I jerked back. It felt as though I had just experienced a real-life jump cut. One second everyone had been clapping, the next the world had shifted a hair to the left, and I found myself completely alone—and more than a little out of breath. Whatever I had done had pulled the cost straight out of my hide and left me doubled over like I had just been sucker punched in the kidney.

  “Guys?” I wheezed.

  Or I tried to. No actual sound emerged from my mouth.

  Nonplussed, I tried again. “Guys? Hello?”

  Nothing. The words had formed on my tongue; air had vibrated over my larynx, then zilch. It was as though I had accidentally broken… air!

  Abruptly, a disembodied fleshy something collided with my shoulder, and I jumped with fright.

  “Who was that?!” I tried to yell, flailing into the perfectly lit void. Which was when I discovered my hands were invisible as well. All of me was.

  Dread formed in my gut. “Ah, crap.”

  My impromptu ‘miracle’ had gone terribly awry. I had meant for the circle to block our collective presence from the world outside as a sort of one-way mirror—visible to one another, yet concealed from without—but in my haste, I had foolishly assumed that part was implied. I should have known better. Mia had warned that magic could often be a tad literal.

  And now we were a tad fucked. Without the ability to interact with one another, we were going to have a devil of a time even figuring out whether the coast was clear. None of us besides Fekinell could see our enemies, and we could not see her. I could not even touch her without turning the woman into pork rinds.

  The questing appendage found me again, and this time, I captured it. Claws… arm… going to the left. This has to be Jax. My fingers blindly wended their way up through her hair, bumped into the curl of her horn, found her face, and then awkwardly caught in her nostrils before I corrected their path down and over her lips—where they were promptly sucked inside.

  With my other hand, I guided her to my mouth and said, “Stop that!”

  “Nay be… muah-muah, Master,” is most of what I think she said on releasing me. It turns out I was not very good at reading lips by touch. “We something some fun, and… something.”

  There was no need to wonder at the contents of those missing somethings. Dolilim were going to Dolilim, no matter the situation, and her second hand was already busy trying to find my crotch before she had finished speaking. I figured it would be faster to let her molest me than force her to behave.

  “Jax, can you hear anything?”

  “What?”

  “Hear. Hear!” My hand fumbled through her hair and over her horn before I found the spear tip of her ear and wiggled it. “Can you hear?”

  “Ye can lick me ear something, Master,” she replied, punctuating the statement with a flirtatious demonstration once I found her lips again.

  I guess that answers that question. And Jax was not so great at reading lips either. Of course, by that point, she was vigorously working my cock over my robe—which reacted predictably.

  “Damn it, Jax! Mia just died!”

  “…ain’t wawa Mia something, Master,” she replied. “Them… princess? …be a something-some lot.”

  She mercifully pulled away from my dick, but only long enough to take the hand holding her to my lips and guide it to her breast.

  “There… not sure …that butter, Master?”

  Butter?! Butter… Maybe if it were room temperature and encased in an unusually soft latex balloon.

  I hesitated. Briefly. But then I figured, ‘Eh. Why not?’ It was a boob. If she was going to put my hand on it, I might as well give it an appreciative fondle. Sometimes a guy needs a stress ball, okay?

  “Can you find Fekinell?” I asked, kneading away.

  “Ye like something munch, Master?” She shook her chest so that her other boob collided with my hand.

  “What?” My head wobbled with confusion. “Fekinell. Fe-kin-ell! Your ser-vant!”

  Why am I yelling? Neat trick, though. Wish I could have seen it…

  Jax nipped at my fingertips, panting now. “I move ye, too, Master.”

  I groaned. This was getting us nowhere.

  Of course, Jax misinterpreted my groan as something altogether different—potentially on purpose—and redoubled her efforts. It was not helping me think.

  Uh… okay, this shouldn’t have interfered with Fekinell’s light-detection thing. She’ll know when it’s safe to move. It was anyone’s guess what would happen when we did, though. Either, uh… either we would, er…

  I gritted my teeth. “Nnn… slow down, Jax! You’re gonna give me a friction burn!”

  “What? Oily got track meet.”

  Whatever the hell she had actually meant, it resulted in her hand again pausing its ceaseless assault—just long enough for me to catch my breath—then she dove beneath my robe.

