Superbunny - Chapter Four

Story by Yntemid on SoFurry

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#5 of Superbunny

Happy new year, everyone!


Four

Patrick set the camera back on its shelf, then pulled two halves of a torn envelope from his pocket. He curled the pieces small enough to fit them through the cage's bars and let them drop on top of Xumaada's back.

Xu twisted around, glaring over his shoulder. "That had better have been a joke." But Patrick was already walking out of the storage room without a second look, and his shoes clomped away after he closed the door behind him.

Still grinding his hips helplessly, Sho plucked the torn envelope from his brother's back and fished out the two halves of the little paper that had been inside. He put the halves together, read the five simple words typed in their center in a small font, and closed his eyes, breathing deeply.

"What? What's it say?"

Shaking his head, Sho just turned the torn paper around, and Xu started cursing vehemently at what was written there: "The messenger is the delivery." Xu had been instructed to deliver that envelope to a bar across campus. They had planned to kidnap and sell Xumaada from the start. Sho had almost stopped that from happening, but he just hadn't gotten his brother out of the frat house quickly enough. Now they were both about to be auctioned off.

There were more loud shoesteps from the room outside, the den's carpet doing little to muffle them, and the storage room door opened again a moment later. This time it was Bakers, the brown-haired human, and he wasted no time striding toward them and picking up their cage, jostling both rabbits inside. Bakers paused for a moment, staring down at them. Sho was still grinding his crotch up against his brother, and Xu couldn't withstand an occasional nudge of his hips, as well. But the human just shook his head and started carrying them out into the den.

"All right, bunnies, here's how this is gonna go," the human told them. He was holding something in his other hand, a square white card, and his thumb ran across it while he spoke. "We're going to drive you somewhere, and neither one of you is going to make a single noise the entire time. If you do, if you so much as whisper or make the pet carrier jingle, we're going to feed you both to Tsari there." He nodded toward the mountain lion from last night, who had evidently been napping on one of the den's couches.

"Very funny," Xu muttered, but then Bakers pressed the other side of the card in his other hand against the bars of the cage's door. It was a photo, not just a card, and when Sho saw what was on it, he finally found it easy to stop humping at his brother. He almost threw up.

"Jesus..." Xumaada whispered, his eyes wide as saucers. So were Sho's for that matter. Tsari's upper body was in the picture, along with a squirrel. There was no way to tell whether the squirrel had been male or female, it was so mutilated. The photo was mostly red from all the blood, and before Sho looked away, stomach lurching, he was able to count at least three bones sticking from the squirrel's ruined body. Yet the photo had captured the squirrel mid-scream, still alive.

"Starting now," Bakers told them, folding the photo and stuffing it in his jeans pocket. "Not a single noise." Xumaada's mouth was open as if to say something else, but he slowly shut it, shuddering.

"Or, you know, you could be as loud as you want," Tsari said, getting to his feet and grinning toothily at them. "I promise I won't mind."

Bakers was carrying them upstairs to the frat house's first floor, muttering under his breath. "I don't have to like it. We keep his secrets and he gets rid of ours, but I don't have to like it." Tsari was following right behind him, and the mountain lion just chuckled.

Sho thought he was about to start hyperventilating. For the first time in ages, his morning wood was retreating back into his sheath after only one orgasm, even though the other rabbit's paws were still pinned under Sho's butt.

A small blanket was tossed over their cage in the frat house's living room, and with the newspapers underneath them, Sho couldn't see a thing. He could hear, though, as they were carried outside and down a short sidewalk before another door was opened. By the smell of it, they were in the garage, and sure enough, a car's door opened. "We good?" Patrick's voice came from outside the covered cage.

"We're good," Bakers told the other human.

Tsari added, "But hungry," probably for the rabbits' benefit.

Then their cage was set down, and a heavy-sounding door shut beside them, muffling all the other sounds in the car. There were more sounds of doors opening and closing, but going by his ears, Sho was pretty sure he and Xu were in the trunk.

The engine started, and they were soon moving.

Sho's paws were moving, too.

"Listen," Xumaada whispered, ignoring the sounds of crinkling paper above his back as Sho blindly, desperately, started folding and tearing at one half of the envelope Patrick had dropped into the cage. "This is bad, but eventually they're gonna slip up somehow, and we'll get a chance to get away. Only, there's no way to know what's gonna happen. Maybe only one of us escapes, I dunno. If it's me, my friends and I will find you and get you out of this, but if you're the one who gets away, you have to do something for me. Remember this address: 1325 Ackerman Street. If you get out, you have to promise me you'll go there and tell the people inside what happened. Do you promise?"

