"An accident," Lyndon said promptly. He didn't look up from the gun he was playing with, "Pure accident."

Sarah sat down hesitantly on the other side of the table. "What do you mean- an accident? Did something go wrong?"

Lydon glanced up briefly, laughing internally at the very innocent confusion- "Haven't you noticed? The rest of us have no magical aptitude."

"I thought it was just a skill."

"Really."

Sarah knew who that flat mockery reminded her of, and she couldn't help but bristle. "Yeah, really."

"You are quite wrong, you know," Lyndon said calmly, not in the least concerned with the hostility directed his way. "We are more attuned to magic than humans are- yes. After all there is nothing particularly demonic about us."

"You kill people and drink their blood," Sarah said tartly, "I call that demonic."

"More magical," Lyndon dismissed, checking the bullet chamber, "People will not willingly give us their blood and we must survive."

"Well, I still call it demonic. You're not alive; you don't need to breathe or anything."

"Define anything," Lyndon interrupted.

Sarah thought about that.

"We drink blood because blood carries life. It is magic; somehow we go through a change that renders us able to absorb life from the blood we drink. We need to eat or our bodies grow weak. We need to sleep because our bodies grow tired. We drink water to quench our thirst and we mate to quench our lust. How different are we from humans?"

"Humans don't get excited about killing. Alright, a few do, but most of us are just average people who try to survive and care for their families without hurting anyone. Our laws protect us. Vampires don't have laws."

Lyndon was completely unimpressed. He considerately put down his gun and folded his arms on the tale to give her his undivided attention, but the cool discipline of his features gave no hunt of any strong reaction.

"To be sure, it will take some time to break your delusions," he commented, "Do you know for certain that vampires have no laws?"

"I hardly think you follow the Ten Commandments," Sarah retorted.

"The Ten Commandments are a set of religious laws and I have seen them abused by the religious let alone the laity."

There were words that Sarah was aware she didn't understand. 'Laity' was one of them. Dismissing that momentary vulnerability as unworthy of this argument she seemed to be in, she opened her mouth to refute the point in question.

Lyndon beat her to it- "We shall not argue. That is for Jareth. I was never good with words."

Sarah's fencing instincts subsided. "You seemed to be doing well enough," she admitted wryly.

Those grey eyes were never friendly but Sarah found to her surprise that the vampire's stern façade hid a quiet laugh beneath. She smiled back unconsciously, looking away because she didn't know if she was allowed to share jokes with subordinates.

Lydnon was beginning to understand why Jareth was in the predicament he was in. The Goblin King had never been immune from error. Far from it! Lyndon had seen him fight and fail and be crushed times without number. In those early days when childer had had to endure the harsh rigours of vampire elders Jareth hadn't fared too well.

"A mistake," Lyndon said again, returning to the original topic, "Mistaken identity."

"Jareth? How come?"

"Oh, one of the elders desired a member of the nobility- someone whose connections could be used to keep us safe and hidden for a few years more. They caught the wrong person."

"I'm guessing Jareth was not nobility," Sarah asked.

"No, Jareth was not. Far from it. Moreover, he studied magic in life. The elders almost killed him when they found out."

"Why?"

"No elder is safe with an unruly childe who is potentially much more powerful. No elder would ever run the risk of being deposed."

"That must have been tough. Why didn't they kill him?"

"They tried. Jareth escaped and simply came back. It frightened them."

Sarah could see it, she really could. Jareth's arrogance would send him swaggering back into the jaws of death. Probably equipped with nothing more than that infuriating smirk and a blithe quip.

"So how did you two meet up?"

"Stories for another time, Sarah. His Majesty will see you now."

Sarah looked over her shoulder and Jareth had just entered the Cathedral, trailing his cape over one arm. She nodded to Lyndon and got up from the table, making her way to where he had paused briefly to talk with his guards.

He held up a hand at her, signaling her to silence until he was done.

And then Jareth gestured back the way he had come. "A walk," he said shortly.

"Okay."

He didn't play tricks on her this time and Sarah wondered if he was in a temper. No snide comments, no tricks, no jokes- not even an offhand remark about a serious subject. Just that unnervingly serene quiet.

"Okay, what's wrong?" she asked, following him into the little room they'd taken to using for their 'walks'.

"Should something be wrong?"

"I don't trust all this peace and calm."

"Don't be so suspicious, Sarah."

She noticed to her relief that Jareth was smiling, relishing her worry. Maybe even her concern. And then her heart dropped again when the smile faded too soon.

"Now I know there's something wrong," Sarah told him, "Is it something I did?"

"Ironically enough- yes."

"Oh. What was it, something bad?"

He studied her, safe behind his enigma and somber as she had never seen him before. "We shall see," he evaded, turning away to pick a crystal from the table.

"I didn't do anything," Sarah offered, "So it couldn't have been that bad."