  “What?! No, Jax! No! Stop. Hey. Get—quit that!” That was about when her tongue found my ballsack. “Sto-sto… o-okay… Ooh.”

  I shifted my weight, struggling for balance. This is weird. I could see everything save what was actually happening. It was like being fellated by a ghost! As a ghost.

  Just about the point when I was settling in for the ride, something sharp poked my cheek.

  “Ow! Freaking… nerf herder.”

  Tap. Tap tap. Questing fingers tangled in my beard for a moment, and I quickly snatched them away before more damage could be done. No flames erupted, so I decided they must have belonged to Lynnria, and the next few seconds were a repeat of what had occurred with Jax. Minus the fellatio.

  “Can. You. Un-der-stand. Me. Lynn-ri-a?” I yelled. Why are you still shouting?!

  “YES!” She yelled back.

  Huh. I can kind of feel the vibrations. Maybe it did help?

  My eyes rolled back as an altogether different source of vibrations rocked my body. Demon Queen’s… tits, Jax! Don’t gargle them!

  “Where. Did. Ya-ts. Go?” she asked, still clearly screaming her head off. “She. Dis-a-peed.”

  Disapeed? My eyes screwed up in confusion. Oh. “We. All. Dis-a-ppeared.”

  She shook her head vigorously.

  “No! I. Was. Ho-deen. Her. Sho-der. Then. She. Puh-ed. A-wah.” I felt her hand pantomime something slipping from her grasp over my wrist. “I. Cat. Fine. Her!”

  My eyes went flat. If only someone could have seen them.

  Explaining would have taken too long, so I just put her hands on top of Jax’s head as she jackhammered away.

  “Seriously?!”

  What could I say? It was what it was. So, I just shrugged—then I moved her hand onto my shoulder and shrugged again.

  “She’s been too breed-y!” she yelled, starting to speak too fast in her agitation. “No idea… turn, damn it! I haven’t… missed that part …all day.”

  Jax being down to breed was a sky-is-blue type of statement, so I was not entirely sure what point Lynnria was trying to make. But then I mentally switched the B to a G, and the rest of the puzzle started to fit together.

  Her too, huh? Guess I shouldn’t be surprised. These people sure don’t take much time for grieving. Then again, I doubted Mia could ever truly die—in the normal sense of the word—else, she would not have been so ready to sacrifice herself. She had yet to pop back into my head though, and that had me at least mildly concerned.

  Maybe there’s a respawn timer? That would have been consistent with how summon deaths typically worked, but Mia was a categorically different type of creature. Unfortunately, the only person who might have known what that category’s rules were had just thrown herself into a living blender.

  Hmm… if that’s how it works, the next twenty-four hours are going to suck. Telepathy would have been a fantastic skill-pick right about now.

  But I could worry about that later. My current priority was to figure out how to navigate the rabbit problem while being functionally deaf, mute, and blind with a pair of girlfriends who were more interested in experiencing an invisible nut than with helping me.

  A shiver ran up my spine as Jax hit just the right spot.

  Focus. Focus…

  As long as none of us touched the flowers, the rabbits would have nothing to trigger them, and while we remained concealed, they should have nothing to attract them if we remained in one place too long. That was predicated on a lot of assumptions, but we were going to have a hell of a time testing them while our lives were on the line.

  Damn it! Fekinell would warn us if we needed to make a run for it, right? Yet another assumption. I did not even know if Fekinell was still nearby.

  “Ah. Oo. List-en-ing. To me?” Lynnria yelled, clearer this time. “It. Is. Ma. Turn!”

  I grunted. She was right, but I was pretty sure Jax would argue this fell under the First-gets-to-try-new-things-first clause. There was no way I was going to attempt explaining that given the circumstances, so I simply allowed a pulse of comfort to flow through my fingers and mouthed, ‘Wait.’ Then, for good measure, I traced my hand along the side of her face until I found the stub of her horn, where I took up a gentle massage.

  There. She can’t complain if her legs are jelly.

  Okay, question number… number one… I shivered and bit my lip. This was like running baseball stats through my head to endure until my partner was satisfied. Except I knew nothing about baseball, and the things I needed to think about were actually important!

  “Fucking-A, Jax! Can you give me a minute?” I yelled, knowing full well it was useless. The yelling was mostly for my benefit.