Distractedly, Sho nodded, bumping his chin against the other rabbit's shoulder. It wasn't easy folding a key when he was completely blind, but he'd made so many keys the night before, his gloved fingers were going through the motions by memory. He thought he had the paper key pretty close...

Xu sighed. "Good. I'm part of an organization called The Eye." Sho's fingers went still, and his breath caught in his throat. "We've been working to take down Mu Delta Rho for months, now. And now they've let slip a connection with Finnigan's Pub. That's where they're taking us, I bet; you need to tell my friends at The Eye that, too. Finnigan's."

Sho barely heard him. Xumaada was actually working for The Eye? All this time, he thought he was going to save his brother from a drug-dealing frat house, and Xu had been trying to take that frat house down for anthro trafficking the entire time? God_dammit!_Sho should have just stayed home. Xu probably had everything well in hand from the start, he always did. Why did Sho think that he could rescue his brother from anything? Xu never needed any help.

Except... If Xumaada had gotten those instructions from the frat boys without Sho interfering, he might have taken the envelope to Finnigan's just to scope the bar out, and if he'd made the delivery, he could have gotten abducted, after all, no matter what he was there trying to do. It was all supposition, though, and Sho couldn't help but feel like a useless idiot.

"Remember, 1325 Ackerman Street."

Huffing a frustrated breath, Sho slipped a paw between his belly and his brother's, holding the paper key with his other hand. The envelope's paper was a little thicker than the newspaper underneath them, but Sho could already tell it would just wind up twisting if he tried to use it as it was. So, trying not to think about what he was doing, he fished around between them, spearing his fingers into the damp spots on his abdomen. Most of the cum had already been soaked up by his costume, though, along with Xu's shirt and belly fur.

"What...what are you doing?" Xu asked, squirming on top of him. He always had been ticklish.

Sho ignored him. He was trying his very best not to think about what he was doing. His paw slipped lower, tucking down over their lower bellies. His brother's shaft had resheathed itself, as well, and there was a snail trail of rabbit cum down the middle of Sho's costume, but even with his paw covered by that glove, he could tell it was merely damp, now. Not enough for what he needed. Then a finger bumped against the top of the other rabbit's sheath.

"S-stop..."

Taking a deep breath and feeling his own sheath twitch, Sho closed his gloved paw around that squishy lump of fur and flesh. His brother's sheath was soft between his fingers, but the moment he grabbed ahold of it, it started plumping out and firming up. He couldn't waste any time thinking about just what he held inside his paw. Sho found its tip again with his thumb, holding the fleshy tube steady, and without any warning he wedged his thumb's tip inside the sheath's folds, keeping his paw where it was while his brother's back arched above him.

Xumaada hadn't had a chance to wipe himself clean after his climax. Sure enough, his sheath was absolutely full of goopy cum, thick enough that Sho could feel exactly what was squishing around his thumb even with his glove on. He swirled his thumb in a circle around the tip of his brother's concealed shaft, then pulled his paw back, tucking his thumb under his fingers to make sure he didn't lose any of the semen to the press of their lower bellies. He slipped his paw out to the side and lifted it above his brother's back again, feeling the sticky web that now covered part of his hand.

"What the hell?" Xu hissed between his teeth, but Sho was already smearing that cum into his paper key.

He remembered missing a spot of semen in his fur while cleaning up after a climax, once. It hadn't taken long to dry, and when it did, his fur had clumped together in a solid mass until he'd scrubbed it clean.

The key wasn't big, at all. It didn't need much, so once he'd covered every part of it, Sho wiped his paw on his brother's back, using that preppy green shirt to get as much of Xu's cum off his hand as he could. His other paw was waving the key between Xu's back and the top of the cage, air drying it as quickly as he could.

It would take a minute or two, at least, though, and that wasn't good. Not with Xu starting to hump him all over again.

"Dammit, why'd you do that?" Xu whispered harshly. "I had just managed to cool down!"

Sho could feel his brother's penis reemerging, climbing up between their bellies all over again. He tried his best to ignore it, to count the seconds as the cum-smeared key dried. He even forced himself to remember the photo of the murdered squirrel, and that did the trick, despite all of Xu's grinding thrusts. But then the other rabbit's paws dug into Sho's compression-suited ass again, and Sho's dick sprang back to life. Why did that keep happening? His butt had never been so sensitive before. But his brother's fingers felt so good when they continued kneading and gripping at his rear flesh.

