Sarah knew that she was alive only because she was quite sure that if she were dead, she would not be in so much pain. Something cold and wet touched her face and she turned her cheek away to avoid it.

"Wakey, wakey, pretty lady," a small, shrill voice said next to her ear.

Sarah grimaced and opened her eyes. She took one look at the little mangy goblin and promptly closed them again. It isn't real, it isn't real, it isn't real she repeated over and over in her head.

This idea was quickly banished when the creature patted her cheeks with his wrinkly hands, then said, "I think she fainted."

"Sarah."

Sarah's eyes opened wide at the sound of that voice. "Jareth?"

He moved to stand directly over her, in her line of sight. He looked very much the same as she remembered him, pale and lovely and so very, very dangerous. He was dressed entirely in shades of white and grey, with what looked like owl feathers braided into his hair.

"What are you doing here?" she asked. "Somebody will see you."

"No. I have stopped time for the present. No one will see me." He smiled, his strange eyes flashing with mirth. "But I appreciate your concern for my welfare, Sarah."

"What are you doing here?" she asked again.

Jareth lifted an eloquent brow. "You summoned me here. Don't you remember?"

"I did not."

He shrugged indifferently. "Oh, well, I suppose we should be off then, Midge," he said to the little goblin, who cackled. "It would seem we made a mistake. Our assistance is in fact not needed here, and we wouldn't want to hang around somewhere that we're not wanted, now would we?"

"No, your majesty," Midge agreed.

Sarah rolled her eyes. Even for Jareth, who had a penchant for the immensely theatrical, it was a bit much. "Fine, what do you want?"

Jareth laughed and folded his arms over his chest. "I don't really think it's a matter of what I want. After all, I'm not the one bleeding to death on the floor of some shoddy little mercantile."

Sarah looked down at herself, at all the blood—Christ, there was so much blood—and suddenly felt like screaming. Or crying. It didn't really matter which at the moment. Maybe both, wouldn't that be a sight? Screaming, and crying, and bleeding to death on the floor of some 'shoddy little mercantile', surrounded by cat food, milk, candy bars and her own lifeblood.

"Help me," she said suddenly. She looked up at Jareth and saw a flicker of something behind his mismatched eyes, but before she could identify what it was, it was gone. "Jareth, help me."

"Pity, pity, the pretty lady," Midge said in a sing-song voice.

"You're mortal, Sarah," Jareth said. "Mortals die all the time. What makes you think your life means any more than hundreds of others?"

Sarah met his gaze and held it. "Maybe to the world, it doesn't matter," she said slowly. From the corner of her eye she could see the goblin, Midge, touch her blood with his fingertips then bring it to his mouth to taste. "But I think maybe to you, it does."

Jareth's eyes narrowed. "You've refused me once already, why should I offer you anything now?"

"What offer? Fear me? Love me?" Sarah chided, giving his words back to him. Mocking him.

"Yes," Jareth growled.

Sarah dropped her eyes. "How can you love something that you fear?" she whispered.

Jareth knelt beside her and turned her face to his. "Like this," he said, then kissed her, gently. It was a brief kiss, a soft meeting of lips, a single stroke of the tongue, but it sent a bolt of pure desire to each and every nerve in Sarah's body.

However, some of the nerves did not appreciate being awoken, and said so with sharp stabbing pains. "Christ," Sarah hissed. "Don't do that."

Jareth leaned back with an utterly unrepentant grin on his handsome face.

She lifted a hand and touched her swollen bottom lip. "You've a tongue like a cat's," she said.

Jareth stood and paced a little away from her. When he came back to stand over her, his expression was unyielding. "If you want my help, I will help you, but there are some . . . conditions."

"What kind of conditions?" she asked warily. Whatever they were, she knew they would be entirely in his favor.

"I will take you to the Goblin City, but once there, you may not leave the Underground. Ever. Not for any reason."

Sarah's eyes widened. "Why?"