"It changed the course of history."

"That's bad."

Jareth nodded grimly and pointed to the apparatus that he found, to his annoyance, he had already labeled 'Sarah's chair'. It was not Sarah's chair. It was his. Everything in the Underground belonged to him. He had created the Castle, created every article of furniture inside it. He had to remember that nothing belonged to Sarah.

"Sit down, Sarah, we need to talk."

"If this is about sending me back…"

"This is not about sending you back," Jareth assured her, "Directly."

Sarah narrowed her eyes. She might have woken up disposed to making the best of her situation, but she wasn't going to be tricked again if she could help it.

"It is about your journey through the Labyrinth," Jareth began, arranging his cloak around himself, "About the havoc you created."

Instinctively Sarah looked out the window. The fires were out but the sky was still grey. The air was smoky; she could smell it now she looked for it.

"The Goblin City is repaired. We needn't concern ourselves with that. The state of my Labyrinth, however, is not to be dismissed. It took me twenty years to build- more years than you've been alive, might I add. And you destroyed it with six words."

"I wasn't trying to destroy anything. I just wanted Toby back."

"You got what you wanted. I want an explanation about my Labyrinth."

"I didn't do anything!"

"Clearly, you did. Stone does not break lightly."

"Okay, it was an accident. I'm sorry!"

Jareth smiled at her and steepled his fingers. "I don't think you are."

She sighed and dropped her head into her hands.

"I don't think you understand any of this."

"No," Sarah said patiently, "I don't understand any of it. I didn't the first time you asked. I didn't even know the Labyrinth had collapsed, remember? I didn't know about the fires, about the Labyrinth or about you. I didn't even know you were a vampire."

The latter he waved away as quite off topic. "And now you do. What have you to say for yourself?"

"That I still don't understand," she snapped, "You said unfinished business, but what kind? Am I supposed to build the Labyrinth again? Do I apologize for winning? Because I won't, you know. I'm glad I won."

"I'm sure you are," he murmured, conjuring a crystal, "But you would never take delight in another's misfortune."

She watched the crystal. Crystals never signified good things. Crystals, so far as she remembered, brought tricks and jokes. And Jareth. The trickster? Strange to think of a grown man- vampire- as Puck, but there it was. Jareth took far too much delight in seeing her squirm.

He laughed suddenly and released the bubble into the air. It split into three and Sarah could see something move inside them.

"Do you remember your party?" he asked, still with the laughter hidden in his voice, "A very grown-up dream for such a little girl."

"Dream?"

"Oh, yes. Your dream. People and places from your mind."

Sarah frowned at the crystal bobbing before her eyes, filled with the flat images she could barely recall any more. It all felt so long ago. Another lifetime, almost.

"I almost had you, then," Jareth's voice continued, almost as disembodied as the images in his crystals, "Another second, another brief touch. But you had other ideas, didn't you?"

"I needed to get Toby." Sarah waved the crystals aware and blinked rapidly, firmly positioning herself in the present. No point wandering away on sunbeams. "You really didn't think I'd fall for such a trick?"

"A trick, no. But a seduction, yes. I think you would have fallen." Jareth very easily popped the crystals and sat back in his chair.

Seduction. Sarah was certain she'd heard wrong. "You were trying to make me forget about the Labyrinth," she laughed, "It's not like you were offering to kiss me or anything."

Jareth sniffed delicately and felt the corner of his mouth turn up. It was just too easy! "In a way, I believe I was."

"What?"

"You know, I prefer you as you were in the Labyrinth. The one thing I have learned from my long, er, lack of life, is that wide-skirted dresses are the very devil to contend with in a struggling victim. That white shirt, however, would have showed every drop I had missed, staining so well. A most debauched picture."

He'd told her before, Sarah remembered, that he took the good things from the children and took blood from the challengers in the Labyrinth. But he hadn't tried to bite her. Or rip her vein open, as Lyndon put it. She said so, somehow doubting that Jareth would do it to her as they were sitting there. She couldn't explain it. She just knew that he wasn't going to do it any time soon.

"And what do you think the seduction was? I was there with you, lying beside you, my hand upon your neck." He lifted his right hand and laid it carefully on his thigh. "I waited. The moment you gave in I would have opened your vein. No consideration."

"Why didn't you?"

"You didn't give in," he said, "You broke the dream. With a chair, too- I was most impressed. The game has rules. That's why it is a game."

Sarah was aware that she had been close to death, close to losing everything for her foolishness. But the logical side of her that couldn't just let things be wasn't satisfied. "You make the rules, you know. Who'd care if you break them?"

Jareth sat back with a smile, shrugging broad shoulders with an easy snap of bone and tendon. "I was once human," he chuckled, "I remember humanity. Human blood still flows through my veins whenever I can get it. It would be a poor victory to win by brute strength."

