Chapter 1: The Broken Willow Stick
The air in the back room of The Enchanted Tome smelled of dust, decay, and something sweetly rotten, like forgotten fruit. Marcus barely noticed. His fingers traced the spine of a water-stained grimoire, his mind a thousand miles away, replaying the final slam of his apartment door, the silence that followed. It had been three weeks. The hollow ache in his chest had curdled into something darker, a restless anger that thrummed in time with his pulse.
“Dude, are you even listening? This place is a dump.” Bear’s voice, a familiar, grating baritone, cut through the gloom. He kicked at a stack of yellowed newspapers, sending a cloud of motes dancing in the solitary candle’s flicker. “We came for weird beer, not a tetanus shot.”
“They said the good stuff was in the back,” Marcus muttered, not looking up. His gaze had landed on a shelf of what the hand-written label called ‘Cursed Trinkets, As Is.’ It was a joke. It had to be. A jar of what looked like pickled onions pulsed with a faint, sickly light. He reached out, not for the jar, but for the stick beside it.
It was just a gnarled piece of willow, rough and twisted. It fit perfectly in his palm. He picked it up. The bark was unnaturally slick, cool and slightly sticky, like it was weeping.
“Let’s go. This is depressing.” Bear loomed beside him, a solid, stocky presence. His best friend since fourth grade, a guy who communicated in shoulder punches and believed feelings were a sign of the flu. Right now, his pragmatic annoyance was a cheese grater on Marcus’s nerves.
A hot, ugly wave of loneliness washed over him. He thought of Sarah’s patient sighs, her final, gentle “you’re just too much, Marcus.” He thought of the quiet apartment, the empty bed, the way his own thoughts echoed. He didn’t want gentle. He didn’t want complicated. He wanted…
He squeezed the willow stick. It groaned, a sound like bending bone.
“I’m so sick of this,” Marcus said, the words a low hiss in the dusty quiet.
“Sick of what? Bro, you’re being weird.”
“Sick of chasing. Sick of arguing. Sick of feeling like I have to perform.” His voice rose, fueled by a months-old frustration. “I just want… God, I just want someone who actually listens. Someone who does what I say, for once. Someone who’s just… mine. No games. No backtalk. Just… mine.”
The stick snapped in his hand.
A soundless, green flash consumed the world. It wasn’t light you saw with your eyes; it was light you felt in your teeth, in the marrow of your bones. The candle snuffed out. The humming jars fell silent. For a second, there was only the afterimage, seared onto the retina, and the smell of ozone and wet earth.
Then a thud. A gasp. A string of curses in a voice that was too high, too sharp, yet horrifyingly familiar.
Marcus blinked, his eyes struggling to adjust. Bear was gone. Where his friend had stood, there was a woman, slumped on the floor amidst the velvet drapes.
She was tiny, a full foot shorter than Bear had been. A spill of straight, platinum blonde hair fell around her face, cut with severe, blunt bangs. She pushed herself up on hands that were now slender, with neatly filed nails. The motion made the cheap fabric of her now-ill-fitting t-shirt—Bear’s The Alchemy of Brewing shirt—strain across a startling new topography. The shirt hung loose at her waist but was stretched taut over a frankly impressive chest, and the jeans, now comically baggy, pooled around a pair of powerful, curvy thighs.
“What the fuck,” the woman spat. The voice was wrong, but the venom, the cadence—it was Bear’s. “Marcus, what did you do? What the actual hell?”
She tried to stand, wobbling on unfamiliar legs. The new center of gravity betrayed her. She stumbled, grabbing a shelf for support, sending a cascade of brittle bones clattering to the floor. In the faint light filtering from under the door, Marcus saw her face. Sharp, delicate features, wide blue eyes currently blazing with pure, undiluted fury. It was a stunning face. It was also, unmistakably, the face of his best friend wearing an expression he’d seen a thousand times after a bad call in a pickup game.
“Bear?” The name felt absurd on his tongue.
“No, it’s the fucking tooth fairy! Of course it’s me!” She—he—Bindi?—looked down at herself, at the hands that patted the new curves with a kind of clinical horror. “You turned me into a girl. A tiny, blonde… You turned me into a chick!”
“I didn’t mean to!” Marcus protested, the guilt instantaneous and nauseating. “It was a stick! I was just venting!”
“Venting? You wished me into a woman!” Bindi’s shout was shrill. She took an aggressive step forward, tripped on the dragging jeans, and had to catch herself again. The humiliation twisted her pretty features into a snarl. “Fix it! Snap it again, say you take it back!”