Jareth ignored that as if she had not spoken. "Because humans are not native to the Underground, they are considered property," he said. "Do you understand this, Sarah? You would be my property. Your every breath, your every word, your every deed, and your every desire would belong to me. If you feel pain, it is because I will it. If you love, it is only because I allow it. Everything you are would be mine to do with as I choose. Do you understand this?"

Sarah swallowed. She wanted to refuse, to tell him no, to banish him back to his dark underworld. She knew the words that would do it, and they were on the tip of her tongue, but she could not utter them. She hated him, and would have denied him if she had any other choice, but the choice was no longer hers to make. If she denied him again, she knew that he would leave her, and she would die there in the pool of her own blood and be forgotten. And more than she wanted to thwart him, she desperately wanted to live, even if it meant being enslaved. She despised Jareth for his cruelty and his power, but she wanted him too, in a deep instinctive way that had nothing to do with love and everything to do with lust. Jareth felt the same, she knew, she could see the need in his eyes every time he looked at her for too long. She had a very good idea what belonging to the Goblin King would involve, and the knowledge filled her with equal parts dread and desire.

"I can never come back?" she asked, hoping that the answer would be different, and knowing that it wouldn't be.

"Never."

She sighed. Her father was five years in his grave and her mother was a washed out actress living with her newest beaux in a trashy basement apartment on the lower east side. Her stepmother wanted nothing to do with her, and the feeling was more than mutual. She hated working at the school, trying to force knowledge into the shallow minds of children who did not want it, at the behest of a tired old man who had long ago stopped caring. She was sick of pouring her heart out on paper only to have it sent back to her dog-eared and scribbled on by strangers who couldn't, or wouldn't, understand it. She was tired of the world, really, and it would seem, the world was tired of her. Her only regret was Toby, who, despite the complete lack of affection between them, was still her brother. She still thought of him as the tiny baby in the red and white striped pajamas that she challenged a king to save. She would probably always think of him that way, and perhaps that was part of the problem. He wasn't that baby anymore, and she didn't have to save him. He didn't need to be saved, and if he had, she was the last person in the world he would have thought to turn to.

Perhaps that was best, really. She could go on remembering the baby in the pajamas the way he was ten years ago, when she doted on him, and resented him, and wished him away, and he could forget her like his mother wanted. No more phone calls—fifteen minutes, and only fifteen minutes—every Friday evening. No more prolonged silences when neither of them had anything to say to the other. He could be allowed to move on, and she would regret that he would have to move on without her, but she would be alive.

"Alright, Jareth," Sarah said at last. "What do I have to do?"

Midge giggled delightedly and scurried up Jareth's leg to perch on his shoulder, clutching the high collar of his cloak. He peered at Sarah keenly with his gimlet eyes. Jareth smiled and stroked the soft fur of the goblin's tail in a distracted way.

"Close your eyes, Sarah, and make a wish," he said.

Sarah hesitated. "Why do I have to close my eyes?"

Jareth made a frustrated sound in his throat. "Fine, keep them open if you like. It's just less . . . disorienting if you close them."

Sarah closed her eyes. "Now what?"

"Make a wish."

She opened one eye and regarded him thoughtfully. "Kind of a genie thing, huh?"

His lips twitched in amusement. "Something like that. Actually it's more of a Fae thing."

"Fae? You mean fairies?" she asked. "I don't believe in fairies."

She was looking at him like she half expected him to fall down dead at this declaration. He shrugged. "Whether or not you believe in fairies anymore is actually no concern of mine. Now make a wish, and say the words, or stay here and bleed to death, as you by rights should. Either way, I am rapidly losing my patience."

"Insufferable, arrogant, prig," Sarah muttered, then, rapidly, before she could lose her nerve or change her mind, "I wish the goblins would take me away—right now."

And in a swirl of sugar scented air and windblown music, she was gone.

Somewhere the clock started ticking again, counting down time in its tiny little increments. Somewhere a dog, caught mid-bark completed the sound, then tucked its ears back and its tail in and lay down, sensing in that deep sixth-sense way that animals have that something had happened, and that he had somehow missed it. In the store, Sam finally picked up the phone and called 911 to report the robbery, then hung up and looked around with wide, dazed eyes.

"Miss Williams?"