I lay in bed that night thinking about all that had happened. It still felt strange going to bed in a nightdress and having to brush my hair a hundred times. I even had to put cream on my face to stop it turning prune-like by the morning.

Tomorrow I was going to have to visit the shopping centre to get clothes. I was also going to have this mythical makeover thing and I wondered if I would survive the experience. Sarah came up and gave me a kiss and a hug before I went to bed. Of course she had an ulterior motive as it appears that she would be happy to help me choose some clothes as she herself would be able to have some. She even gave me one of her stuffed bunnies so I wouldn’t be all alone that night. It was, of course, pink.

I had no idea where Bracken, my cat was. I had hoped that she would keep me company tonight but she was out clubbing with her friends.

So it was just me and the fluffy pink bunny–what joy.

And now the story continues…

I had this dream. I had changed into a girl, a witch in fact. It was so real. I wasn’t a boy any longer. I had budding breasts and a slit where my Percy Pointer used to be. My hair was long and I was, of all things pretty.

My sister hated me even more now and she was strangling me in my bed as she hissed that she was the only cool chick around and she want about to let me muscle in.

There as a tapping noise coming from somewhere as Sarah kept throttling me and hissing ‘’snot fair.’

The tapping grew louder and I opened my eyes.

The moonlight was streaming through my bedroom and the curtains were drawn back. My satin nightdress had ridden up and was around my neck. My hair was all over my face and I sneezed as it tickled my nose.

I had been sleeping on my back as my budding breasts were itchy and sore and this was the best position for comfort–if you could call two tennis balls on your chest comfortable.

On top of that, to add insult to injury, I was clutching a very pink, very fluffy, stuffed bunny rabbit.

So, I was a girl and this wasn’t a dream, it was a nightmare.

The tapping continued and I looked over at the window.

I had a sharp intake of breath situation when I saw, in the moonlight a bat, sort of hovering like some sort of horrendous leather winged ugly humming bird, hitting the window with its bat like, wings.

‘Oh great.’ I thought, ‘that’s all I need, bats!’

Then something incredible happened. The window swung open. I have no idea how as I was sure that I had locked and secured it when I went to bed. I am not paranoid or anything, but I always check the doors and windows and look under the bed before I go to sleep, a boy–I mean girl had to be careful and there were a lot of weird things and beings out there. The fact that I was now a weird being, we will put aside for the moment …

The bat flew in, its leathery wings flapping loudly and I bravely made an ‘eek’ type noise and dived under the covers with the rabbit–it may have only been a stuffed rabbit, but they say that there is safety in numbers. My reason for the head in the sand type manoeuvre, such as it was, was that if I couldn’t see it, then it couldn’t see me.

There was a sort of whooshing noise and then a cough.

It didn’t sound like a bat’s cough, although I had no experience of what a bat’s cough would sound like. I imagined that a bat, if it coughed at all, would sound a bit thinner and not so loud–let’s face it, they aren’t large in the size department.

There was another cough.

Do bats get colds?

‘Excuse me.’

Now that didn’t sound like a bat. They make those squeaky type noises, I think; something to do with radar or something.

‘Daniel?’

That made me sit up and I gasped as there before me was a startlingly pale but very pretty girl with long black hair, wearing long white flowing robes. She had switched on the bedside light and stood there looking at me.

I looked around for a bat, but we appeared to be in a bat free zone.

‘Erm,’ I said, ‘where’s the bat?’

‘That’s me.’

‘Pardon?’

‘I’m the bat, that is, that’s what form I have to take when I go for a flight. Although, I have to be careful as I’m still a learner. More than once, I’ve fallen base over apex or rather as my friend Clarissa rather crudely put it, arse over tits. Landings can be a bit difficult, especially with a following wind.’

‘Oh, so you a, um …’

‘Vampire? Yes, that’s me, ‘have fang will travel’.’

I clutched the bunny tightly–she didn’t seem to mind.

‘So, erm, are you here to erm, bite me and make me swoon?’

‘Swooning is optional, but I’m not here for a snack. I had to come and see you. You are Daniel, aren’t you?’

‘Well I was, I’m Selene now.’

‘Cool name; well I heard it on the bat-vine at St Vlads …’

‘Bat-vine?’

