Dreaming of Sin Ch. 06

Chapter 6 - Betrayal

Professor Amanda Carpenter looked out her office window at the campus. Students rushed about between buildings, held hands with friends, or sat on anything flat and waist height to play on their phones. She couldn't help but wonder how many of those students had a darkness in them. A desire that their better angels knew had to be kept down, but was only ever awaiting an excuse to emerge.

Saliah's orders had been simple: tell Jack a story. It was a story Saliah had written, but Amanda could see the point of it clearly enough: it was a story meant to give Jack an excuse: that evil could lead to a greater good.

No pleasure is so great as indulging in evil while thinking it righteous.

What would Jack do with his excuse?

He cleared his throat from the doorway, and she looked back, waving him in.

"I'm a little more than half finished," Amanda said, though her hair was far from perfect, her makeup rushed, she doubted Jack could put his finger why she was out of sorts today. If he asked, she would simply said she had been up the whole night working on this, and perhaps he would accept it was just the smell of coffee and the so-tired-you-can-taste-your-teeth haze of an all-nighter.

"At first I thought it was poetry. And yes, there are rhymes, and verses. But it is almost like a contract. Clauses, provisions, overlapping and interacting. It is going to take more time to fully decipher. But I can tell you the main thrust."

Jack nodded along.

"Essentially a part of Saliah, you might think of it like her heart," is locked away in the urn. The spells keeping it locked away sound like they could be lifted fairly easily by the urn's owner. But they also talk about how the urn, which is really Saliah, can be destroyed."

Jack perked up at that. "Destroyed? That's a possibility?"

"Yes, but not an easy one. There are things that will be needed, other spells to cast, but there is one huge obstacle that none of the rest will work without..." Amanda paused for effect, eyes locked on Jack. "The only way her defences come down, the only way she makes herself vulnerable enough for someone to actually kill her, is if she thinks they are her soul mate. It isn't so much love, but more like finding someone who resonates with her, wants the same things as her, someone she thinks could be a true partner. That's her only weakness."

Jack left looking like he had just failed an exam, head low, a sway to his path. Whatever he had done to keep their meetings secret from Saliah, it hadn't been enough. Saliah was magic, though perhaps that was the wrong way to think about it. There were rules that applied to Saliah, it was just that those rules were completely different than the rules that bound herself and Jack. And unlike the rules that governed the normal world, Amanda had only what she could deduce from the urn to tell her the rules of Saliah's existence.

One thing was the same whether dealing with a human mafioso, or a magical demoness, you never turn down a bribe. Saying no meant death, the end, game over. Saying yes on the other hand keeps so many more options open.

One thing Amanda was sure of, Saliah could be beaten. The urn proved that. She just had to figure out how, without being caught again.

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You could tell so much about a woman's life by forcing her to perform cunnilingus. Vanessa licked and kissed Saliah's smooth, bare, vagina eagerly, but she had no artistry to her actions. She made the wild, exaggerated motions of someone desperate to please.

No doubt Vanessa's husband, and boyfriends, and flings, over the years had done little more for her than a perfunctory peck on the lips before turning their attention to their own pleasures. That Vanessa had never sought a partner who cared for her was apparent in her own oral deficiencies.

If Saliah had only been taking pleasure in the actions of lips and tongue, she would have stopped the pathetic display. But pleading had been added to the mix and that send tingles of pleasure up Saliah's back to the base of her neck.

A maid stood to the corner of the room, pointedly not making eye contact, though in the ample dining hall that was easy to do.

A long redwood table, with seating for thirty, ran the rooms length. The chairs around it were hand carved ornate affairs. Each had its own beauty and truly would make a fitting place for her to seat Vanessa and put her into an unending, frozen, trance.

"Please..." Vanessa mumbled between clumsy kisses on Saliah's clit, and Saliah's nipples hardened in response.

"Your mistake was pushing Jack too far, too quickly my dear," she explained. Would Vanessa understand? Would she appreciate all the effort Saliah had gone through to tempt Jack into enslaving her, and see that it would take almost equal skill for her to tempt him now?

Jack had needed the excuse that Vanessa was a bad person, he had needed to be put into a compromising moment, the very edge of orgasm, to agree to owning a slave, he had needed his head filled with gifts, appreciations, and compliments before presenting him his prize. If not for all that, Jack could well have refused, let his better angels win. But Saliah had eons of practice at corrupting men.

"He still wants consent, or excuse, and you only offered him darkness."

Vanessa was an amateur who had rushed to hurl Jack's dark fantasies back at him, only to find there was still some morality left to say no. It had been sloppy of her to offer Jack her own daughter. Jack had, of course, bolted, and now Vanessa was to be put into storage.

"Take you for example. If I put you in one of these beautiful chairs and freeze you like that, Jack would only see the 29 empty chairs. He would imagine each one filled with a frozen slave he had grown tired of. He would imagine women draped on top of the table like courses at a meal until the weight of his slaves threatened to break the heavy oak surface. Some men would take that as a challenge to find more women quickly. Jack, as he is now, would be afraid. Aroused? Yes. But also afraid."

