It was later into the evening when she’d finally wrapped-up her rather pointless excursion onto the campus, having achieved nothing that she’d set out to do. Besides being stymied by both the financial aid and registrar’s offices, even her advisor didn’t recognize her, much less anyone else in her department. Everyone she had spoken to operated under the impression that Catherine was skipping a few classes, which wasn’t that unusual for her, and so there was no cause for alarm beyond the strange girl who claimed to be the thirty-five-year-old graduate student.
Annoyed, regretful, and still extremely hungry, she stopped by the fish and chips place on the way back to her flat, demolishing four orders of battered cod and what had to be two pounds of fries. By the time she’d started back towards her room in earnest, darkness had settled over the city streets.
It was no surprise when the lifted-body truck rolled up on her underneath the overpass while she was cutting across to reach the other bus stop. The College Republicans had hosted another ‘controversial’ speaker that week, and as always the patriot sons had loaded themselves into their chariots and rode out to do battle with the weak and isolated. Armed and roving in packs, the fun-seeking crowd searched for queer-looking prey and Cat’s aesthetic stood out like a flaming beacon in the dark.
Even outnumbered, they weren’t terribly difficult to deal with; her height gave her a considerable amount of reach, and the cowardly scavengers turned tail the second she’d planted a solid kick into the first man’s groin, following with an elbow to the jaw that sprawled him out on the pavement. Naturally their retreat would only be temporary unless she was willing to risk putting one of them in the hospital, but it was trivial to flee while they panicked under the opposition they hadn’t expected to face. Reinforcements would only embolden them again and so it was important to put space between herself and the goons before they had a chance to regroup.
Sprinting up the hill towards the ugly plywood box she called home, she raced towards the entrance, hoping to make it up to her rooms before they had a chance to tail her. The exterior access helped keep costs down, but the lack of a gated entryway encouraged crimes of opportunity, which usually meant theft but stayed impartial towards assault. Taking the steps three at a time, she careened around the sharp corners on her way up to the fourth floor. Gasping for breath, she nearly slammed into her own front door as she skidded to a stop, fumbling for her keys.
Alarmingly, the battered old housekey stubbornly stuck in the lock, refusing to turn. Somehow it had become much too large, the teeth grating irritably against the tumblers. Belatedly she realised that this was Catherine’s flat and the world around her considered her to be an entirely different person; of course her keys wouldn’t work on someone else’s domicile, but it was such a shit time for whatever wish magic Genie had woven to start complicating her life. Hissing angrily, she abandoned her attempt, slinking down the open-aired corridor towards the fire escape.
Ill-maintained and rusted, the ladder groaned in protest as she kicked it down. All subterfuge lost to her by the echoing noise of the metal banging into place, she gripped the rails and swung on into space, taking the rungs as fast as she could manage, boots thunking against them in her haste. By the time she dropped down the last few feet onto the ground her exit had already been blocked-off by more carbon-copied hooligans of the same privileged breed she’d left lying on the pavement.
Of course they were all masked, their convenient ‘plague muzzles’ worn beneath their noses in a flagrant display of an inability to follow even basic safety instructions. Their ranks had swelled to a little more than a half-dozen jeering assailants approaching her from both sides of the alleyway. The street was so narrow that a truck could barely pass through, which meant the collection of goons could easily block her path with their bodies alone; the sound of footsteps on pavement informed her that they weren’t the last of the reinforcements, either.
With no other choice but to fight, she threw herself at the group closest to the back of the alley; if she could break through their ranks she would be able to sprint to the bar a few blocks down the street, and once inside the public establishment they would be much less willing to continue their pursuit.
Unfortunately their bravery grew with their number, and their caution had been tempered alongside their desire for revenge. Finally working as a cohesive group they approached her three at a time, swinging metal bats and police batons in a concerted effort to overwhelm her with force. Defending against one or two of them would have been manageable, but there were too many swings coming from too many directions to protect herself and the shock of the impacts stacked up quickly. Herself inured to a certain degree of pain, her body could only tolerate so many strikes before something had to give.
As focused as she was on trying to make a break around the attacker she had just immobilized with a one-two combo to the gut and solar plexus, she didn’t even see the metal bat arcing towards her until it smashed her in the jaw, sending her reeling. Stumbling backwards as stars exploded in her vision, she collapsed against the wall, struggling to keep her bearings and stay in the fight; leaving her no time to recover, the mob crowded around her, piling on the beating. Falling to her knees on the pavement, she covered her head and neck with her hands, weathering the brutality as best she could.
