Jack looked around, momentarily confused. For a brief second she had thought she was somewhere else, trapped in a subterranean cell, naked, half-starved, and dirty. The flash of confusion passed as quickly as it came. Jack was at work just as she had been all afternoon. She was fully dressed in her work clothes, a long checkered dress and white apron, complete with her mane of blonde hair done up in braided pigtails. Standard issue for all the girls at the Burger Barn. The guys wore blue overalls and checkered flannel workshirts, which from time to time made Jack long for the days when such garb would have been appropriate for her. Of course, her nametag said Nora, not Jack, but she was still Jack on the inside. However, everyone thought she was Nora Volancort and, honestly, Jack herself was sometimes more than a little confused about that.
But if she were Nora she should be rich and influential, right? Why would she be working at the Burger Barn?
Briefly, she wondered if someone had used the stone. Jack suspected DeMorrell still had it, but she couldn't prove it for sure and anything was possible where the stone was concerned. Really, she was living proof of that now, wasn't she? Not many eighty-nine year old men got a second lease on life as an unwed twenty year old mother-to-be. Besides, Jack had to admit she didn't even know where DeMorrell had set up shop these days. He had covered his tracks well.
The baby kicked, forcing Jack to discreetly conceal a burp by pretending it was a yawn. Peering across the main dining area, she noticed table twenty-seven was getting low on drinks. Collecting the pitchers of water and tea, both sweet and unsweet, the young woman made her way over quick as she could, which wasn't breakneck speed, but still pretty light on her feet for eight and a half months pregnant. After topping off the table's drinks she stopped by tables twenty-nine and thirty, taking an order and asking how everyone was enjoying the food respectively. It was pretty slow tonight. Jack hoped Grosman would let her go home early.
Back at the waitresses' station, hidden in a small alcove between the main dining area and the room reserved for private parties, Jack leaned one hip up against the counter and firmly kneaded her lower back with both hands. Her feet hurt. Her back hurt. Her head hurt. Even her boobs hurt. She was tired and, really, she didn't know how much longer she could keep doing this. Yes, she had no one to turn to. Yes, she needed this job. It seemed that Nora had miscalculated when she killed her parents. Their vast fortune was tied up in probate due to the suspicious manner of their deaths. Worse, trapped in Nora's body, Jack didn't have access to any of the considerable sums she had squirreled away in her old life. Voice and thumbprint were definitely not a match. Hell, even her signature was different now!
So here she was, working for a living and trying to resume some sort of normal life, which was hard once you got accustomed to wishing for whatever you wanted with a magic stone.
Still, there had to be an easier way. Some of the other girls didn't understand why "Nora" didn't work the system and get on welfare and rent-assisted housing. Jack had to admit, even if it was just to herself, that the idea was getting more tempting by the day. Not yet, though. Some part of her old self remained, a part that couldn't stomach going from Jack Merlin, world traveller and man of adventure, to Nora Volancort, welfare mom.
Which all meant she hustled and she bustled for minimum wage and the occsional tip. The head waitress seemed to like her, mostly because she worked harder than the majority of the girls that weren't knocked up. The manager - - not so much. Mr. Grosman had this way of glaring at her through slitted eyes, as if he expected "Nora" to deliver her baby on the dining room floor before the eyes of his horrifed patrons. Jack supposed he was still mad that she had rebuffed his clumsy advances after first hiring her. Of course, that was back when her breasts had still been bigger than her belly. It was already obvious she was pregnant, but that hadn't stopped Grosman from making a pass at her anyway. These days, her due date rapidly approaching, Jack didn't seem quite so captivating to him.
Jack wondered if she would have time for a quick trip to the bathroom before she checked on her tables again. It would help if Angie and Susan didn't spend all of their time hiding out back of the building smoking and gossiping. She wasn't mad at them, though, or not too much anyway. They were still young and headstrong. Jack offered up a small prayer of thanks that, even if she had to be a woman and pregnant to boot, she didn't have to endure the trials of adolesence all over again. That would have been one change too much.
It was hard to believe, but after all she had endured, she was grateful for this second chance. Sure, she would have been happier if she could have selected some of the specifics of her "reincarnation." Nevertheless, this was another go at the game of life and Jack was going to try her damnedest to not screw this one up like she had the last go around. It wasn't until the dark of night when she was laying in bed, the baby turning over and over in her womb, keeping her awake, that she began to truly question her existence. That was when Jack began to ask the truly hard questions.
