Alex shuddered. His arousal turned to tingling in his belly, then to giddy joy.
He could feel it start deep at the base of his spine: a rapidly accelerating heat in his groin, the most sensitive and intimate parts of his libido, his most private and most desired fantasies—sexual or otherwise—plucked from his soul and spoken into immanent reality, igniting like rocket fuel poured onto a flame, shooting out through every nerve of his naked body.
For the briefest of moments, Alexander Carpenter believed that Sydney Beaumont, the most beautiful woman he had ever seen in his life, could really—actually—turn him into a big, sexy, and strong were-beast woman, just like her.
Syd took one glance downwards and smirked.
“Someone’s excited to hear that.”
Alex followed her gaze, and as soon as he looked down at his … his member … all at once the illusion was shattered.
At the sight of such a defining biological feature of his masculinity, he remembered a syllogism that haunted his worst nightmares:
He was a man.
Only women could turn into beastesses.
Therefore, he could never be a beastess, no matter how much he wanted to.
Alex’s arousal subsided as quickly as it came, like a firework slowly fading into the darkness of the night sky.
A moment ago he had just felt his own strength for perhaps the first time, but the fact of the matter was that no amount of strength could change the truth.
Alex closed his eyes.
“Don’t fuck with me, Syd.”
Syd put her arm down.
“I’m telling you the truth,” she said. “Besides, you’re one to talk! You lied to me when you walked into my—”
“I said don’t fuck with me!” Alex exploded. “Because I’m so, so tired of people fucking with me! I get fucked with by my classmates, I get fucked with by the Church, I get fucked with by my superiors … and now you’re telling me that you can ‘turn’ me into a beastess?”
“Y-yeah…” Syd stammered, taken aback. Her intimidating demeanor from earlier was diminishing by the second.
My God, she’s serious, Alex thought. She actually pities him. He cackled at the absurdity of it.
“You’re talking to someone who has researched beastesses his entire life,” Alex spat. “Someone who is obsessed with you all. I probably know you better than you know yourselves! Beastesses. Are. Women. Always have been. End of story. I’ll help your pack in whatever way I can, but you she-beasts have lost your damn pagan minds if you think I can join you as a mock ‘beastess’. What, are you going to dress me up in a fur coat? Put little ears on me? Make me your little pet? Am I that much of a fucking joke to you godforsaken heathens?!”
He breathed heavily. Spittle ran down his chin. His face felt hot. Was he crying?
Everyone had gone completely silent.
Alpha Lea took the lead and spoke up.
“Little church mouse …”
“Stop calling me that!” Alex yelled.
Lea pressed her paw firmly into Alex’s chest, covering it almost entirely, right over where she had just scratched him. He howled, the pain lighting him up as if he had stuck his finger into an electrical socket.
“I call you that because that is what you are … for the moment, anyway,” she purred. “You are a church mouse, scurrying around in the maze that this world—particularly the Church—has constructed in your mind. You are trapped in a labyrinth, partially of your own making.”
She released Alex, gesturing to the tall hooded beastess with the magitech bionic clawed arm and her giggly counterpart from earlier—Meg and Sabrina, he remembered—who approached him obediently. He could just barely make out their appearances under their hoods and cloaks. Meg looked to be a bit heavier-set than Syd but just as beefy, with short brown hair in a pixie cut style with the ends dyed bright blue. Sabrina was long and lithe, her height emphasized by the bright pink heels she wore, and her immaculately-styled chest-length brown hair with blonde highlights flowed out from beneath her hood.
Damn it, were all of them taller than he was?
Lea licked her paw clean as she spoke, grooming his blood off of it with her rough tongue in a hypnotic motion that helped take his mind off of the pain. It was so mesmerizing that he barely noticed the stinging sensation as the tall beastess, Meg, sprayed an antiseptic on his chest from her bionic arm, followed by a numbing agent. The other one, Sabrina, pulled out rolls of gauze and tended to his wounds as Lea continued.
“Luckily, mice are quick learners. Give them a sniff of a little cheese and they’ll find a way out of the maze. You’ve explored all the options, all of the possible paths, and felt hopelessly trapped. Am I wrong?”