Eventually, as their bodies tired from exertion, they let up as they watched her bleed, grinning like a pack of jackals as they considered her fate.
“You boys wanna fuck it?” cackled one man, leering at her as he stood over her.
“That’s gross,” another opined, a disgusted look on his face. “It’s a man, right? I’m not gonna do anything gay like sticking my dick in it.”
“It looks too pretty to be a man,” one argued, quarreling over the dehumanizing semantics. “And young, too.”
“Not young enough,” his compatriot guffawed. “What is it, like twenty-five? I bet it’s loose as hell by now.”
“What do they call those freaks anyway?” the first one asked as he turned towards the laughing man. “The ones in the porn cartoons. Girl-boys?”
“They’re not ‘porn cartoons’, and it’s called ‘hentai’,” the offended man rejoined. “The boy ones are called ‘fembois’, and the girl ones are called ‘futanari’.”
“You some kind of scholar of all that faggy shit?” the other snickered derisively. “I bet you do wanna fuck it, you homo.”
“I do not!” he shrieked back, working himself into hysterics over the mere association with the gender they’d forced onto Cat. “That shit’s vile, man. I don’t want to get some kind of gay cock disease.”
Shoving aside the others, a man with heavy-sounding footfalls pushed his way to the front. “Nobody’s fucking it,” he ordered, his speech brimming with authority. “We’re gonna put it down and then go have a drink to celebrate one less godless pervert in the world.”
Staring down at her own shadow pooled beneath her, she heard the muted click of the safety switch on a firearm, followed by the louder clacks as the man racked the slide and then pulled back the hammer; a pointless mechanical flourish, the thug clearly wanted to scare her one last time before her death so that they could all properly savour her terror.
Even as the fear exploded in her chest, she promised herself she wouldn’t give them the satisfaction, gritting her teeth as she tried to seek a way out of her fatal predicament.
Seized by a queer sensation crawling out of the pit of her stomach, she watched in strange fascination as the shadow beneath her began to grow as though some monstrous creature stood behind her, stretching outwards as its limbs elongated, gaining mass as it expanded. A rumble echoed from somewhere near her, a feral snarl that grew in volume as the alarmed cluster of men took a step back from her.
An echoing crack erupted in front of her face as the man discharged the handgun he’d been holding, the bullet grazing her skin before ricocheting off the wall. She was on her feet before she saw what happened to him, his body launched away with considerable force to slam against the opposite wall. The growling sound became a roar as something ripped through the two men next to him; bleeding from enormous gashes arcing up through their abdomens and chest, they crumpled into wheezing heaps.
Those still left standing fought against each other in their panicked need to flee; grateful for her chance to do the same, she made to leave in the other direction. She’d only gotten a handful of feet before something dull and heavy impacted her between the shoulders, briefly knocking her to the ground; when she turned to see what it was, her attacker was already stumbling backward, clutching at the ruined mess of where his throat had been. Tearing her eyes away from the gruesome sight, she didn’t stick around to search for the cause of such visceral violence.
Bolting back out towards the street, she rounded the corner at a dead sprint. Racing down the sidewalk as fast as her legs could carry her, she vaulted the boom barrier outside the fenced-off car park that technically serviced her apartment. Careening around the other vehicles, she almost crashed into her own as her feet skidded on the bits of loose gravel in the poorly-maintained lot. Fumbling for her keys, she was thrilled to find that the one on her ring still worked. Throwing open the door, she banged her head on the frame as she slid inside as quickly as she could; stars spun in her vision as she jammed the key into the ignition.
Thankfully there wasn’t anyone waiting for her as she jabbed the button for the gate, slapping her prepaid pass against the scanner. Once her tyres hit the street she floored the accelerator, hoping that she could be well out of Washington before anyone could connect her to whatever the fuck it was that just happened.
Only once she merged onto the on-ramp headed south did she finally notice the blood staining her hands.
She’d pulled over at the often-neglected rest stop, its location in the mountains off the main highway ensuring its lack of maintenance and infrequent traffic. Sure, it would add another two hours to her trip, but she needed to be somewhere without a whole lot of cameras and it was hard to do that on I-5 proper.
Grabbing her first-aid kit, she took it into the foul-smelling ‘bathroom’, the whole affair much closer to an outhouse than she would’ve liked. Still, beggars couldn’t be choosers, and the rancid air would discourage accidental discovery.
