Chapter 1: The Bite That Changed Everything
The bathroom was a steam-filled cube, the air thick and wet against the skin. Condensation dripped down the mirror, leaving clear streaks in the fog. The only sounds were the low, relentless thrum of the shower running in the stall and a distant, garbled crunch from the kitchen garbage disposal two rooms away.
Lucky’s knees ached against the cold tile floor. Her focus was absolute, a practiced concentration she usually reserved for quarterly reports. This was different. This was a departure, an experiment in chaos she’d decided to conduct with her nephew after one too many glasses of pinot grigio. The logic had seemed fluid at the time: he was eighteen, newly graduated, and she was thirty, feeling a restless itch her corporate ladder couldn’t scratch.
Lewis leaned back against the sink, his fingers gripping the porcelain edge. His eyes were wide, not with passion, but with a kind of stunned disbelief. “Aunt Lucky, I—”
“Shhh,” she murmured, the sound vibrating. She didn’t want his words. Words were contracts, negotiations, liabilities. This was supposed to be sensation, pure and simple. An escape from the spreadsheet of her life.
Then came the sharp, electric burn on the side of her neck.
It wasn’t a buzz. It was a piercing, chemical sting that felt like a needle injecting fire directly into her jugular. She gasped, her jaw clamping down instinctively.
A pained, guttural scream tore from her throat. The sound didn’t just leave her; it rattled against him, a physical vibration of agony.
She recoiled, clapping a hand to her neck. Her fingers found not an insect, but a small, twitching lump that sizzled under her touch. She flicked it away, a speck of iridescent blue hitting the shower curtain before it dissolved into the steam.
“What? What happened?” Lewis’s voice was high, panicked. He stumbled back, pulling himself up from the sink.
Lucky tried to stand, but a wave of nausea rolled through her, violent and hot. It was followed by a deep, internal cracking, like every joint in her body was being reset at once. She looked down at her hands, still braced on the floor.
Her knuckles were swelling. The skin wasn’t just changing color; it was morphing, darkening to a deep, verdant green. The change raced up her arms, a wave of emerald fury following the pathways of her veins. Her bones groaned as new muscle layered over them, expanding, pushing against the confines of her silk blouse.
“Aunt Lucky… your… your face,” Lewis whispered, scrambling backward until his back hit the door.
She caught her reflection in the cleared streak on the mirror. Her own familiar hazel eyes stared back, wide with terror, but the face framing them was alien. Her jawline was squaring, her cheekbones rising like mountain ridges. Her auburn hair seemed darker, wilder. A sound escaped her—a ragged, shallow breath that was almost a growl.
The seams of her blouse shrieked in protest before giving way with a series of sharp pops. Fabric rained down around her in tattered scraps. Her skirt, already strained, split down the side.
“Oh, god. Oh, god, oh, god,” Lewis chanted, frozen in place.
It wasn’t pain anymore. It was power, a terrifying, surging torrent of it, flooding her system with a raw, green energy. She felt invincible. She felt monstrous. She stared at the stranger in the mirror, this giantess with her own terrified eyes, now set in a face of sculpted jade.
She flexed a hand. The muscle in her forearm corded, powerful and defined, a map of strength she’d never owned. She brought it up, turning it over. It was hers, and yet it wasn’t.
“What did that fly…” she started, but her voice was wrong. It was her, but lower, richer, vibrating with a resonance that made the glass bottles on the sink rattle. She flinched at the sound of it.
“We need… we need to call someone. An ambulance. A scientist. Something!” Lewis babbled, fumbling for his phone in his discarded jeans. He dropped it, the device clattering on the tile.
“No.” The word came out firm, a command in that new, strange voice. The thought of being seen, studied, photographed in this state was a worse terror than the transformation itself. “No one.”
“But you’re… you’re green! You’re huge! You’re like… a she-hulk or something!”
The term hung in the humid air, absurd and perfectly accurate. Lucky looked from her gargantuan green hand to her nephew’s pale, petrified face. A hysterical laugh bubbled up in her chest, loud and booming, echoing off the tiles. It sounded unhinged.
The laugh died as quickly as it came. The reality of the sink, now seeming child-sized next to her, the shower head suddenly at eye level, crashed down. Anger, hot and immediate, replaced the shock. Anger at the fly, at the stupid, reckless choice that led to this, at the universe for picking her.
“This can’t be happening,” she growled. “I have a merger meeting on Tuesday.”
Lewis just stared. “That’s what you’re worried about?”
She ignored him, staring at her reflection. The green woman stared back, a monument to chaos in a bathroom built for order. The distant garbage disposal finally stopped, leaving a ringing silence broken only by the drip of the faucet and her own heavy, unfamiliar breathing.
Outside the bathroom door, the floorboard in the hall creaked. Someone was home.
Lucky’s new, powerful body went rigid. Lewis’s eyes darted to the door, then back to her massive form, clad only in tatters of her former clothes. Panic, pure and shared, flashed between them.
The door handle began to turn.