Chapter 7: Chapter 6 – Good Morning Good Morning

 I’m drifting in and out of sleep when my phone dings. I open my eyes to dim light filtering through the curtains. This time, there’s no doubt that I’m not in my bed at home, but there’s still a moment of unreality.

I notice two things are missing. First, there’s no cat snuggled up to my feet, which makes me feel a little lonely. Second, no morning wood, which I don’t miss at all. I guess when you’ve lived with something for years, you can almost forget how annoying it is until it’s gone.

My phone dings again. I stretch languidly and roll over because it sounds like my phone is on the floor. Oh yeah, I briefly forgot about the boobs and now they’re squished under me. After an undignified moment when I almost join my phone on the floor, I regain my balance and roll back over to look at my phone. It’s after ten and I see that Dave has texted me.

I unlock my phone and it occurs to me that for all the changes I’ve experienced, my fingerprint is apparently still the same. I wonder if that means anything.

Dave has sent me a selfie of him sitting on our couch with my tuxedo cat curled up in his lap.

Hey just checking in. Zatanna misses you but she’s turned to me for comfort
Hope you had a good night!

I think I’m going to need to talk to Anya and June before I know for sure how I want to handle things with Dave.

Thanks for the check-in
Good night last night. Just woke up. Probably be home in a couple hours?
You cool if I bring some folks with?

Sure man no prob

The “man” stings, but I try to ignore it. Dave is pretty open-minded so I think he’ll be okay with me being trans. It’s more the demon part that I don’t know how to approach.

Thanks! Got news but it’s too much for text

Am I going to be an uncle?

Lol no

I sit up and swing my legs over the side of the bed. I notice a bathrobe on the back of the door that I’m pretty sure wasn’t there last night. I feel like Spider-Man is getting a little ripe, so I pull my t-shirt off and toss it on the floor with the other discarded clothing. I should probably do something about that so Anya and June don’t think I’m a total slob.

I sniff my armpit. Yeah, there’s a bit of funk going on there, but it’s way less than I expect and it smells different. Huh.

I pull the bathrobe on, wrap it around me, and tie it securely. Looking down, I feel like I’m still showing a lot of cleavage. Oh well, I’m sure Anya won’t mind anyway.

I make my way to the bathroom. There’s a sticky note on the mirror that says, “The purple towel is for you. Help yourself to any products.” Sure enough, there’s a purple towel hanging on the towel rack with two others.

Being clean sounds great, so I strip and step into the shower. I find some pretty-smelling body wash in the shower and take my time getting clean and, if I’m being honest, exploring my new body. While there are a lot of changes, overall it still feels like me, just…right.

There’s a knock and I can hear the door open a crack.

“Good morning,” says June from the other side of the door. “I assume you found the towel. There are new toothbrushes in the cabinet. Breakfast is ready when you are. Need anything else?”

“Um, I think I’m good. Thanks!” I answer.

“Okay! You can go shopping in the Magic Closet after breakfast, but there should be a few things that fit in the dresser in your bedroom if you’d rather not wander around in a robe. Whatever you’re comfortable with, though.”

I thank her again and she closes the door. 

When I’m done with my shower, I dry off and put the robe on again. I go back to my room and get some underwear from the dresser that seems to be the right size and decide I’ll wait to find out what the Magic Closet is before I get dressed further.

I follow the smell of frying bacon downstairs. The kitchen is bright with the morning sun coming in the windows, but still feels cozy. June is sitting at the table and Anya is standing in front of the stove.

“Are bacon and French toast good?” Anya asks as she turns around. “We’ve got non-carnivore options if you’d prefer.

“Bacon and French toast sounds perfect,” I tell her, trying and failing to meet her gaze. I focus on her mouth instead, because that’s going to work so much better. Her lips quirk.

Anya hands me a plate of food and I retreat gratefully to the table with a mumbled “Thanks.”

“So,” says June. “My sense was that last night was more about catharsis than fear that you’ll be stuck as a girl forever. You should take as much time to process as you need, but if you want to talk about it, we’d love to listen.”

I chew some bacon. It’s greasy and salty and perfectly cooked. I could get used to Anya making me breakfast in the morning.

“Down, girl,” I tell myself.

“What was that?” June asks.