Saliah could put Vanessa into a guest bedroom, like sleeping beauty. But that was so pedestrian. With door closed, Jack would likely simply forget about her, never even be tempted to visit and use his helpless slave.

"Just one more chance..." Vanessa said, licking the length of Saliah's labia for emphasis, and went on, "I know how I can help you."

Saliah took a handful of the kneeling woman's hair and twisted it sharply, forcing her face up look into her eyes. "Do you have any idea what it is I even want?" Saliah asked, a smile twisted the corner of her lips. Mortals could be so cute when begging for their lives.

"You want him to be cruel... to women... to use them..." Vanessa said slowly, neck arching back, veins pulsing in her throat as though her heart knew these words could well be her final chance.

"How would you get him to do that?" Saliah replied, though kept the woman's hair twisted in her hand. Saliah's nails scratched a fraction along Vanessa's scalp as she tightened her grip. There was such beauty in fragility.

"I figured out a way. I just have to trick a girl to willingly play out his fantasies."

Saliah traced the side of her nail along Vanessa's cheek. "You have a plan for this?" She asked, using just enough pressure with her nails that Vanessa would heck to check if she'd been cut.

"Yes. Please. Just give me this one last chance."

Perhaps Vanessa would succeed. Or perhaps she would fail and be found out. Saliah let a warm glow spread through her chest at the thought of what Jack would do to Vanessa when she, eventually, told him about the Vanessa's plan.

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How do you seduce an immortal magical being that eats sin?

The obvious answer was that you take an interest in the same things she likes. She likes sin, so you give her sin, the best sins. If you have a friend who liked heavy metal you don't get them a book, you get them heavy metal tickets.

The campus was full of beautiful women, and Jack had the rings Saliah had given him in his backpack. But it was wrong. It didn't just feel wrong: it was wrong. Even if it was a necessary evil to defeat her.

Vanessa had been, what? An accident? A mistake? When Saliah had first been talking to him about a slave, he'd almost been indulging it as a fantasy, her promising it would be someone evil, someone who deserved to be enslaved, and he hadn't really agreed to it... Well, he had, but he was a half second away from orgasm at the time. Then Saliah had just vanished before he could take it back. When he'd finally seen her again, she'd been so happy, given him his rings as a gift, and he had, technically, agreed to it... So, he went along, sure he'd be able to stop it when the woman proved not to actually be evil.

But then came Vanessa. She was evil, she did deserve it, but, again, his choice had come as he was on the very cusp of orgasm and he'd... just gone along again.

So, he found himself wandering Cleavland's streets, thinking. Navel gazing if he were being honest with himself.

His phone buzzed in his pocket and the cracked screen displayed the message he had known was coming, "Jack - if you're not in tomorrow you have to send a Dr.'s note. You're out of vacation and sick days." Wonderful. Navel gazing with time he didn't have to be burning. Saliah had of course made perfectly clear he didn't need to keep his job or worry about any of the practicalities of life. But Jack just kept coming back to the same line he'd heard about winning the lottery: don't quit your job, or change your life, right away.

He had to be honest with himself: Saliah was too tempting, and too good at it. She was winning inch by inch like reeling in a fish. His choices came down to loosing but having a thousand excuses as satisfying as the ones he had for enslaving Vanessa or fighting and having to live with doing terrible things as part of that war.

Sometimes though, even naval gazing yields solutions. His wandering took him past an indescript government building with the stink of unhappiness radiating from it and the sign on the building's door caught his eye, 'Department of Corrections - Parole Management Office'.

He took a long breath. So rarely did a history degree come in handy. You could read a dozen biographies of FDR, or Kennedy, and yet when you ask yourself what they would do when stuck in a dead end job, being dumped by the woman you thought you loved, or having crushing student debts, no health care, and an empty fridge, all those books would have no answers. But this one time, at this one juncture in his life, he knew exactly what all the great men of history would say. It was to be a war.

And wars required soldiers.

White pearl ring of truth on his right ring finger, and the emerald green memory charm ring on his left hand's ring finger, he went into the parole office.

A security guard, just inside the door, standing to the side of a huge metal detector, held out a hand for him to stop. "Name?" the man said.

"Jack Walker."

"Who is your appointment with today?" the man asked.

Ok, good question. "Actually, I'm here about someone out on parole who is violating the terms. I'm not sure who I need to talk to though."

The security guard pushed a plastic basket towards him, and Jack deposited his bag, and rings then passed through a metal detector. "Head up to the fifth floor, that's the parole officer's floor. Reception will get you sorted out."

Alright, lying opens a lot of doors it seems. Fifth floor. When the elevator opened it looked pretty much like what you'd imagine. 1970's vintage paint on the corridor's walls, a horrifically scuffed, heavy industrial floor. And men and women wearing lanyards walking about very, very, slowly as if getting a cup of coffee from a machine in the basement was their only moment of reprieve.

A tired woman in her forties, wearing a department of corrections lanyard, walked by, on her way back from the machine judging by the coffee cup she held in her hand.

