Bunnygirls Read online

  Bunnygirls

  Book 1

  Simon Archer

  Contents

  1. Foot Masseuse

  2. Hopper

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  10. William Knight

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  30. Regent Silverfang

  A Note from the Author

  1

  Foot Masseuse

  This is what I deserve, I thought. It was just like me to push too far. What’s a Bunny like me doing, disobeying my master? I could do nothing but lay suspended by the steel cables around my arms and midsection, keeping me in place in the air above the giant hole below me. My tan house servant’s rags were torn, ravaged by the Wolves who chained me up. The shredded clothes revealed the palest of white fur, thin enough to be just skin, at my shoulders and up my thighs, dangling below me as she merely hung. I could have passed for one of those hairless Bunnies. They were so strong and confident. One of those girls would have never been caught. I just was a light-furred foot masseuse before, but now that I’d angered my master and been sent to this prison, I didn’t know what I would be called. My pink nose twitched nervously as my ears, long stretching out of my short pixie-cut hair, drooped in despair. If I had just kept to myself, I would never have been in this nightmare. I wished it was a nightmare. I wished I could just wake up and that everything would go back to normal.

  The encircling stone patterning twirled out to the stone columns holding up the ceiling in this wide abyssal silo of a chamber. Though I couldn’t quite turn myself around, I could see my captors, five lumbering Wolf guards encircling the entrance, each easily twice my height or more. They stood on their hind legs, casually stomping about the room as they patrolled it, constantly keeping watch over both the door and their captive. Their hunched backs seated both their broad shoulders and their wolfish heads, an exaggeration of viciousness in every hungry canine and furled snout. The shaggy fur that coated them thinned at the ends of the arms, long and thick like a gorilla’s, and their legs, as powerfully wolfish as their heads. Black claws stretched out from both their paws on their hind legs and the claws in their primate-like hands. Covering all of this, they wore thin leather armors, confident that this was more than enough to protect against another Wolf’s attacks. A tail of wild fur poked out from a hole in the armor, swaying behind each of them.

  What could I do against masters like that? What could any Rabbit do?

  Breaking the silence, an unearthly buzzing swelled and echoed throughout the room, growing louder and louder, as the hole beneath me glowed a purplish hue. The cables feeding out of the hole began to glow as well as the purple light quickly wormed up their lengths, spreading to the anchor points and up to where I was held. I shrieked as an excruciating jolt of agony shot through my whole body, draining me of energy as the purple hue encompassed me. An eternity passed as the metallic buzzing continued to pierce through the room, the Wolf captors merely watching this evil arcane mechanism torture me. Once the moment was over, the buzzing died back down slowly, the purple glow following suit as it crawled back through the cables, like liquid draining from a straw until it fully retreated to the hole, and the glow faded away from it. I took a few breaths of desperate air but quickly halted my breathing when I saw the Wolves still looking at me. I stifled myself, hoping not to draw their ire by annoying them in any way. The Wolves, having seen the ‘spectacle’ already, returned to their posts as if nothing had happened.

  The cables’ glow had left black marks on me, spreading the black marks that were already there and almost sizzling from the heat left behind. As hard as I tried to keep myself quiet, controlling my breathing, the pain proved too much for me, and I let out a small whimper.

  The biggest of the Wolf guards, his uniform stained blue with a golden medal on the shoulder pad, snapped its head to look at me, supremely offended by the barely audible noise. It stomped over to one of the stone columns, where a long wooden pole was hung. The implement was twice the wolf’s massive size, with a small hook on the end. With two hands, the elite Wolf guard took down the pole and swung the pole over his head, smacking it against my own and my shoulders over and over again in a brutal attempt to teach me not to make noise. It had quite the opposite effect, as I let out a whimper at every hit, the small hook occasionally pressing against my snowy flesh like a thick needle to increase the pain. I was still desperate to keep myself quiet, but the whimpers escaped my mouth all the same.

  Between the hits of the pole, I could hear faint sounds of popping coming from the walls. While the beating didn’t help the focus, I managed to correlate the popping to a new smell that I was picking up. I’d smelled some strange smells before, even from Wolves, Bunnies, and Hares alike, but nothing quite like this. I almost couldn’t find a word for it. I was intoxicated by it.

  Suddenly, the beating stopped as the elite Wolf froze in place. Its nose twitched as it lifted its snout in the air. A few more sniffs to the air prompts it to lower the pole to focus on what it’s smelling. With one final sniff, it squinted its eyes in frustration, its ears twitching around like searching radars.

  “Someone’s here.” The elite Wolf spoke in a growl like the crackling of embers.

  “Is it the Baron again?” one of the Wolf guards asked, looking to the elite Wolf. “We haven’t gotten any more meat since the last time.”

  “What does he want now?” another one piped up, “Do we have to switch out another one?”

  “Quiet!” The elite Wolf barked at his subordinates, “It’s not the Baron. It’s a slave and… something else.”

  “Something?” a third Wolf asked to clarify.