Her sweater had to go immediately, which would only make the aging air conditioning in her car that much-more unpleasant, but there was little she could do about it. After thoroughly washing her hands, she cleansed them again with the disinfectant wipes just to be sure. The splash of hydrogen peroxide stung as it hit the graze on her cheek, and despite how nasty the cut looked there was little she could do but cover it with a bandage. After that, the rest of the antiseptic was instead employed for its cleansing ability, rinsing the blood off of her car door and the vehicle’s interior. Figuring it would be impossible for her to clean it well-enough to pass a forensic inspection, she settled for surviving a visual check instead.
Digging through the rest of the glovebox, she checked her registration. While the document had shown that she’d apparently sold the car to herself, the vehicle passing from ‘Catherine’ to ‘Callie’, she’d neglected to file it at the Washington DOT; later, the car’s cigarette lighter would help her wrap-up that paper trail rather cleanly, but first she would need to figure out where it was that she was going.
Digging out her cards, she decided to play detective, looking into whoever she was now.
‘Callie Brambell,’ as her driver’s license helpfully informed her, was a resident of San Diego, though likely not a current one given that her listed Clairemont address turned up a hardware store when she searched it online. She had a matching social security card at least, which meant that if it was a fake ID then it was one that she’d tricked the California DMV into printing. Still unsure as to the ‘rules’ of wish magic, she had no idea how complete her inhabited identity was supposed to be, or where it had even come from; ostensibly April had to have done something, but as far as wishes went it seemed odd that she’d burned one of hers on Cat.
Or perhaps it was entirely reasonable, once she considered it. She herself had passed her wishes off to someone else, so she knew it was possible to involve others in the magic requests even if Genie had insisted it wasn’t supposed to work that way. It begged the question as to what it was that April had wanted to achieve with her wish, but evidently it somehow required a six-foot-something, platinum-blonde hottie. Part of her wanted to imagine a meaningful connection between her new body and her bestie’s wish, but if anything it was likely a simple favour, the other woman (rightly) assuming that she wasn’t thrilled with the one she’d had.
An equal mix of both gratitude and self-conscious appraisal swam through her adrenaline-addled thoughts as she struggled to come to a conclusion regarding her edited form. Of course she vastly preferred it to the way it had been, but it was clearly not strictly of her own design; lots of it followed her own aesthetic taste, of course, but she’d always assumed her ideal body wouldn’t have been so fucking tall.
Either Genie could only do so much, or April had been much-more involved in the process than just making the request. She didn’t hate that, either; there was a certain appeal to the thought that what she was now had been what her bestie wanted to see. Obviously it was pure speculation, but her idle fantasy was much easier to engage in than wrestling with whoever she was supposed to be now.
What did ‘Callie’ do for work? Where was she going to live? Had she gone to school, or was she still attending?
As difficult as those introspective conundrums were, they were preferable to grappling with the idea that she might have slain a bunch of neo-nazis outside her apartment building. Sure, they definitely deserved it, but instead of coming down from the high of committing such incredible violence she was instead finding that she had kind of liked it.
Examining her hands hadn’t revealed the claws that should’ve been necessary to tear out a man’s throat, and she struggled to decide if that was reassuring or disappointing. Either way, she couldn’t help but poke at her teeth with her tongue, exploring the rather-concerning edge to her enlarged canines. They fit well-enough in her mouth, she supposed, but peering at them through her phone’s camera she had admit that they looked quite concerning ⸻ or sexy, to a certain kind of person.
Altogether she seemed like the eerily-threatening love-interest in a late-2000s monster-romance movie, which more or less would’ve been her ideal image when she’d been that age ⸻ that was to say, the age ‘Callie’ was now. Maybe it’d been lurking in the back of her mind, a distillation of adolescent wishes that Genie had glommed onto, and she supposed there were far worse things to be in the world.
With nothing left to do but flee the wreckage of her former life, she got back on the interstate headed south.
She dumped the car in a small town off I-5 once she crossed back into California, then walked several hours over to pick up a cheap rental. By the time she made it back to April’s place it had been nearly thirty-something hours since she’d last slept. She’d taken a taxi after she’d dropped the rental off, and as she stepped out of it and onto the little walk up towards the front door she felt like she was on the verge of collapse.
Despite her much-altered appearance, Xena was still happy to see her; in fact, her canine companion was so jubilant that Cat hardly recognized her in turn. Lacking the stiffness in her limbs that had only solidified with her progressing age, the Husky seemed like a much-younger version of herself. Even her coat was shinier than it had been, as if the years had simply melted away.
Unsurprisingly, Genie wasn’t present when she’d arrived, but she was far too tired to complain about it. April had come out to meet her alongside her furry companion, and even she wasn’t how Cat had left her either. Her bestie’s hair had continued to lengthen, falling in a golden wave down to the middle of her back, and her top stretched over her chest in a way it hadn’t before. Beaming with excitement, the other woman looked like a hotter version of herself from a decade prior, and Cat had to wonder if Genie hadn’t just wiped away the last ten years from the trio.