‘It’s a cooler name that grape-vine. Anyway, I heard that you had changed from Daniel to a girl type witch.’

‘As you can see, I’ve been girliefied.’

‘You make it sound like you have some dreaded disease.’

‘I have.’

‘Well, I think it’s cool. I was erm, girliefied too. Do you recognise me?’

I leaned forward. There was something about her …

‘I think I know you, but I can’t quite …’

‘I was Stewart Dobbs.’

‘Stewart? Is that you?’

‘Yup.’

I had been friends with Stewart at school. Then he disappeared after a dance at the school and no one knew where he went.

‘So how come you are a blood sucking vampire now?’

‘That’s a bit heavy. We prefer the term vamp. Well, I went to the dance and a gorgeous bird hit on me. I thought my luck was in and things got heavy. I sort of did the swooning thing and the next thing I knew was that I had turned into a vamp girl.’

‘You didn’t die then?’

‘No, as you can see. I’m alive, permanently.’

‘I thought that vampires sucked their victims dry and left them dead, with hideous looks on their faces where they had gone through pain and agony before falling lifeless to the floor, bed or whatever.’

‘You’re kidding aren’t you? What films have you been looking at? It’s nothing like that. I blame that Bram Stoker bloke. What he knew about us vamps, you could write on a postage stamp with room left over.’

‘So you don’t kill indiscriminately in a lust for blood?’

‘Course not. We normally drink syntho-blood, but when we get really peckish, we snack on people. We never take too much. Think of it like cows.’

‘Cows?’ my mind boggling as to what cows had to do with it.

‘Yea, you get milk from cows right?’

‘Yes.’

‘Well, you don’t kill the cows do you? You come back and milk them again and again, that’s what you do when you want some blood; you take enough but not too much and come back again and again. The beauty of it is, the donor or bite-ee doesn’t remember a thing and in fact our saliva gives them life health, well being and vitamin V.’

Talk of saliva made me feel a bit sick. I was after all a weak girl now and was surprised that I hadn’t swooned myself.

‘So, why did you remember, after you were bitten, I mean.’

‘Well,’ she said sitting on the bed. ‘Clarissa–she’s the doofus who entrapped me–and I had a heavy, tonsil tickling French kiss. Her fangs grew a bit longer when she got all excited and she bit her lip. I sucked in some of her blood and she of course had a bit of a suck on me. Our blood mingled and instead of me just being a normal bite-ee I got changed into a vamp and for good measure, I changed sex too, so here I am, Jessica, beautiful, dark haired beauty who just happens to be a bat flying vampire.’

‘Quite modest then?’

‘If you’ve got it, flaunt it. So do you like being a girl?’

‘No.’

She looked shocked.

‘Why not? I think its ace.’

‘I’m a boy …’

‘Not from where I’m sitting.’

‘Well a boy inside. I never meant for this to happen.’

I told her all that had happened and she looked suitably impressed.

‘So you actually exploded crockery and then sort of pulled it back together?’

‘Yes.’

‘Well cool! That is mega-ace. There are girls at St Vlad’s, witch girls I mean, who get in a tizzy doing the most simple of spells. Your sister is … well, never mind that, we don’t all have a great talent. Anyway, you did all that without waving your fingers about or doing an incant thingy?’

‘Mmm–what was that you said about my sister?’

‘Never mind that, this is about you not her. Being a girl is great. Believe me, I thought the same as you for a very short while, but now I am so glad that I’m not that spotty, angst ridden nobody called Stewart. I wear lovely clothes, have great friends. I get to fly about without the use of a plane and the feeling I get when warm blood slides down my throat …’

‘Please, that sounds gross.’

Sorry, got carried away there. You will go to St Vlad’s of course …’

‘Not sure about that. I have to have an interview with some head mistress.’

‘You Mean Miss Isabel Sidegraves?’

‘Is that her name?’

‘Yes, she’s okay. Likes to quote rules at you all the time and her history of The Occult is booooring, but she’s all right unless you get her on a bad day.’

‘Bad day?

‘That’s right, that’s every day with the letter ‘d’ in it.’

‘Oh.’ I said, not knowing whether she was kidding me or not.

‘So, do you fancy boys?’

‘Gross, no way. That is sick!’

‘Girls?’

