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FIVE

Solierre shivered as Marcel dumped another bucket of water over the naked bunny's head, but not because of the cold. Well, partly because of the cold, but mostly from shock. He knew he was in shock, but that didn't make the shock go away at all. That was odd, wasn't it? One would think being aware of it would lessen the effect, but no. Solierre's mind was rebelling against what he had just witnessed, and at the same time he was analyzing his own reaction, aware the entire time that he was directing his thoughts inward so that he wouldn't have to accept what had happened.

Turick's cum still dripped from his body, sticking to his ears and his chin no matter how Marcel scrubbed. The priest apprentice was a young green lizard, and had an easier time of washing his scales clean, but the water only seemed to make the semen covering Solierre runnier, doing nothing to actually remove it.

The tiger-striped rabbit held his arms out to his sides, unable to make them move with enough coordination to help the lizard behind him as the other male combed his smooth fingers through the bunny's clumped arm fur.

"You aren't a particularly religious rabbit, are you?" Marcel asked quietly. Marcel was always quiet.

"Huh?" Solierre could barely manage more than a dull grunt in response.

"I haven't seen you at evening mass once since you arrived here, you know." The lizard dug both hands into Solierre's elbow, trying to work free cum that had seeped in up to the skin. "I'm not accusing you or anything, just mentioning."

"Oh." The rabbit stared at the temple's back wall, careful not to move any more than he had to. He could feel a string of cum dangling from his chin sway back and forth when he moved. "I guess I'm not."

"That's okay. Between you and me," Marcel murmured, working his way up and down the rabbit's forearm, "I'm not, either. Not anymore, anyway." The lizard flung a clump of cum free, needing to shake his paw out to the side vigorously to slough the sticky fluids off his fingers.

"You're not?" Solierre asked dully.

"Not really. I still believe in the gods, in good and evil and all that, but some of the specific stories in the Teachings...well, they focus on the wrong morals. There are some that Reverend Parser won't even bring up in evening mass because they're so obviously wrong." He stroked both paws down the rabbit's striped arm, trying to simply wring all the cum out of Solierre's fur. It wasn't working. "I'll probably ask to change fields soon."

That was a confession Solierre had never thought to hear from a priest's apprentice. The clergy in his home village had been adamant that every word in the Teachings was the voice of the gods, infallible and uncontestable. "You're sure?" He wanted to ask why Marcel was telling him this now, but maybe it was the lizard's own way of coping. Solierre wouldn't want someone to try to stop him from coping, if he could find something that helped burn the image of Lev bursting apart from his mind.

"Yeah." They were quiet for a while. Marcel took a moment to fetch more water from a nearby well, leaving Solierre naked and shivering behind the temple, wishing his tail was long enough to hide at least his butt from view. No one else was nearby, but they were outside, and anybody could walk around the building's corner. The lizard didn't take long, though, and soon another bucket's worth of icy water was cascading over Solierre's shoulders, drawing a sharp gasp from the bunny. "But like I said," Marcel went on, "I still believe in good and evil, in spirits and devils and gods and such. And what we just saw..."

"It was evil," Solierre finished for him while the lizard got to work on his other arm. The rabbit grimaced, feeling that cum string bobbling around under his chin again as he spoke, and reached up with his free arm to swipe his muzzle clean. The cum caught between his finger and thumb, webbing out when he spread the digits, and rubbing his fingerpads together only made the thick fluid roll around until it felt like watery rubber cement. He couldn't get it off his paw.

"Yes, but not just Turick's actions," Marcel said. "I've never felt anything like it before, but I swear there was evil in the room with us. Present and manifest, its own entity."

"You mean that cinnamon smell?" Solierre asked, his nose twitching. That smell was rolling off of his cum-covered fur in waves. He didn't think he'd ever be rid of it.

Marcel shook his head. "That was physical, whatever it was, at least the smell itself, though there was certainly something unnatural behind it. What I'm talking about was...something else. Something dark, like an ambient malice. Couldn't you feel it?"

All Solierre had felt was the blast of cum exploding out from Lev's ruptured body. He gulped, still able to taste that cum in his mouth, but just shook his head with a simple, "No." Then, after a moment's thought, he added, "But I believe you when you say you did. There was some sort of foul magic at work there, everyone knows it. How could that not feel evil?"

Marcel nodded with a sigh, then reached up for Solierre's sensitive ears, bringing another shudder to the bunny. "I told you before, let me handle this. You'll just get it all over your paws and then smear it around."

The rabbit's shoulders slumped, but he nodded, staring at the ground in front of his cum-slathered feet. "Do you think the other huntsmen will be able to bring Turick back?" The five hunstmen apprentices had gathered their weapons and set out after the leopard as soon as they found out what happened. That had been about an hour ago.