“Are you shorter than when I last saw you?” she asked as she accepted her bestie’s welcoming hug. “Or did I just get taller.”
“Maybe a little of both?” April answered with a sheepish grin, her cheeks blushing a rosy red. “You um, look really good.”
“Yeah?” Cat chuckled, inordinately pleased to hear such a sentiment coming from her crush, even if her own appraisal immediately slunk back into a familiar self-criticism. “I look like a girl trying to attend an MCR comeback tour after she heard about them from her mom.”
“Not in a bad way, though,” April assured her. Giving the taller girl the once-over with a wide-eyed stare that seemed almost cow-like, she bit her lower lip as she took in her altered mass. “You’ve really … ⸻ filled out.”
“So’ve you,” she smirked back, eyeing the shorter blonde’s chest. “Looks nice, too, though their … lift kinda reminds me of implants.”
“All-natural,” she grinned, drawing her shoulders back to thrust out her chest for further inspection. A curious sincerity to her teasing, she blushed further as tried a salacious taunt. “Want to feel for yourself?”
Summoning every ounce of her admittedly-weak self control, Cat held back everything save her hungry, wolfish gaze. “Maybe later,” she hedged, a desirous growl lingering on her tongue. “I kinda just want to sleep for a while if I’m being honest. I’m exhausted.”
“You certainly look it,” April allowed, a queer disappointment hidden in her somewhat breathier timbre. “Do you want to have a lie-down in the spare room?”
“I thought Genie was using it,” she accused, her envy even more audible than it used to be.
“Well, you see,” she explained with an almost-guilty tone to her voice, “Genie hasn’t really taken advantage of it. She’s been, um, sleeping elsewhere.”
Though she’d turned her gaze away in something somewhat less than ‘shame’, she still glanced at Cat out of the corner of her eye, testing her expression.
“I … see,” she muttered, a possessive rumble in her chest.
“Does that bother you?”
“No,” she lied, hiding her feelings behind sharp teeth.
“Oh. Well, that’s good,” April nodded, clearly skeptical, and perhaps her comment had been a sort of test, though Cat couldn’t say of what. “She’s actually been off to see her sweetheart whenever she gets the chance. They have some little ones together it seems, and in order to stay out of the bottle she has to spend a decent bit of her time away from home and granting wishes.”
“Makes sense that she’d want to take off, then,” she agreed, frustrated with herself.
Cursing inwardly, she reminded herself that she didn’t have a claim to her bestie, and even if she did there was no reason for her not to share with others if April was into that. If she were willing to look at herself objectively for a moment, it wasn’t necessarily that she disliked the idea of her bestie fooling around with Genie ⸻ who was incredibly attractive and probably knew a thing or two about sex, given the kind of thing her mistresses might’ve wished for in her however-many hundreds of years as a djinn ⸻ but instead she was upset that April would so readily consider someone who wasn’t her. It was pure envy, plain and simple, a longing for something she shouldn’t dare hope for.
She had to face facts: they’d been friends long enough that if there was ever going to be anything between the two, it would’ve happened already. It wasn’t like her relationship with Mark had fallen apart instantly, either; if her bestie had been looking for an out, there had been a dozen chances to ask for it.
April just … wasn’t into her.
Resolving to deal with Genie when she wasn’t so goddamn tired, Cat similarly let her desire for April fade into the background. Pretending to focus her attention on Xena, she allowed the conversation to pass beyond her as she steadily maneuvered herself towards the spare room.
Unfortunately for the sake of her one-sided affection, the sheets of the guest bed shared April’s scent.
Never one for perfumes and the like, the smell of her shampoo and fabric soap was all that adorned the shorter girl, both present on the hardly-used extra mattress. As the soft blankets wrapped around her, she couldn’t help but imagine that her crush had snuggled inside the bed with her and a tightness in her chest stirred a sense of longing. Soothed and tortured by that sentiment, she breathed deep of the calming aroma, letting herself drift off to a much-needed rest.
Again her sleep was interrupted by her strange dreams, an odd continuation of the one she’d had back in her flat. Perhaps informed by her present circumstance, the hazy narrative borrowed its setting from her surroundings, morphing them into an abstract stream of consciousness.
