Synopsis: This is the seventh chapter of an ongoing story. While I recommend reading from the beginning here is a brief synopsis for those who want to jump right in. Saliah is a nearly all powerful demoness who feeds off moral corruption, and who had the majority of her powers unwillingly locked away inside an urn. Jack came across the urn by chance and instantly became Saliah's focus. She feeds off him with the ultimate goal of having him free her from the urn's grip. To better understand the urn and Saliah, Jack turned to his beautiful, brilliant, college professor Amanda Carpenter. She translated some of the urn's text and warned Jack that Saliah was not all she seemed. Saliah got to Amanda before she could complete the translation and, through threats and bribes, convinced Amanda to betray Jack, telling him that Saliah would become vulnerable only if Jack could make Saliah fall in love with him. Jack has hatched a plan, using magic rings Saliah gifted him to bring two women to his mansion, determined to impress Saliah.
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Chapter 7 - The Contest
Jack owned exactly one suit. It wasn't a good suit. It avoided being comically bad only because he had so few sets of clothes he looked truly good in. But Saliah could smell the effort leaking off him. His freshly ironed, white, off the rack, shirt. The black dress shoes too obviously just cleaned. And the not-horrific, suit she recognized from pictures of his and Samantha's anniversary dinner three months before.
Saliah was reclining back on a lounge chair in the mansion's back yard. Her foot dipped slightly into the cool water of the pool. She wore a white silk toga, trim and sleek against her body, gold jewellery caressed her neck, ears, and played its way down her arms to finger rings.
"Don't you look dapper," she smiled to him as he approached. A director would never have dreamed of asking for a second take had his camera been trained on the scene. She would have ripped out his throat if he had.
"You put the heavens to shame," he said, and she chuckled. That line had probably taken Jack some time to think up. He wasn't the type to try something so cheesy on the spur of the moment.
"Have you decided? The perfect woman we talked about?" she asked, sitting up, a small wet footprint forming where she set her wet foot down.
"I have actually been thinking about something else. That I haven't really been fair to you," Jack sat down on the lounge chair beside hers.
Fair? To her? How times had changed. Her Khan had never spared a moment's thought to fairness in their relationship. He had thought of her as a woman, a dangerous one certainly, but a woman to be used like any other. For her it had been much simpler - what did veal owe its farmer aside from being delicious?
"You've spent days thinking about what I would enjoy, about making sure I was having my mind blown. And I realized I never did the same for you. A good lover should think about his partner as much as his partner thinks about him. I thought of a gift for you."
A whisp of air escaped her nose, and she caught a flicker of a kind of sad surprise rushing through her at the words. If this wasn't the most delicious irony she had ever tasted. Saliah's plotting with Amanda Carpenter had, as its objective, Jack's acquiescence to Saliah's temptations. Her Khan, really any man of the past, would have viewed simply being agreeable and open minded as the height of flirtation. Yet thanks to the very morals she so delighted in stripping away, here Jack was, trying with unpracticed, unrefined, primitive words, to tempt her in the same way that she spent millennia tempting others.
A flicker of true excitement for her gift glowed in her chest. One day she would have to thank Jack for this. Not for whatever gift he had thought of in his self-serving attempt at seduction. His idea would be as pathetic as a toddler's gift of a plastic toy to a parent. Not for 'thinking of her' as a step in his own plans. But for letting her feel, even if for only a moment, what it felt like to be on the other side of temptations.
"I'm certainly curious..." she said, and he offered his hand. His grip warm, firm, she let herself be guided onto her feet and into their palatial home. She couldn't resist. Jack's suit transmuted as they walked, the fabric shrunk, tightened, shifted as it actually began to fit his frame. "This," she whispered into his ear, "is what a suit is supposed to look like."
Jack placed a hand on the small of her back as he led the way. A war horse couldn't have pushed her to take a step she didn't want, but she let that mortal hand on her back guide her path. Moments like this were rare enough that they ought to be enjoyed absent worry of tomorrow.
The house's library was a decorative space, a bit of performance art for visitors. Saliah would have put a wager on fewer than two books a year being removed from its shelves, and yet thousands of leather bound volumes lined the walls, reaching up twenty feet with a rolling ladder providing the necessary access. The small bar in the room's corner undoubtedly received far more attention than the books. Of course, her full focus was on two women, laying against one another, fast asleep on a plush leather chez that straddled the center of the room. Two pads of paper and pens sat on the ground at their feet.
Jack had arranged two sumptuous wing chairs to stand side by side and face the chez. Their two chairs were near enough to being thrones. She took the chair on the right, Jack sitting to her left.
She leapt into the two women's minds. Jack had used the rings on them. With shocking skill. It would take days to view the women's entire lives and Saliah had moments. It was enough to watch Jack surprise them in their homes, use the ring of truth to openly question how best to abduct them, and then put on his emerald ring and with a single tap, put them into a slumber.
It wasn't his first time using the rings. Though if she wanted to know more, she would have no choice but to ask Jack. Perhaps he would tell her, eager to gain favor and seduce her. Perhaps he would lie, and she would be left to divine the truth.
"I'm thinking," Jack began, looking at her with a gentle smile on his face, he seemed truly to be enjoying this. Perhaps it was a smugness of feeling like he was tricking her, or perhaps he anticipated the pleasure to be had, "that you wake them up and implant in their minds the knowledge that you're an all powerful, wicked, magical being and I'm your mortal boyfriend who's calling the shots. Saves us from having to explain their situation."
Those endless explanations did get rather tedious after the first thousand times, and with the tiniest flicker of power, Saliah acquiesced. But she smiled to Jack letting her teeth seem delicate in her petite mouth, "Jack, when have I ever been wicked?"
It was much the same as the two women waking up to find themselves in a tiger's enclosure at the zoo. They both froze, locked in place by fear, even their eyes moved with care, looking to Jack, then each other, but always back to her. Always back to the true source of dreadful power that they had stumbled into.
"Good morning, ladies," Jack said, and she drank in the cheer his voice contained. Her chest fluttered lightly wondering what his next words would be. For a wild moment she was glad she couldn't read Jack's mind. In her entire existence she had never been blind to what her victims were thinking and the uncertainty, the thrill of possibility, was intoxicating.
"Natasha, meet Kerri. Kerri, meet Natasha. Now, let's get to the heart of things, shall we? You're here to compete in a series of sexual challenges, one against the other. The winner gets to go free. The loser is going to get turned into a very special kind of sex toy. I don't want to spoil the surprise, but let's just say it's going to be worse than anything either of you can imagine."
She'd had conversations like this before, uncountable times, and these women both reacted oddly. There was no pleading, no useless tears. They both tightened their face as though at the starting block of a race, awaiting the pistol shot. Had she gone too far with her implanted understanding? She so wanted to investigate, but even more she wanted to drink in the suspense of waiting for Jack's next words. Investigation could come later.
"Your first challenge is physical, and you need to impress me and Saliah as the judges. Natasha, you're going to come up with a set of physical changes to Kerri's body that will please us. Kerri you're going to come up with a set of physical changes to Natasha's body that will please us. Whoever does a better job changing the other, wins. I'll give you ten minutes to think about your answers."
Kerri and Natasha looked at leach other, eyes scanning over the others' bodies appraisingly. Kerri could have been a cheerleader. Blonde hair, breasts on the smaller side, a dainty upturned nose. Jack had caught her at home without any makeup and freckles dotted her cheeks.