Marcel was quiet for a moment, then murmured, "I don't think they mean to bring Turick back. Not alive."

Solierre flexed his toes, watching semen stretch and jiggle between them. "Turick's a victim in all this, too, somehow, isn't he?" He'd liked Turick, even if the leopard's flirting could get a little heavy-handed at times. The rabbit might not admit it out loud, but the flirting might have had to do with why he liked the feline so much in the first place.

"I don't know, Sol." Marcel scraped a big clump of semen from the inside of Solierre's ear, and the rabbit gasped, able to hear much better out of that ear now. "But I hope so. What he did to Lev, that wasn't Turick. That cat's ornery enough to get in all kinds of trouble, but he'd never outright rape someone. But the evil I sensed...it was coming from Turick."

The rabbit just sighed again.

"It'll be okay," Marcel assured him. "If you have faith in anything at all, have faith in that." He grunted as his scaled fingers stuck to a thick clump on the back of Solierre's ear, making the rabbit's head jerk backward jarringly. "But damned if this isn't going to take a while."

***

Solierre couldn't sleep. Even after hours of Marcel's scrubbing, the cinnamon scent in the rabbit's fur lingered, and every breath brought back the traumatic memories from the apothecary. The rabbit sat up, running his paws over his thick head fur and over his upright ears. His fur was clean and dry, now, fluffed up messily from all his tossing and turning. But still that cinnamon aroma was everywhere.

He tossed off the thick blanket, blinking around himself at the unfamiliar room. Marcel had let him curl up at the foot of the lizard's bed in a small room in the temple once he realized how badly Solierre didn't want to return to the bakery alone. More, the lizard had let the rabbit borrow some of his clothes, though Solierre had needed to take off the uncomfortable pants before trying to sleep. The rabbit found them now where he'd folded them beside him and pulled the white linen over his legs, wincing at the tight squeeze. It felt like his thighs would rip through the thin cloth, to say nothing of the bunny's broad hips, but the linen was just stretchy enough to hug around his legs without splitting at the seams.

Getting to his feet, he walked out to the temple proper, padding as quietly as he could over the cold stone floor so as not to wake Marcel, and sat on one of the long, hard benches, staring at the backs of his knees, trying not to think anything at all. It was a futile effort.

The hunstmen apprentices never came back that night. No one else knew what to do, no one aside from Colem, a golden retriever and the older of the two mage apprentices in the village, but he was locked up in the mage's hut and wouldn't explain his plan to anyone. All the other apprentices just milled about the village all evening, whispering rumors and fears to each other. Something always went wrong when the masters left for the craftsmeet, they'd warned Solierre, but he didn't think anything this bad had ever happened.

Solierre didn't trust Colem. That dog was more superstitious than the priesthood, and it was magic that had changed Turick in the first place. What good could throwing more dark magic at the problem do?

The rabbit stayed there in the temple until the first hints of dawn lit the stained glass windows, sitting hunched over with his eyelids drooping. He never fell asleep, but it was a sort of rest, at least. When he noticed daylight, however, he gave himself a shake and got back to his feet, groaning and rubbing at an ache in the small of his back from sitting still so long on that hard bench. He glanced toward Marcel's room, then walked down the aisle between benches and out the temple's front door, hoping some fresh air might waft away the lingering spice in the air around him.

The rabbit found himself looking toward the apothecary's shop and the forest beyond it, shivering as the chilly morning breeze blew at the oversized shirt he'd borrowed from Marcel. The cloth was draped around his skinny torso like a loose tent, except where it bunched over his short tail, the linen trousers beneath it a skintight contrast hugging embarrassingly snug around his plump bottom.

He kept remembering Turick's face, frightened and hungry, mortified and horny, all at the same time, and looking straight at Solierre as if begging for help. He could admit to himself that he had something of a crush on the leopard, or at least he used to, even if he had never confessed as much out loud. And Turick had been looking to Solierre for help.

The huntsmen didn't run after Turick to help the leopard, but to kill him, to deal with one of their own gone bad. Would anyone in the village actually do anything to help the leopard, or were they all too frightened?

Solierre was frightened, and that was a fact. He didn't know what he could possibly do to help, not without knowing what had happened to Turick in the first place.

And then it dawned on him, and he was astonished it had taken so long for him to realize: No one had even asked. They'd demanded to know what was wrong with the leopard, had shouted at him to stop what he was doing, but nobody had made any real effort to get answers from him.

Solierre looked toward the dimly lit trees past the apothecary again. He glanced back at the temple over his shoulder.

Then he set off for the woods.