Another minute. Just another minute.

He tried to think about what Patrick had said, that anthro rabbits were pretty much just sex toys. It pissed Sho off, and he would have done anything to prove the human wrong, but it only took a couple more squeezes to his rump before his shaft was fully unsheathed and re-dampening the front of his costume. In that moment, it felt like Patrick was all too right, like Sho was completely helpless to deny his instincts.

He gritted his teeth, wishing the feeling of another rabbit thrusting and bucking against him didn't feel so right, wishing it didn't seem like something more would have been even better. But it did feel good, Sho did want more, and there was no getting around it.

The rabbit shook his masked head, winced when the motion tugged at the ears pinned under his shoulders, and used that discomfort to distract him from his brother's maleness sliding against his belly. That would have to be long enough. It was a short drive across campus, and they didn't have much more time lift. Slipping the paw holding the cum-slathered key up past his brother's face and shoulder, Sho fished around blindly with the fingers of his other paw until he found the lock past the thin bars of the cage's door, right beside his head. Going by touch wasn't easy, especially with those compression gloves on, but he moved the key out through a square opening in the mesh bars and angled it up, carefully prodding around until he found the keyhole.

A half-formed image tried to fill his thoughts as he slid the key up into the lock, and he found his hips had started gyrating up against his brother's once more. For a moment he couldn't move. The other rabbit's paws were working Sho's ass cheeks like a pair of stress balls, and god it felt good, even while the muscles ached under the gripping assault. Xu's fingers were slipping deeper between those cheeks, too, pushing the flexible fabric covering them further up underneath his tail. Sho shuddered, his cock throbbing, its small bulge twitching against his brother's exposed erection.

Having refused himself a second orgasm earlier, Sho suddenly found himself poised and tensed, his hips going still, the key and lock all but forgotten. His eyes went wide in the darkness, feeling his brother's squeezing, kneading fingers reaching steadily deeper into the crevice under Sho's tail.

And then there it was. Through the stretched fabric between Sho's rear cheeks, Xumaada's fingertip found his quivering tailhole. The rest of Xu's fingers still dug fiercely into Sho's inner buttock, but that single fingertip stayed where it was, pressing lightly and nestling into that heated, sensitive flesh.

That's all it took. Sho felt his orgasm surge from his tailhole forward. First his sphincter gave an instinctive clench, his backside flexing and clamping around nearly the entirety of his brother's paw, and pleasure coursed forward through Sho's taint, his balls spasming in their tight confines. Then he was spurting his second climax of the morning into his costume, his cum pooling in his belly button and soaking through the stretchy material over his abdomen.

Gasping, he found himself wishing his brother would press that fingertip just a little bit harder...

There was a click past his head, and distractedly Sho blinked in the darkness toward where his paw had just spasmed. Then his eyes widened. Still squirting out his orgasm, he pushed at the door above his face, but of course, it didn't go anywhere, not until his fingers fumbled awkwardly through the mesh cage, turned the unlocked padlock, and pushed it free. The thing thumped dully on the trunk's floor. Then the cage's door swung open easily. Paired with his climax, Sho could only stare blindly, stunned.

"Did you just...?" Xu mumbled. Still humping away, he lifted a paw away from Sho's backside to wave his arm past the other rabbit's head. Feeling open air where a cage's bars should have been, he breathed out, "No fucking way!" Then he was squeezing himself up and past Sho's chest, hips still grinding instinctively as he wriggled forward, pulling with his arms to escape the pet carrier at long last.

Sho could only lie there, fighting back a pang of regret when his brother's paws left his rump. He could still feel Xumaada's erection and ballsack pressing and scooting their way up Sho's belly and chest, but with his climax fading into another afterglow, it once again sank in just who those private parts belonged to, and he grimaced as a knot twisted in his belly. He could never, ever, let Xu know who was behind his mask.