‘Yes–well I did before I became this.’ I waved vaguely at my feminine like body.

Mind you, I had led a sheltered life. Being as we are–a Wiccan family, it had always been the way that we didn’t get involved too much with ‘Norms’.’

Dad explained it to me when we had the fairies and goblins talk–as compared to the birds and bees one at school.

‘Picture it if you can. One of us makes mad passionate love to a norm and we get all excited. Wiccans have certain defences against harming one another whilst making erm, love. Norms don’t have that defence, and in the past there have been horrific ‘incidents.’ One Wiccan girl once turned her prince into a frog …’

All this made me jealous at school where some boys bragged about the length of their tool and the amount of times that they had ‘done it’. They were probably bragging, but it didn’t help me to feel very secure.

Anyway, I was brought back down from la-la land by Jessica who had this dreamy look on her face.

‘My boy friend, Oscar is lovely.’

‘Oscar?’

‘Mmm, he’s my dream boat. We met one night in the woods. I crashed into him in bat mode. He was doing loop-de-loop’s and I didn’t see him. By the time we untangled our wings and morphed back to human type form, I was in love.’

‘Love, at your age?’

‘I’m 14 and will be forever and he is 15 and has muscles in all the right places. His fangs are ever so long …’

I shuddered and then shrugged. Who was I to judge?

Just then we both jumped as my door creaked open and there, framed in the erm, frame– was Sarah!

‘What’s going on?’ she asked as she rubbed her eyes sleepily.

I almost didn’t recognise her. She was wearing some sort of flimsy baby doll nightie that left little to the imagination. Normally she was almost Goth-like and was into black, grey and earthy colours. This ‘thing’ she was wearing was a sunny yellow colour and I nearly grabbed my sun glasses. We didn’t need additional light in the room as the glare off the fabric was equal to at least a kilowatt.

‘Hi Sarah,’ said Jessica as if there was nothing unusual in the appearance of ‘Sister Dear’.

She sort of squinted at Jessica.

‘Hi Jes, what are you doing here?’

‘Just popped in for a chat. Where are your glasses?’

‘Glasses–she doesn’t wear glasses.’ I said.

‘She does at school.’

Sarah looked, or rather, peered at me.

‘I wear contacts at home, but take them out at bed time.’

That was something else I didn’t know about her. Hidden depths, my sister and all of them shallow.

She wafted in and sat on the bed. ‘Mum woke me up with her snoring. I don’t know how Dad can take it.’

‘I think that Dad uses ear plugs.’ I said.

That figures, I think that I might get some. I need eight hours beauty sleep or I’m ratty in the morning. So Jes,’ she said yawning again, ‘you just happened to pop by. How did you know that my bro is now my sis?’

‘Oh, someone told someone else, and I just happened overhear.’

‘Liar.’

‘Sarah, Sarah, don’t get your frillies in a twist. All right, I was outside the Head’s study and I just happened to have my ear to the keyhole when I overheard a telephone conversation, and as it was on the speakerphone, I could hear everything. Daniel and I were mates at our old school and as it looked like a similar thing happened to her as it did me, I thought that it would be nice to have a chat.’

‘Well, don’t you go getting her in trouble at school. I will be blamed, I always am.’

‘It’s always about you.’ I said. ‘What about me?’

‘What about you?’

‘In the last 24 hours, I have gone from being a manly male …’

She snorted for some reason, but I continued, ‘… I have, as I say changed from a perfectly normal boy to this.’

I waved my hand at my scantily clad form. ‘All I wanted was to taste The Power for a little while and then turn back to Daniel. Instead, I have breasts that are huge, melon sized, and itch like crazy; a bum that looks decidedly bigger than before, curves where I didn’t have curves before; a disgustingly cute button nose rather than the handsome masculine hooter that was there before, and to add insult to injury, my Percy and two little walnuts have gone walkabout and I have this decidedly poorly designed slit and fold feature that seems to have been designed by a moron,. I mean, how is it when I do a wee, it makes a mess everywhere? And then, added to that, I have hormones, female ones, raging around my body, making me want to cry all the time; anger management issues that will only get worse when, joy of joy, I get periods. So if you want to know how I feel, I think it stinks!’

