The knocking on my window persisted. I realized after a second that it was exponentially harder to cover yourself in blankets and comforters when you have a pair of wings and a tail and I was worried for a moment I wasn’t so much hiding as I was flashing my ass, so I got up, full blanket-burrito. Perhaps there was the ever so slim chance that all of this had come off as deliberate. I tried to stand tall and felt my head hang to one side, shook it and heard the sheet that was hanging off it tear. Closing my eyes and sighing was more for dramatic effect than for my own benefit. 

 

I heard a noise from the window and realized that Madeline was laughing softly at me from behind the window. How dare she. While, yes, technically it’s entirely possible that a busty demon girl getting her horns stuck in the blankets she was trying to wrap around herself was adorable, currently the demon person in question was me. I haughtily walked over to the window, holding the now-perforated blanket around me as tightly as possible. 

 

“What,” I said, sternly and with full intention to be as eloquent as possible, swinging the window open with all the righteous anger I could muster, “the fuck.” 

 

Nailed it. She giggled as she flipped around and crouched onto my window sill with a fluidity and grace usually reserved for… well, I couldn’t think of any comparison that fit. She stepped into my room with practiced perfection. 

 

“Well…” She brought a finger to her lips, the corners of her mouth curling up into an amused smirk. “It looks like you’re special, dear.”

 

“Miss… I mean, Madeline. Lullaby,” I said, stammering like a teenager. I didn’t know how to address her. I did my best to sound as furious as I was. As it turned out, it is very hard to say ‘Lullaby’ angrily. 

 

“Yes, dear?” She crossed her arms and looked me in the eyes. I noticed two things. The first was that I was now taller, somehow. The librarian had, when we’d first met, been about my height, but now I seemed to have a few inches on her, at least. And that wasn’t even counting my horns. The second was that her eyes were… intense. I felt a pang in my gut that I couldn’t place when I looked at her. Something needy and almost painful. Like the feeling I got when I ate something too sweet, but almost as a full-body experience. 

 

Trying to regain my composure -- which she was clearly aware she’d ruined -- I stood up straight and tried at least to return her gaze. “Respectfully, what the fuck is that supposed to mean?”

 

“Well,” she said as she stepped closer and every bone in my body told me to retreat. I felt almost like a mouse, cornered by a particularly curvy cat. “I was trying to give you a gift.”

 

“What gift?” I tried to look up and realized that looking at my horns was about as easy as trying to look at the top of my own head. I heard her giggle, a soft noise that was at odds with her otherwise-dominant air. I was sure I would’ve turned beet red if I hadn’t already been, well, beet red. It took some getting used to, certainly. 

 

She took a breath and gestured at the bed. “Have a seat, darling.” I did, almost without thinking about it. I’d always been weak when it came to that tone of voice. The kind that didn’t so much promise punishment for disobeying, but rewards for good behaviour. I shook my head. She was in my head, again. “I promise you I’m not, dear,” she said, looking at me with a cheeky smile. She was doing it! Again! “Just whatever you’re yelling at me in that pretty little head of yours. And just to prove to you that what I’m about to say is going to be both absolutely improbable and entirely true.”

 

The expression on my face must’ve been a delight to behold. It had better be, to get her to laugh at me again like that. I was trying to formulate some response, but she was already several steps ahead of me. 

 

“Alright,” she said, leaning against my small desk, and held up her hands. “Full disclosure. First off, yes, I can hear your thoughts. The word ones. The ones you keep screaming at me.” I grimaced, and realized that I felt guilty for having inconvenienced her. Something about the woman made me want to please her, for her to like me. I shrugged it off, trying to keep from actually shaking my head as if I’d just walked through a cobweb. She raised an eyebrow. “I can’t pick up on memories or whatever. Just words, if I’m listening. And… eh…” She paused. “Whenever people think… let’s be diplomatic about this…” Another pause. “Whenever someone has improper thoughts about me, I can’t tune it out.” 

 

I blushed. I’d been mostly fine so far, being content to just be angry and confused. But now that she’d brought up the possibility, my thoughts suddenly became very improper indeed. The kiss came to mind, and I wondered if she still tasted as sweet. I imagined her thin fingers running through my hair, grabbing my horns and squeezing, pulling my head back and planting her lips on my neck, opening her mouth--

 

“Yes,” she said, and I saw her cheeks flush. “Y-yes. Those kinds of thoughts.” She tried to laugh away the fact that she was clearly flustered. I felt a bit guilty about that, but, in my defense, I wouldn’t have if she hadn’t brought it up as a possibility. “A-anyway,” she said, tugging at her collar slightly. “I’m uh… I tried to, well, give you what you needed.” She looked me in the eyes and that pang in my gut came back. It wasn’t fair. People who ruined your life weren’t supposed to be this pretty. Then her eyes flitted up to my horns. “I’ve seen you in my library a lot lately. I figured you were, well, wrong, and without having known what right tasted like, you might have felt that way your entire life.”

