Chapter 1: The Night the Gun Changed
The whiskey was mostly gone, and the world had that soft, fuzzy edge Jed preferred. He belched, the sound echoing through the quiet pines. Daisy lifted her head from her paws, her tail thumping once in the dirt.
“Ain’t nothin’, girl,” Jed muttered, squinting at the moon. It was fat and yellow, hanging low like it was resting on the treetops. The creek below mumbled over rocks. Something rustled in the blackberry brambles across the clearing. Not a deer. Too clumsy.
Daisy’s low growl vibrated in the still air.
“Hush now.” Jed’s hand found the familiar, oiled wood of his shotgun, propped against the rotting log he used for a seat. He stood, his knees popping, and the world tilted for a second. He righted himself, patting the comfortable swell of his belly through his flannel. “Probably just a possum. A big, juicy one.”
The rustling came again, quicker this time. A dry twig snapped.
Possums didn’t snap twigs like that.
A slow, wide grin spread across Jed’s face. Coon. Had to be. His trap line was empty, but a bonus was a bonus. He hefted the shotgun, the solid weight a comfort. Daisy was on her feet now, a line of tension running from her nose to the tip of her quivering tail.
“Easy,” he whispered, stepping forward. His boot sank into a patch of damp moss. The forest seemed to hold its breath. No crickets, no frogs. Just that rustling, moving away from the creek, deeper into the thicket where the pines grew tight and mean.
He followed, Daisy a silent shadow at his heels. The brambles clawed at his jeans. Moonlight died here, choked out by the canopy. He navigated by feel and memory, the smell of damp earth and decay thick in his nose. The rustling stopped.
Jed stopped too, listening. He could hear his own heart, a steady thump in his ears. Then he saw it. A light.
Not firefly light. Not lantern light. This was a slice of electric blue, peeking through a stand of skinny saplings. It hummed, a sound so low he felt it in his teeth.
“What in the hell…” he breathed.
Daisy whined, pressing her wet nose against his leg. He absently scratched behind her ear. “Ain’t no hunter’s camp,” he decided. The light was all wrong. It was too clean, too cold. It made the twisted tree trunks look like stood-up corpses.
Curiosity, a rare and cumbersome guest in Jed’s mind, elbowed aside the whiskey fog. Maybe it was a crashed plane. There’d be parts. Good parts. He could use the wiring, maybe some aluminum. He shuffled forward, pushing a branch aside.
The clearing was small and perfectly round, like a bald spot on the land. In the center sat… a rock. But it wasn’t a rock. It was smooth, blacker than a hole in the ground, and the terrible blue light pulsed from within it, like a heart made of TV static. It sat there, humming that teeth-humming hum, and it was wrong. It was the most wrong thing Jed had ever seen.
His shotgun felt suddenly silly in his hands. Daisy’s whine turned into a sharp bark.
The light flared.
It wasn’t an explosion. It was an unfolding. The blue tore out of the rock in a silent wave, washing over everything. It didn’t hurt. It just… filled. It filled his eyes, his mouth, his lungs. He saw the bones in his own hands, glowing like X-rays. He saw Daisy, frozen mid-bark, a skeleton wrapped in ghostly fur.
He tried to say something, but the light was inside his head, buzzing, rewriting. Then, nothing.
He woke up face-down in a bed of damp ferns. His mouth tasted of pennies and burnt hair. A fly buzzed near his ear.
Groaning, he pushed himself up. Everything ached, a deep bone-ache like he’d spent a day throwing hay bales. Daisy was licking his face, her tongue rough and worried.
“Alright, alright, I’m up,” he grumbled, shoving her gently away. The world swam into focus. It was morning. Pale, gray light filtered through the trees. The clearing was just a clearing now. No black rock. No blue light. Just crushed ferns and a weird, circular patch of scorched earth where the thing had been.
He must have passed out. Drank too much, wandered off, had a spell. It happened. He looked for his shotgun. It was lying a few feet away. He crawled over and grabbed it.
He jerked his hand back.
The metal barrel was warm. Not sun-warm. A deep, inner warmth, like it had been fired a hundred times. And it hummed. A faint, almost musical vibration thrummed under his fingers, the same frequency as the memory now screaming in his skull.
