Author's note: I simply can't believe the wellspring of writerly encouragement from people reading the first chapter - y'all are just the best. My writerly heart squees in your general direction and blows you kisses. Special thanks to Ellen Weaver, who invited me to this B&B story genre mashup party.

Chapter 2: Morphata


I broke the silence first. "So...how does this work exactly? Is there an oubliette with my name on it somewhere?"

Jareth clucked his tongue. Which was just as unnaturally mobile as I remembered. "Sarah, Sarah...of course not. What fun would that be for either of us? You rotting away in some dank pit and me bored out of my skull? No, you're an official guest of the Court now. Albeit a permanent one." His smile was razor sharp. "And as such, you have obligations. You must participate fully in all Court events."

I swallowed. "You always kept me away from Court events before."

"That was before you had obligations, my flighty girl."

I shuddered at the affection in his tone. Prior experience suggested that that tone occurred right before he delivered a smackdown of epic proportions and enjoyed the hell out of it. "So what does participating fully mean exactly?"

He extended a hand. "Come find out."

I looked at him for a long moment, sighed, and placed my hand in his, my fingers looking fragile against his glittering talons. With my adjusted perception, the elongated bones with their dagger tips had a certain alien beauty to them that was new. But they were undeniably weapons I lacked and it was a reminder of how much of a disadvantage I was at.

Just like old times.


We stood side by side in a balcony, gazing down at one of the event halls of the Chaotic Court. It was less unbearable than it had ever been before - under Jareth's previous tutelage, I had caught the occasional fleeting impression and the roiling miasma had usually been enough to incapacitate me.

But I looked with impunity now. Involuntary impunity, courtesy of Jareth, but impunity nonetheless. I could make out distinct forms, easily separating foreground from background once I had adjusted to the appropriate fractal perception.

Black humor flickered through me. I think I'm getting smarter. This is a piece of cake.

The forms below had recognizable motions and localizable voices. I squinted. Mmm, and every single one had talon-tipped hands, the sketch of flaming wings, and a phantom multiplicity of mismatched eyes hovering around it.

Whatever was this little nephilim gathering up to?

A blazing light suddenly engulfed the hall. It flickered with deliriously bright colors, cascading in an organic rhythm, concentrating into a glowing singularity at the very center of the hall.

A circle of nephilim formed around the pulsing light, leaning in. And then they began to consume it.

It shrieked in unadulterated agony, and my breath caught when I recognized that tortured cry as human. The sound grew, a howling wail of unendurable pain - piercing, rending, unending.

I reeled, staggering sideways into Jareth, my hands flying to my ears.

He righted me with strength as irresistible as stone, dragging my hands down to my sides and pushing me back towards the balcony. "Observe."

I struggled against the maelstrom of sound, my heart racing. "What the hell is going on down there?"

"The closing of a deal. We paid our part and now he pays his."

I stared, digesting this. "Since when are nephilim in the soul-eating business?"

His laughter rolled down like freezing rain. "You only just noticed? You're too precious."

I turned to goggle at him.

His hands raised to cradle my face. With icy precision, he forced me to look back to the scene below. "There's more to come."

The nephilim surrounding the man raised their arms with aching slowness, then dropped them.

Alien perception slammed into me like a freight train. It was a mirrored perception, a shared sending almost, as they consumed the soul. I felt the pulsing light sliding into me, tasted it as if I were the one biting the dripping chunks out with sharpened teeth. The simple visceral pleasure of swallowing that light (juicy, savory, delicious) was beyond anything...God, it was the acute satiation of a hollowing hunger that stretched back eons, burning, so good, God, so good. I felt heat building inside me, an arousal that ground at my bones, cascading through nerve endings, sweeping everything away in an ultraviolet burst, and then - oh! Wave upon wave of pleasure, of ecstasy, God, God, please don't stop, never stop, never stop-

I sank to my knees as the soul's light drained to emptiness and I was suddenly back alone in my own skin.

In the calm and the silence, heedless of the multitude of interested eyes that flicked my way, I wept. And whether it was for the loss of that unholy pleasure or the bruising realization of its cause, I couldn't have said.