  Abandoning Lynnria’s horn massage—and thus losing her to the void—I yanked my robe free of Jax and tried to wrestle her off of me. It went about as well as you would expect. Even if she did not have me by the literal balls, she was easily twice my equal in Strength and heedless of my emotional state, so my attempt only landed me flat on my back and pinned while disembodied kisses rained down from above.

  Outside the circle.

  My moment of panic subsided upon realizing we were still invisible. And it actually answered one of our most pressing questions… if not in the way it should have been asked. Was the circle making us invisible, or had the circle made us invisible? Apparently, it was the latter: we had been the targets of a one-time spell, meaning we were now free to roam without fear of discovery.

  It also meant we might be stuck this way. Although…

  There had been no additional draws upon my pool of Life Energy. That probably meant the effect would end once the spell’s fuel ran out, which, if I were forced to guess, should happen somewhere between the next few minutes… and never—averaging out to around eight hours?

  I rolled my eyes. Well, that was a brilliant set of deductions, Hercule. Why am I getting all worked up over this, anyway? The most gorgeous redhead I’ve ever seen is—whoa, okay—is moving things along whether I like it or not. The only natural purplehead I’ve ever seen is out there blindly—foo! Nnn… Don’t squeeze so hard, Jax! …is out there blindly looking for me, hoping for more of the same. And to top it off, that blasted spell has got my stomach growling!

  And can I just take a moment to mention how unsettling it is to have your digestive and reproductive systems magically intertwined? Normal people think about having a nice chopped beef sandwich when they get hungry. With some chips, maybe a pickle on the side? If they are feeling greedy, they might throw in a refreshing cola to wash it down, but then they remember they are trying to watch their sugar and mentally switch over to a green tea or something equally repellent, which carries just enough of a dopamine hit from being a responsible adult that it almost makes up for the flavor. And that starts up the whole mental debate over whether to satisfy their craving or to actually be responsible and settle for those leftovers that have been getting perilously close to an unwilling sacrifice to the fungal gods.

  Not me. Oh, I still remembered craving those things. A large part of me still thought I should crave them. Instead, the first thing that popped into my head was burying my tongue into some pussy… followed by all the delectable side dishes that came with it. And that bothered me! A little. The stuff was basically a never-ending basket of tortilla chips around here, served with whatever variety of salsa I desired, so I never had much chance to dwell on it.

  Which might have been on purpose, come to think of it. My waitress was usually a redhead with a habit of sprinkling monosodium lust-amate over everything.

  Jax’s questing mouth finally found its way to mine, where she slapped my tongue with a leather glove.

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  I guess it’s a little late to be worrying about that.

  Since this was happening anyway, it was best I make the most of it. Sometimes, Jax and I could get this psychic, emotional-connection thing going. With that working, we might just be able to establish a semblance of communication. And if we could somehow push it to the level Arx and I had once achieved…

  Hmm… You’ve made a solid argument there, me.

  You know it! And with that done, we can move on to Lynnria’s Life-boob milk. We’ve been wanting to try that.

  I have been wanting to try that!

  It was not like she could deny us this time. We’re hungry! And from saving all of our lives.

  I always fed her when she was hungry…

  We need to find out just how concentrated that stuff is. Think of the time we could save! The scientific community must know!

  It must! It must!

  Plus, we’re invisible!

  No danger from the rabbits while we’re invisible.

  …I was thinking she would not be able to pull the embarrassment card if no one else could see us.

  Ah, okay. Pause. Wait, why would that be a problem?

  You think she’s going to just let us suck on her breasts in front of everyone?

  Well, if I got her in the mood first…

  Obviously, if we got her in the mood first. Nobody is arguing that. But what about Jax? She would never let her have a taste.

  …

  …

  …

  What?

  It was a little too far.

  A little too far?

  Just a little, yeah.

  Oh, drat. Vabbè… Nothing ventured, yes? Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have a bedroom to vandalize. Thump.

  I blinked in shock.

  It felt as though my mind had just experienced a blue screen of death, rebooted, and carried on like nothing had happened. Except all my programs had closed, and I was missing several minutes of work, which I now had to reconstruct from memory.

  “What the fuck was that?!”

  How I wished I had not been muted right then.