  “Watch the door!” The elite commanded with a snarl, and the others backed away, “We’ve got company or fresh meat.”

  As if on cue, the faint pop picked up on the other side of the iron door, and the other wolf guards could now hear it. They went to pick up their weapons, a few mauls and spears that were lying on the ground and pointed them at the iron door as another pop, louder, sounded off again. A third pop, more like a small explosion, and the Wolves gripped their weapons tighter in anticipation of discovering the source of the commotion.

  They waited, and waited, and waited, but the popping noise stopped altogether. Flaring his nostrils, the elite Wolf popped his neck as the eerie feeling crept into the room.

  “Check on the others,” the elite Wolf ordered, “Tell me what they know about this.”

  The elite Wolf signaled for two others to approach the door with some quick nods of the head. The two candidates kept their spears facing outward. One of them moved the iron handle, pushing the door outward while the other went to stab at the opening, catching nothing. From their little peephole, the outer chamber seemed empty and dark.

  The two Wolves stepped through the opening, and the iron door slammed behind them. Right afterward, two more pops went off. The elite Wolf snarled, the growing suspicion of danger now being all but confirmed in its mind. It walked over to another pillar, picking up the spiked mace as it readied itself.

  “Cowards!” It shouted out. “Come face me! Your ‘popping’ trick won’t work so easily on the strong!”
/>   An answer to the challenge came in the form of the iron door swinging open by itself, though the outer chamber seemed empty still. The two Wolf guards left set their heavy mauls down from over their shoulders, approaching the entryway as they sniffed about.

  From out of the entryway, two figures flew in. The first one to enter was familiar, a hairless Bunny. She had smooth and creamy skin, very noticeable by her flying kick of an entrance to the face of one of the guards, smashing it into the pillar behind it. As she landed, she flipped her black ponytail behind her, moving some strands of hair behind her second ears and positioning myself to make another attack. She seemed so confident, her Bunny ears bent ever so slightly as they rose from her head and her sleek leather armor hugging her hourglass figure tightly. An unbuttoned red overtunic designed with black stripes running down and across it, with the sleeves rolled up to her elbows, draped over the leather, hanging down to her thighs. Her legs were bare, save for strange black armor wrapped around her thighs and her shins. The creamy color changed into white as it reached past the black wraps to her lower thighs, down to a pure wintery hue at her feet. Her Wolf victim could barely keep its body upward, leaning on the pillar that it just slammed into for support as it suffered its concussion.

  The second to enter wasn’t familiar in the least. He came in at almost the same time as the Bunny, swinging a strange club straight to the other Wolf guard’s jaw. Holding it by the black handle, the brown head of the club met the Wolf’s face two more times consecutively as the male kicked the Wolf into the other pillar. He was male, yes, but also hairless. I had never seen a hairless Hare, let alone any amongst the Rabbits without rabbit ears. He only had the little pair at the sides, tucked under dirty blonde hair with a slight curl to it. His face had some hair to it, too, covering his strong jaw and most of the bottom half of his face. He wore a red tunic just like the Bunny’s over his large shoulders, lined with faded black strips both straight down and across, the intersecting sections overlapping and becoming darker. Coming out from the rolled-up sleeve of the tunic was a sleeve of chainmail, protecting him underneath. This was all worn under another garment held by straps over his shoulders, covering his chest and stretching all the way down his sturdy body to his wide leather shoes, brown with a darker tip covering the toes. He carried a musket on his back, though it was designed unlike any I’d ever seen, as well as a black pouch at his hip, right at the bottom of the loop of his overgarment.

  And it was blatantly, almost painfully obvious that he was the source of the intoxicating scent.

  With the others all disposed of, the male came up to the elite Wolf, who bared its fangs, teeth, and maul. He held his club in two hands, but at two different parts, the head of the club pointed back at him. With a hand outstretched a grip at the bottom side of the handle, he shifted it back and forth, pointing it at the elite Wolf’s snout. I then realized that this thing wasn’t actually a club, but a strange musket of sorts, like some of the Wolves used. I knew I had to understand how it worked and how it got so tiny. I had to get to know this man better.

  “Once chance,” the man spoke with powerful authority and a rugged tone, “Surrender.”

  The elite Wolf barked, opening its maw to bite at this intruder. A deafening bang shredded the air as the male’s musket fired, and the Wolf’s face burst open in a grisly display of blinding fire, like that from a mythical dragon, pushing the Wolf backward as its body tumbled into the hole behind it. With a cracking thud, the corpse landed somewhere in the darkness, and I didn’t want to think about the visual aftermath. The male looked over to the other Wolves, who had just regained their footing. They looked at the male and lowered their gaze from him.

  “You work for me now.” The male pointed a finger at one, then moved it over to the other. “Do you understand?”

  “Yes, sir,” they replied in unison. “Our strength recognizes yours as superior. We will serve you until one of us dies.” Wolves were bizarre creatures.

