with a scoff, bouncing her leg with irritation. “I would be exempt, of course.”

  Jax opened her mouth to protest, froze, clocked my sharpening glare, then reconsidered. “What about singing?” she suggested instead. “Arx be a Siren. If she’s got a thing, that be it.”

  That idea had some legs. And it was testable.

  “Can’t hurt to try.” My mind quickly landed on something appropriately harmless, and I took a breath—

  “Does it have to be something Arx would sing?” Mia wondered.

  —only to let it out in a huff. Of all the fucking…

  “That seems a little specific, Mia. I doubt—”

  “I got one!” Jax proclaimed before springing to her feet and dusting herself off. “This be sommat me and the lads used to bandy about. Lemme see, er… Be tough to get the tune in yer head with no lute to go on…”

  She hemmed and hawed a moment longer, scratching at her chin as she mentally prepared herself. I considered stopping her. There really was no reason to believe the selection should matter, but Jax did not volunteer her singing voice very often. She had me curious.

  “Right,” she said eventually. “This be the better when everyone-like knows the words, but here we go.”

  She started thumping her chest to mark the downbeat and tilted her chin.

  “There were an old binter, what lived down the street.

  Her passage were blocked up from too much to eat.

  She took her some pills without reading the box,

  and afore she could strip, shite were flying like rocks!”

  She paused to look at us. “This be the part where you lot come in.”

  My mouth worked uncertainly until I settled on a distracted nod of acceptance. If the goal had been to select something Arx would sing, Jax had certainly hit the mark. My second lover had more than her share of quirks and her musical taste ranked high on that list.

  But right then, I was more concerned with a rather ominous gurgle I had just heard from the fountain.

  “Toor-a-lah! Toor-a-lah! — It be an echo, right?

  Toor-a-lay! Toor-a-lay! — See? Yer getting it.

  A rolling stone gathers no moss, so they say,

  Sing along… sing along — More echoing, yeah?

  With the birds… with the birds!

  It’s a wonderful song, but it’s all about turds!”

  The… colorful lyrics aside, Jax sang like a blind man painted—random, but full of gusto. Anyone listening could tell she was used to working a crowd and cared not a whit for pitch or accuracy. Like she had said, this was just a tune for having a round with your mates, after which you were expected to drain your tankard and smash it over the head of whomever was on your left. There would be a light stabbing, someone would get thrown through a window, and everyone would laugh like it was their last night on Vrekfren while the nerve-wracked piano player tried to keep their flop sweat from interfering with their playing.

  Altogether, great fun.

  Or it would have been, but the wet gurgling coming from the fountain had started to sound a lot like my intestines after just such a night of throwing them back.

  “Uh… Jax?”

  “Hang on. There be another four verses, yet.”

  I was not certain I could handle even one more verse, let alone four, and I had a feeling the fountain agreed with me.

  “Y-Yeah, but—”

  “Let her finish,” Mia said, head cocked to listen. “It’s clearly doing something.”

  Maybe. But not a good something.

  I edged my way nearer the entryway to the garden, just in case. “Alright,” I said with the resigned air of a man watching the idiot neighbor kids about to take a baseball bat to a hornet’s nest. “Go ahead.”

  Jax nodded eagerly and began belting out the next verse with even more gusto than the last.

  “She ran to the windy and stuck out her arse.

  Just at that moment, her ‘usband did pass.

  He heard a strange noise, so gazed up on high,

  A mighty big turd hit him right in the eye!”

  I could not tell you whether it was happenstance or the Dungeon adjusting to our antics, but just as Jax was coming to another round of toor-a-lays and toor-a-lahs, the fountain made her into quite the prophet. With a flatulent fffthuppphth, blackened, foul-smelling slop erupted from the twin roses, high into the air, only to scatter and rain down on us like a font of lava from Mount Doom. I had moved, so I was fortunate to have only gotten a light spackling, but the other two were coated head to toe.

  There was a moment of stunned silence… and then Mia made a sound I could only compare to a woman watching her infant child getting beheaded. I sympathized. But I had warned her.

  “It’s in my clothes! It’s in my hair!” she shrieked, on the verge of retching. “Uuuagh! This is unbearable. I can feel it dripping from my tail fur!”

  Jax stared at the other Dolilim for a few seconds, every bit as soaked and, from her expression, more than her share of upset. But she was at least keeping it together; getting mud on our faces was common enough around here, even if it was rarely so literal. Eventually, she dismissed her in favor of checking on Lynnria. There was no change on that front.