  Abruptly, Jax grabbed my ears and gave my head a shake—probably because I had been lying there like a dead fish while she did all the work. I had an excuse, but… shit, how do I even attempt to explain this? I would have had a hard time over a nice cup of cocoa, never mind while dealing with this crap!

  Had somebody climbed into my head? Mia had certainly implied the possibility, but it had not felt like the Demon Queen or anyone else I knew. It had felt like a normal back-and-forth with my own thoughts… one of which had been a pretty good idea, now that I considered it.

  Right. Pull yourself together, Donum. You can deal with your fracturing psyche later. It was not as though suspicious, unexplained bullshit was anything new. The important thing was that it had stopped. I was okay.

  But how was I supposed to establish a connection with Jax? Sex, obviously. I can check that part off. But what comes next?

  Every time I could recall it happening, I always wound up astonished by just how horny she was, and not the ‘I could do with a scratch and tickle to relax’ kind either. It was more the kind that would land you in a squad car on the wrong side of the tracks at three in the morning with a bag of something extremely questionable crammed up your hoo-ha—a fair bet for her current mood, given the circumstances.

  Okay, I guess I can check that part off, too.

  But what else? Was there some special requirement on her part? On my part? Not fighting her, at a minimum. Perhaps if I were simply open to it… what? Nature would take its course?

  It was one thing to say that and quite another to make it happen. Ye olde lizard brain could take over just fine when you were not paying attention, but the second you actually wanted to bring out your primitive side, those pesky higher-order thinking skills would get in the way every time. Concentration was ever the enemy of a man’s libido, which was the entire reason thinking about trivia helped with endurance.

  But how was I supposed to concentrate on not concentrating?

  Jax grabbed my hands and planted them firmly over her breasts.

  Okay, that helps. And now that I was on that line of thought, Jax could do more than help me appreciate her physically.

  Quickly, I slid my grip to her back and pulled her toward me, but not for a kiss. Instead, I tried speaking directly into her ear. I doubted it would be fully effective, but vibrations were happening. If I could transmit them directly to her eardrum, surely she could pick up something.

  I took a breath. “Make me—”

  She jerked away. Then, after giving me a hard squeeze, she slapped my chest. Confused, my hands quested back up toward her head, which she soon caught and pinned to the ground. A moment later, her lips came to my ear.

  “BWAH BWAH!”

  The unexpected thundering bass made me jerk just as she had. The words were completely unintelligible, of course, but my hypothesis had been correct. This was sound.

  “What?” I attempted to reply.

  “Dwohn yehn!”

  My eyes twitched from side to side, trying to parse her words. This was like listening to a subwoofer with the gain turned all the way up. Under water. Somehow, I had discovered a means of communication worse than lip-reading, Helen-Keller style.

  But I could at least do something about the volume.

  “Jax,” I tried again, vibrating my larynx as gently as I could without slipping into a whisper. “May-ke. Me. Hor-ny. … As. Har-duh. As. You. Can-nnn.”

  Once I had finished, she pulled haltingly away. Obviously, I could not see her face to understand why. Thinking, perhaps? Trying to interpret the message?

  The spell I had inadvertently saddled us with hung as a pall about our necks, muting and numbing everything. I could feel Jax atop me, feel the heat of her loins and the slick organ working at my flesh, but without the music of her call, the vision of her beauty, and the exquisite scent of her to cement it all together… I could not even describe it. It was like being caught between sleep and wakefulness. Jax had become a mere paralysis demon, forcing herself upon me in the middle of the night. I wanted to be into this, but there was just something, whether it be lingering anxiety or the lack of those key tactile markers, holding me back, trapping me within my own head.

  Then it all fell away. For one beautiful moment, I was again in the present. I could feel. I could not see or hear or smell, but I could feel! She was in my hands. I loved the touch of her. The softness of her skin. The sweeping curves, guiding my hands in and out.

  And I had her. Just her. My Jax.

  But only for a moment. Thoughts of my goal soon came rushing back, and with them, the lingering doubts and worries… if less severe.

  “Yike. Dat?” her voice sounded in my ear.

  I nodded into her cheek. “More.”

  She pulled away again, doubtless confused. And small wonder. I had never asked her to do this before and had only ever tolerated such tomfoolery at camp. She knew perfectly well now was not an appropriate time, and that I had been going along with it as a purely neutral participant. She must have sensed the change in my emotions and now needed to puzzle through the new flavors.