“N-no, you’re not,” Alex admitted. “That kinda sums up my life.”
Meg and Sabrina finished covering his wounds and stepped back to their original positions. Lea stopped licking her paw and locked eyes with Alex.
“Has it ever occurred to you to think outside of the box?” Lea asked. “Outside the confines of your self-imposed cage?”
Alex rattled his chains as his fidgeted, letting her words settle in his mind.
“Has it ever occurred to you … that you may not be a church mouse at all?”
The lioness stepped closer. Her breath smelled like blood. His blood.
“That while you think you are nothing but weak, helpless little prey—even as we have been telling you that you are this whole time—that you are actually …”
She grabbed his chin until her muzzle, almost as large as his face, was barely an inch from his lips.
“… A hunter?”
Alex couldn’t hide his disbelief. He certainly didn’t feel like one now. But the big cat’s argument was certainly … persuasive.
“I-I …”
“There are things about our kind that even you don’t know, Alexander Carpenter.”
The reflections in her amber eyes danced, glowed, shimmered with endless colors and blurry flashes of creatures unknown.
“Secret magic. Wild magic. Magic that we do not allow outsiders to witness or know.”
Wild magic …
Memories of the mission briefing he had with Bishop Ironside flashed through his mind.
‘They make an effort to keep their pagan rituals and … wild magic … as hidden from paladins as possible.’
What Lea was telling Alex was not new to him. Of course pagans practiced magic in secret, either from certain groups or the general public. That’s why he was sent on his mission, after all! Their cults and rituals were well-known hedonistic orgies of the most debauched sex, violence, and ferocity he had ever read about.
He had ‘researched’ those rituals countless times.
But rituals he didn’t know about? That no one except the beastesses knew about? What do they—
No.
No, it can’t be.
… Could they?
The puzzle pieces in his mind slid into perfect alignment as it all became clear to him.
“Is … is there a ritual that can turn a man into a beastess?”
“BINGO! Give her a round of applause, folks!” Roxy shouted from the crowd.
Lea turned around and hissed. Roxy immediately bowed her head.
“Sorry, Alpha,” the hyena beastess said. “I’ve been trying to hold my tongue this whole time and I just couldn’t take it anymore!” Lea clicked her tongue, but decided she had chastised Roxy enough and turned back to Alex.
Her?
The pronoun Roxy had used stuck in his head like a splinter in his finger. Much like how they kept calling him ‘Lexi’.
“Yes, little church mouse,” Lea said warmly. “There is such a ritual.”
“And it was done to me.”
Alex whipped his head around to Syd, not believing what he just heard her say.
“You … you used to … to be … ?” he said.
Syd gave a sheepish smile to Alex.
“That’s right,” the wolf beastess said. “I’m a trans woman.”
Alex’s eyes widened. His shoulders tightened.
Trans woman. They were words included in the deviancy section of his textbooks, along with other terms that he never felt comfortable reading in class—he-shes, trannies, queers … freaks.
He looked her up and down. Certainly she was freakish, monstrous even, and quite masculine for a woman, but he never saw that as a bad thing, really. Honestly, it was why he adored these she-beast women so much. Besides, most beastesses were big and muscular, and no one argued they weren’t women. She couldn’t have been a … started as a … born as a … changed into …
“Bullshit,” he countered, his mind sputtering as he tried to reconcile what she had said with what she looked like. Syd threw her head back and laughed.
“It’s the fuckin’ truth, dude!” She gave him a coy look, almost pensive, looking him up and down this time. “In fact, I used to look a whole lot like you.”
“What did I say about fucking with me, Syd—”
“Beta isn’t lying, you idiot!” Roxy yelled, waving her arms in exasperation.
Before Lea could react and scold her again, others joined in to defend their acting beta and pack-mate.
“Yeah, like, Roxy’s right!” Sabrina piped up. “Like, when Syd rolled in here, she looked like any other guy in Abraxas!”
“She was goin’ through some trouble, and we embraced her into our lil’ ol’ family here,” Meg said kindly, with that slow drawl of hers saturating the air like liquid honey.
“Beta Sydney is as much of a female as any of us here!” Audrey said, indignant at Alex’s attitude. “We merely hastened her biological processes in a slightly different direction.”