She shook her head in despair. "You are mixed up. Very mixed up. You're a vampire with no conscience and a warped sense of fair play. You told me that nothing was fair."

"Watch how you quote, Sarah. I asked you what your comparison was."

"What's yours?"

"A fair contest, Sarah. I've killed and hunted, taking what I want with no worry for right or wrong- that was not fair. I've been hounded from one continent to the next for it- that was not fair either. There must be more to life, or unlife, than a constant struggle to eat and exist. I will not repeat that in the Underground. It is my home, even if parts of my duty are distasteful; I'm not going to be driven from the Underground."

Sarah felt weak. A little light-headed, even. But she was still thinking and she didn't want to stop the conversation. Especially now that Jareth was talking. Not tossing out words, but actually talking like a person with sense and emotion. "You can't. No one will find you here."

"Oh? It's not so hard to find. I found it."

"With magic! Lyndon says even vampires don't have the same skill as you do."

"I practiced before I was ever turned, Sarah. It was a coincidence, not a skill. Vampires are naturally more sensitive to magic. It keeps us away from complete death."

"Yeah, but you got better and you found the Underground. You tamed it. Lyndon says that no one he's ever seen could do that. How could anyone come and take that away?"

"Magic has its limits. And I know one person who could take that away."

"Who?"

"You."

Sarah blinked in shock. But Jareth was serious. He lounged back in the curved seat in a room messy with dust and cracked stone. And she could hear the dust and cracks in his voice too, in the way he watched her with those not-quite-right eyes.

"Me?"

"Remember your words, Sarah- 'you have no power over me'. If I don't, what does that make me?"

"I don't know," she confessed, "I can't think of it just now, but I'm sure it doesn't really mean anything except that you can't push me around."

"Really." He swung his feet back to the ground and stood up, towering over her. "If I am not your superior, what am I?"

She couldn't think of it. She knew what it was, of course, but the word slithered away so fast from her tongue that she couldn't say it.

"What am I?" he demanded.

"Stop shouting at me, I can't think." She put an adrenaline-icy hand up to physically cool her eyes. "I can't think if you shout."

"Then tell me what I am."

"This is not the way it's supposed to go," she told him, "It ended with Toby. It was only about Toby."

"With those words? Those are words that break lives, Sarah. Who does have power over you? Your mother? Whoring bitch ran away with another man; is that what breaks her power over you? Disgust? Anger? Rejection?"

"My mother is not a bitch. And how do you know all this, anyway?"

"My vampires move easily Aboveground. No problems with the sun. Or garlic. Or crucifixes. We give up our weaknesses and live for eternity, and we pay with our lives and our families. I can worship in a temple or a church with more piety than any of you can conjure up."

"You- you're shouting again."

"Humans have no concept of the universe. How can they worship a creator when they can't see creation?"

She was frightened by his vehemence. He could see that. So he stood back and took a deep breath. The cool air in his dead lungs calmed him, just as it always had.

"And you, a human with a human's understanding and human's ignorance, you are not my inferior. So what does that make you? More to the point, what does that make me?"

"I don't know," Sarah said thickly, "I don't understand any of this. It's not supposed to be like this at all."

He pinched the bridge of his nose, remembering headaches from long ago times when his eyesight had been compromised by dark rooms and faded writing in faded light. "Get rid of this habit of expecting the expected. Life is never like that and the Underground less so."

"I don't know," she said honestly, "I said those words because they were the words to say. I thought I understood them then but now I don't."

"Then let me explain. If I have no power over you, I am your equal." He nodded to the window. "Everything I saw was once mine but now I share it with you." The smirk this time was bitter. "That is, of course, if I am not your slave."

"I'm lost."

"Then I'll help you find yourself. I offered you my enslavement for one reason- it was a lie. If you had taken the crystal, you would have gone back Aboveground, forgetting everything that had happened. Everything would have gone back to normal except that you would have had the luck that people crave. You would have had your dreams come true. And you would have taken the bad with the good because people dream bad things as often as they dream good."

"I didn't take the dream."

"No. You didn't even accept reality. Not you. That would mean you had to accept that you had done the unthinkable- you had wished your defenseless little brother to a tyrant and a monster, to become a creature of ugly ignorance. You wouldn't accept that. You wanted things your way."

She was learning, she realized, because this made sense. "I changed reality. I ran the labyrinth."

His mouth curved wider, sharp incisors clearly visible. "Clever girl," he approved, "You did. You changed reality. And you made it what you wanted- you won the game, you took back the baby, and you dealt the tyrant a cruel blow. You became a creator, Sarah. That is your unfinished business."

"Oh my God," she murmured. She looked down to her hands, expecting somehow to see them changed. "I didn't do all that."

"You did. Unfortunately. You ruined my vision of reality when you created your own. I can only ask you again- what am I to you? An equal? Or a slave?"