“Pardon,” Gawain croaked, blinking back tears from the corners of his eyes as he looked up to Jack.
Jack knew full well he’d done nothing to require a pardon and murmured as much as he bent to reward his stalwart efforts with a kiss. Gawain melted into it and gave a sigh as Jack withdrew.
Butcher, after first seeing to it that Gawain was truly all right, took up his post on his knees before Jack. He had none of Gawain’s bashful hesitance. He took the cock into his mouth with a confidence even Jack himself couldn’t claim. His already-sharp cheeks honed their edge as they hollowed around Jack’s prick. His tongue delved beneath the foreskin to encircle his cock-head in a snare of sensation, paying particular tribute to the slit, before sliding along the vein to lavish the shaft with ravenous fury. It was all Jack could to do to keep his hold on the rim behind him. If his knuckles clenched any tighter he felt sure the wood would crack.
Gawain kept kissing him all the while with a needful hunger Jack eagerly indulged. The gentle affections of Gawain above and the furious devouring of Butcher below threatened to tear Jack in twain; a fate he would hap’ly succumb to.
Then Butcher let Jack slip out of him just long enough to say in his low rumbling burr, “You can be a bit rougher, if you’d like.”
Jack laughed to hear his own words echoed back to him. He took Butcher up on his offer and drew his hair into his fist. Butcher groaned around him—a sensation which threatened tobring Jack to his knees as well. He thrust into his throat. Butcher greedily swallowed him down. It wouldn’t take much more to bring Jack to the brink.
But as he wrapped what felt like a yard of raven locks around his fist, it revealed something he’d not yet noticed in all their intimate acquaintance.
Jack had seen many things over the years.
Knife-pointed ears, however, didn’t number among them.
The shock tightened Jack’s grip. Another long low moan reverberated through Butcher’s throat, and this, combined with the thrill of the unknown, sent Jack over the edge of exhilarating ecstasy.
He returned to himself—still upright by some miracle—to behold Gawain drawing Butcher up to seize his mouth in a kiss. Gawain’s ears, Jack noted, had the same rounded crests as his own.
Jack braced his palms against the rim of the hollow stump behind to keep himself upright. Gawain and Butcher seemed in no hurry to end their embrace.
Which gave Jack a moment to consider all he’d seen.
A sane man would take the sum of the facts—an unknown path through an unfamiliar wood, with vines that seemed to slither away from a fellow as he walked along, ending at a cottage filled with earthly delights, and at least one host bearing ears like arrowheads—and conclude he’d either run mad or fallen into some trap. Distant echoes of a ballad about a man taken by the fae for a sacrificial All Hallows Eve tithe floated through Jack’s mind.
But Jack hadn’t entered the Horse Guards because he preferred a life without the spice of danger. And besides, his hosts had proved beyond polite thus far, and promised to see him safely back to familiar territory.
Gawain and Butcher broke off their kiss and turned to Jack.
“Shall we?” asked Gawain, glancing at the door.
Jack nodded, and Butcher led them all out.
By the light of day, Jack beheld the meadow he remembered from last night. Now, however, he could clearly see the wall of thorns surrounding it.
He could likewise clearly see how, when Butcher went down the overgrown path, the thorned vines withdrew into an arched tunnel.
Jack’s heart did an acrobatic flip which left him somewhat light-headed. Still, he steeled his nerve and gave no hint he thought any of this out of the ordinary, even as he followed a knife-eared man through a most unnatural forest.
Within a quarter-hour the thorns withdrew altogether. Jack found himself beneath a canopy of more familiar-looking trees, though still far more ancient than anything in Hyde Park. The autumn leaves flickered like flames in the breeze some hundred feet above his head. The trunks which bore them stood far too broad for any man, let alone Jack, to span their width with his arms.
The path led on until the forest opened into a mossy clearing filled with stone ruins. Half-tumbled walls with arrow-slits and peaked windows missing their leaded glass, staircases and towers crumbling before they reached their full height and thus climbing upward into nothing, gateways and arches bereft of their walls and leading nowhere. And yet, it all held a nagging familiarity in the back of Jack’s mind.
Butcher and Gawain walked past the ruined monuments toward a ring of stones on the ground; the remains of an ancient well, now filled up with dirt and spilling ferns rather than water. There they halted and turned to regard Jack.
“This portal will take you home,” Butcher declared.
Jack glanced to the ruined well and back up to his hosts. He could read nothing in Butcher’s stoic face. Gawain appeareda touch apologetic, like one who knew his companion had said something odd yet couldn’t contradict it. Jack supposed he might as well trust them this one step further.
“Good morning, then,” said Jack. “I’m game for another round, if you ever find yourselves a-wanderin’ in search of good company.”
“Likewise,” Gawain blurted. He coloured soon after, seeming to judge his own speech as rather over-eager, though Jack found his agreement as charming as his flush.
“You’ll know where to find us,” said Butcher.
Jack cocked his head at that. But Butcher seemed confident in what he’d said, so with a shrug, Jack bid them farewell and stepped into the ring.
