Chapter 4: The Occultist's Gambit
The bell above Dmitri’s shop door didn’t tinkle; it groaned, a low, rusted sound that matched the air inside. Cassie shoved the door open, her movements sharp with a caffeine-and-fear energy. I shuffled in behind her, the sway in my hips now an unconscious, unavoidable rhythm. I’d thrown on my loosest pair of gray sweatpants and a baggy hoodie, a pathetic attempt to hide the new architecture of my body. It didn’t work. The fabric draped weirdly from my shoulders before collapsing in at the severe waist, then billowing out over my hips and thighs. I looked like a mismatched doll.
Dmitri was behind the counter, polishing a tarnished brass bowl with a cloth that looked dirtier than the bowl itself. He glanced up, his watery blue eyes moving from Cassie’s frantic face to my shrouded form. They didn’t widen. He just nodded slowly, as if we were a confirmation of a weather forecast he’d already made.
“You are later than I expected,” he said, his voice a dry rustle of paper.
“We need help,” Cassie said, bypassing any greeting. She grabbed my wrist and pulled me forward, yanking up the sleeve of my hoodie to expose the silver band. “It’s worse. She’s texting us… instructions. She knows we talked to you. There has to be another way.”
Dmitri set the bowl down. He took my hand, his fingers cold and surprisingly strong. He turned it over, examining the ring. He didn’t try to pull it off. He just stared, his lips moving silently.
“The waist is fully reset,” he murmured, more to himself. “The iliac crest has expanded. Significant soft tissue augmentation in the glutes and femoral region. The foundational magic is… efficient. It doesn’t just alter; it rebuilds for purpose.” He looked up at me. “Do you feel any ache in the jawline? Any tightness in the larynx?”
“No,” I croaked. “Just… this.” I gestured helplessly at my lower half.
“Good. The order of operations is logical. Structure first, then secondary sexual characteristics. She is building a stable chassis.” His clinical tone made my stomach turn.
“Stop talking about him like a car,” Cassie snapped. “How do we stop it? You said the pendant. But she knows. She’s guarding it. There has to be a loophole, a way to disrupt the ring.”
Dmitri released my hand. He leaned back, the old wooden chair creaking in protest. For a long moment, he stared at a jar on a high shelf that held something murky and veined. “Disruption is possible,” he said finally. “The ring’s connection to the caster—Mia—is a thread. It can be… plucked. But it is not a severance. It is a temporary dissonance. A few hours, perhaps. A window.”
“A window for what?” I asked, a spark of desperate hope flickering.
“To challenge her,” Dmitri said, his eyes sharpening. “Formally. In the old way. A practitioner’s duel. You force the dissonance, then you issue the challenge. She must accept, if the terms are correctly set. Within the space of the duel, the ring’s obedience to her is suspended. You are free to act.”
Cassie leaned forward, her hands flat on the glass countertop. “And we can demand the pendant as the prize for winning.”
“You may demand any tangible object in her possession as forfeit, yes. The pendant qualifies.” Dmitri’s gaze shifted between us, growing heavier. “But you must understand the stakes are absolute. If you win, you claim your prize. If you lose… she can pick anything she wants from you. Anything. Your memories. Your voice. A decade of your life. Or,” he said, his eyes settling on my distorted silhouette, “she could simply accelerate the remaining changes to their completion in an instant. The duel is a contract. The terms are set, but the wagers are open.”
The spark of hope guttered. “We can’t ask for the curse to stop?” Cassie asked, her voice small.
“No. That is beyond her power to grant. The ring’s magic is its own engine. She is merely the architect, pointing it where to build. She tells it when to activate, and which areas to change. She cannot tell it to cease. Only the fulfillment of its purpose or its destruction can do that.” He steepled his fingers. “But for now, know this too. I doubt you can win that duel, Cassie. She has been magically inclined her whole life. You have barely anything. A flicker of sensitivity, inherited from a grandmother you never knew. And the challenged party chooses the form of the duel. It can be anything Mia wants. A test of wills. A battle of summoned shadows. A contest of altering a third party’s form. Be careful.”
The silence in the shop was total, swallowed by the dust and the oppressive weight of the artifacts. The ‘barely anything’ hung in the air, a verdict.
