Jack Merlin was in trouble. In fact, he was in the most diabolical danger of a long and dangerous life. He was a captive, utterly defeated and debased by his most powerful enemy, and the supreme irony was that enemy did not yet suspect Jack was already his prisoner.
Yes, Jack was imprisoned most securely; first, imprisoned in a nearly medieval dungeon beneath Lucius DeMorrel's palatial home and, secondly, a prisoner of strange flesh and an even stranger condition for a lifelong womanizer and the father of five children by three different women.
Jack Merlin was a woman now - - and she was pregnant.
The baby inside her kicked and Jack's hand instinctively rubbed the point of contact on the fecund sweep of her stomach, trying to sooth it back to sleep. It irritated the former adventurer to realize her mannerisms and behaviors showed little to no difference from those of his two wives and mistress when they had carried his other children. Soon she would endure what they had endured and learn what it meant to give birth.
Jack shuddered.
After a battle that had lasted over half a century, a war waged beneath the noses of unsuspecting governments of a dozen nations and in a variety of disguises, Jack Merlin had once again assumed a new identity, though it was unwillingly this time. This time she was to be female and, humiliatingly, fertile.
The mind and soul of Jack Merlin now inhabited the form of a very pretty and very pregnant young blonde woman once known to the world as Nora Volancort.
Once, briefly, Jack had served as the guardian of a vast and deadly power that could make wishes reality, a power once contained in a crude stone idol. Nora Volancort had once been one of the few mortals on earth to even suspect much less know of the idol's existence. The pampered daughter of a once aristocratic and still wealthy family, Nora had studied Meso-American anthropology - - with a particular emphasis upon witchcraft and mythology. She was a student par excellence at the university where Merlin had installed himself as a professor in order to learn the origins of the power he protected.
Jack had enjoyed a brief dalliance with the young woman, but it had ended in disaster. Accidentally discovering the idol's power, Nora was transformed into a sociopathic magnification of her former self by a poorly worded wish. Corrupted by the desire to possess the idol, Nora was now another in a long list of enemies.
Jack managed to disappear without a trace - - or so he thought. He took up life as an unassuming grandfather in middle America, hiding the vast power of the idol he had freshly exposed to this beautiful adversary.
His mistake had been in letting her hear his last wish. She therefor knew of the reality shift and began to search for him. However, she also knew she was not powerful enough to wrest the idol from him. She lacked the manpower and resources to mount a full scale search for Jack Merlin.
But Jack Merlin had other adversaries, older, more powerful foes, and if one of those could steal the idol, she could in turn steal it from their lesser, human hands. So Nora Volancort found Lucius DeMorrel, a match made in hell. Inevitably, DeMorrel took her to his bed, just as Merlin once had, little suspecting her for the amoral adventuress she truly was.
DeMorrel got the idol soon after, but that was another story, and him keeping it was another matter entirely. Jack saw to that.
After all, over the past fifty or so years Jack Merlin had not just altered history - - he had also altered himself. The idol had made it possible to bestow upon himself inborn powers not dependent upon possessing the idol itself: stength, longevity, heightened intelligence, even psychic powers such as telekinesis, psychometry, and astral projection. The idol had also made it possible to make the mightiest weapons of myth and legend a reality. So Jack Merlin had gathered his forces and began a midnight raid upon DeMorrel's compound.
Unfortunately, midnight was also the hour in which Nora Volancort chose to make her own move for the idol. Nora, who had infiltrated DeMorrel's operation from within, stole the idol from it's webwork of lasers and magnetic sensors and then sought to escape. She could have simply wished to teleport away. She could have turned DeMorrel's fortress into dust or made his guards into her willing slaves, indeed, any number of things. However, unused to unlimited power, and with an imagination perhaps crippled by the ealier wish which corrupted her, Ms. Volancort employed her newfound power in very limited ways. Merlin easily caught her off guard and very nearly got the idol. That would have been the end of it right then, but instead both of them were discovered by a platoon of armed guards.
Using his TK, Jack snatched for the idol in Nora's hand, but before her grip was pried open Nora made her fateful final wish. She wished to swap bodies with Jack Merlin, thinking ot use his powers to protect the idol from all comers rather than using the idol itself. She would escape in his body and leave him to take the blame and receive her punishment. With a kiss upon Jack's new lips, Nora thanked "him" and sought to fly away.
The guards had opened fire. Jack and Nora were both hit.
Jack, in Nora's body, survived. Nora, in Jack's body and taken the bulk of the gunfire, did not. Nora's mind and Merlin's body died that night. Jack lived on as a woman, though in the months to follow she often wished she had been the one to die instead.
It was Jack's final desperate move which sealed her fate. Taking the idol she had whispered a wish. The idol had disappeared, leaving him behind in the body of the woman who had betrayed a man unused to betrayal unless he were the one doing it.
DeMorrel had been furious. He promised his traitorous lover the full punishment a Mata Hari such as she deserved. And so, Jack Merlin had lived only to envy the dead. Day after day, night after night, Jack was raped and beaten, sometimes by the guards, sometimes by DeMorrel with the aid of a little blue pill. Her mind was twisted by injections of psychotropic drugs and she was often kept in a state near starvation.
All this DeMorrel did to her - - never realizing it was not Nora who enduring his attentions and those of his men, but rather it was his old enemy, Jack Merlin who screamed in pain and begged for mercy. It was hard to think DeMorrel could have imagined a more perfect means of torture
Eventually, inevitably, Jack Merlin had conceived. Trapped in the body of the lover that had betrayed her and DeMorrel alike, the new Ms. Merlin would fulfill the biological destiny of one enemy by carrying the child of another hated enemy to term. DeMorrel had run tests to determine if the child were his or one of the many guards to have violated her. By chance or by design, Jack Merlin was to be a mother and DeMorrel, the father.
Briefly reliving the humiliation of her time in the lab when the results of the DNA test were read aloud, Jack ducked her blonde head in shame. Yes, it had been a long eight months in the prison, both dungeon and body, made especially for her. The baby moved inside her, rolling over, eager to escape its own watery confinement, and Jack whimpered.
Nervously wetting her lips, Jack placed a hand on her swollen belly, pressing here and there, trying to determine the position of the child's head. Had it been eight months or nine? How much longer did she have? She had tried to put on a brave face for Jon, but Jack was terrified. Of the pain. Of the humiliation. Of what DeMorrel might do to her once she had safely provided him with an heir.
Worst of all, the grandson she had entrusted to guard the idol-turned-stone was now a prisoner as well, a prioner in this place and in a female body of his own. Even now, DeMorrel was violating her just as he had violated Jack, and with the same intention - - of impregnating Jon, and providing himself with another heir.