  “Head back to the entrance, help the boys out there if they need it,” the male told them, “Tell them Dragonoak sent you. We’ll be out real quick.” The Wolves obeyed, taking their weapons and moving through the iron door to protect their new boss.

  I didn’t know what to think of this. Who was this male? Why had he come here? No Rabbit, even one of the old Hare nobles, could hope to win a fight with a Wolf, but these two just took on five right here, and they must have dealt with all of the guards in the outer chamber and the ones outside. That kind of feat is barely possible by the strongest Wolves. Or maybe he’s…

  No, I couldn’t bear to hope for that. And yet something in my heart couldn’t stop me.

  “You’re gonna be okay,” The male called out. I looked down from my suspended position, seeing that he was looking right at me. I could see deep into his brown eyes as my heart leapt into my throat. “We’re gonna get you down from there.” I could feel my cheeks reddening, so I closed my eyes and looked away in the hopes that it would stop.

  “Do you know how we get her down, my lord?” The other Bunny said, the sound of her voice wafting through the air like a gentle breeze. She walked over to one of the anchor points to the cables to get a start on helping the suspended victim.

  “I was hoping you would know,” The male looked to the other anchor point, inspecting it for clues as to how to work it. He then investigated the room, quickly locking his eyes on something behind me. “Ha! Over here, Hopper, I found something!” Hopper, the other Bunny, bounced over to where the male pointed, moving out of my vision.

  “Shall I pull this now, my lord?” Hopper called out from behind.

  “Not yet,” The male said, looking at the hole beneath me, “We want to do this right.” He walked over to the pole the head Wolf was using before, picking it up and eyeing the hook at the top. “Alright, I think I see how this works now. Try to pull the lever slowly, see if it lowers her down so I can catch her.” Hopper’s gruntings followed soon after as she tried to pull the mystery lever just enough to make it budge.

  The unearthly buzzing whirred to life again, as the purple light rose from the hole. I screamed in reflex at the terror of being subjected to it again.

  “Screw what I said, slam it down!” The male swung the pole up towards me, hooking it on one of the cables around my stomach. He yanked as hard as he could while the loud clanking of rusty metal signaled the cables to drop me. The buzzing grew to its loudest, as the light began to spread quickly up the chains. Hand over hand, the male pulled me over before diving beneath me with open arms. The cables loosened around me, and the male pulled me out before the purple light reached, the loose metals still curled in a circle as they lay on the ground. The buzzing grew even louder than before, to the point where I had to cover my ears to withstand the sound as I felt myself become wrapped in warmth. Suddenly, the buzzing popped, disappearing along with the purple as if someone had just turned off a light. I kept myself curled up, afraid of anything else that might happen in the next moment.

  “Hey, you’re okay, now,” The male said, stroking the side of my face. I looked up to see him and realized I was now bathing in the intoxication he exuded. On impulse, my lips were meeting his, feeling the softness of them despite the ruggedness of his features as I held his face in my hands.

  I quickly realized the imposition I had just created, yelped, and scrambled out of the male’s arms, crawling away to hide behind a pillar. I peeked around to see the male still looking towards me, not having moved from his embracing position. Hopper then moved over to the male, helping him up.

  “I don’t know what just happened,” the male said, not moving his eyes away.

  “Makes sense to me, Lord Hank,” Hopper replied. “It’s almost exactly what I would have done in her place. She probably thinks she’s offended you.”

  “You didn’t offend me, ma’am,” Hank, the male, called out to me, “You can come out. I swear I don’t bite. I’m potty trained and everything.”

  A former house s
ervant like me didn’t know what that last comment meant, but Hank’s voice was so much softer than before now. Just hearing it helped put an ease to the anxiousness in my chest. As I looked over at the two of them, it was obvious that Hopper was Hank’s slave. But she seemed so happy near him, so comfortable. I had never seen any slave, Bunny or Hare, furless, furred, or shaggy, act that way. I had so many questions for Hank, for the both of them, and my anxious heart beat in my chest all over again. But something about this male, this Hare with no hair, made all of that anxiousness not matter. So I stepped out into the open.

  “There you go!” Hank said, “How are you feeling?” I couldn’t open my mouth. After such an offensive gesture as I just did, I couldn’t bear to even look at him.

  “I promise, I’m not mad,” Hank chuckled in his chest, “It was cute. I’m happy that it happened. Heck, I might want it to happen again. You can talk to me.”

  “How…?” I started to whisper, “How does your musket fit a bullet inside?”

  “Pardon?” Hank said, then his face lit up with understanding, “Oh, the shotgun. Yeah, it’s got special rounds inside it.” He pulled a few little cylinders from a slot right underneath the barrel to show me. “It also doesn’t just shoot one bullet, but a couple of dozen little ones.”

  My eyes widened as I stared at it. “That was a bullet? It was a genius idea, but how could you make it so small? How do the bullets go into the barrel to be fired? Where’s the gunpowder? Do they require special charms to function? What kind of bullets does the one on his back fire? Where did all of these come from?”