I had that funny feeling just behind my belly button again and suddenly, the bulb on my bedside table popped and somehow the wood in my fireplace spontaneously combusted. Then I found myself floating on the ceiling frantically trying to hold my nightie down so I wasn’t showing something naughty. It took an active will thing for me to float back down onto the bed.

By this time I was crying and I was surprised that I had a double hug. I let it all out and had a good cry and funnily enough I felt a bit better afterwards. Even Sarah was being nice to me and that made me cry even more. Being a girl was hard work!

Eventually everything quietened down and we all sat on the floor and covered ourselves with my duvet. The extra padding on my nether regions helped, and the floor didn’t seem that hard. At last something good about being female.

So we just sat there, all snugly under the covers and watched the flames go up the chimney. Strangely, enough the embers didn’t go down but stayed the same all the time. Normally you had to keep feeding the flames.

I wasn’t surprised at what happened, weird things seemed to go on around me now. The others didn’t think it was out of the ordinary either, and said that all sorts of unusual things happened at school and what had happened in my bedroom would be seen as tame compared to certain incidents at St Vlad’s.

At one point Jessica pulled out something from the nether regions of the long white robe she was wearing–it was a flask. She poured out something that looked a bit like red grape juice into the screwed cup and then drank deeply.

‘Is that erm, juice?’ I asked.

‘Nope, syntho-blood. I was feeling a bit peckish.’

‘Blimey.’ I said. I changed the subject. ‘I’m thirsty.’

‘No problem.’ Sarah waved her finger a couple of times, making sparks come out. In seconds two cups and saucers were in front of us, full of steaming tea. I blanched whiter than Jessica as I recognised the cups as beings Mums ‘special ones’.

‘She’ll kill us if she catches us drinking out of those,’ I said with understandable alarm.

‘Nah, she’s drugged up to her eyeballs. Granny spiked her cocoa. She would sleep through doom.’

I wasn’t happy with the thought of any harm coming to the crockery and the resultant hysterics from Mum, so I was very, very careful not to cause any damage. I didn’t think that I would be able to repeat the trick of putting broken, smashed or exploded china back together again.

‘So what’s it like at St Vlad’s?’ I asked when I had placed both sets of china safely out of harms way.

‘We can’t say,’ said Sarah and Jessica together.

‘Why not?’ I asked.

‘Until you are enrolled, there is a veil of secrecy,’ Said Jessica.

‘You already told me who the head mistress is.’

‘That’s common knowledge, just buy a copy of Unseen Times or even Teen Witch and you will see her mentioned in there. But you will never get any juicy information about the school. There is a security blanket over the place. Anyone from the school; pupils or staff can’t say anything. If we do, strange things happen. The whole place is charmed.’

‘So?’

Sarah sighed and then said, ‘by charmed we mean hexed, spell bound and other magical things. There is serious magic there and nobody wants to be turned into a slug or a toad, so we all keep schtum. Anyway, the norm papers would have field day if one of the trashy tabloids got hold of information about the place.’

‘So neither of you can tell me anything?’

‘Nope, we would be found out; walls have ears?’ said Jessica mysteriously.

Nothing would surprise me. I tried another tack. ‘How come you are allowed out at night?’

‘When I’m not at school I’m with Mummy and Daddy. They never have a clue as to what is going on. They would sleep through doom. It helps if I give them a teeny, weeny bite before I go walkabout or flyabout. It sends them to sleep.’

Just at that moment we could hear a reverberating deep sound–it was Mum, snoring loudly enough to wake the dead, or semi-dead. Dad, with his industrial strength ear plugs, slept blissfully while Mum shook the house with her snoring.

Sarah looked at Jessica and said, ‘Fancy a quick bite?’

We all giggled and I was disturbed at how girlie I sounded.

We talked until just before dawn; Jessica and I that is. Sarah fell asleep pretty quickly. She wasn’t a night person really, so she would have been crap at doing the vampire thing. I was too excited to sleep, and Jessica didn’t seem to need any. Probably a side effect of vampirism.

At one point I asked what it was like being, erm, her.