“So it’s a trap either way,” I said. “We do nothing, I turn into her… wife. We challenge her, we probably lose, and she gets to take whatever she wants from us and finish the job anyway.”
“It is a path with a slim chance,” Dmitri corrected, but it sounded like semantics. “The disruption is your only tool. The duel is the only recognized method to forcibly claim an artifact from another practitioner without outright theft, which would bring other consequences. It is the rule.”
Cassie straightened up, her jaw tight. “How do we create the disruption?”
Dmitri moved slowly, opening a drawer beneath the counter. He pulled out a small, lumpy pouch made of faded red felt, tied with a black cord. He placed it on the glass. “Ground nightshade, iron filings, and a hair from the transformed. Burn it together at a crossroads at midnight. The smoke will confuse the thread for a time. You must issue the challenge before the smoke clears.”
“A hair from the transformed,” I repeated, a hollow laugh escaping me. I reached up and pulled a single strand of long, coppery red hair from my head. It felt alien between my fingers. I dropped it on the counter.
Dmitri nodded, sweeping it into the pouch and pulling the cord tight. He pushed it toward Cassie. “Your gamble.”
Cassie took the pouch. It looked pitifully small in her hand. “Thank you.”
“Do not thank me. I am giving you a knife to take into a gunfight.” He looked at me again, a strange, old regret in his eyes. “The ring was not always hers. I lost it, long ago, in a duel with a stronger person. It has a taste for reshaping the unwilling. I am… sorry it found you.”
The admission landed like a stone. He’d owned it. He’d lost it. This was his legacy. Before I could process it, Cassie’s phone buzzed violently. Then mine. A synchronized judgment.
We looked. A text from Mia.
Running late for your shopping trip? Dmitri’s a washed-up old fool. His advice will only cost you.
My blood went cold. She knew. She always knew.
A sudden, itching warmth erupted all over my body. It wasn’t painful, not like the bone-deep burns before. This was a surface-level fever, spreading from my scalp down my neck, across my shoulders, over my chest and stomach, racing down my legs to my toes.
It felt like a sunburn blossoming in seconds. I gasped, scratching at my arm through the hoodie. The itch intensified, became a crawling, prickling sensation. And then… it just stopped. The warmth faded, leaving behind a bizarre, uniform smoothness.
I looked at my hands. The familiar, sparse dusting of dark hair on my knuckles and the back of my fingers was gone. Completely. The skin was utterly bare, pale, and weirdly vulnerable-looking. I yanked up the sleeve of my hoodie. My forearm was smooth. I touched my neck, my cheek. The perpetual five-o’clock shadow I could never fully manage… was just gone. The skin was soft, uninterrupted.
“What?” I whispered. “What did she do?”
Cassie was staring at my face, her horror reflecting my own. “Your… your stubble. It’s gone.”
The crawling sensation had been everywhere. Everywhere. A full-body depilation, instant and total. My legs under the sweatpants felt slick, strange. My chest, my armpits—all of it, just silently erased.
Our phones buzzed again, in unison.
You shouldn’t waste time at Dmitri’s. You might want to get Erica some tights now too. No leg hair and tights would be perfect for her.
Erica. The name was a bullet.
Cassie stuffed the red pouch into her jacket pocket like it was contraband. “We’re leaving,” she said to Dmitri, her voice strangled. “Now.”
We fled the shop, the groaning bell sounding like a laugh at our backs. The morning sunlight outside was too bright, too normal. I felt exposed in a whole new way. The wind on my neck felt direct, intimate. My jeans—no, my tights—wouldn’t encounter any resistance.
The mall was a cathedral of muted terror. The sheer, staggering normality of it was the worst part. Teens laughed by the fountain. Retired couples walked slowly. The air smelled of pretzels and cheap perfume. We were here to perform a grotesque parody of a sisterly shopping trip.
We went to a generic, mid-priced clothing store. Racks of jeans, walls of bras. Cassie’s hands were shaking as she pulled pairs of jeans off the shelf, her eyes glazing over at the size labels. She’d hold up a pair, look at my hips, and put it back.
“We’re guessing,” she finally hissed. “We’re just fucking guessing.”