 

“Did you think I needed horns??”

 

She shook her head. “N-o, that hadn’t been part of the plan, no. I just… okay, you seem to be one dense motherfucker, so I’m going to take this slow.”

 

“Hey, fuck you.” I frowned, but she had that playful smirk on her face that made me feel like she was just trying to get a rise out of me (not that it wasn’t working) and I softened my expression a little bit. 

 

“Buy me dinner first,” she said, and I felt my cheeks glow. Again I had a vision of her lips, her teeth on my collarbone. She interrupted me with a cough. “-hem. Anyway. Okay, context. Sorry, I’ve never done this.”

 

I smirked and realized it was my time to say something witty. I desperately wanted to, if only because I was frustrated with being on the back foot. “If this is your first time,” I said, my mouth a little faster than my brain, “I promise I’ll be gentle.” That hadn’t been the kind of witty I’d intended, but apparently all three of my brain cells had worked together and hadn’t been able to come up with anything better than this. Still, it felt sufficiently ballsy. It worked, to a degree. She laughed, for real this time. None of that cute giggle nonsense. Instead, I felt like I was being laughed at by royalty. Her voice rang like a melody, played playfully on a xylophone. This was worse, this was so much worse than the giggle. I felt myself get flustered just because of the way she laughed. Help. 

 

She crossed her arms, her shoulders bouncing softly from the smaller aftershocks of her bout of laughter. I tried not to notice the effect the bouncing had on her physique. “You’ve got spirit, I’ll give you that. So… to clarify,” She cleared her throat again. “Have you ever heard of, um, succubi?”

 

“What, like, sex demons?” I reached up and almost grabbed one of my horns in panic, realized the immediate effect that that might have, then realized that, without both hands to keep the blanket in place it was slipping down and I was basically flashing Madeline a whole tiddy, and quickly covered myself up again. “Di-Did you turn me into a sex demon? What the fuck?”

 

“That is,” she huffed, and she seemed genuinely annoyed, although the flustered blush was still on her face, “a gross oversimplification.” She sat upright and glared daggers at me. Clearly this was a sore subject for her. “A succubus is someone who needs to feed off, well, strong emotions. Positive ones taste better, but any emotion will do.” 

 

“But what does that--”

 

“I’m a succubus. You really are impatient. Yeesh.” She pursed her lips in annoyance but it just made me want to kiss them again. Apparently that had been ‘impure’ enough because she blushed again and smiled. “Anyway, feelings tend to linger on whatever they were targeted at.”

 

“Oh,” I said, understanding dawning on me. “That’s why the library…”

 

She pointed at me triumphantly, happy I seemed to have figured it out on my own. Or perhaps she was simply happy I wasn’t just calling her crazy and being done with it. I’d always been good at humoring people’s fantasies, especially my own. “Exactly! Books are, well, food!”

 

“That still doesn’t explain me.”

 

She waved her hand noncommittally. “I felt that you weren’t in the right place when you handed your books back. I thought I understood. Honestly. The stories you read… at first I thought it would’ve been a fetish thing, looking for stories of a knight with beautiful blond hair, blushing as she rescued the princess. But I never got that vibe from you. And the more you read, the more I was sure.”

 

“Of what?” I was a little frustrated. I’d assumed that nobody cared what books you read in a library. Or not the librarian, at least. But apparently she’d been reading my emotions off the books. “You thought that, because I think there’s something really powerful about queer fiction, that I should have wings? And a tail?”

 

“Oh my god,” she said, squeezing her eyes shut and rubbing them. “You are so…” she sighed. “Okay, are you aware of any other changes that might have happened? Ever so subtle.”

 

“There’s also the horns. And my skin is red.”

 

“I am going to scream if you don’t pick up what I’m layin’ down here.”

 

“Fine, yes, you’ve turned me into a woman. Good for you. Happy now?”

 

“Are you?”

 

We-ell. I wanted to say no. She’d turned me into something else without asking me first. On the other hand, I would’ve said no. But now that I was here… I looked at the shard of glass that was still on the bed and carefully picked it up, making sure not to drop the covers from around my shoulders, and looked. She really was very pretty. And it was a happy surprise each time not to see that depressing face. She was very pretty and looking at her and realizing she was me, well…

 

“I think so.”