"Shhh, now, shhhh." Cool fingers stroked my cheek, the talon tips scraping gently along my skin. "The first time is always...memorable."

I didn't care that he was a cagey bastard who had orchestrated this whole damned sequence of events. I turned into him and buried my face against his leg, sobbing as if my heart were broken. Maybe it was. Something certainly was.

His talons twined through my hair, drumming out a familiar rhythm on my skull, the one he used to do for me when I was overwhelmed by something he had just taught me. It was the Fibonacci sequence. 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, 34, 55, ...

Eventually, at 89, I raised my eyes. "I hate you."

His phantom eye multitude blinked down at me through feathers and flame. "I know."


Later, he escorted me to my old room. Or at least, the door to my old room. But when the door opened, rather than being the spartan affair from our previous acquaintance, it was sumptuous. The penthouse suite at the Vegas Venetian could eat its heart out.

My eyebrows jumped, my sarcasm rising like a shield. "Well, this is different. Do all official guests of the Court get this kind of upgrade?"

"Only the ones who merit it."

"Lucky me. And what precisely have I done to merit it?"

His smile slid across the side of his face like a manic Cheshire cat. "You've always been rather special." He leaned forward so his aura of flame, wings, and eyes engulfed me. "Insane yet?"

I twitched against the phantom press that was was pushing, tasting, burrowing. If I shifted my perception a little more, I was sure I'd see precisely what his aura was doing and I wouldn't like it one bit.

Lesson one in the hell dimensions, especially the Chaotic Zone, and most especially with Jareth: Pick your battles. I smiled, baring my teeth. "It'll take more than that little show to do me in." I cocked my head, watching his smile slither hither and thither across his face and down his neck. "Or the one you're putting on for me now."

"Good. Solved my Labyrinth yet?"

I blinked at him. "You haven't even shown me where it is this time."

His eyes flashed with amusement as he turned away, humming a tune with a decided blues shuffle to it. He didn't even bother to look back as he strolled away into the pinprick dark, his aura sloughing off me and galloping after him. His smile was the last to go, of course.

Infuriating bastard.


I didn't have too much time to mull over the many different kinds of bastard Jareth was since the nephilim Court events kept occurring with alarming frequency, and I was escorted by him to every accursed one. He offered to continue my perceptual training, and I accepted out of sheer self-preservation. Nephil Court events were shifty in the extreme.

Our evenings routinely ended with the two questions about my sanity and his Labyrinth. It was too regular to be him just rubbing it in, so it was meant as a deliberate clue to unravel. Puzzle-obsessed nigh-immortal creatures were so damned irritating. They rarely did anything directly.

In the meantime, that blues tune Jareth invariably hummed after his nightly inquisition was downright catchy. I found myself humming snatches of it during our training sessions, which caused him no end of amusement.

Those nephilim soul-snare affairs, though...if I ever got back to earth, I'd have to write something about the practical consequences of promising your soul away. Seriously. It always ended the same way, and it wasn't sweetness and light. Not for the human, anyway.

After the first dozen or so, I had stopped collapsing into tears, so I thought I was building up a reasonable tolerance to that sort of thing. I made the mistake of saying so to Jareth.

It probably should have been a warning sign when he doubled over laughing and then perceptually backhanded me. My visuals gamboled to and fro until I toppled over from vertigo.

It turned out that routine nephilim gatherings were a bit tamer compared to what happened when multiple Chaotic races got together for a little fun.

The real issue was the longevity afflicting most Chaos natives. Beings that lived that long got an epic case of ennui and some rather jaded appetites. So what's a long-lived Chaos being to do? Muck around shamelessly with collective perception, that's what. Every multi-ethnic gathering was really a contest to see who could create the most elaborate communal perceptual shift. Some went for brute force right away, while others liked to draw it out with seeds of uncertainty bursting into a holistic onslaught covering all the senses.

They had turned mind-bending into a cross between an extreme sport and a snooty art exhibition. It would have been hilarious except that it nearly broke me every damned time.