We settled on three pairs in different cuts and sizes, all with ‘curvy’ or ‘shaping’ in the name. Then the bras. Cassie stood in front of the wall of beige, black, and white, her face a mask of utter defeat. She grabbed a handful of sports bras in small sizes. “For now,” she muttered.
Skirts. Blouses. A package of plain cotton panties. Each item she dropped into the red plastic basket was a small death. My role was to stand there, a silent, hulking mannequin with a woman’s silhouette, avoiding eye contact with the other shoppers. A store clerk, a perky woman with a name tag that read “BREE,” zeroed in on us.
“Finding everything okay?” she chirped.
“We’re fine,” Cassie barked, then softened her tone. “Thanks. Just… my sister needed a refresh.”
Bree’s eyes swept over me, taking in the hoodie, the sweatpants, my bare, delicate face framed by red hair. A story assembled behind her eyes. “Oh, of course! Well, our fitting rooms are right over there. Let me know if you need different sizes!” She gave me an encouraging, invasive smile. “It’s a journey, honey. You’re doing great.”
The fitting room was a fluorescent-lit cell. Cassie shoved the pile of clothes at me and stood guard outside the curtain. “Try it all. We need to send the pictures. Fast.”
Alone, I peeled off the hoodie and sweatpants. The full-length mirror showed a stranger. The severe waist, the wide, childbearing hips, the full thighs and rear. And now, the completely hairless skin everywhere, giving my body a weird, plastic uniformity. I was a doll, half-assembled.
The jeans were a battle. The first pair wouldn’t slide over my hips. The second did, but the waist gaped hugely. The third, a ‘super skinny curvy fit,’ slid on with a shocking ease, hugging every new curve like it was designed for them. They felt restrictive, tight, a second skin that emphasized the sway. I put on one of the blouses, a simple lavender thing with a slight ruffle at the neck. It hung differently on my narrower shoulders.
I looked at the stranger. Erica looked back, her expression haunted.
I took the photos, my phone feeling like a betrayal. The flash illuminated the stark, unkind mirror. I sent them to Mia, one after another, a digital strip-tease of my dissolution.
No immediate response. No new pain. Just the waiting.
Cassie bought it all, her credit card emitting a weary beep. The final bag was the tights. She stood in the hosiery aisle, staring at the packages of sheer, opaque, and control-top styles. Her hand hovered. She grabbed a three-pack of black, opaque tights. “For the cold,” she said to no one, her voice hollow.
As we walked back through the mall toward the exit, the bags heavy in our hands, my phone finally buzzed.
MIA: Much better. See how easy it is to be good?
Cassie read the message over my shoulder. She didn’t say anything. She just adjusted her grip on the shopping bags, her knuckles white, and stared straight ahead at the exit doors, sunlight blazing beyond them like a false promise. The red felt pouch in her pocket felt like it was burning a hole through the fabric, a tiny, desperate weight against the crushing inevitability of the bags she carried.
The red felt pouch in her pocket felt like it was burning a hole through the fabric, a tiny, desperate weight against the crushing inevitability of the bags she carried. Cassie led the way out of the mall’s artificial climate, pushing through the glass doors into the damp, real air of the afternoon. I followed, my new jeans whispering against each other with every step, the denim a strange, constricting hug.
I won’t lie. I’m getting turned on by these jeans hugging my hips, I told myself, the thought arriving fully formed and horrific. It was a purely physical feedback loop, the tight pressure on my new shape creating a low, unwelcome thrum of sensation that had nowhere else to go. The ring on my finger vibrated, a subtle, insistent hum that was nothing like its previous pulses of heat or cold.
“Bus stop’s this way,” Cassie muttered, not looking back, her stride eating up the sidewalk.
We reached the stop, a plexiglass shelter plastered with fading ads. Cassie set the bags down with a sigh just as her phone rang. She glanced at the screen, her mouth tightening. “It’s work. I have to take this.” She stepped a few feet away, turning her back, her voice dropping into a professional cadence that sounded absurd given the circumstances.
I leaned against the shelter, the vibration in the ring a constant, mocking reminder. My phone buzzed in my hand.
A text from Mia. I KNOW YOU FEEL GOOD IN THEM JEANS MY SOON TO BE LOVER. YOU LOOK GREAT IN THEM.
The words glowed on the screen. My face flushed hot. How?
