“We’ve been talking about that,” Gavriel said. His eyes were hot on me, and I realized I was the only one naked. I pulled a small blanket around my torso, trying not to think about how I’d just had wild merging sex with Rumple while Gav was in the same room. But once I started thinking about it, my brain sort of skipped. All I could picture was Gavriel watching us, touching himself, Rumple asking him to hold my hair and fill my mouth while he pounded that thick, ridged cock into?—
“Feather!”
I blinked, then did a quick check. Both guys had erected substantial tent poles under their sheets, but neither looked happy about it. “Sorry. I’ll focus.”
Gavriel spoke through clenched teeth. “You need to get back to Mikhail and Righteous as soon as possible. Ideally, we could stay here longer, rest, and restore our powers from the box.”
“But while we would both get stronger,” Rumple said, “you would grow weaker. So we have to act soon.”
“We evacuated Sanctuary, right? There’s no one out there. So we just need to reach the gate and get through.” I sucked in a breath, an obvious problem shoving its way to the forefront of my sex-hazed brain. “But Rumple, your smut…” I considered his physical form. All the armor was gone, and he was a slightly lighter shade of charcoal, but he still had a whole lot of smut on him. “Are you going to be able to get through the Great Gate? I know Precious made it out, plus Sunny had a little smut, and she was fine…”
“We’ll worry about that later,” Rumple said, his voice heavy. I pushed down my anger as his ill-disguised intention to sacrifice himself at the gate resurfaced in his undercurrent of thought. Like I was going to letthathappen. “First, we must go by the Maker Hall. The naming chime is there. And, more importantly, the small portal to Earth that allows beings like Novices to travel to that realm in possession of their powers.” The room was silent, and I realized what he meant.
If the shadows found that little open doorway, they could get to Earth as corporeal beings, not just ephemeral ones. Their power would be as strong as a Protector, but twisting the balance away from good. “They’ll wreak havoc on Earth. Shizz on toast.”
“Indeed,” Gavriel agreed. “The hallways are crawling with shadows. The larger beast, from what Rafe can sense, has broken itself into many smaller entities, and is going through the realm in a rather systematic way. Looking for something, we think.”
“Can it get through the angelic locks?”
Gavriel frowned. “It might be able to get through Rafe’s. But not mine, or yours. It doesn’t know those keys. The Maker Hall is safe for now.”
“Why wouldRumple’slocks be the problem?” I asked, alarmed. “How would the shadows know his keys?”
“Well, I sort of… have a portion of the void inside me.” Rumple ducked his head sheepishly. “I more or less ingested it when I was in the Abyss, and there’s no way to get it all ou?—”
“What the actualfork,Rumple!” I yelled, jumping off the bed and looking down at my privates. “Did you give me a spiritual STD? Void scabies? What the heck kind of antibiotics is this gonna take?”
They both sighed, rubbing their foreheads like they were getting twin headaches. Well, a headache sounded a lot better thanshadow crabs.Bitsy was itching just at the thought. Witha growl, I stalked toward Rumple. He saw the danger and began backing away.
“Rumpelstiltskin Johnson the Third, are you telling me that it wasn’t just you in bed with me today? Are you honest to glob going to tell me I did the dirty with the VOID?!”
Gavriel caught me from behind, his arms swooping under my armpits and holding me back just as I was about to leap on Rumple and show him what all those WWE reruns had taught me. Piledrivers and hulk smashes and crab sandwiches. All of it.
“Calm down, Feather. You’re getting hysterical.”
Across the room, Rumple’s eyes went wide, and then he started laughing. “Bad move, Gav. Never, ever say that to a woman.”
I was already in motion, but Gavriel realized what he’d said and shifted. Instead of my heel connecting with his balls, it hit his thigh.
“Ow!” How could a thigh be that muscly and hard? “You damaged my foot with your tree trunk legs!” With an amused snort, Gavriel set me on the sofa, where I rubbed at the sore spot on my heel.
“I didn’t let the void interfere when we were together, Feather,” Rumple said, sitting just far enough away that I couldn’t smack him. “It surfaced a couple of times when we were… warming up. But I suppressed it during. And honestly, I’m positive it wasn’t thinking about anything other than how you felt?—”
I slapped my hands over my ears.I fucked the void.
“Technically, you already had a little of the, um, void in you, love,” Rumple admitted sheepishly. “When I remade you in the Abyss, some of the smut I carried found its way into your body…”
I relaxed a little, remembering. “So, I was already void-inoculated? Like, I had some inactive Abyss germs inside me?”
“Inactive?” Gavriel scoffed. “Look at you. It’s moving around right no—” He stopped talking when Rumple shot him a glare.
“Nope,” I said, firmly denying what Gavriel had suggested. “It’s like a vaccine. Or the Borg. Any Abyss material has been fully assimilated.” I’d always known that believing I was safe from danger was the most important part of keeping myself from turning into a woman-shaped deer in the headlights of certain death. I was determined to think of myself as void-vaccinated, not void-contaminated. Anyway, the thought of having some of Rumple’s genetic material in me wasn’t entirely…
Oh, cold crap on a stale cracker.
Genetic material.
“I forked my brother.”I stared at Rumple’s groin and tried to summon actual remorse. All I could manage was horror and humiliation. My cheeks felt like they were going to burst into flames.