He stared at it. He lifted it slowly. The weight was different. Heavier, but balanced better, like it was part of his own arm. The familiar dings and scratches in the stock seemed deeper, more intentional. The humming seeped into his palm, up his wrist.
Daisy sniffed the barrel, sneezed, and sat down, looking utterly unimpressed.
Jed’s mind, a simple machine, tried to process. Weird light. Warm gun. He turned the events over, examined them from all sides like strange stones found in a creek. The conclusion he arrived at was inevitable, comforting in its simplicity.
“Well I’ll be,” he drawled, a slow grin spreading across his stubbled face. He brought the shotgun close, almost cradling it. The hum vibrated in his chest. “Ain’t you full of surprises.”
It wasn’t fear he felt. It was a giddy, possessive wonder. This was his gun. It had always been his gun. And now it was… better. Blessed, maybe. Touched by something. He didn’t need to understand it any more than he needed to understand how his truck’s engine worked. It just did.
He stood, his aches forgotten. The strange warmth from the gun seemed to spread through him, settling the last of the whiskey-sickness. He felt good. Clear-headed. Lucky.
“C’mon, Daze,” he said, slinging the miraculous firearm over his shoulder. “Let’s go home. I’m hungry enough to eat the ass-end out of a skunk.”
He gave one last look at the scorched circle. Then he spat into it, turned, and trudged back toward the familiar dirt road, the humming weight on his shoulder a secret, wonderful promise. Something had changed. Something had been given. And Jedediah Cletus Boone wasn’t one to look a gift horse in the mouth, no matter how strange its teeth.
And Jedediah Cletus Boone wasn’t one to look a gift horse in the mouth, no matter how strange its teeth.
The walk back to his rust-streaked trailer was different. The woods weren’t just woods anymore. They felt charged, like the air before a lightning strike. Every chirp of a bird, every rustle in the undergrowth, seemed sharper, loaded with meaning. The shotgun’s hum was a constant companion, a low duet with the buzzing in his own blood.
He spent the afternoon on his porch, cleaning what didn’t need cleaning. He ran the oiled rag over the walnut stock, feeling the hum deepen under his touch. He’d hold it up, squint down the barrels, and a weird feeling would wash over him—a sense of potential, like the gun was a door and he’d just found the key.
“Somethin’s gonna happen, Daisy,” he said, taking a pull from a warm can of beer. The hound thumped her tail in the dust. “I can feel it in my toes.”
The feeling didn’t fade with the daylight. It grew. As the sun bled out behind the pines, painting the sky in bruised purples and oranges, an itch started between his shoulder blades. A restlessness. The gun, leaning against the doorframe, seemed to pulse in time with his heartbeat.
“Ain’t right to let a evenin’ like this go to waste,” he announced to the gathering dusk. He stood, his joints protesting, and grabbed the shotgun. The moment his fingers wrapped around the stock, the restlessness clicked into purpose. “Gotta check the tree line. Might be a coon after the hens.”
Daisy fell in beside him as he crunched across the gravel yard and into the forest’s welcoming shadows. He wasn’t hunting, not really. He was walking with the thing, seeing what it wanted to do. The path was a familiar ribbon of packed earth, dappled with the last of the light. The air cooled, smelling of pine sap and wet clay.
He saw the deer just as the path curved near the old creek bed.
A nice doe. Young, slender, standing perfectly still in a patch of fading ferns about thirty yards away. She was a silhouette against the silver water, her head up, ears swiveling. Jed froze. This was meat. This was free groceries for a month. His old instincts took over, smooth and automatic. He raised the humming shotgun, the stock finding its familiar nest against his cheek.
The world narrowed to the V of the sight and the doe’s chest.
He exhaled slowly, the way his daddy taught him. His finger took up the slack on the trigger.
But the hum… the hum changed. It rose in pitch, not a noise but a feeling of gathering intention, like the gun itself was drawing a breath. The metal grew warmer against his palm, almost hot. A blue glow, faint as a will-o’-the-wisp, seeped from the seam between the barrel and the receiver.
Jed’s simple mind processed two facts: one, this was the weirdest damn thing he’d ever seen a gun do; and two, his daddy never taught him what to do when a gun started glowin’.
He shot the deer.