AND YES. THE RING TELLS ME WHEN YOU GET TURNED ON. IT BASICALLY LETS ME KNOW YOU WANT TO BE BREED WITH. DON’T WORRY DARLING. SOON.
A new message chunked in. An image. I thumbed it open before my brain could catch up.
It was a dick pic. Hers. A clinical, well-lit shot against a dark background, meant to display not arousal but simple, shocking fact. I looked at it, my mind blank. A strange, warm saliva flooded my mouth, pooling under my tongue so suddenly I had to swallow.
WTF. Why am I drooling?
I deleted the picture and her last text, my fingers clumsy. I shook my head, as if I could physically dislodge the involuntary reaction. The taste in my mouth was coppery, alien.
Cassie ended her call with a sharp, “Fine. Tomorrow.” She walked back, her eyes scanning my face. “You okay?”
“Peachy,” I mumbled, wiping my mouth with the back of my hand.
The bus arrived with a hydraulic sigh. We boarded, the driver giving my jeans and the shopping bags a bland, uninterested glance. We took a seat near the middle. Cassie stowed the bags between her knees and stared out the window, but her eyes were unfocused. She was working through the steps Dmitri had given her, her lips moving slightly. Ground nightshade, iron filings, a hair. A crossroads at midnight. A challenge.
The ring had stopped vibrating. It sat silent and cold on my finger, a lie detector waiting for my next transgression. I watched the city blur past, feeling the seams of the jeans dig into my hips, a constant reminder of the chassis Dmitri had described. The bus lumbered on, carrying us toward a home that no longer felt like a sanctuary, but a staging ground for a war we were guaranteed to lose. Cassie’s hand drifted to her jacket pocket, her fingers tracing the outline of the felt pouch through the fabric, over and over, as if memorizing its shape for a blindfolded fight.
Cassie’s hand drifted to her jacket pocket, her fingers tracing the outline of the felt pouch through the fabric, over and over, as if memorizing its shape for a blindfolded fight. The bus ride was a study in quiet dread, each lurch forward feeling like time we were wasting. I just stared at my hairless hands, the strange smoothness of my own skin making me feel like I was wearing a bodysuit I couldn’t take off.
We didn’t speak. Words were useless things now, too small to hold any of what was happening. The shopping bags at our feet were a monument to our compliance. When our stop came, Cassie grabbed them all, refusing to let me carry any. “Just walk,” she said, her voice low. “Concentrate on that.”
The climb to our apartment was a quiet torture. My new balance made the stairs feel treacherous, each step requiring a slight, conscious adjustment. Cassie fumbled with the keys, the plastic bags rustling like anxious ghosts, and shoved the door open.
She didn’t even turn on the light. She dropped the bags in a heap by the door, the soft thump of denim and plastic the only sound in the dim foyer. The digital clock on the microwave glowed a soft 11:58 PM.
“It’s almost midnight,” she said, not looking at me. She walked straight into the kitchen, yanking the red felt pouch from her pocket.
“Cass, wait, we should—”.
“No time,” she cut me off, her voice flat. She emptied the pouch’s contents onto our old, scarred cutting board. A pinch of grey-black powder that smelled acrid, a small pile of dull metal flakes, and the single, long copper hair I’d given Dmitri. “Crossroads at midnight. Our kitchen is the center of the home. It’s a crossroads of sorts. It’ll have to do.”
She grabbed a small ceramic bowl from a cupboard, the one we never used. She scraped the components into it with the side of her hand. Her movements were quick, jerky, but certain. She found a book of matches by the stove, the kind from a Chinese restaurant.
I just stood in the doorway, watching. My heart was a frantic animal in my birdcage ribs. This was it. Our one play.
Cassie struck a match. The flare of light painted her face in harsh orange and deep shadow, her tired eyes looking ancient for a second. She held the flame to the edge of the bowl. The nightshade powder caught with a soft whoomp, releasing a thick, greasy smoke that smelled of thunderstorms and burnt plastic. The iron filings glittered in the heart of the tiny fire. My hair sizzled, curling into nothing.
She didn’t chant. She didn’t make a sign. She just held the burning bowl out at arm’s length, her jaw clenched, watching the toxic smoke curl toward the ceiling.
And I felt it.