The nephilim soul consumptions became a welcome respite. I considered that an official Bad Sign.

It's true that my mind was extra bendy (and getting more flexible all the time), thanks to Jareth's training and my bloodline, but hot damn. This was simply...beyond. Even with all my mental dexterity, it wasn't enough. I felt my mind beginning to fragment as it tried to surf the insane tide of the grand Court gatherings and it scared the hell out of me.


"Sarah?"

I looked up, startled. We were at the door to my room. I realized that Jareth had asked the first of his nightly questions and I hadn't answered. Time loss was not a good sign. "Not insane yet," I hissed, clenching my teeth.

"No? Then you were just letting the silence hang for dramatic effect?"

I looked at him wearily. "Fuck you."

His eyes glittered. "You know, if you actually do go insane, I'll have no use for you. Off you'd go to somewhere...less generous."

I bared my teeth, letting my voice roll into a layered chorus of sneers that I'd recently learned from him. "Such a pity."

His laughter ricocheted back at me. "Touché. But I'd miss you terribly."

A sour half-smile twisted my mouth. "I'm sure."

"I could give you something that would make the grand Court events more bearable."

I watched his phantom miasma of mismatched eyes unspool towards me, dripping bits of flame and feather. "And what would that cost?"

"Not a thing you'd miss." His smile stretched wider and wider, wrapping around the back of his head as his aura coated me, stroking and touching and digging uncountable little hooks in. And then it halted abruptly, holding itself back as if awaiting permission.

Suddenly I could see exactly where this was going. I shook my head slowly and twitched beneath the aura layers. "No."

"So you'd prefer to shuffle off into madness, then? It's coming, and soon."

Silence stretched like taffy between us. I hated it when he was right. "Suppose I accept your oh-so-generous offer. What do you get out of it?"

His tongue flicked out, long and slick. "Your aura is so very sweet right now. Sweet as honey. A taste freely given of such a delight...well, that's something rather rare here."

"Keep up the sweet talk and I may retch all over your nice eye-flame aura."

He shrugged. "As you like. The offer is there."

A heartbeat passed, and I felt those little aura hooks spinning, clacking, waiting, hungry. But my sanity was precarious. I knew it. He knew it. And for whatever reason, he didn't want our game to end that way. I sighed...I'd probably regret this soon, but any port in a storm. "Fine. How does this work?"

For a moment, I saw his smile grow voracious, and then his aura had me. It engulfed me, a spinning swarming mass made up of tiny mouths. My mind kept telling me that it ought to hurt (and hurt like hell, in fact), but the infiltration was curiously painless as the little hooks burrowed and burrowed, carving space for themselves by consuming infinitesimal pieces of my aura. It was unnerving, sure, but not painful. Like ants crawling inside me, colonizing, building fibrous structures that made sense to their hive mind.

Unnerving, as I said.

Really damned unnerving, in fact.

And that's the main reason I could figure for why I was starting to hyperventilate. Well, that and whatever this was doing to my aura. Being turned into aural Colby Jack cheese isn't for the faint of heart or constitution.

I felt his hands take mine as my vision narrowed to a small hole, things suddenly zooming away in starburst trails.

"Breathe, Sarah." His words were solicitous, almost tender. "Breathe with me."

His face was right there in front of me, and I watched him breathe in through his nose and back out through his mouth. In fuzzed desperation, I mirrored him. In and out we breathed together, our inhalations drawn from the common space between us, our exhalations mingling.

Even with this, I felt my consciousness slipping under the aural transformation.

He leaned closer to me, and whispered, "Solved my Labyrinth yet?" The cadence of laughter at my expense tinkled in minor thirds.

I opened my eyes fully for a moment. "Fuck. You."

He licked his lips. "Anytime, honey girl." The words positively smoldered.

I managed to keep my mouth from gaping open. Barely.

He smiled and hummed the familiar goodnight blues tune. And he looked absolutely beautiful. Shining, gorgeous, downright luminous with beauty.