At least his brother's knees were kicking the arousal out of Sho, digging into his thighs, then his groin and belly while Xu tried to wriggle his way to freedom. But Sho could still feel the other rabbit's exposed cock tip bump against his chin, and he barely heard Xu's muttered apology, turning his head to the side to let that turgid length slip up and past. Then his brother's plump balls were sitting on Sho's cheek, and he clenched his jaw, holding his breath and feeling the sheer _warmth_of them through his mask. "Your timing, though..." Xu murmured, just before giving one last, slow grind that absolutely plastered his sack down against the side of Sho's face, dick trapped between Xu's lower belly and Sho's head. It was only for a moment, but Sho felt a wet dollop of his brother's pre land on his ear before Xu pulled himself further, dragging his fluffy scrotum forcefully up across Sho's face until it dangled, wobbling, past his head.

"Not much room out here," Xumaada grunted, pulling his legs out with another few squirms. There was a metallic click as he set his paws back on the edges of the pet carrier once he was free. "Here..." With a grunt, he shoved against the cage, pushing it back to make more room, and once Sho heard the other rabbit step back, he set about pulling himself free, too. Sho had a much easier time of it, with only himself in the cage.

"All right, they're not going to expect us to be out and free like this," Xu said, but Sho had a hard time paying attention when he heard a steady fip fap fip fap coming from beside him. Hunched down under the trunk's low lid, his brother was jerking it right there, within arm's reach. Sho could smell rabbit arousal filling the cramped space, but that was coming from the sperm drooling down his belly fur as much as from Xumaada. "We're gonna need every bit of surprise we can get. Patrick's a good shot with that taser pistol, and I bet Tsari's as fast as he looks. As soon as the trunk opens, we jump out and book it, agreed? If only one of us gets away, the other can get to the Eye and tell them what happened. Agreed?"

Sho didn't say anything, of course. Though he was surprised that Xu trusted a bunch of conspiracy blog writers to mount a rescue before even mentioning the police. Instead, he fumbled at the edge of the trunk's low hood, trying to find a latch somewhere. When a thorough search found nothing useful, he just started pushing up against the low ceiling.

"Oh, for the love of..." Xu grumbled, after a few seconds of relative silence, the only sounds coming from the car's engine and his own masturbating. "Tap me twice if you agree."

With a silent huff, Sho gave up trying to force the trunk's door and reached out to pat his brother's shoulder twice. Even after what they'd done in the cage, it felt too strange to even touch Xu while the other rabbit was pawing off.

"All right." Fip fip fap fap fip... "Shouldn't take much longer..." He might as well have meant that for his orgasm, which overcame him with a series of wet, quiet splats after just a few more jerks of his paw. But sure enough, Sho felt the car turn in somewhere and slow to a stop. There was a rustle beside Sho as his brother tucked his balls and member back inside his shorts. "No way I could have run with that hardon."

The engine turned off. They could hear the car's doors open and shut, and heavy footsteps clomped over pavement toward the trunk. Sho's heart was pounding until he could feel it in his ears.

There was a chirp from the car, and the trunk's hood lifted to show a moonlit alleyway, the slightest hint of sunrise tinting the starlit sky above a dim purple. Both rabbits sprang out as soon as there was enough space, and Sho aimed his jump carefully between the silhouettes of two of their captors' bodies. An arm clipped his leg, sending him into a tumble, but he came up running, his ears swiveling back to a grunt, and heard his brother call out, "Go! Don't look ba--" before his voice was muffled by something.

Panting already, Sho did exactly that, and when he heard an almost feral snarl behind him, he darted to one side, seeing a campus street past the corner of a brickwork building. As light as he was, he changed directions in the blink of an eye, but a paw still managed to close around his ankle, and when Tsari's attempted tackle turned into a roll, Sho was pulled along for the ride.

Another paw gripped around the rabbit's throat, and when Tsari got back to his feet, he was laughing in delight, squeezing with both paws as he held Sho out in front of him. Sho tried to cry out, to call for help, but he could only wheeze past the thumb digging into his throat, the mountain lion's fingers clenching around nearly his entire neck. "Oh, I can't tell you how happy you've made me," Tsari rumbled. He was actually purring! "It's been so long since I've eaten a rabbit. And now I'll have two."

Sho could hear Patrick snap, "Tsari, inside," from somewhere behind him, but he couldn't make himself look away from the cougar's predatory eyes.

Tsari just kept chuckling while carrying the costumed rabbit after the others, choking the air right out of him. Sho couldn't draw in even the thinnest breath. "Will you go first, I wonder, or will you watch while I eat your boyfriend?" the feline purred. "I've been practicing swallowing my meals whole. So far I've never made it past the shoulders, and ending things there always takes the fun out of it. Makes a mess, too. But you both are tiny. I might be able to manage it."