  My hands wandered upward again, where they briefly tangled with another set of fingers—Lynnria, I decided, recovered from my petting and blindly looking for me only to find Jax in my stead. There was not much I could do about that just yet. Jax might well have been hogging me today, but I at least had a chance at establishing some form of mind-to-mind connection with her. For now, that was all I could concern myself with… though if we succeeded, I resolved to burn the experience into my mind as well as I could.

  Lynnria held a fascination with this sort of thing that bordered on fetish, and she would want all the gory details.

  Come on, Jax. Help me lose myself within you. I hit her with a quick burst of pleasure, then a long, relaxing bed of comfort before letting it die away. Make me forget everything but satisfying you.

  Her hips began working over mine, urging me to continue, but I refused. Her teeth nipped at my cheek, but I turned away. Her lips quested for mine, but I gave her nothing. I told you what to do, Jax. Why don’t you listen? Just believe me. I want you to make me.

  Pulse… then nothing. Happiness… then silence. Comfort, then abandonment. Over and over, while her body writhed over mine, going slowly mad as I drove her ever on and up without so much as moving a muscle, without even a single moment of genuine physical connection. And then it hit me.

  Connection! That’s it! …oh, she’s gonna hate this.

  Without mercy, I clamped down on the bond between us, severing her from me completely.

  Jax froze.

  For a moment, it felt as though she was holding her breath. Then, her hands began scrabbling over my skin, slowly at first but with increasing intensity, increasing panic.

  Her lips found my ear. “No! No… no!”

  Lust slammed into me, harder than I had ever felt from her. Harder than I knew was possible, but… it was not working. This was wrong. I needed more than simple lust. I needed to lose myself within her just as she needed to lose herself within me—to truly join as one. But how to communicate that? I barely knew a word for it!

  Still, she was only doing as I had asked. She deserved something for her efforts, so I allowed her a brief respite, along with a quick dose of pleasure and comfort. But only a moment’s worth. Just as our lips began to intertwine in tearful relief, I severed her from me again.

  I felt her outcry through my skin more than I heard it.

  More lust came. So much, all I could think about was satisfying its call. Gripping the flesh at her hips, I pounded away at the apparent nothing above me while pale, half-remembered images of her danced through my mind. But now, I was not giving her what she wanted. My ardor meant nothing without our bond. Nothing had meaning anymore, and so she was forced to release me.

  Panting, I reestablished our connection with heavy doses of happiness and comfort behind it—only to clamp down a third time before either of us had the chance to catch our breath. But this time, I left just a sliver behind, a single thread for her to follow.

  I had no idea what I was doing or what the point of that was. This was all instinct. In truth, I had not known I even could sever our connection without Mia to provide the interface, let alone narrow it. Yet when I reached for the controls, they were just there, waiting for me. Somehow.

  Jax tugged and wrestled with the thread I had left behind like a fish on a hook, even as she shook me in a much more physical sense, pounding my shoulders over and over against the cobblestones. But I did not relent. I simply dribbled seeds of happiness, comfort, and pleasure into her, driving her deeper into desperation. I was the party behind a jammed door, love within a locked chest, everything she could have ever wanted… if only she could discover the password.

  “Stop it!” she sobbed into my ear, claws dimpling my flesh just hard enough to introduce a ghost of pain. “Please! I ain’t… muffled…what ye want.”

  I had no way of answering. I was an ensign on his first day on the bridge of the Enterprise, but instead of clear labels and helpful tooltips, the viewscreen had gone dark, leaving me to control the communications array with nothing but a screwdriver and bare wire. But I must have touched something to somewhere, because the next thing out of my mouth was as unexpected as it was incomprehensible nonsense.

  “The key can only open the lock if the gate is willing.”

  And now I’m speaking in riddles. The fuck, Donum?! Not only was it singularly unhelpful, the timing was atrocious. We could barely hear each other!

  I blamed the Demon Queen for this. It was the only explanation. Somehow, her influence had bored through my mind to leave these packets of chaos behind, to be revealed in moments of inattention and high stress. That or hanging out in so many Dungeons was slowly turning me into an idiot.