The report was wrong. It wasn’t the sharp, final crack he’d heard a thousand times. It was deeper, wetter, a sound with a zap in the middle of it. A lance of that same electric blue light, brief but blinding, shot from the muzzle alongside the spray of buckshot.
The doe didn’t drop. It… lit up.
The animal jerked, a full-body spasm, and a network of crackling blue energy skittered over its hide. It made a sound—not a bleat of pain, but a high, confused whistle that cut off into a gurgle. It was falling, but the fall wasn’t right either. It was too slow, like the air had turned to syrup.
Jed lowered the smoking gun, his mouth hanging open. The hum was gone, replaced by a satisfied, cooling purr.
Where the doe had fallen, there was now a heap of trembling, shimmering light. The outlines swam, bloated, reconfigured. Bones popped with sounds like green branches snapping. A desperate, human-like gasp cut through the twilight silence.
The light collapsed in on itself, faded, and was gone.
The light collapsed in on itself, faded, and was gone.
Where the doe had fallen, a woman was gasping on her hands and knees in the ferns.
Jed blinked, hard. He lowered the shotgun, which was now cool and silent. He blinked again. The image didn’t change. He squinted, took a step closer, and felt the world tilt under his boots.
She was naked, for a start. Skin the color of fresh cream shone in the twilight. But it wasn’t just skin. A soft, fawn-brown pelt dusted her back, her forearms, the outsides of her slender thighs, like she was wearing the ghost of her own hide. From the tangled mess of chestnut hair on her head, two long, velvety ears poked through, twitching and swiveling with a life of their own. A puff of a white tail trembled above the incredible, impossible swell of her rear.
And what a swell it was.
The transformation hadn’t just made her human-shaped. It had shaped her with a kind of hungry, exaggerated artistry. As she pushed herself up to kneel, her back arched, and Jed’s jaw went slack. Her breasts weren’t just breasts; they were heavy, ripe handfuls that spilled against her chest, their weight making them sway with every shaky breath. The areolas were wide and a dark, dusky pink, stark against the pale skin. They looked soft as fresh dough and just as yielding.
Her waist nipped in, a delicate curve above the dramatic flare of her hips. Those hips were wide, built for bearing, and they flowed into thighs that were thick and powerful, the kind of thighs that could squeeze the life out of a man or welcome him home. And between them… Jed’s throat went dry. A thatch of the same chestnut hair from her head nestled there, a neat, tempting triangle.
But the masterpiece was behind her. As she turned her head, looking around with wide, terrified eyes, the movement made her rear shift. It was a bubble butt, round and high and perfectly proportioned, each cheek a full, jiggling globe that seemed to defy gravity. It was barely contained by its own shape, the skin so smooth and taut it looked like you could leave a handprint on it that would linger for hours. The little white tail flicked again, a ridiculous, adorable punctuation mark on all that lavish flesh.
She was, in every impossible detail, built for one thing. And every curve screamed it.
“Lord Almighty,” Jed breathed, the words scraping out of him.
The sound made her flinch. Her head swung toward him. Her face was delicate, with a small, black nose that was still wet and animal-like at its tip. Her eyes were huge, liquid brown, and filled with a deep, instinctual fear that was quickly being washed away by something else. She sniffed the air, her velvety nose quivering. Her gaze landed on him, and the fear melted into a profound, unsettling recognition.
She looked at the shotgun in his hands. Then back at his face. A low, shivering breath escaped her.
“You…” she whispered. Her voice was high, soft, with a faint, musical tremor. “You shot me.”
Jed couldn’t find words. He just nodded, his grip tightening on the gun.
“It… it doesn’t hurt,” she said, more to herself than to him. She looked down at her own body, at the overwhelming newness of it. Her hands—small, with slim fingers—came up and cupped the unbelievable weight of her own breasts. She gasped, a little sound of shock and fascination. She squeezed gently, testing. Her nipples pebbled instantly under her touch. A flush spread from her chest up her throat.
Daisy, who had been frozen in a point this whole time, finally broke her stance. She trotted over, not with aggression, but with a wary curiosity. She sniffed at the woman’s knee, her wet nose leaving a dark spot on the pale skin.