The other beastesses spoke all at once, their words becoming incomprehensible from the echoing effect of the empty train station.
Alpha Lea gave a low, menacing growl that cut through the noise, silencing her pack at once.
“Your concern for Syd is much appreciated, my pack-mates … but our acting beta can speak for herself.”
“Thank you, Alpha.” Syd cleared her throat. “Yeah. I used to be a guy. I’m not really gonna go into detail about it—honestly, I don’t know you that well yet—but what I will say is that I recognize in you the same signs that Mac recognized in me. The hurt, the guilt, the shame, the self-loathing, the envy … Goddess above, that burning envy for women … for beastesses … Beta saw it all.”
Syd flashed her fangs in pure unabashed joy.
“That’s why she changed me. Unleashed me. Made me into this beast of a woman!” Syd threw off her cloak and flexed her gigantic arms, her hands balled into fists near her abdomen to better emphasize her broad shoulder and chest muscles. In this pose, she was wider than most doorframes.
An unstoppable behemoth of Amazonian beauty.
“And I see it all in you too,” she said, her tone growing softer. “We did our homework on you. We read your history, your emails, your messages. And when I combine all of that information and think back to the person who I met when they walked into Club Demiurge to prove themselves—and to get closer to the women they envy so much—it all paints a picture of a scared, lonely young woman. A woman who lets people walk all over her. A woman who believes she’s a guy because that’s what the mirror shows and that’s what people see on the surface, so she just goes with the flow. A woman who wants to get strong, not to be like one of the guys, but to distinguish herself from them, to transcend them. A broken woman longing to be made whole, but having no clue how to put herself together.”
Alex was being read like a book. He was stunned.
“I’m not lying to you about this,” Syd said. “None of us are. I know where you’ve been because I’ve been there too. Like I said earlier, the only one lying here is you—to yourself.”
This was real. This was really happening.
If Alex wasn’t chained up, he would pinch himself right now.
Never before had someone unearthed and so plainly spoken out loud his darkest secrets and deepest desires, some of which even he didn’t know about but knew were the truth—let alone given him permission to act on them.
Now that they were brought to his attention and laid out, in hindsight his life up until now seemed so … disjointed. Disconnected. As if there was a constant push and pull between conscious compromises and unconscious desires. A war within his mind that he was caught square in the middle of and refused to examine any deeper, for fear of losing any sense of identity in the chaos.
Only … was that identity worth holding on to at all?
Who was he, right now, in this moment, really?
Cadet Alexander Carpenter. A doormat of a person, pretending to be a man.
And who did he want to be?
He didn’t know quite yet, but the beastesses were his clearest guiding star.
Crucially … was he allowed to be what he wanted, instead of what he was?
Was he allowed to change?
Allowed to want to change?
The answer came to him like the light of a full moon shining down as the clouds drifted away.
… Yes.
“Do you … really think I’m a woman?” he asked.
“I know you’re a woman, cutie,” Syd said. She took one of his chained hands in hers, almost completely engulfing it, and squeezed gently. She smiled.
“Want us to help make you a wild woman too?”
His entire body felt warm again. Only this time, it wasn’t arousal.
No. It’s more pure, more all-encompassing. There’s a better name for this feeling.
Euphoria.
“Y-yes! Yes! Yes, please!” he pleaded. “Fuck, I want it more than anything in the world! YES!!”
Syd’s smile widened, and she rubbed the side of his cheek.
“Attagirl. I can’t wait to see you shine in the moonlight, pup.”
… Pup?
Is that was they call new members?
“So,” Lea interjected as Syd stepped away from him, “since you’ll be joining our pack, we can still call you ‘Alex’ … but I stand by my view that you definitely look more like a ‘Lexi’ to me.”
Huh. She was right. That fake name he picked out of his brain ‘at random’ seemed to fit him better than ‘Alexander’ or ‘Alex’ ever did. It rolled off the tongue so nicely. It felt … correct.
Fuck it.
“Yeah,” he said. “Yeah I think you’re right.”
Goodbye, Alexander.
“Call me Lexi.”
Alpha Lea smiled proudly.
“And you can call me Alpha. Let us begin at once.”