The Fairest One of All: The Demon's Valentine


After three years' grace and three years without wishes, the Goblin King returns to play a third game of magic, power, and desire with Sarah Williams. But this time, he's determined to win her over, and will not scruple to invoke lust in the place of love. Rated M for sexual content.

This story is a sequel to "The Fairest One of All" which can be found both at FF and AO3.


Chapter 1: A Knock at the Door

Soundtrack for chapter 1:
David Bowie: "Valentine's Day"
Bob Dylan: "Knocking at Heaven's Door"


"Yes," she said to him.… and in that moment she knew it was a dream, because she had woken up.

Jareth. Jareth.

Sarah Williams lay curled under the warmth of her quilt and kept her eyes closed. She let the memory of the dream drain past her like a hot bath of scented water.

"Yes," she had said to him. His arms had been hugging her, his chest pressed to her back, his erection a threatening, slowly warming heat against the base of her spine. He had been speaking to her in a voice that wasn't so much soft as it was quiet, a purring engine of meaning that lent the formless dark a style of comfort… and anticipation of other beginnings that might come in the dark.

He had asked her a question, smoothing her hair off her neck, planting one sharp kiss there…and she had answered yes.

She rolled over and thumped her head against her pillow. "Oh, no," she moaned into its cotton-stuffed depths. "No. No, no, no. I meant no."

"What's said is said," she imagined him replying, and she squeezed her eyes tight, hating the fact that, dream or real, Jareth was right. She'd said yes.

And she couldn't remember what she'd said yes to.

Blearily, angrily, she slid out of her narrow dorm bed and plugged in her electric teapot, and then folded herself back into the sandwich of its warmth to wait for the water to boil. Swayer Hall was the second-oldest dormitory at Triptoleme University, with a notoriously unreliable furnace in the late winter months. Like beggars, sophomores could not be choosers, and today was a wonky furnace day. Today was going to be wonky, full stop. She slipped her arm out of the blankets and grabbed her phone, and called the only person who would come out in the freezing Saturday-morning February weather to give her any constructive help, the only person who would believe that Sarah's dream of the Goblin King was an action item on their personal agenda.

"It's him," Sarah practically spat over the line. "He's back in my life. Can you come over?"

"Give me five," her friend replied.

"Bring snacks," Sarah added before the call ended, without much hope that a decent breakfast might be realized.

The first wisps of steam began to rise from the teapot's plastic spout, and the radiator began clanking. She would be warm soon. She might be too warm, soon. Everyone she cared about might be too warm. After all, Jareth was fire, and what he wanted most was to set the world on fire. And he saw her as good kindling. In his opinion, that was what witches were for.

If you had to trace it back to a beginning, to an initial spark that set her soul to burning, it probably began with a bad wish she'd made, at the age of sixteen, demanding that the King of the Goblins take away her nasty screaming baby brother away. What had ensued was a series of tests and lessons about the nature of words, power, magic… and sex. Jareth had woken her body to her first awareness of sex as a state of being. He had strummed her soul into the music of desire as knowingly as a rock star strumming a cherry guitar on a stage to the screams of adoring fans. It had been all the more powerful a sexual awakening because he'd also obliquely offered to give her practical instruction to go along with the theory he'd delivered. She'd wanted to fuck him; after meeting him she had known for the first time what it was to want to fuck. To want. To fuck. That time, she'd at least had the sense to say no.

What in hell had she said yes to?

In the end, she'd been able to rise to the challenge and defeat the Goblin King; she had returned safely to her life and her bedroom with her baby brother in tow. No one in her family had been the wiser, except perhaps her stepmother, Irene, who slowly acknowledged new and better patterns in her difficult stepdaughter's behavior. Sarah had been changed by her experience—not in any fundamental way that changed her nature or herself. Rather, she'd been changed in her ability to make the right choices. She'd been changed in the way she saw her responsibilities to others. She'd been changed in the way she judged other people's choices. She'd judged her mother's choices to abandon her and pursue a glamorous career and equally glamorous men. She'd judged her mother. She had removed all the pictures and press-clippings and playbills that celebrated Linda Williams' bad choices from daily viewing, keeping only a small photo of herself, her mother, and her dog Merlin up on her vanity mirror. At that point, she had still loved her mother. These days, she mostly didn't. But that had come later.

Six months after her adventure in the labyrinth, Sarah had met the Goblin King again. Unwished-for and unexpected, he had greeted her with spread thighs in her mother's New York apartment, a carafe of mulled wine in his hand and honeyed propositions on his tongue. Things had become more complicated after that, and Sarah Williams had come to understand that the labyrinth had only been a prelude to a deeper game, a more complex story. Several things had happened that Yuletide in short order: Sarah had discovered that her mother was an honest-to-God witch, that Jareth was a demonic familiar and her mother's slave, and that each were determined to lay claim to her nascent witch's power for their own selfish ends.

The outcome of that story had been mixed for all parties involved. Her mother, using her considerable witchcraft, had attempted to steal Sarah's body to keep as her own as she had done with twelve generations of daughters. Jareth had led a rebellion of the entire coven's spirit-slaves, at the cost of many human lives. An Elf was set loose on the streets of New York. There had been an explosion. And somewhere along the way, Sarah had managed to keep herself for herself, body and soul, thwarting her dangerous mother and nullifying her power, and refusing to submit herself—for the second time!—to the Goblin King's rule in exchange for all the power and magic he had to offer as her slave.

She'd walked away from that one. No one could blame her for walking away. But the Goblin King had informed her, after she banished him, that he couldn't be banished forever.

"Beloved," he had written in letters burned through a length of silk ribbon. He'd given her this love-note, this warning, mere hours after she had thought to leave him behind. "Beloved. We play our game a third time. Expect me the winner. Expect me. J."

She'd bought herself three years of grace and paid for it with her literal blood. It hadn't been wasted time. She wasn't the naif she'd been at sixteen. She didn't keep the kind of secrets she used to. She had trusted her father enough to tell him the entire sordid, unbelievable story. And he had been good enough to believe her. She had spent the past three years honing her witch's powers, living a life without Jareth, living a life without speaking a wish out loud for fear he'd grant it and demand the price owing for his service. But now, with the dream of him still warm over her body like the trace of a tongue, she knew that the time had run out. The hour was striking thirteen. Any moment, he'd be back to play her again. And this time, she was afraid that she'd sing to his tune.

The teakettle screamed like a woman in orgasm. At that moment, there was a knock at her door and a well-known man's voice calling her name, asking for entry. At that moment, she remembered Jareth's question.

"Sarah, you once promised me that you would keep me fed if I would keep you warm. But I'm terribly hungry, and you're awfully cold. Will you let me warm you?"

And she'd said yes.

"Damnable hell," Sarah muttered, abandoning the bed to open the door. She already knew who it was, knocking for her. After all, she'd called him.