This was undoubtedly a Very Bad Sign.

At that point, my mind decided it had officially had it and I slumped into unconsciousness.


When I woke up, he was still there. In fact, he was stretched out next to me on the bed in my room, his hands still holding mine.

I looked at him, looked at our hands, looked down the length of the bed at the proximity of our bodies, and raised an eyebrow.

His eyes glowed with bits of flame. "Well, I couldn't very well leave you passed out against the door frame."

I gave another pointed look at our currently entwined fingers.

His lips quirked up. "You cried out whenever I let go. I hadn't the heart to leave you in such a state."

Both of my eyebrows jumped in disbelief. "Uh huh. And the walls are made of penguins." I blinked suddenly as the walls became overlaid with penguin outlines, as if the wallpaper had been formed of penguin-shaped cookie cutouts that were gaining color and solidity. "Stop that!"

"I'm not the one doing it." His smile stretched wide and satisfied.

"Uh huh." I yanked my hands out of his and felt a sucking jolt of disconnection. I shivered violently for a moment, but then it passed. It was probably a side effect of the aura transformation business, not to mention that unconscious perceptual shifting I worked with the penguins. Speaking of...

Sorry, penguins. Away you go. And just like that, the walls shifted back to standard palatial opulence, as easy as breath.

I blinked. Well, clearly there were some benefits to having a semi-nephil aura, whatever the drawbacks.

Speaking of...how about that luminous beauty perception? It's possible it was just a temporary transition effect. A girl could hope. Or a girl could gather some empirical evidence.

I let my gaze linger on Jareth, taking him slowly in from head to toe. Nope. He was still luminously beautiful to me. It wasn't physical, because the talons and phantom eye-flame wings and all were still there, not to mention that razor mouth. But my sense of aesthetics was luxuriating in it. Beautiful.

Damn semi-nephil aura.

He could see it in my eyes too, the smug bastard.

I rolled my eyes at him, feeling a novel sense of...equality. Another side effect, probably. The most dangerous one so far, really. Jareth and I were not the same. I needed to remember that.

I swung my legs off the bed, turning away from him. "So what's on tap for today, sensei?"

I felt his eyes boring into me from behind, assessing. And then his aura nipped me. Playfully. "We're due in the grand hall in an hour or so." His breath was suddenly hot in my ear. "Wear something nice, honey girl."

I stiffened, not turning around as he left the room.

Something serious had happened. Jareth pulling the hey-baby option was definitely new in our dynamic. The only other time he'd done something like that was during my initial evaluation at fifteen. It had been a test then, a decoy and distraction. There was no reason to think it was any different now.

But why now? What was he trying to distract me from?

Well, I wouldn't find out by sitting here. I got up and started sorting through Chaotic dress options, humming our blues tune.


I'll say this much: a grand Chaotic Court mind-bending entertainment is way more survivable when you have a semi-nephil aura. With a full Chaotic aura, I bet it's a rollicking good time. Definite benefit.

Drawback, at least in my particular case: The other Chaos natives noticed my new, improved aura. And they didn't seem to be taking it well. In my previous state of Oh-God-must-survive-must-survive, I had neglected to notice exactly how much interest my presence garnered at these things.

Even at the beginning of this one, I had been so busy focusing on Jareth and trying to ferret out his motives that I missed all the outraged eyes directed at me. Particularly from the other nephilim.

When we went to leave our balcony, there was a glare of nephilim blocking the exit. And while "glare" is usually reserved for a group of cats, I think it was appropriate here. This was an official nephil stinkeye en masse.

Jareth stepped forward. It was an unhurried movement, courtly even. But he was unmistakably putting himself between me and them. "Fine entertainment, wasn't it?"

They stared at him with glacial coldness, which is a neat juxtaposition trick when you're surrounded by phantom flames.

Jareth looked back, unperturbed, projecting an air of gentlemanly indulgence.

I pretended I was made of stone. Very observant stone.

They broke first. "We must talk."

"I believe it's a nephil matter you wish to discuss. Sarah, leave us."