Oops, was that out loud? It’s a good thing my mouth is full. Also, did I just call myself ‘girl’?

I swallow.

“I was trying to say, ‘This bacon is really good,’” I say completely convincingly. “But yeah, I guess I’m trans? Like, it’s not exactly a new thing, just something I’ve been trying not to think about. I’m just not entirely sure what to do with that information, you know?” I feel my eyes begin to well up with tears and I don’t even know why.

“Hey, it’s okay,” says June gently. “Thank you for sharing that with us. I’m sure it’s a lot to process. I talked to Sam earlier and it sounds like between her and Anya, you got shoved through a lot pretty fast. Even if you come out the other side happier, there are less traumatic ways to get there.”

June walks into the next room and returns with a box of tissues, which she hands me. It’s a step up from trying to blow my nose on a napkin.

“Thanks,” I say. “How much of this did you go through?” I pause. “Also, are you a demon or something else? Like, I don’t want to assume too much, but I kinda I expected bat wings for demons, but I guess I didn’t get any?”

“I’m an angel,” says June, “and I found that out my freshman year of high school when Anya performed a little ritual on me.”

Anya laughs. “I got in soooo much trouble for that!”

“This I gotta hear!” I say.

“Okay, but you need Nephilim Biology 101 first,” says Anya.

“Neph-who?”

“It’s what most of us call ourselves as generic term. It’s from the Bible, I think?”

“It is,” June interjects. “It says that the ‘sons of God’—which is usually interpreted to mean angels, maybe fallen angels—and the ‘daughters of men’ had superpowered kids called Nephilim.”

“In other words,” says Anya, “there have always been monsterfuckers. Anyway, you and I aren’t technically demons and June isn’t exactly an angel. We’re really just humans with somebody from another dimension way up the family tree somewhere. But the cool thing is that the genetics work completely differently, so we’re still badass. The original angels and demons showed up a long time ago, got busy with humans, and then fucked off to who knows where.”

“Wait,” I interrupt. “You’re talking like it’s no big deal that humans were able to reproduce with beings from another dimension.”

Anya shrugs. “Magic.”

“We really have no idea how it works,” June says. “It’s not like genetics, though. It really is more like a magical birthright or something.”

“Rob was talking about theories about why it sometimes shows up and sometimes doesn’t?” I say hesitantly.

“There are lots of regular human magic users who would really love to know more about us,” Anya says. “Generally, we prefer to play dumb and leave them to their own guesses. The less they know for sure, the safer we are.”

“Are you afraid of Rob?” I ask. “He seemed nice enough, although he liked to hear himself talk.”

“Not Rob, really,” says Anya. “But let me put it this way. There are top secret teams of Navy SEALs or commandos or whatever who are trained and equipped to take out any of us supernaturals who the government thinks is a problem. Generally that means shit getting outside the supernatural ‘community’ and upsetting the normies.”

“I mean, that seems like what I’d expect from the Uncle Sam, but how do you know?” I ask.

“Because four years ago, we had a situation with one of us who’d recently acquired his powers and, because he was also a Nazi, started hurting people. I’ll spare you the details because it was pretty horrifying.”

“I’m okay without the details.”

“Anyway, my mom and I think her second cousin or something? They showed up in town to deal with the situation and drafted me to drive the getaway car. We got to his street at 2 AM and there was a bunch of guys with all the tactical shit breaking his front door down. They were out two minutes later and then the guy’s house mysteriously burned later that night.”

“Wow!”

“We circled the block with the lights off and then just kept driving. Mom was freaking out that they’d come after us next. Her cousin said the car couldn’t be traced to us and he’d get rid of it. But the moral to the story is that while we really don’t know how much the government knows about individual types of supernatural folks, we’re better off not spreading that kind of knowledge around. I don’t think Rob’s a bad guy, but I don’t know that if push came to shove, he’d choose Nephilim over baseline humans.”

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“Yeah, I guess that makes sense.” I ponder. “So are there, like, rules about who we can tell or how we use our powers?”

“No. It’s not like there’s a Nephilim Council or anything to make the rules in the first place. I think most of us are kind of allergic to authoritarians. The original angels and demons who showed up were having a war. There are still some old Nephilim who think we should still be fighting, which is just dumb, since my best friend is an angel.”

