Jumper Cable by Piers Anthony Read Free Book Online Page B

appeared. It looked ordinary, except that it was undisturbed by the rising wind. They crowded onto it just as the storm let loose half a deluge of rain. The water sluiced away, not touching them. Now Phanta approached Jestin again. “Thank you so much for your help,” she said, kissing him. She could do what Maeve could not: kissing without biting. Then, before she could freak him out, Jestin faded. “We can’t have a distraction,” Olive snapped. “We have to make our way to the permanent enchanted path before this one breaks down from the strain.”
    “One might almost suspect that one girl is a tiny bit jealous of her friends,” Haughty murmured.
    “Almost,” Jumper agreed.
    They followed the path, but soon it ended. Ahead the storm was intensifying, with lightning striking trees and wind battering them, and of course water beginning to flood.
    “We pick up the rear section and carry it forward,” Olive said. She put her hands down, and a section of the path came up. She carried it to the front and aligned it with the section they were on. Then they all stepped onto that.
    In this manner they advanced slowly toward the regular enchanted path, while Fracto raged all around them. Not one jag of lightning struck them, not one wash of water soaked them, not one fierce gust of wind blew them away. It was a great way to travel through an otherwise treacherous region.
    In due course they made it to the regular enchanted path. Fracto, defeated, blew off elsewhere.
    “Thank you, Olive,” Jumper said. “Your friend Jestin really came through.”
    “My friends generally do,” she agreed, flattered. They resumed their interrupted trek along the path. At noon they paused to eat from the pack Crater had packed. Jumper reached back a foreleg and swung it down to the ground.
    It turned out to be far more bountiful than they had anticipated. It was a veritable feast, with something for each of them, ranging from a really juicy bug for Jumper to a really gory leg of bovine for Maeve. There was also a big jug of rhed whine.
    They tried a sip, then a cup, then several cups, and finally finished the jug, though they had not meant to. This led to some things that seemed odd only in retrospect. Jumper and Haughty did an impromptu dance, with him jumping high in the air and her plummeting almost to the ground to zoom under him as they whirled crazily around. Wenda, Maeve, Phanta, and Olive threw off their clothing and danced in a circle around them, jiggling ferociously front and rear. Wenda was of course fine from the front, but from behind her hollowness was completely
    exposed. The others took turns “trying her on,” stepping into her from behind so that it looked as though she were full-fleshed. Then they were too tipsy to stand, let alone walk, and had to make camp right there on the path, in the middle of the day. They weren’t even up to doing that properly. Instead they collapsed into a pile, with Jumper on the bottom and Haughty on the top, the others draped somewhere in between. What a meal!
    Late in the afternoon they recovered, one by one. Jumper was the first, he thought maybe because being the largest, he had taken a smaller portion of rhed whine relative to his size than the others had. Even so, he felt as if he had eaten a rotten zombie fly.
    Maeve was next. “That whine’s not the same as what our home pool has,” she said, making a wry face. “More impurities. But the wildness—
    it was good to experience that again.”
    “We’re just lucky no human males were present,” Wenda said, extricating herself from the pile. The others shared a shudder as they got to their feet, and searched out their scattered clothing from the surrounding bushes and tree limbs.
    “We’d have been ruined,” Phanta agreed.
    This perplexed Jumper. “All we did was have some fun dancing. What is wrong with that?”
    A female glance circled one and a quarter times. It landed on Olive Hue. “When men see bare girls,