"Excuse me ma'am," Jack said, and the woman flinched back when he extended his right hand towards her, not fast enough however, the pearl ring grazed her fingers.

"Sorry," jack said, "I didn't mean to startle you. What's your name?"

The woman blinked in confusion even as her mouth moved. "I'm Mary Jane Anderson."

"Is there somewhere here we could talk privately?" Jack asked.

"Yes, there are a dozen meeting rooms."

"Please, lead the way," Jack said, but the woman didn't move. Her face was a mask of confusion. "I'm sorry, but I don't know you. If you need to speak with someone, reception is just through those doors," she said and pointed down the hall.

'Interesting. Telling the truth was just that, no follow through. Ok... more than one way to skin a cat,' Jack thought.

"What could I say that would make you take me to one of those meeting rooms right now?" he asked.

She didn't hesitate. The more she answered, the easier it seemed to get for her. "That my daughter had gotten into trouble again."

"I'm sorry Mary, but your daughter's gotten into some trouble, we need to talk about it," Jack parroted back, and Mary's face twisted in frustration, and she let out a long exhalation then nodded for him to follow her.

Her lanyard buzzed them in without a second look from any of the dozen workers with dead eyes and slack skin. The meeting room was barely big enough for its door to close without banging into the table and two small chairs - not that the table and chairs hadn't been banged up extensively whether by the door or otherwise.

"So, what did she do now?" Mary asked. Jack wondered just how much the ring would let him take over the conversation.

"Mary I'm looking for something very specific, I'd like to find two women who committed serious crimes but somehow escaped justice. I'm trying to maximize two things with them, beauty, and how big the gap between crime and punishment was. Do you know any women like that?"

Mary laughed. "Beautiful women get off easy all the time. I can think of a dozen off the top of my head."

"What are their full names and addresses?" he asked.

"I don't know," she said.

The pearl stone was not exactly the least frustrating super power one could ask for.

"What could I say that would make you go and find out?" she thought about that for a minute.

"That you'd pay me 10,000 bucks in cash for their files."

Jack's mouth formed a small 'o' of surprise. Ok, maybe the pearl ring was more interesting than he had imagined. Mary Jane Anderson was the kind of woman a husband would find beautiful. It was easy to look at her and see the woman she had been in her twenties. Age had given her a maternal warmth, but work had washed away so much of the happiness that had been there. It felt wrong for her to ask for a bribe, like she had finally become so jaded that her hopes of making a difference in the world were finally dead and she could simply face the reality of her life - she did what she did for money, nothing more or less.

"I'll pay you 10k, cash, for copies of the files for the two ones that best match what I'm looking for."

Mary's eyes widened in surprise, her breath caught, it was almost comical to Jack that she could genuinely look conflicted as she considered the question. But he had figured out how to use the ring. Her requests for cash first, about what he was going to do with the information, about how she could trust him, were all easily answered from her own imagination and then regurgitated back to her, and an hour after he had walked in, Jack left with two files. The emerald memory ring, tapped against Mary's hand when they shook to say goodbye closed the loop with her.

Though he did get her card. He wasn't sure why he'd done it. It just felt, a shame to lose the connection completely.

One nice thing about parole records, finding exactly where someone was at any given time, was part of the job. Jack thought about thumbing through the files, seeing the details of exactly what these two women had done, but he'd wanted to get out of the parole office faster rather than slower, and by the time he was back to his car, had started to question whether reading the details of some horrible criminal file wouldn't spoil his mood. He debated as he drove.

The first woman on the list, the woman who was to be his first foot soldier in his fight against Saliah, had moved into a quiet little suburb a half an hours drive outside of the city, and as Jack pulled onto her street he had absolutely no trouble finding her house. The neighbors had made sure of that.

Every street lamp had a paper poster, some wet and distorted from rain, others fresh. 'Monster!' written in huge letters at the poster's tops, and then a photo, the same one from the parole office's file, printed below. He didn't even need to double check the address, the houses flanking his target's all had huge laminated versions of the poster, the word, "MONSTER" in bold, red, semi-transparent lettering across the woman's face.

The driveway of his target's home had been spray painted with ten foot letters saying "GET OUT!", with flecks of older, multi-colored, paints surrounding it where a power washer had failed to remove the previous versions of the demand.

That treatment, it turned out, was mild compared to what his second soldier's neighbors had done when Jack arrived there two hours later.

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I would like to encourage some community participation. This chapter has ended with Jack finding two new women to bring into the fun. I'd like to give those of you who have been enjoying this story so far the opportunity decide who they are. Just leave a comment in the following format: "[Character's first name]; [a brief - sub 50 word - description of their appearance]; and [a brief - sub 20 word - description of their personality]. [What you think of the story so far!]"

I'll select the winners ten days after the story goes live.

Please note, the standard lit rules apply to these characters, and any variation from the format required will result in disqualification. Also, based on context, you can probably imagine these characters are going to be in for some tough times ahead, so bear that in mind with your submissions.

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