“Which we didn’t even know until freshman year,” adds June, “because somebody was getting all angsty about being the only demon girl in the whole wide world.”

“My mom wouldn’t ever tell me how her inner demon came out,” Anya continues. “But it happened in her thirties. So she’d been doing the demon thing for decades when she had me. Turns out if a mommy demon lady has a kid, you get a demon baby automatically. I didn’t get all my powers till puberty, but it was pretty obvious from the very beginning that I wasn’t exactly human. The tail was a giveaway. Mom used a lot of glamours on me until I started learning to shift.”

“My family moved here right before I started fourth grade,” says June, “and we were in the same classroom. We’ve been besties since the second day of school that year and I’ve known about Anya’s deal since the third day.”

“I couldn’t help myself,” says Anya, sticking out her tongue. Which is forked. “She was looking kind of sad on the playground, so I started making faces at her. And I did the tongue.”

That probably explains why her tongue felt the way it did last night. I can feel my face heating up thinking about it. Fortunately, June keeps talking and either doesn’t notice or pretends not to notice.

“Anya’s motto is, ‘Why think twice when you could not think at all?’” she says. “I was sad because I was still adjusting to a new house and school and everything. It worked, though.”

Anya laughs. “No one can withstand my silly faces! Even though June has always known everything and has been great about keeping my secret, I was kind of an angsty bitch in high school. ‘Woe is me! Nobody understands me except my mom and my awesome best friend!’ So I figured why not see if June was a demon too! So I snuck some of Mom’s books and learned how to do the ritual.”

“The same one that Rob did on me?” I ask.

“Yeah, probably. Except Rob knows his containment runes better than I do. I made the magic circle on the basement floor and told June that I had a spell that could cure her acne.”

“It was pretty bad,” says June, “and Anya’s skin was always perfect so I was more than happy to try.”

“Hey, it worked!” Anya retorts. “It got you in the circle and it cleared up your skin. But I did fuck up the runes a little and maybe I didn’t do the ritual exactly right. There was a flash and a bang and I went through the drywall and one of the pipes in the ceiling broke a little. Mom wasn’t happy at all. The only thing that saved me was that she was busy making sure June wasn’t freaking out so by the time she got to me, she was only very pissed, not nuclear. I think I only got grounded for a month.”

June smiles at me. “So yes, I do have some idea of what you’re going through. I didn’t have to figure out my gender at the same time, though.”

“But you both seem to be pretty well up on gender stuff,” I say. “Wait, are you trans?” I turn to Anya.

“We’ve seen it before,” she answers. “For some reason, there’s a lot of trans demons. But then, shapeshifters seem to have a fairly flexible relationship with gender on the whole. But no, I’m cis. Well, cis-ish.”

“Anya’s always just been a huge butch,” says June. “Except when she was my boyfriend who lived in Canada when the guys in high school wouldn’t back off.”

“Remy was from Quebec and didn’t know much English, but he had intense eyebrows and more facial hair than your average high school boy, so he was very intimidating,” adds Anya, laughing.

“Of course, Anya doesn’t know French, so it was mostly scowling and asking the boys to arm-wrestle in a terrible accent.”

“I’d show up every couple months to a school event with ma chérie and then the boys would leave her alone.” As she says this, Anya’s voice drops a fifth and becomes more resonant and suddenly there’s someone with dark hair, pronounced stubble, a toned masculine figure, and yes, intense eyebrows standing where she had been.

I stare.

“Whoa! Like, obviously I know it’s possible,” I gesture at myself, “but it’s super cool to see it in action. Do something else!”

As I watch, Anya’s skin becomes redder and her figure shifts again, becoming much curvier than what I’ve become accustomed to on her, straining her sweatpants and tee in interesting ways. Her hair, which is still dark, lengthens while horns sprout from her temples and the pupils in her now-yellow eyes become ovals. A forked tongue licks her full lips.

“I’m not doing the tail right now,” she says in a low, breathy voice. “Tails and pants don’t work very well together.”

“Damn!” I exclaim. “Is this your regular demon form?”

“Nah,” she says, shifting once more to what I think of as her regular body type. Her hair shortens and lightens to a reddish blonde. The demonic traits remain, though. “This is more comfortable.”