  However, at least something I had said had gotten through. Jax went completely still, and for a handful of seconds, I felt nothing but the beating of her heart through our joined lower halves.

  Then came a new emotion. Slowly. Building.

  It was one I knew well… yet rarely acknowledged. It was always there, resting at the pit of my stomach, useless as it was puzzling. Always. While I was alone. While I was with company. Having sex. There was no resolution for it. I could not be absolved of it. There could be no relief, and so I had long learned to push it away, ignored.

  Yet Jax had seen it, picked out and identified as the thirteenth spice within my emotional bucket of chicken. And for whatever reason, she had decided that the solution to the riddle I had posed was to confront me with this baffling aspect of my own humanity by dumping the entire bottle into the fry batter.

  I felt… lonely.

  Is that not ridiculous? Me? Even now?

  Still, a little I could tolerate. A lot? Not so much. Within half a breath, I was ready to rush into her arms, half-formed apologies tumbling from my lips, and as I wavered, the grip I had maintained upon our bond loosened. Jax yanked the line away instantly, pole and all—which she then commenced to rending to shreds in a fit of all-consuming rage.

  I may have been stretching the bounds of metaphor with that one—as neither of us was moving or in any way visible to one another—but it felt appropriate. Whatever door or orifice I had been using to restrict our bond was gone, ripped from its hinges and smashed. Even the frame was gone. I felt as though the mere suggestion of there being a wall to house it had been ruthlessly gnawed and scratched.

  Then came the current. From me. From her. Into her. Into me. Meeting somewhere in the middle, and swept to sea. Emotion and thought co-mingled in a confusing morass of consciousness, but as the waters calmed and the silt settled, sight returned. With it came awareness. And realization.

  We were Jax. We were Donum. We were one.

  Um… okay, no. That was an exaggeration.

  I had no idea why, but this was not the same as I had experienced with Arx. We were not one consciousness struggling to puppet two bodies. It was more… oh, how do I even describe it? There were no boundaries between us. There was no point where you could clearly define one from the other. Yet there was a distinct me and her. We were like… like a rainbow! Or a spectrum whose ends were flesh and blood. It only became difficult to define us where we met in the middle.

  I could see her thoughts as stray bits of consciousness floating through me. Her emotions were laid bare, coloring and coating everything. To say that Jax was livid was an understatement of profound proportions, but it only lasted as long as the misunderstanding persisted. As we were now, there could be no misunderstandings.

  I had not wanted to withhold myself from her; she realized. I had wanted this—a meeting of minds and hearts so that even in this, most total of darknesses, we would never be separated. Jax was ashamed to have allowed doubt to control her, ashamed of her fear… yet even that was soon washed away. Because I felt only elation. We had succeeded! And at the touch of my perceived glory, arousal swelled anew within her.

  That was when I realized something. Something I could never have realized before, something so utterly alien, it was nigh incomprehensible. Jax had not tackled me to the ground simply because this was all new and she was a lilim, therefore sex. That was in there too, but she had mainly mounted me because she had been proud.

  I had accomplished something impossible! Again! This time, in front of her ignorant cunt of a servant. Fekinell might not have shown it, and how could she given that we were blind and deaf to one another, but Jax knew—that strange, silver-blooded creature had been gobsmacked. Both by the spell I had cast and by Mia’s apparently blasphemous declaration of loyalty. And somehow, that elevation of my intrinsic value within an outsider’s eyes had made Jax’s womanhood absolutely flood with heat.

  I had no idea what to make of it. Nor did she. But then, she had stopped worrying about what made her nethers tick a long time ago. They idled at a dull purr pretty much constantly, and if something just so happened to step on the gas, so be it. She was always along for a ride.

  Still, to be aroused because your partner had gained in honor? Imagine getting a hard-on after your girlfriend got a promotion at work. Or kicked a soccer goal. I could see myself getting pumped or shouting with joy. But this? It was weird.

  Must be a girl thing.

  “Ifing yer saying so, Master,” her thought floated out to me. “Now can we be about it? If ye don’t start to pumping soon, I be like to lose it.”

  I smiled. I had known that, of course. And it turned out that knowing—viscerally feeling—just how turned on my partner had become was a particular turn-on for me.

  Oh, you’re going to lose it, all right. Just you wait.

  Jax whimpered.