Sho tried not to listen. He gripped at the cougar's wrist with both hands, trying to get Tsari to loosen his hold. The rabbit kicked with his free leg, but had no more luck against the cougar than he had against Jeffreys back at the frat house.

The feline brought Sho close to his face, running his tongue across sharp teeth. "But no. I think I'll have more fun tearing your meat off your legs. They do look so...juicy." He squeezed around Sho's ankle, but the rabbit barely felt it. He could see sparks at the edges of his vision as he was carried into a restaurant's small back kitchen. Not a restaurant, though, he remembered. A bar.

A door opened on the other side of the kitchen, and another human walked in, one Sho didn't recognize. He was middle-aged and skinny, and was wiping his hands off with a small towel. "Patrick," he greeted casually, looking over the two squirming rabbits before meeting Patrick's eyes. "You're usually more discreet than this."

"I did promise you a surprise," Patrick said wryly.

"And I told you I don't like surprises." He clomped across the kitchen to look Sho up and down, taking in the rabbit's superhero outfit without pause. "But two rabbits for the price of one..."

"Two for the price of two," Patrick corrected. "You'll more than make up for it in profits."

"Hey!" Tsari cut in. "You can't go back on your word, Patrick. You told them, if they caused any trouble at all, they're mine."

"Is that true?" the new human asked. "Did you tell them that?"

"It doesn't matter," Patrick said. "I promised you a surprise, as well, and that surprise was two rabbits. So long as you're willing to pay?"

"Oh, you'll get your money, kid." The middle-aged human chuckled, moving toward another door, not far from where Tsari held Sho.

Patrick just stood where he was. "I livestreamed a little advertisement for you. The bidding's scheduled for tomorrow at the usual time."

Bakers was clutching Xumaada to his chest calmly enough, a palm held over the struggling rabbit's short muzzle, but Tsari swung Sho out to the side, farther away from the older human. "Now hold on a second." He let go of Sho's ankle, and the rabbit swung down, but it was all he could do to hold onto the feline's thick wrist. He still hadn't drawn a single breath with that paw around his neck. "I know you keep your word, Patrick."

Patrick just gave the cougar a level stare. "I told the rabbits I would feed them to you, Tsari. I didn't tell you anything. Do you expect me to keep a promise made to a pair of critters?"

"Just leave me one of them," the mountain lion pressed. "I can be happy with that."

The middle-aged human was standing at the open door, a stairwell leading to a basement behind him. He folded his arms impatiently.

Patrick just stared at Tsari without saying anything else. That was it. Then the cougar let out a growl, and when the older human started heading into the basement with Bakers right behind him, Tsari followed with a grumbled, "This is bullshit." He took his frustration out on Sho's throat, squeezing even harder.

One of Sho's paws fell from the cougar's forearm, and he couldn't seem to get himself to reach up again. The stairwell was dimly lit already, but it was going almost black in the rabbit's swimming vision. He worked his jaw, opening and closing his mouth while his chest strained, but he still couldn't breathe.

He was carried through a large cellar and past another doorway, then down a second flight of stairs to a much smaller extra basement, this one cement-floored rather than tiled. Finally, the mountain lion tossed Sho against a hard wall, and by the time the rabbit gasped in a desperate breath, Tsari had already spun on his toes and was stalking his way back upstairs, Bakers following his thrashing tail with a sigh.

Sho rolled onto his hands and knees, staring at the gray cement underneath him while coughing and panting. Any time he tried to look up, his vision swam. He heard a door shut somewhere off to his left, but there were still the heavy clops of shoesteps coming from nearby. There was also a quiet clicking of claws on cement that he knew couldn't be coming from his brother.

"Stay where you are, both of you," the older human told them, then added, after a near-silent shuffle of Xumaada's paws, "Ah ah, I said stay." And then a low growl came from the middle of the room, and Xu's feet went silent.

Still dizzy, Sho made himself look toward the source of the growl. Standing there in the middle of an unfurnished basement was a huge feral dog. It stood a full three feet tall at the shoulder, at least, every bit as tall on all fours as Sho and Xumaada were standing on their toes, not counting their ears, and it looked like a short-furred German shepherd, or maybe a cross between that and a Rottweiler. With maybe a touch of wolf mixed in, the way it was baring its teeth at Xu.

"That's better," the human said calmly. "My name is Gregory. You may call me that, or sir. I recommend the latter. It will be good practice for you."