The house felt so much smaller as she stalked through it, a deep hunger burning inside her. Much like that panicked moment in the alleyway, her limbs felt somehow elongated, her musculature more pronounced; her fangs were massive in her mouth, and when she briefly caught sight of herself in the hallway mirror she was stunned by her own monstrous silhouette. Still herself and yet altered, the once-straight platinum hair seemed instead a wild mane, complimenting the ferocity of the harsh, animalistic glare staring back at her; her canines ached with purpose, a growl escaping her lips.
Lured by the scent of someone cooking food, she crouched underneath the weirdly too-short head of the entryway to the kitchen. Unsurprisingly, given her obsession with her crush, April had once more infiltrated her dreams; the cheerful blonde laboured over an assortment of baked goods, steadily accruing racks of cooling breads. As delicious as they smelled, her predatory gaze fell over the delightfully-curved form of her bestie instead.
Humming a greeting as she turned towards her, April’s eyes widened as she caught sight of her, plush lips parting in a surprised ‘o’; that small change to her features was decidedly erotic, and her hunger spurred the predator forward as she sought a taste. Whatever her crush said in response was lost to the fog of her dream, the sounds turning into shocked gasps as Cat cornered her against the counter. Bending low to reach the much-shorter woman, her towering frame still loomed over her prey as they kissed, sharp fangs teasing soft flesh as their mutual exploration deepened.
She’d been stubbornly pushing down on it while awake, but the exhilaration of her confrontation in Seattle had left her with a powerful desire; confronted with the beautiful little cow in front of her, she couldn’t help but give in to her dream-addled needs. Stockings already stretched beyond their limit by her feral transformation, she tore a new rip in them as she freed her cock, her impossibly-large length slapping against the smaller girl’s stomach. As pent-up as she was after her exultant violence, she relished the gift of the moaning toy caught in her grasp.
Lifting her as if she weighed nothing at all, she set April on the counter at a height that better served her intentions. Shredding the cloth barrier between the other woman’s thighs, she was rewarded with the delectable scent glistening in that soft valley. As blinded as she was by her rising frenzy, it was impossible to say who was reacting to whom; had she been drawn here by the aura of her prey’s need, or had the sexy morsel squirming in her grip been coaxed into heat by her presence?
Giving into the debauched fantasy swimming luridly through her head, Cat spread her would-be lover’s legs, lining herself up. The difference in their relative sizes was almost comical, but in the way of absurd dream-logic she knew it would fit ⸻ how could it not? Her perfect prey quivered in nervous anticipation, and the snarling beast indulged her monstrous appetite, her better judgement overpowered by her blazing hunger.
True to the impossible world of her unconscious fantasy, she slid into April with only a slight resistance; thrusting shallowly at first, she drove steadily deeper and deeper as the other woman adapted to her enormous size. Somewhere in the back of her mind, her conscious appraisal was impressed by the erotically-unlikely elasticity of her crush, but the monster at the forefront of her awareness saw it only as a matter of course. The mewling little cow impaled on her cock was the perfect outlet for her frantic need, and she pounded her pussy with a ferocity that elicited scared and excited mooing. Grinning broadly at the wonderful sound, her fangs flashed in the light as she worked out her aggression.
Lost in the fog of arousal and her dream-state, she lost count of how many times she filled her lover, seeking a blissful release. Again and again she claimed the other woman, using her to take the edge off her impossible hunger. Only when she had completely emptied her swollen balls did she finally cease her attack, the obscene vision blurring into indistinct impression as she pulled out of her new favourite cocksleeve, a deluge of cum spilling out as she extricated herself.
Satisfied for the moment, the absurd fantasy slipped back into quiet darkness.
It was light out by the time she awakened again, having slept through the afternoon and well into the following morning. Enticed by the aroma of sizzling bacon, she wondered if she might convince April to share.
As she sat up in the bed, she was surprised to find herself in a different set of clothes. Clad in an ill-fitting tee and men’s sweatpants that struggled around her curves, she tried and failed to remember whether or not she’d swapped outfits under her own power. Given how long she’d been dozing, it was possible that April had set them out for her at some point, and she’d changed into them while still half-asleep; the half-empty glass of water she spied on the nearby nightstand lent solid credibility to the idea that the other woman had been looking out for her.
Accepting that convenient explanation, she padded back downstairs, seeking the bounty grilling in the kitchen.
Her bestie nearly jumped in fright as she came up to the little island, an apprehensive look settling onto her pretty features; despite the suppressed alarm, Cat had to admit that even this expression looked cute on her crush.
“Good morning, gorgeous,” she smiled as she took a seat, resting her elbows on the counter.