Marcus looked at the two broken halves of the willow stick in his hand. They were dry, inert, just wood. He tried to fit them together. Nothing. “I don’t think it works like that.”
The panic in Bindi’s eyes was real now, cutting through the anger. She looked around the room as if searching for an exit, a solution, her breath coming in short, sharp gasps. And then she froze. A deep, uncomfortable flush spread from her neck up to her cheeks. She shifted on her feet, a subtle, awkward motion.
“What?” Marcus asked, dread pooling in his gut.
“Nothing,” Bindi snapped, too quickly. She crossed her arms over her chest, which only served to accentuate the new fullness there. She was trying to glare, but her pupils were wide in the dim light. A sheen of sweat glistened on her upper lip.
“You’re lying. What’s wrong?”
“It’s nothing, you asshole! Just… this body feels weird. Everything’s… hot. It’s like I’ve got a fever or something.” She uncrossed her arms, fidgeting. Her hips gave a tiny, involuntary roll. She bit her lip, hard. The anger was still there, but it was being crowded out by something else, a creeping, biological urgency that was clearly as frightening to her as the transformation itself.
Marcus stared. The request, the wish, echoed in his head. Someone who does what I say. The broken stick felt heavy in his hand. A terrible, curious thought uncoiled in the back of his mind. It was wrong. It was the worst thing he could possibly do.
His mouth was dry. He spoke quietly, not a command, just a testing of the waters. “Calm down, Bindi.”
The effect was instantaneous and absolute. The furious tension drained from her shoulders. Her breathing slowed, deepened. The frantic look in her eyes softened into a placid, vacant haze. She stood still, waiting, her head slightly tilted.
Marcus’s heart hammered against his ribs. “Holy shit.”
The voice of his conscience was a distant whisper, drowned out by the roaring, intoxicating novelty of it. He took a step closer. She didn’t flinch. He reached out, cautiously, and brushed a strand of the blonde hair from her forehead. Her skin was soft, incredibly soft. She leaned into the touch, just slightly, a kittenish nudge.
This was Bear. His best friend. And he had just… turned him off.
The guilt surged, sharp and acidic. But underneath it, something else stirred. A warmth. A fascination. The power was a drug, and he’d just had the first pure hit. He looked at her—the delicate line of her jaw, the full curve of her lips, the way the oversized shirt slipped off one smooth shoulder. The body was undeniably, breathtakingly attractive. And it was his. He had wished for it.
The conflict must have shown on his face. The command’s hold seemed to loosen as her own will fought its way back to the surface. The vacant look in Bindi’s eyes fractured, replaced first by confusion, then by dawning, horrifying comprehension. She looked from his face to his hand, still hovering near her cheek.
The fury returned, hotter than before, fueled by shame. “Did you just… try to pet me? I will end you, you fucking creep!”
She swung a fist at him. The punch was amateur, all anger and no skill, the motion hampered by the unfamiliar geometry of her new body. Marcus caught her wrist easily. Her arm was slim, her bones fine-bird fragile in his grip. She was strong—he could feel the latent power in those dense muscles—but he was stronger. He always had been. Now, the difference was laughable.
She struggled, a wild, thrashing thing, her other hand clawing at his arm. “Let go of me!”
He didn’t. He held her, watching the struggle, feeling the heat of her skin. His own breath was coming faster now. The guilt was still there, a sour note, but it was being woven into something thicker, more complex. A possessive, thrilling darkness. He had caused this. She was his problem. His creation.
His.
The word echoed in the silence of his mind, fitting into the lonely hollow Sarah had left behind. It felt good. It felt right.
He leaned in close, his voice a low murmur by her ear, laced with a curiosity that chased away the last of his hesitation. “You’re not going to hit me, Bindi,” he said, the command woven into the statement.
Her fighting ceased immediately. Her body went limp in his grasp, her arms falling to her sides. The defiance in her eyes guttered and died, replaced once more by that empty, waiting calm. A single, traitorous tear leaked from the corner of her eye and tracked through the dust on her cheek.
Marcus stared at it. He wiped it away with his thumb. She didn’t pull back.
“Okay,” he breathed, the word swallowed by the dust and the dark. A plan, reckless and inevitable, began to form in the chaos of his mind. He couldn’t fix this here. He needed to get them home. He needed to understand what he could do.
He kept his grip on her wrist, not rough, but firm. Final.
“Come on,” he said, his voice leaving no room for the backtalk he’d wished away. “We’re leaving.”