  “Well.” She firmed her lip before turning my way. She looked like she was hovering on the razor’s edge between tears and a frothing rage, but had settled for now on a deadly sort of calm. “That were… summat. Should I should keep at it, Master?”

  Breathing lightly through my mouth to minimize the smell, I glanced at the fountain, but other than the one rather violent outburst, it remained dormant. Honestly, I was surprised not to have attracted the local Faen with this little stunt. They were usually more punctual when an opportunity to jeer at us came around.

  “I’m not sure, Jax. Somehow, I doubt doing the right thing would have caused something like that.”

  She bobbed her head shakily in agreement. “As ye say, Master.” Swiping some of the filth from her arms, she turned on the other woman. “Quit yer blubbering already! Step to and make with the magic.”

  “But my dress!” Mia turned to her like a limp marionette. “Magic? What—huragh… Oh, I got some in my mouth.”

  “Don’t be daft!” Jax was fast coming down on the side of rage. “This be yer fault. Ye should have listened to Master—I should have listened—and now look at us! Both fouled! Fouled with muck when I were all but tripping into his arms. He’ll not touch me like this. He’ll not even take a step—”

  Suddenly, she stopped, then whirled to stare at me. For a moment, she looked like she was about to rush forward, but she hesitated.

  My lip twinged.

  I knew she was not actually upset—or well, she was, but not for the normal reasons. The last time she had been reduced to this, I had sort of… implied she should think about bathing before attempting to seduce a fellow, the result of which had gotten her tossed into a river. Since then, she had felt an almost pathological need to keep herself in a pristine state, just in case, but if she was looking at me like that, she must have sensed something to contradict that instinct.

  Which probably had a lot to do with the muck now slicking her clothes to her curves. Normally, that would have repulsed me. Make no mistake, it was great from a distance; there was something impossibly hot about a woman in that state—the shine of her skin, the vulnerability… its similarity to a certain vision of perfection recently drilled into my subconscious. But now? I was seriously tempted to set my second-thoughts aside and just go for it, but circumstances being what they were…

  I just wished we had a clean water source. I would have taken great joy in setting them both down and gently washing them clean. And then after, getting them very… very dirty.

  “…mmm~… …so hot… …—uck me…”

  “Aye… I be thinking ye’ve the right of it, wean,” Jax agreed, chest starting to heave in echo of my own repressed desire. “There be sommat there… pushing and pulling at me. Can ye feel it, Mia?”

  “What are you—sausage pilgrim—on about now?” She tried scrubbing at her eyes, but that only made it worse. “Oh, yuck! This is not what I was hoping for when I asked to be enrobed. What was the Fifth trying to achieve with this indigni—wait, weren’t you saying something about magic? Magic, magic… Okay, um… yes. Yes, a cleaning spell. I should be able to manage that. But not all at once. This body’s maximum Life Well is pathetic, so I need time to recover between each spell.”

  A distant part of me heard Mia talking, but the rest of me was concentrated fully on Jax. She was so focused on me and my emotions, for once unable to quite figure out what I was feeling, and it was making her squirm with naked want.

  Perhaps all the constant temptation had eroded my good sense, but I decided to help her out. A little.

  “Maybe if you were to wash your clothes separately,” I suggested, with an innocent scratch behind one ear.

  Jax’s eyes widened, and her hands flew to the straps at her shoulders—but they froze there. Again, she only stared at me. I could almost see the gears turning behind her eyes as she worked it out. I wanted her. Badly. But she knew I would never touch her like this; the smell made sure of that. I wanted her to show off her mud-slicked body, yet with a certain artistry. A panache.

  That’s right, Jax. Don’t just give it to me all at once.

  That combined feeling of yes and no must have been driving her insane. And in hindsight, it probably had been for a while now. I was nearly always in a state of semi-repressed desire, just as a guy hanging out with a bunch of ridiculously gorgeous women, but whether it was from their backgrounds, their instincts as Dolilim, or a simple lack of experience, none of them had any sense of timing.

  They could feel my every flush of arousal, and their natural inclination was to instantly respond. It was always sex now! Feel me! Touch me! Feed me! From their perspective, it must have seemed like I was always telling them no, the rare yes, an exception. So it was no surprise they had fallen into the habit of waiting until I initiated. But that was wrong, too. I absolutely wanted them to seduce me. Just… a little at a time. A touch, a tilt of a hip, a coy smile, all with no expectation that anything might come of it beyond an appreciative glance—until it inevitably did.

  But how was I supposed to have explained any of that? I was a man! Being out of touch with my emotions was the default setting. I could not be expected to teach a bunch of hypersexualized demons how I wanted to be flirted with when I barely knew that myself.