April blushed as she stammered her reply, and the taller girl found it odd that she’d react so strongly to a greeting she’d given a hundred times. “Good m-morning,” she mumbled, avoiding eye contact as her pink coloration deepened. “A-are you hungry? I suppose you might be, after … ⸻ after all of that.”
“The drive?” Cat tried, unsure as to what her bestie was referencing. “Yeah, the last time I ate was back in Seattle, so to be honest I’m kinda starving.”
“You certainly looked it,” she murmured in response, a strange tension hanging in the air between the two women. “I never would've expected that kind of appetite, but I … ⸻ I didn’t dislike it.”
“Uh … sure?” she returned quizzically, tilting her head to the side as she grappled with the puzzle of the other woman’s odd behaviour. “I mean like, it’s normal to want to eat first thing in the morning, right?”
“Well, yes,” April agreed hesitantly, “but I meant the, uh, other thing.” Putting her hands up, she preemptively waved-off whatever response she believed Cat would have, despite the taller girl only feeling bewilderment. “It was obviously not an unwelcome turn, but I was honestly frightened that you might try something that could hurt me ⸻ which was thrilling in its own way, yes, but I wasn’t aware you thought about me in that manner.”
“I would never try to hurt you,” she promised emphatically.
“Perhaps ‘try’ isn’t the right word, then,” the shorter girl mused. “Maybe it’s more like an accidental consequence.”
“I’m not really sure what you’re getting at,” Cat hedged, “but I would never harm you, ‘accidently’ or not.”
Blushing ever deeper under the sincerity of the other woman’s promise, April nodded. “Well, then … thank you,” she said, an awkward sincerity to her speech. “I’m happy I’m the one you chose. And, um, if you ever need to use me again, then, well … you’re welcome to it.”
“I’m the one that should be thanking you,” she countered, still not quite sure what it was that April was dancing around. “I hate imposing on you so soon after your separation with Mark, but I appreciate you … uh, accommodating me. I know it’s a lot to ask of you.”
“It was actually surprisingly comfortable,” April murmured abashedly. “Once I got used to it, at least.”
“Then the next time I need a hand, I’ll think of you first,” she smiled, flashing her wicked teeth.
“I very much hope so,” the shorter girl squeaked, eying her fangs with a queer mixture of both fear and enamoured interest.
Catching her eyeline, Cat leaned over the counter, bringing her face closer to her bestie’s. “Were you hoping for a better look?” she teased.
“It was quite the inspection before,” she mumbled, putting her fingers to her plump lips, absently stroking them as if recalling some sensation. “Just not a visual one, obviously.”
Eager to continue flirting, Cat was about to ask her what she meant before they were rudely interrupted by a commotion in the entryway.
They arrived to find Xena posted up in the hallway, her hackles raised as she growled a threatening warning. Half-in, half-out of the doorway, a man she’d never seen before was cursing obscenities at the Husky, clearly looking around for some sort of weapon.
More out of concern for Xena than the intruder, she coaxed her irate princess away from the door, resting a calming hand on her shoulders as she gently offered reassuring pets. Clearly April knew the man because she tried to interpose herself between him and her guests, but Cat put an arm out to prevent her; if the stranger was going to do something, she’d rather he do it to her than to the shorter girl.
“Call your mutt off!” he snapped, perhaps emboldened by the fact that the taller girl had already done so. “A man can’t even enter his own home anymore without being attacked!”
“No one’s attacking you,” April said firmly. “The dog is just stressed.”
“I’m stressed!” the man rudely countered. “This is exactly the reason why I never let you have one of these stupid animals in the house.”
Her own hackles raising, Cat bit her tongue, holding back her aggression. “I’m going to have to ask you, politely, to lower your voice,” she demanded in an even tone. “If you keep shouting you’re going to upset her more than she already is.”
“Who’s ‘shouting’?” he shot back at her, almost screaming the words. “And who the hell are you, anyway?”
“She’s my friend Catherine,” April spoke up, answering for her. “I’m letting her stay for a spell.”
“Catherine, huh?” the man glowered, grinning as if he’d caught her in something. “Oh I know all about ‘Catherine’.” Jabbing a finger accusatorily in her direction, the man advanced on April. “You couldn’t even give us a week before you went full lesbo, could you? You ungrateful slut.”
A combative rumble in her chest, Cat moved to step into his space, but the shorter girl caught her by the arm and arrested her advance with a knowing shake of her head.
“Just tell me why you’re here, Mark,” April demanded of the angry intruder.
“It’s my house, isn’t it?” he scoffed.
“It isn’t,” she asserted.