Some serious shit was about to go down, and Jareth wanted me as far away as possible. I wasn't about to argue, since I wasn't equipped to be an asset in whatever was going to happen here. I stepped forward, watching to see if they'd let me pass.

A whirlwind of calculating stares nearly flattened me. But I stood my ground, and they parted to let me through. I walked calmly through the opening, not looking back at Jareth. Just an obedient little apprentice here, don't mind me...

Once I thought I was far enough away, I ran like a bat out of hell to my room and barred the door.


It had been an hour since I'd escaped, and still no Jareth. I was officially worried. I paced. I unintentionally shifted the walls to eyes. Watchful, hopeful, sorrowful eyes. The furniture was starting to go towards clasped hands.

I shook my head hard. I had to get myself under control. Jareth could take care of himself. I hoped.

I was only vaguely perturbed that I had all these atypical emotions directed at Jareth, like worry and trust and hope. And something else I would not - would not - be naming, even in my own thoughts. There Be Dragons. Semi-nephil-aura-induced dragons.

Dammit, where was he?

I began contemplating if I should go find him. The floor became an interlocking weave of thumbs up and thumbs down, flipping back and forth.

I shut my eyes with a little scream of frustration.

At that moment, a polite knock came at the door.

I opened it.

He was a bloody mess, holding himself upright with a breath and a hope. His aura was absolutely shredded, a tattered net of eyeful feathers on fire. He exhaled carefully, leaning against the doorframe and surveying the shifts in my room. A mischievous little smile twisted up. "Insane yet?" The words sent him into a coughing fit.

"Oh, shut up and get in here. Sit down. And tell me what the hell happened."

My aura surged to him as he did, trying to fill in the wounds in his. It was a little fractal maze of emptiness that I could fix if I could just follow all those tiny black velvet paths waiting for me...

A growl ripped from my throat. It felt like I was plunging myself into him, over and over again. Drawing in and out, honing that piece of myself that plunged. And it felt very, very good.

Conscious thought slapped me upside the head and I looked at him in a sudden panic.

He looked better already, though, sitting up straight under his own power. And he clearly felt better enough to laugh at me, a rippling sound that slid like scales into a hidden note of despair.

The despair is what got me. It tugged at my remaining sense of heroic duty, consequences be damned. I sighed and let the auras do what they would for now, trying not to notice the accompanying urges that cascaded through me. "Well?"

"The others were displeased about your aural augmentation."

"I figured as much. Why?"

"I believe the precise word they used was abomination."

"Charming." My breath was coming faster. "Can they do anything about it right now except beat us up?"

"I don't think so."

"That's something, anyway." Heat was building in my throat, my chest, my stomach, lower. "Is it?"

"Is what?"

"Is it an abomination?"

His smile floated lazily between us. "Abomination is as abomination does."

I swallowed hard, feeling the rising need inside me, grinding my teeth and arching my spine. The air in the room pulsed red and moist. "And what does abomination do?"

His eyes glowed with knowing. "Why don't you tell me?"

An inhuman sound crawled out of my throat. "Why don't I show you instead?"

And with that, I took him.


It was sex. Slick, burning, breaking sex. It was good. Actually, it was amazing, but I didn't want to contemplate that too much further.

This was Very Bad. It had to be.

The howling need inside me was sated, though. Jareth's aura was back to its usual eyeful flaming feathered glory, the little empty labyrinthine passages filled with pieces of me for the moment. And I seemed to be no worse for wear.

This was still Very Bad. The fact that I seemed to have no obvious ill effects just made it worse. It meant I was corrupted.

Masculine laughter interrupted my self-flagellation. "Solved my Labyrinth yet, honey girl?"

I clenched inside around the length of him, causing him to groan in pleasure. "Shut up."

But in my mind, where I had stowed away my demon hunter self who knew all about how these things worked, I was panicking, flailing, screaming. Not who I am, not who I am, notwhoIam-

But perhaps it was who I was now. And I would just have to deal with it.

I took a breath, squaring my shoulders. Any frickin' port in a storm.