  So now, here was Jax, on the precipice of putting it all together thanks to a weird prank on the part of our antagonist. And if Xhinn had foreseen any of this, I was a moose.

  Of course, it should go without saying that precisely none of that was going through my head right then. I was just hoping I might get a nice striptease.

  Still staring intently, Jax let one of her shoulder straps slip down her arm, then held it there, breathing down my reaction. Her lip curled over a fang. “What be that?”

  But then Mia stalked up behind her. “What are you standing there for? He just wants to look at your—milk prunes!”

  She then yanked Jax’s dress to the ground.

  “Nay! That ain’t—” Startled, Jax’s hands flew up as though to cover herself, but she hesitated before they could get there, hovering in the middle and accomplishing nothing.

  Naturally, I was quite pleased with the view… and the uncharacteristic reaction, yet it was tinged with a mild undercurrent of disappointment. I could not have said why.

  “Blast it! Ye flamin’ cock-knobbler. I almost had sommat.”

  “What you have,” Mia retorted, “is to take a shot. First, you insist I use magic to clean us both, then stand there like a loon, as if it was some great mystery that our lord might appreciate your body. None of which is getting us any closer to freeing Lynnria. Honestly!”

  So saying, she wrestled her own mud-caked garment over her head, which ended up getting stuck on her antlers and driving what slop was still clinging to it inexorably toward her face—all while shouting with increasing panic and dancing about, stark naked from the neck down. Together with Jax, it drove the wild eroticism of the moment down a few notches, but it kept a certain amount of that cheesecake fun.

  Jax glared. “What shot?! Bloody nose-blind wench. Ye’d not be saying that if—” Groaning, she cast a weary glance my way, then mercifully stomped over to help. “Here, leave off. Ye’re making it worse.”

  “She’s right though, Jax,” I called from the side, amusedly watching as the two devolved into a full-on mud-wrestling match. “That was very off-topic.”

  “Ye just wanna see me thump a tit!”

  “Jax, you’ve got my ear. Ow! Ow, I said!”

  “So hold still! Ye keep slipping about,” she growled.

  “Yeah? Obviously,” I agreed, ignoring the side exchange. “But I guess there’s nothing in the rules that says I have to watch. I could turn away if you’d rather…”

  “Now ye be talking rot?! What be the point if’n ye do nay watch?”

  “To keep you on-topic?” I suggested. I swear, these people.

  “That ain’t any kind of shot! It’s supposed to be—”

  “Jax! Jax, that’s my hair. You’re pulling my hair!”

  “Bloody… why did ye make the hole so small?! Ye know’d ye got horns.” Distracted, she turned back to me. “—supposed to be reward and punishment in one. Else it ain’t a game!”

  She had a point. Though I was having trouble seeing what the downside of my giving them oral was supposed to be. She could not think I disliked it, could she?

  I waved the thought away. Entertaining though it was, none of this was getting us any closer to freeing Lynnria.

  What did we do wrong?

  I felt sure we were on the right track. Arx was a Siren. She sang. She even had a skill to lure people to their doom… sort of.

  Although, from that angle, Lynnria was an Engraver. But she did not really do all that much Engraving. Not yet, anyway. Poison was just one of her peripheral skills.

  “Hmm…”

  For a moment, I let my eyes passively follow the jiggling display, not really thinking of anything in particular beyond a subconscious appreciation for the scene. I was drawing a complete blank on this.

  “Hmm, hmm, hmm…”

  “You should just give up,” a familiar voice suddenly advised. I knew there was nothing there, but the urge to find the person whispering in my ear was hard to ignore. “You’re only humiliating yourselves. I almost feel sorry for you.”

  I let out a puff in her general direction, like I was blowing a fly away. “There you are. I was expecting one of you to come gloating sooner or later. Don’t you worry. We’ll get it. There’ll be no rape today.”

  “Don’t be like that,” the voice pouted. “I would make certain you enjoyed it. Every. Single. Second… of the rest of your life.”

  I ignored her mad cackling. I knew Mia should have been more specific.

  “You’re not making a very persuasive case…”

  She made a sound of acknowledgment that was not unlike a cat’s meow. “Ah, but what if I sweetened the pot?” she asked. “What if I told you Xyn isn’t the only one who wants out?”

  I had to think about that one. “You’re saying…”

  “Exactly. Just because I get to have my way with you doesn’t mean you need to stay here,” she explained. “Though… I would need a body.”

  I blinked. “You don’t have one?”