“That’s not what the judge says,” he smiled, a vicious grin plastered over his features as he dug a folded set of papers out of his jacket. “I showed up today out of the goodness of my own heart to give you a second chance, and what do I find but you squatting on my property with some fleabag hookup.”
“You had better watch your tone,” Cat snarled; she didn’t care about the insult to herself, but she wasn’t going to let anyone talk down to her bestie like that.
“And you’d better watch yours before I report you for trespassing,” he snorted back, evidently pleased with himself. Still, he was quite a few inches shorter and probably weighed less than the tall girl’s imposing frame, so he was careful not to push the envelope too far; instead, he turned his attention back to April, a woman he was actually large enough to threaten. “I’m giving you a week to get your shit together and either apologize to me or hit the road, or I’ll happily call the sheriff over to evict your bimbo ass.”
Pleased with himself, he thrust the papers at the shorter girl; glaring at Cat as she flipped him off, he stomped back out the way he came to a waiting car.
“Can’t say I’m not pleased to see the back of him,” Cat growled once he had finally gone.
They were sitting together in the living room, breakfast preparation having mostly been abandoned in the wake of Mark’s presumptive interruption. Not wanting to waste anything, Cat had folded what was already finished into a sandwich made with fresh bread April had apparently baked the night before, and wolfed the entire thing down in a little less than three bites.
Shoulders heaving as she sighed, April only continued to pet Xena, the gesture doing quite a lot to calm both of them. “I’m sorry you had to see any of that,” she apologised as though Mark’s behaviour was entirely her fault. “I wasn’t expecting him to come around.”
“It’s nothing,” Cat insisted, waving off her apology. “In fact, I’m kind of glad I was here. I’d hate to see what he’d try if you were alone.”
“Probably nothing,” April assured her. “He’s gained a horrible temper over the last few years, but it’s mostly all bluster. I’m more concerned about the paperwork he left.”
While the other woman had contended that the house had been purchased in her name and with her own money, the documents that Mark had ungraciously dumped on them seemed to show that he was the rightful owner instead. Photocopies of mortgage payments, bills, and other items suggested that not only was he the primary breadwinner in the failed marriage, but he had also paid for everything as well.
“I don’t understand it,” April muttered, staring at the pile of papers Cat was sifting through. “All of those seem to be correct, but they have to have been fabricated somehow. I was the one making all the payments, out of my own account. Sure, we divided costs on a number of things, but ….” She trailed off, her brows furrowing as she tried to make sense of it all.
“Can’t we just pull the correct records, then?” she asked, trying to be proactive. “If we have those on hand, we can prove that he’s making shit up.”
“He might not be,” came the sound of a familiar voice.
Tail wagging happily, Xena bounded up to the returned Genie; rewarding her familiarity with chin-scritches, the djinn gave her a slight smile before turning her attention back to the other women.
“What do you mean?” Cat asked accusatorily, ready to launch an interrogation.
“Wishes like you’ve asked for can have a lot of knock-on effects,” the dark-haired woman explained, taking a seat next to April as she forced the blushing girl to squish-in between the two amazons on the couch. “The Veil works to prevent anyone from noticing changes to the world, and so continues to keep magic a secret. Without the extra ten years of seniority at her office, Miss Jersey here has likely fallen to a much lower-paying title.”
“‘Jersey’?” the taller girl echoed, raising an eyebrow.
“It’s … like a pet name,” April mumbled, clearly too embarrassed to give the whole story.
“So then why is she the one using it?” Cat protested, a possessive edge to her tone.
“Let’s talk about it after,” the shorter girl begged, seeming to shrink between the larger forms of the women on either side of her.
“... Sure,” she allowed, unwilling to push her bestie too hard after the tension of only an hour prior. “I’ll change my question, then: what is the ‘Veil’ you mentioned? How is it fucking up the deed to the house?”
“It’s a very powerful force that hides the effects of magic,” Genie continued, “and does so in as complex detail as is required of it. It conjures documents where necessary and alters faint memories where it must, but it prioritizes secrecy over anything else. The harder it is made to work, the less likely you are to enjoy how it goes about it. Take Mark, for an example: he has likely always believed he was ‘in charge’ of the relationship, and the metamorphosis of his ex into a somewhat-younger ‘trophy wife’ has given the Veil cause to support that interpretation as it hardly needs to change anything to do so.”
“It certainly did a great job of fuzzing my memories,” Cat grumbled, annoyed at the experience as well as the frustrating way the mysterious force seemed to enjoy causing problems.