A subtle, profound shift in the pressure around my finger. Not a removal. A slackening. The ring, which had felt welded to my skin, like a part of my actual bone, now sat like any other piece of jewelry—loose enough to spin, to wiggle. The constant, low-level hum of connection I hadn’t even fully acknowledged until it was gone just vanished. The silence in my head was dizzying.
“It’s loose,” I breathed, holding my hand up, staring at the silver band. “Cass, it’s loose.”
She nodded, setting the smoldering bowl in the sink. The smoke alarm didn’t go off. The smoke itself seemed to cling to the ceiling, a low, malevolent cloud that didn’t want to disperse. “The connection is paused. She can’t see or hear or know what’s happening here. For now.”
Cassie pulled out her phone. Her thumbs hovered over the screen. She looked at me, and for the first time since this started, I saw pure, undiluted fear in her eyes, and beneath it, a bottomless grief.
“I’m about to challenge her,” she said. Her voice was raw. “In case this doesn’t go well. I am truly sorry for even introducing her to you.”
She didn’t wait for a response. She typed it out, simple and stark, and hit send.
Cassie: Mia. I challenge you to a magic duel.
The effect was instantaneous.
The overhead kitchen light, the glow of the microwave clock, the faint streetlight bleeding through the window—all of it dimmed. Not to darkness, but to a deep, oppressive twilight, as if all the light was being sucked into a single point.
That point was the center of our kitchen.
The air crackled, dry and static. Mia simply coalesced there, stepping out of nothingness as if she’d been waiting behind a curtain we couldn’t see. She was dressed in simple black jeans and a sweater, her short-cropped hair perfect, her gray eyes gleaming with amused anticipation.
“I accept your challenge,” she said, her voice smooth and echoing slightly in the charged air. “Name your prize if you win. But I have a feeling I know what it is.”
As she spoke, the simple silver pendant she always wore—the one with the odd, rune-like etching—detached from her neck. It floated up to hang, spinning slowly, inside a shimmering, soap-bubble sphere of energy that appeared just above her left shoulder. The sphere pulsed with a soft, violet light.
“This sphere will not break and cannot be touched by anyone but me,” she stated, the words sounding like a formal rule.
Cassie didn’t flinch. “I want that pendant of yours. Name yours.”
Mia smiled, a slow, spreading thing. “You know I can claim anything right? I could even just finish her transformation right now.” She glanced at me, and my blood froze. “But that seems boring and not fun. No. My prize is this: I want you to accept Erica’s full transformation as it happens. She will have always been and seen as your sister, and you will help me turn her into my loving wife, and baby mama.”
The words hung in the dim kitchen, monstrous and clear. Cassie’s prize was an object. Mia’s was Cassie’s very soul—her memories, her allegiance, her love.
“I also pick the duel,” Mia continued, her hands casually sliding into her pockets. “This duel will be a game of chance and luck. The game is simple. We will have a deck. On each card is a symbol: a circle for female, a line for male. There are hundreds of cards. Pick up five male cards, and you turn into a male version of yourself, and thus lose the challenge. Any form of magic is permitted to find the correct cards, with the exception of physical violence against me or the cards. Use magic in any way to guide your choice.” Her smile turned sharp. “Oh, and the loser remains male at the end. Sounds good, Cass? If you agree, we duel tomorrow at dawn.”
Cassie stood rigid. The terms were a horrific trap. A game stacked in Mia’s favor, where the penalty was to become the very thing she was fighting against. To lose her identity, her self. To become a brother.
She had no choice. The ritual’s disruption was fading; I could feel a faint, creeping tension returning to the ring on my finger.
“I agree,” Cassie said, the words ash in her mouth.
“Wonderful,” Mia purred. The light began to return to the room, bleeding back into the walls. “Dawn. The empty lot behind the old textile mill. Don’t be late.”
She vanished. Not with a pop, but by the light simply snapping back to normal, leaving her absence behind like a afterimage. The pendant was gone too. The kitchen was just our kitchen again, smelling of burnt nightshade and fear.
The ring on my finger tightened again, snug and inescapable. The connection was restored.
Cassie slumped against the counter, her breath leaving her in a shaky rush. She looked at me, her eyes hollow.
Dawn was only a few hours away.