  She seemed to hesitate. Apparently, we had both noticed her blunder at the same instant. “Not… Not at the moment, no.”

  “So… what did you expect to happen if we gave up? I’d have to owe you one?” I frowned. “Actually, hold on. What is Xhinn’s take on all of this? She would just let you have your way with me? Forever? And she wouldn’t get involved?”

  “Alright, fine! Escape was my plan from the beginning. And don’t think I’m the only one getting ideas—plenty of us saw what you did and rumors have a way of spreading around here. Just the hint of enrobing in a vessel absent Mother’s influence… We might even be able to leave without you defeating us first!”

  My left eyebrow climbed upward. Intriguing.

  “So you just want out? That’s it? No sex?”

  She chuckled. “Let’s not get ahead of ourselves, sweetling. A deal’s a deal. Make no mistake: should you fail, you… belong… to me. I’ll just have to give you some free time so Mother doesn’t interfere.”

  “And if I don’t hand over a body?”

  Her answer was immediate. “You will…”

  From her suggestive tone, she already had a plan in place to force my hand. Obviously, she would have a hard time affecting me in a physical sense, but there was no telling how much power she might have over the local environment. I had seen the kinds of things Faen could do around here.

  “Yeah, well, we haven’t given up just yet.”

  If she thought I could not tolerate a little humiliation, she had another think coming. Pretty much my entire high school experience had been on the wrong side of Freddie Mercury’s chants of ‘We Will Rock You.’ In four years, our football team won something like three games. Total. And that trend did not improve going into college, either in sports or on a personal level.

  Jax had been the one to take my virginity, after all.

  With a roar, my First finally tore the filthy tunic from Mia’s antlers, wadded it up, and spiked it to the ground. “There!”

  Mia howled in anguish. “My dress! You ripped my dress!”

  “Dress? Fah! A tarp-shaped choker, more like, and half-sewage besides,” Jax returned. “Now get this shite off us afore I rip me own skin off! Now it’s drying, it feels like ants be crawling over me.”

  “Uh huh,” the voice whispered again, trailing away. “I’ll be seeing you soon… lover.”

  It occurred to me that she had never actually introduced herself. And it was not like I knew her face. If some other Faen happened to show up, claiming to be her, how was I supposed to know the difference? And for that matter, how was I supposed to claim my prize if we won this bet? It was not like I could track her down and force the issue.

  Why did she even show up? To gloat? I had to suppose softening the blow of our loss here had some strategic merit, but she could not have thought I would be tempted by the allure of more women. I would almost rather she raped me and be done with than deal with that… even if the added Life pool would have made feeding time easier.

  It was a positive feedback-loop kind of situation, but never mind that.

  What if the Queen had put her up to it? She had let some interesting tidbits slip, and it was certainly Her M.O. to weave hints into what you thought was casual conversation. I already knew the Faen were interested in Mia’s body, and now I knew why. The question was: what advantage could my knowing that have for Her?

  Hmm…

  It was an interesting question, but what if the Faen had shown up for a different reason? What if she had been trying to distract me? Had I been about to stumble on the correct answer… without realizing?

  I scoffed. There’s no way.

  But if I had been… “What was I thinking about?”

  “I’ll tell ye what ye wasn’t thinking,” Jax barked, stalking muddy, naked, and jiggling closer. “Ye wasn’t thinking about returning no favors. Don’t think I ain’t felt yer eyes all over me, watching me mad as hell and flopping about, while ye muttered and hummed all by yer lonesome. Ye think I ain’t got eyes, too?”

  “Uh…” I took an involuntary step back.

  “Selfish, be what it is. Selfish! Now, off with it! Ye got mud on ye, same as us, and I wanna see me some man flesh.”

  I blinked. And then smiled.

  Sometimes it was nice to have a woman put on a sultry little striptease for you… and sometimes it was nice for an enraged, mud-drenched demon to demand to see your dick.

  “Off with it!” she yelled again.

  “Hmm…” I murmured, playing it coy. “You know, you catch more flies with honey.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?” she growled. “I don’t want flies. I want yer body! I want my man. Feeling ye lusting at me… not wanting me to touch ye… Bugger Lynnria! What about the ache yer putting ‘twixt my legs? Ye ever think of that? I be First, not her, and I’ll hear no more humming about it! That be Arx’s thing, any—”

  She froze, eyes springing wide, even as I gasped with realization.

  Of course! That was what the Faen had tried to distract me from. I had been humming. And not only that, the answer had been in the poem all along. I had thought it was just the solution to the bears, but no! Stinking double meanings.

  “Whisper soft! Humming!”