Would it hurt? Her ex-wives and her former mistress had seemed to think it hurt. Would DeMorrell come for the baby? Would he try to take the little boy or girl from her? Did she owe it to the world to try to stop him - -to take back the stone? Should she try to find Linda, her daughter, or Jon, her grandson? Could they, would they, help her? How did it all come to this anyway?
It was odd that these thoughts were plaguing her during the day. It usually wasn't until the dark watches of the night that the confusion and terror of all she had been through hit her. Jack's head began to hurt, a pinpoint headache somewhere between and behind her crystal blue eyes.
DeMorrell had gotten the stone from Jack's hiding spot, an incredible feat in and of itself, since Jack had twelve highly inaccesable spots around the globe and the stone randomly teleported to a different one each day. It shouldn't have been possible to DeMorrell alone, rich and influential as he was, but he had the amoral genius of Nora Volancort to help him. She had learned many of Jack's secrets during their brief tryst and used them all against him. Jack sought to recover the stone and had nearly done so when Nora used it to steal his body and wish-granted powers it possessed. An unnecessary cruelty considering she now had the stone, and one that had been Nora's undoing. DeMorrell's guards killed her in a hail of bullets.
Thus began Jack Merlin's life as a woman, her captivity in DeMorrell's dungeon, and her torture by his men and, eventually, DeMorrell himself. Raped. Beaten. Very nearly brainwashed. DeMorrell or more likely one of his many guards had gotten her with child. Hadn't the guards had enjoyed her significantly more often than their employer? Yet somehow Jack knew it was DeMorrell's child inside her. It wasn't until DeMorrell had grown overconfident, greedily rubbing the steadily emerging mound of her belly, that Jack managed to touch the stone, wishing herself away to "a normal life." Unfortunately, she hadn't been specific enough. It seemed a normal life for a pregnant young woman with no higher education meant waiting tables and living in a tiny garage apartment
It was back to this apartment Jack trudged this evening, like every other one, making her way from the bustop to her new home. Hopefully her landlady wasn't sitting on the front porch smoking as she often did on balmy summer nights such as these. Mrs. Hudgins, a stocky sixty-something widow and mother of five, was full of unwanted advice on how to endure the upcoming birth, which she described with gruesome relish. Jack shuddered, as much from thinking of Mrs. Hudgins as from contemplating the ordeal that lay ahead of her.
Still a thought nagged at the back of Jack's mind, making her headache worse. Mrs. Hudgins said the headaches came from blood pressure problems, common in the final monthsof pregnancy, but Jack didn't think so. It was some out of place memory rattling around in her skull. She didn't escape from DeMorrell on her own, did she? Something made her doubt it. Someone else must have used the stone, but was it to help her or hurt her? The gaping hole in her memory could be explained by amnesia from the bullet that clipped her forehead shortly after her disastrous switch with Nora - - or it could be explained by DeMorrell carving up her mind with the stone. She had fought DeMorrell for decades - - so why couldn't she remember what country he was from? Or why he had hired her to find the idol that the stone had been fashioned from? Even if she had intended to return it to him, which she obviously hadn't, wouldn't she remember to where or to whome she was supposed to transfer it?
Thankfully, Mrs. Hudgins was already indoors. She really hated this place, but it was all she could afford. It even came furnished and Mrs. Hudgins had tossed in an old basinet, changing table, and rocking chair that her youngest daughter no longer needed for her own children. It was often that Jack regretted wishing herself away and leaving the stone behind without making sure she would have access to the Volancort fortune. Jack paused on the landing at the top of the steps leading other small apartment. What had she been thinking? That if DeMorrell had the stone he wouldn't bother with her, his revenge already taken?
But why would she wish herself away and leave the stone with DeMorrell? Hadn't she meant to send it to Jon? Or at least to take it with her?
Jon! Jack was seized by the sudden inescapable fear that something horrible had happened to the grandson of her old life.
The baby kicked and Jack rubbed the peak of her bulging belly. The young woman wished he or she would settle down in there. It had to be DeMorrell's baby - - the little devil kept her up all night with its internal gymnastics and, even this late in her pregnancy, made breakfast, Jack's favorite meal, a nausea filled battle to get her food down. Rattling her key home into the rusty lock, Jack stepped into the cramped foyer and set her purse down on the small table to the left of the door. Slipping off her shoes, a habit Jack had picked up in the orient in another life, she waddled down the short hallway and paused in the doorway to what was her living room and bedroom, a couch on one side and a bed on the other, the coffee table between them.
Reaching over she flicked the lightswitch by the door. The lights came on and Jack gasped in shock. There was someone sitting on the couch!