The woman—the doe—jumped, then looked at the hound. Slowly, hesitantly, she reached out a trembling hand. Daisy licked her fingers. The woman made a sound that was almost a laugh, a choked, breathy thing. Then her eyes drifted back to Jed. The awe in them was deepening, shifting into something warm and unsettlingly direct.
“You made me,” she said, her voice gaining strength. She rose to her feet in one fluid, graceful motion. The movement made everything jiggle in a way that short-circuited Jed’s thinking. She took a step toward him, then another, her gait unsure on two legs but quickly finding its balance. The swing of her hips was a natural, rolling rhythm. “I was… I was running. The creek. The tender shoots. Then light. Then… you.”
She was close now, close enough he could smell her. She smelled like the forest—clean air, dry leaves, a hint of something sweet and musky underneath. It was a good smell. A wild smell.
Her large eyes traveled over his scruffy face, his stained flannel, the bulk of his belly. There was no disgust there. Only a deepening, terrifying fascination. “I remember the feeling. The heat. It came from you. From your… your thing.” She nodded toward the shotgun. “It went inside me. It changed things. It made me… for you.”
Jed finally found his voice. It came out as a croak. “For me?”
“To serve,” she said, as if it were the most obvious thing in the world. Her hand lifted, not to touch the gun, but to touch his arm. Her fingers were warm, startlingly soft. “To… mate.”
The word hung in the cooling air, blunt and heavy. A thrill, hot and immediate, shot straight to Jed’s groin. He’d had women before, sure. Roadhouse girls with hard eyes and tired smiles. This was different. This was a miracle staring at him with doe eyes, her body a blatant invitation crafted by his own damn gun.
He was about to speak, about to maybe reach out and see if all that cream-colored skin was as soft as it looked, when a sound cracked the moment in two.
A enraged, guttural bugle ripped through the trees from behind the woman.
She froze, her ears snapping upright and swiveling backward. The tender submission in her eyes vanished, replaced by a flash of pure animal terror. “He’s here.”
Jed looked past her. Coming down the slope, crashing through the underbrush with a fury that shook the ground, was the biggest goddamn buck he’d ever seen. It was a monster. Its coat was a deep, rusty red, and its rack wasn’t a set of antlers—it was a fortress, a crown of thick, sharp-tined bone that looked capable of uprooting small trees. Its eyes were black pools of murder, fixed not on Jed, but on the woman.
“Amy!” The buck’s voice was a shock, a deep, resonant roar that shouldn’t have come from a deer’s throat. It skidded to a halt, hooves tearing gashes in the earth. Its chest heaved. “What has he done to you? What is this… this obscenity?”
Amy—the doe—shrank back, pressing herself against Jed’s side. The feel of her ample body, soft and warm and trembling, was electrifying. “Bambi,” she whispered, the name a relic from a forgotten life. “He… he made me new.”
“He defiled you!” Bambi roared. He pawed the ground, his head lowering. The points of his antlers gleamed like polished knives in the dying light. “I will gore his guts out! I will scatter his innards for the crows!”
Jed may not have understood the angry bleats coming out of the buck’s mouth, but he understood enough from his body language. Threat. Territory. Fight. The confused lust evaporated, burned away by a colder, simpler adrenaline. He shoved Amy gently behind him, the movement instinctive. He brought the shotgun up.
“You just stand down now,” Jed growled, his voice firm. This was his woods. His doe. His miracle. “She ain’t yours no more.”
Bambi screamed in answer—a sound of pure, shattered pride. He charged.
It was terrifyingly fast. A ton of muscle and rage and sharp bone moving like a locomotive. Jed didn’t have time to think. He jerked the shotgun to his shoulder, aimed at the center of that oncoming mass, and fired.
The same wet, electric CRACK-ZAP split the world.
The blue light lanced out. It hit the buck square in the chest just as his antlers were about to connect. The impact wasn’t physical. It was transformative.
The buck’s charge became a violent, airborne seizure. He was lifted off his front hooves, his magnificent body bowing backward as the crackling energy enveloped him. That same horrific symphony of popping bones and tearing tissues filled the clearing, louder this time, deeper. The bugle of rage became a strangled, shifting cry that slid up the scale, losing its animal roughness, gaining something else—a feminine tremor, a note of shocked pleasure.