‘It’s cool really. You get to stay up at night even at school. The flying is well cool, the only downer being that when you de-bat, you morph back wearing these less than cool clothes. I’m not into white diaphanous robes, but I think that’s it’s a hang-up from previous times. I’m happier with blouses and tees. The amount of times I’ve tripped over the damned hem of this robe. One cool thing though, is that it never gets dirty. A good thing really, as I spend some time in cemeteries and they are full of earth and dirty stuff.

‘Cemeteries? Why?’

‘It’s a vamp thing; we have to lie down on fresh earth in a cemetery once in a while. I’m not sure of the technicalities, but it sort of recharges our batteries.’

‘Sounds gross.’

She shrugged. ‘So’s going to the toilet, but you get used to it.’

‘I’m not keen on graveyards and cemeteries; they give me the heebie-jeebies.’

‘They are cool; you meet a lot of ghosts there.’

‘Ghosts?’ I quavered.

‘You haven’t got a hang-up about them too, have you? You are going to have a whale of a time at school–no I’ve said too much. Look, ghosts are just people who have passed on and are stuck in the waiting zone–like a station waiting room. Admittedly, some have been waiting for a long time, but they have issues about letting go. Others just think that it’s cool to be a ghost and don’t want to move on.’

‘What about nasty ghosts and p … p … poltergeists?’

‘They are dealt with by the Unseen Police.’

‘Where are they based then?’

‘I haven’t a clue, they are unseen.’

‘Oh.’

I thought for a moment and looked out of the window, light was just starting to show in the sky and the dawn shift of birds had started to make themselves heard.

Outside my room was the branch of the tree that had been very useful for nocturnal exits and entries and on that branch sat Bracken. She was looking at me with a kind of piercing gaze and washing her paw at the same time, it was disconcerting, and I wondered how long she had been out there and what she made of the fact that I had a vamp in my room.

I looked away and when my eyes returned to the window, she was gone. Strange cat that. I wondered what was going through her mind. Strange though it sounds, I had recently felt as if she was on the point of communicating with me somehow, a bit like an itch inside my head when she was around …

‘Look, I had better go now; I want to get back home before my parents wake up. Anyway, bats flying in the daytime is a bit of a no-no. I’ll see you at school, maybe on Monday if you get through the interview in one piece. You’ll love the school, it’s well-bad and cool.’

She gave me a quick hug, stood up, went to the middle of the room, gave me a finger wave and then suddenly sort of imploded and changed into a bat. She then took off and promptly hit the window pane, as the window had been closed to keep out the cold.

‘Oops,’ I said as I got up and opened the window for her. She didn’t seem all that dazed apart from going slightly cross-eyed for a moment, so she just shook herself a bit and then flew out of the window.

I watched as she went high in the sky, did a loop-de-loop and flew off over the trees chased by what looked like a pigeon.

Sarah had woken up a bit, stretched, ‘She’s gone then?’

‘Yes.’

‘Okay, I’m going back to bed.’ Then she turned to me and looked as fierce as anyone could wearing what she had on. ‘Don’t you dare ever tell any on my friends from around here that I wear glasses, understood?’

‘Would I do that?’ I asked innocently.

‘You had better not.’ She stalked out of the room and I went back to bed.

As I cuddled my bunny, I marvelled at all that had happened and how my world had been turned upside down. This girl thing had disturbed me, and I wondered once again, why I felt like a boy inside despite the packaging.

Oh, the clothes felt nice, I couldn’t deny that and the body bits were interesting to say the least. I still hadn’t explored myself ‘down there’ and I didn’t really want to, as it would mean that I was accepting the girly bits as my own and not some weird, dreadful mistake. Having a fondle would make me feel a bit pervy, and that was one label I could do without.

So here I was, a boy in a girl’s body, and it just didn’t feel right. The trouble was, at the back of my mind, I was just beginning to have feelings that I may not have ever been a proper boy in the first place, and that was confusing to say the least.

As I fell asleep, despite the racket from the birds outside and my mum’s snoring inside, I could hear laughing coming from inside my head and it didn’t seem to be my laughter …

To Be Continued...

My thanks go to the lovely and talented Holly Hart for editing, and pulling the story into shape.

Please leave comments and kudo thingies...thanks! ~Sue

Shameless Plug
If you are enjoying this story, The original Penmarris story - Changes Book 1 is now available on Kindle:

http://www.amazon.com/dp/B006NZFWG8 (US)
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