"Listen," Xu began, but the dog let out a loud, percussive bark that had Sho covering his socked ears before he could stop himself.

Gregory cleared his throat. "I did not give you permission to speak."

Xu looked like he was going to try again, scowling up at the human, but the feral dog let out another low growl, this one even more intimidating than the first, and Sho had to fight the urge to flatten himself back against the wall behind him. That instinct to cower made him curl his fingers into fists and take a challenging step toward the canine, but he stopped when it turned its brown-eyed glare on him instead and barked again.

Gregory sighed irritably. "This is Reiniger. He will be your minder for the next day or two. I suggest you learn to get along with him. It isn't hard. Just do as you're told."

Reiniger stopped growling and sat on his haunches in the middle of the room, but the dog was still splitting canine glowers between the two rabbits. Sho took a deep breath and made himself look away from the animal, taking in the rest of the room. There wasn't much to look at. A single, dingy mattress sat in the corner nearest the rabbits, and there was a small table standing against an adjacent wall with a digital camera plugged into the room's only outlet. There was a pale rock on the table, as well. An open doorway behind Sho led to a stark bathroom. The stairs led up to the next floor along the far wall across the room from Sho and Xu, and there were two lines taped across the cement floor between them and the stairs.

"You don't have many instructions you need to follow, and they're simple enough," Greg said, making his way to the table and the digital camera and talking while turning it on. "You see the two lines on the floor? You are not to cross them." A red light started flashing on and off on the front of the camera, and he angled it to get a clear view of the mattress, and much of the rest of that end of the room, as well. "If you cross the white line, Reiniger has instructions to haul you back to the proper side of the cellar using his teeth. He will not be gentle." The white line stretched across the room about six feet away from the back wall, leaving the rabbits only a quarter of the basement they were allowed to move around in. The other line, made of red tape, divided the cellar in half another six feet past the white. The stairs and the table were both on the other side of that.

"If you manage to cross the red line," Gregory said calmly, making a small adjustment to the camera's angle, "Reiniger will eat you."

It wasn't that Sho didn't believe the human, but he found himself rolling his eyes. First Tsari, now this dog? Was every human he met from now on going to threaten to feed him to something?

"Of course he will," Xu muttered, but as soon as he opened his mouth, Reiniger was snarling and growling again. Xumaada flinched back reflexively, but then he glared at the dog and snapped, "Oh, fuck off!" Surprisingly, Reiniger quieted down, but only to smile at Xumaada. It smiled, its lips curling upward, and showed even more teeth than when it had been snarling.

"Reiniger is a gen-modded canine," Gregory told them, walking over to the dog and petting between Reiniger's pointed ears. With the dog sitting and his head lifted, Greg barely even had to reach down. "One of the new breeds, first generation. He has heightened intelligence and stamina. His reflexes and strength are only average for a dog his size..." Reiniger huffed, his smile fading, and the glance he gave his owner looked indignant. "...But that means he is more than fast and strong enough to kill both of you."

Making his way back to the table, he picked up the rock next to the camera, and Sho's stomach lurched when the human turned it around. It wasn't a rock. It was an anthro skull, and he had a sickening feeling he knew what species it had belonged to. "And he's grown fond of the taste of rabbit," Gregory said. "If I were you, I wouldn't give him an excuse to make a meal of you. He hasn't been fed for a day and a half."

Gregory set the skull back down on the table, its empty eye sockets now staring blankly in the live rabbits' direction, and clomped back to the stairs across the room from them. For the first time, Sho noticed the pistol Greg wore in a black holster on his hip, like some kind of modern cowboy. "Wash yourselves up," he told them. "I expect you to be in pristine condition come tomorrow, though you can put your costume back on after you're clean." That last was meant for Sho, of course. Gregory started climbing the stairs. "Curiosity ought to drive up your price. And Reiniger. If you have to eat one of them, make sure to do it on camera. I'll be watching."

The human reached the top of the stairs, and there were four quiet beeps as he entered a pass code on the door at the top of them. Then he was gone, the door closing again behind him, and Sho and his brother were locked in a cellar with a hungry, biologically enhanced canine.

The rabbits looked at each other. Reiniger settled himself on his belly to watch them. Then Xumaada let out an aggravated breath and turned to the bathroom's open doorway.

"I wasn't lying after the game," he grumbled, as if there was nothing more important to worry about. "I've been holding it in all night."