“And would’ve continued to do so had you not been drawn into the spell,” Genie nodded in agreement. “The technique I used to ‘pass forward’ your wishes caused the Veil to attempt to include you in my mistress's requests, and I allowed it to happen rather than risk the Veil imposing consequences for ignoring its pull, but in other circumstances it would've punished you just as severely in order to keep you out. For that reason, I’ll caution you as I did Jersey and ask you not to bring up our arrangement with anyone else, no matter how close to you they might be. The Veil does not like to be tested.”
“So it’s like the opera,” the taller girl added needlessly, referencing the spy thrillers of her youth; Genie’s warning was far too close to a lecture for her own liking, and so the knowing comment was her way of establishing her own authority.
“Pardon?” the djinn exclaimed, somewhat confused. “I suppose I could connect the dots between a stage play and magic, but you’d be best-served by being much more quiet about it than the typical tenor.”
Sighing exasperatedly, Cat tried again, this time nodding towards a common trope of more supernatural fiction, the kind that would’ve included characters like Genie herself. “No I mean, like, it’s like the masquerade.”
“In that there are obscured identities, you mean?” the djinn finished for her. “I suppose, but I can’t say I’ve attended one in at least a few hundred years, so the metaphor might be beyond me.”
“Not a big fan of balls?” she smirked, taking an easy shot at low-hanging fruit.
“Well now, I never said that,” Genie returned with a curious half-smile, shocking the taller girl with the unexpectedly-flirtatious banter as if she understood that she’d been baiting Cat the entire time.
“Speaking of obscured identities,” Cat returned, diverting the conversation away from … wherever it was going with the djinn, “is anyone going to explain why I’m apparently an entirely different person now?”
Fishing her cards out, she set her driver’s license on the table for the others to see.
“Well ‘Callie’ is a cute name, isn’t it?” ‘Jersey’ contended. “So it could’ve been worse.”
“Sure,” ‘Callie’ agreed, “but I don’t know what I’m supposed to do with it. I’m kinda cut off from everywhere else.”
“Perhaps you could seek residence and employment alongside Miss Jersey,” Genie offered as a solution. “Without the aid of a further wish there’s scarcely anything I can do to help you against Mark, and I think it would be best for everyone if you saw him as little as possible.”
“I can get onboard with half of that, at least,” Callie hedged, growing nervous at the idea of living alongside her crush. “I’m not sure how I feel about dragging ‘Jersey’ along with me, though.”
“I wouldn’t mind,” Jersey interrupted, shifting in her seat as though she couldn’t decide which of the two women she was becoming too close to. “I’ve expressed the thought at least a dozen times to you. And, especially now that Mark’s gone … I kind of wish we could just start everything over.”
Callie shot a meaningful look at Genie, who frowned in response.
“No, yeah, I’m going to have to grant that one, but only because it’s part and parcel of some of the others,” the dark-haired amazon sighed, though she hardly moved in response; perhaps granting wishes didn’t require anything more than her own conscious effort, but Callie had to admit she was a little disappointed not to see any waves of her hand and the accompanying glowing sparkles that indicated spellcasting in animated media. “You really ought to be more careful about how you phrase things, Jersey, or we’ll end up with a repeat of the last time.”
“Last time?” Callie echoed, raising an eyebrow as she held Jersey’s gaze.
“It was really two different wishes,” the djinn said, more gesturing in the direction of the events rather than recounting them like the taller woman would’ve wanted. “And, given the aura surrounding you now, I’m afraid I was perhaps too hasty in my acquiescence ⸻ speaking of, where did you say your ancestors were from?”
“I don’t think I did,” she answered, tilting her head to the side as she studied the other woman, confused as to why she’d even ask.
“I’d give you my guess but I don’t suppose anyone in this era knows the name, though perhaps ‘Septimania’ might ring a bell? Or maybe ‘Gévaudan’, but that feels a bit too on-the-nose and thus very misleading.” Shrugging her shoulders as she came to some sort of baffling conclusion, she dismissed her own line of questioning without filling anyone else in on the details. “Either way, I would prefer to keep an eye on both of you until all the wishes have finished their changes and that’s much easier to do if you stay together in the same place.”
“I don’t have a problem with that,” Jersey ventured shyly, glancing at Callie’s reaction out of the corner of her eye.
“I’m not completely opposed,” the taller girl muttered, still possessed of a dozen misgivings. “But I hate the idea of having to give up the house to Mark. It just doesn’t seem fair to April.”
“It isn’t, but that’s not going to be your concern anymore,” Genie began again, her clarifying comment muddying the waters even further. “I doubt Jersey will be able to stay April May much longer.”
“Then I’ll have to enjoy it while it lasts,” Jersey grinned, covering an emotion that she was careful not to show Callie.