“Oh yeah, that looks more like you,” I say.

“I think of it like there’s a human-demon slider and then all the space to play around with otherwise,” she explains.

I’m sure I look confused. “I don’t follow.”

“Okay, so you and I are shape-shifters. It’s kind of a demon thing. My personal opinion is that that’s part of why we’re the ‘bad guys’. Can’t trust folks who change their shape. Especially sexy people who change their shape, right?”

I frown. That makes a certain amount of sense. “Okay.”

“June only has the human-angel slider. She can look more or less angelic, but she always looks like June as long as she’s vaguely human-shaped.”

“Wait, what are the options other than human-shaped?”

June looks a little uncomfortable. “You know the memes about biblically accurate angels?” she asks.

“Yes?”

“Anything past the ‘Oops! All eyeballs!’ stage gets seriously weird,” Anya says.

“All eyeballs is already seriously weird,” says June. “I don’t like looking everywhere at once. Also, people start seeing me differently after they see that.” She looks down for a moment. “But I love the wings!”

“They’re gorgeous,” I tell her. June smiles warmly.

“Wings are pretty standard for Nephilim,” says Anya. “We’ll have to see what yours are like, but there’s a strict ‘no wings in the kitchen’ house rule.”

“That’s because someone wasn’t careful and started a grease fire,” June chimes in.

Anya ignores this. “So we all can move back and forth along the human-supernatural spectrum, but most demonic Nephilim have other options too. Some of us can do animals, which I’ve never figured out. You should give it a shot, but don’t hold your breath. Mom can’t either and she says that’s pretty normal for succubi.”

“Wait,” I interrupt. “We’re talking sex demons, right? Are you saying I’m a sex demon?”

“Oh, I guess I forgot to mention that.” Anya has the grace to look slightly abashed.

“There’s no good way to neatly classify Nephilim,” June explains. “Remember, we’re not dealing with DNA and earth biology. We look at traits and abilities and can make educated guesses based on those and genealogy. It’s messy. Angelic and demonic Nephilim can have interbreed, just like our original ancestors did. Sometimes traits combine, sometimes they cancel out or change. There are plenty of old religious texts that classify angels and demons in strict hierarchies, but there were a number of faulty preconceptions there. Some of those words and concepts are common enough that they’re still somewhat useful.”

I nod. “Okay, but honestly, I’m still hung up on the sex demon thing.”

“If you get a bunch of Nephilim together,” June continues, “a good sixty percent are going to be succubi.”

“Because sexy sex demons have a lot of sex,” Anya adds.

June gives her a look. I can tell it means something and Anya, who looked like she was about to say something else, shuts her mouth.

“Just statistically speaking, you’re most likely to be a succubus,” June says. “Again, that’s not a tidy classification. Your skin goes purple naturally, Anya goes red. We know that means something in terms of your ancestry, but not much beyond that. Succubi have powers that give them an advantage at attracting and pleasing sexual partners. They also can gain energy from sex and other strong emotional situations. But please don’t think that it’s just about being a sex demon. If you are a succubus, you’re not going to turn into an out-of-control nymphomaniac and”—she pauses and looks between Anya and me—“Anya isn’t magically giving you the hots for her. She’s just hot.”

I’m sure my face changes color and my personal demonic heritage has nothing to do with it.

“But I think Anya has something else she wants to say.” June gestures theatrically at her.

“Last night at Sam’s, as soon as I walked in, I could tell. You’ll learn how it works.” Anya says. “I could feel that you found me attractive, and I used that to help you shift. I used my sexy sex demon powers to know what would help you focus on me and that let me give you a little nudge to help with the tail. It’s a cool thing that succubi who are into each other can do. The rest was you.”

Anya pauses, then adds. “I hope that was okay. In other circumstances, I would have taken more time so you could understand what was going on. If I overstepped, I’m sorry.”

I realize that she has come closer and is looking at me with an expression I can’t quite decipher. I also realize that I kind of spaced out a little after she mentioned succubi who are into each other. I kind of figured she was into me after our encounter in the middle of the night, but it’s nice to hear her say it.

“Okay, good communication!” June says brightly. “What are our plans for the day?”

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