 

“You know what that means?” She seemed genuinely concerned. It was affirming, encouraging me to keep going. The street these thoughts led down had always been in the periphery of my mind. It had been there on my daily commute, it had been there as I tried to sleep. But I’d never gone down it. That way, I’d figured, only misery would lie. But there was a small side-street that wasn’t so much beckoning as asking me to make sure this was a dead end. I had to make sure.

 

“Does this mean I’m gay?”

 

“I mean, that depends on you. But in a way, maybe?” The way she’d answered the question didn’t really alleviate any fears. It just confirmed what I’d been worried about.

 

“All of the crazy stuff, the weird shit, all of that aside… this is real, isn’t it?” I asked her. I hoped she’d know what I was alluding to. 

 

“Do you want it to be?” Still that tone of care, concern. I liked her a lot better this way. She was very attractive when she was being dominant, like she was comfortable in her own skin like no person had any right to be, but this was much, much better. 

 

“I think I do? I mean…” I sighed and looked down, wiggled where I sat. The fabric was uncomfortably rough against my skin but, for lack of a better way to phrase it, my skin wasn’t as uncomfortable against my brain. I’d had the blankets clutched against my chest this entire time and my fingers against my own now-impossibly-soft skin had been a constant reminder of how much nicer this felt. “Does it just get to work like that?”

 

She shrugged with a smile. “If you want it to.”

 

Something bubbled in my chest. I couldn’t tell if it was crying or laughing. It was a strange mixture of both. I wanted to scream. I wanted to cry. I wanted to laugh at how something so obvious and yet so absurd seemed to have escaped me for so long. There were some nagging questions, though. “Why the, uh… the weird stuff?”

 

“Oh, the wings and so on? I think that’s my bad.” She raised her hand. “Mea culpa.”

 

“What do you mean?” 

 

“Well, I can… how do I put this without sounding like a ‘sex demon’.” She mimed quotation marks. “I can satisfy someone’s needs. With a kiss.”

 

“Oh.”

 

“Yeah. But I do still have to like, actively think about it. So tried to make you, well, like me. But something went… wrong? Maybe this kind of stuff does follow the letter a bit more than the intent? I’ll be honest, this is all new to me. I figured that ‘like me’ would’ve been ‘hot woman’, but there might be more to it.”

 

“Holy shit,” I said. This was a lot to take in. “But you’re not…”

 

“Demonic?”

 

“Horn-ey.”

 

“The term is horned, dear.”

 

“I said what I said,” I said. She giggled again. “But yeah, you don’t look like I do.”

 

“I can look mostly how I choose to, darling. It’s a very useful trick. I used to look a lot like you.” 

 

“Holy shit,” I reiterated. 

 

“I know, darling. But not to worry, I can undo this. I think.” She got up and rolled up her sleeves.

 

I looked up at her, suddenly in a panic. “W-wait! I don’t… Please don’t turn me back!”

 

She relaxed and let her arms hang by her side. She smiled at me reassuringly. “I’m not going to give you that old body back, darling. Don’t worry.”

 

I sighed a breath of relief, and then a thought occurred to me. “D-do you think I could keep the horns, too?”

 

She blinked a few times in surprise, stepped closer, and kneeled in front of me. “Do you want to stay like this?”

 

I shook my head. I didn’t know what I wanted. My primary focus on what I was feeling was still the fact that I was allowed to be not who I’d been. That the splinter in my mind could be extricated. “I don’t want to be like this all the time. Fuck, I wouldn’t be able to leave the house.”

 

“No, I mean…” She paused and looked me in the eyes. She put her hands on my knees and the blanket fell away a bit. The warm skin of her hand against my upper thigh sent jolts of concentrated electricity up my leg and, well… y’know. The look in her eyes was one of caring and I hoped the look in mine wasn’t nearly as lustful as I felt. “I could teach you…” she said.

 

“I…” I paused. “Would you?”

 

“You want to keep your horns. You want to stay a girl.” She shrugged. “I’m down.”

 

“Wait,” I said.

 

“Hmm?”

 

“If I get to stay a girl, that does mean I’m gay!”

“That was like five minutes ago!” she laughed. “You only just figured this out?” I frowned, and she laughed again at that, too, but her hands slid ever so slightly higher up my legs and my breath caught in my throat. “Yes, dear, you can be gay. Gay as a daisy in May.” She sat up a little more straight and edged closer. I realized suddenly she was sitting between my knees now. When had this happened? I didn’t not want her there but… She was so close to me and I felt her breath on my face again. I felt like I could faint in that moment. I was losing a sense of presence. She blinked once, twice, lazily, and raised a hand. Then, slowly, she ran a single finger down the length of one of my horns. I groaned and gasped for air. “You can be as gay as you want to be, darling.”