The light was blinding, consuming. Jed watched, his heart hammering against his ribs, as the form within the blue nova stretched and reconfigured.
The antlers remained, but they were now rising from a mess of tousled, auburn hair. The powerful, stag-like body elongated, the back legs lengthening, the front hooves splitting, thickening, becoming powerful hands that clawed at the air. The russet fur receded, pulling back to form a pelt-like pattern along toned, powerful limbs, leaving vast expanses of smooth, human skin the color of sun-kissed oak.
Where the buck’s strong chest had been, a new topography erupted. Two full, heavy breasts swelled into existence, pushing out with a lush, dizzying speed that made Amy’s look modest by comparison. They were mammoth, pendulous, capped with large, copper-colored areolas that puckered tight in the charged air. The waist that formed was narrow, but above it flared hips that were warrior-wide, and between them…
Jed’s brain stuttered.
A thick, veined shaft of flesh, easily 16 inches long and in a state of furious, rigid attention, stood proud from a thatch of auburn curls. It bobbed, gleaming, as the creature writhed in the throes of its change.
But the transformation wasn’t done. Below that shocking appendage, the anatomy completed itself, a soft, feminine seam hinting at a second, hidden purpose. This was both. All.
The light died.
Where the proud buck had stood now knelt a giantess. She was easily seven-and-a-half feet tall, built like an Amazonian gladiator. Ropes of lean muscle corded her arms, her shoulders, her flat abdomen. Her thighs were pillars, thick and strong, and her rear was a high, muscular shelf that rounded out with athletic perfection. The magnificent rack of antlers crowned her head, a permanent testament to her stolen pride. Her face was fierce, beautiful in a sharp, angry way, with the same black, wet-tip nose as Amy. A pelt of short, auburn fur traced her spine and the outer curves of her formidable thighs.
Bambi—or what was left of him—sucked in a huge, shuddering breath. She looked down at her own colossal chest, at the intimidating cock that stood stiffly from her body. A roar of pure, unadulterated fury began in her gut. She threw her head back, the muscles in her throat cording.
“I WILL KILL YOU, YOU SICK FUCKING HILLBI—”
The roar cut off. Her body betrayed her. A violent, full-body shudder racked her. Her eyes, blazing with hate, flicked down to Jed. Then to his waist. The scent of him—musky, human, male—hit her new senses like a drug. The hatred in her eyes fractured, mixed with a sudden, devastating wave of raw, chemical need. Her mouth, open to curse him, went slack.
A low groan escaped her lips instead. Her hand, which had been clenched into a fist, twitched. It didn’t rise to attack. It drifted, almost against her will, toward the throbbing erection her own body had furnished. She stopped herself, trembling with the effort.
“No,” she gasped, fighting it. “No, I… I want to crush your skull…”
But her other hand was moving, too. It cupped the staggering weight of one of her own breasts, her fingers kneading the soft flesh. A choked whimper escaped her. The dual sensation—the aching need in her cock, the sensitive swell in her hand—was short-circuiting her rage.
Jed stood frozen, the smoking shotgun hanging loosely at his side. He saw the war on her face. The majestic, feral anger being swamped by a tide of baser, simpler programming. The gun’s intent was clear. It didn’t just change them. It tuned them. To him.
Amy peeked out from behind Jed. She saw her former mate, now a towering, hermaphroditic reflection of feminine power and masculine equipment, fighting the very instincts that now ruled her. A strange, possessive sound rumbled in Amy’s own throat. She pressed closer to Jed, claiming her spot.
Bambi took a step forward. It wasn’t a charge. It was a stagger. Her legs, strong as tree trunks, shook. She was fighting it with every ounce of her will, but her body was a traitor. Her gaze was locked on Jed, burning with a mixture of loathing and desperate, humiliating craving.
“What…” she panted, the words thick with struggle, “…what did you do to me?”
Jed swallowed, his own confusion giving way to a dawning, powerful understanding. He looked at the shotgun. He looked at the two incredible, impossible creatures now in his clearing—one soft and submissive, one powerful and fighting a losing battle against her own need. A slow, wide, gap-toothed grin spread across his face.
“Well,” he drawled, his voice full of wonder. He let the shotgun’s stock rest in the dirt. “Looks like I’m havin’ company for supper.”