"Perhaps I've sacrificed enough? Pft!" he spat. "I would sacrifice anything to realize my dreams."
With a sigh, he fastened the chain around his neck and stood. Domenic had taken the Viking helmet but forgotten the rest of his costume. Again. This time Ashton would stuff his clothes into the pack without even folding them. That would show him.
Then, as he reached to grab Dom's studded leather jacket, the single bulb above the cracked mirror flickered and went out, plunging the room into darkness.
"Fucking shit venue," Ashton grumbled, groping about to find the door. He soon noticed that the room wasn't pitch black after all. A faint green light illuminated the area, and it was coming from the amulet.
The hyena-head charm glowed brighter by the second. The strange light illuminated a circle around him as though he were standing in a spotlight. The room's musty furniture began to rattle, and sheets of music fwipped and tossed like they were caught in a windstorm even though the air was still. A stream of heavy, jade smoke poured from the hyena's mouth and flowed down to the floor below. Ashton yelped and grabbed at the amulet to toss it away, but its surface nipped at his fingertips like dry ice. Damn, it was cold! The smoke did not spread or dissipate, but instead gathered in a pool on the carpet.
A pair of ghostly forelegs shot from the side of this puddle and gripped the rug with blunt claws. The rest of the beast followed like a dog climbing out a swimming pool, only here the smokey pool became the dog. No, not a dog. A hyena. A hyena that stood at least six feet tall with green, vaporous fur. He couldn't find the eyes in its shifting, cloudy face, but he felt it watching him nonetheless.
Ashton grabbed Domenic's guitar and lifted it like an axe of legend. "Stay back!" he threatened. "Or, if you're a genie, I want to rephrase my-"
The creature opened wide its maw of ghastly teeth and bounded straight for him.
"-Wish!" he finished, swinging the guitar. His aim was true, but the axe sailed through the creature like so much smoke. Only the strings themselves caught on its ghostly flesh. They screamed a drop-D power chord that filled the room, but that didn't stop the hyena. It sailed into Ashton's chest, knocking him onto his back. The hyena pinned him and yelped a hollow, victorious howl that formed an erie harmony with the guitar. Then it lunged for his head. Ashton's last thought was "at least this is an awesome way to go."
But it was not the end for Ashton. His mouth opened wide to gasp his last, but instead of air, he got a mouthful of ghost. The hyena plunged its muzzle down his throat, forcing his jaws painfully wide. It slammed Ashton's head against the ground and pressed forward, sinking deeper until its paddle ears slapped against Ashton's cheeks. Ashton could feel every frigid inch flowing down his gullet like a frozen stream. It tasted like spent firecrackers and wet dog.
Ashton flailed his arms at the ghostly creature, but it was as effective as trying to grab a hold of the morning fog. The beast certainly felt solid enough as it pushed its way deeper inside. Its form compressed to fit but still stretched Ashton's mouth so wide he was afraid his lips would split. The ears folded back and popped inside, then the neck. At the bulky shoulders, it hooked a ghostly paw into the side of Ashton's mouth and pulled itself deeper. All this mass pooled deep in Ashton's belly, descending it like he'd swallowed a watermelon. He should have burst from the sheer size of the hyena, but his stomach held.
The creature's forelegs bulged down his neck, followed soon after by its chest. The rear legs kicked wildly until one of the claws slipped past his lips and found purchase against his lower teeth. That was all it needed to pull its legs inside. Some heavy, fleshy appendage slapped against Ashton's chin before it too slurped past his tongue. Now it was only the monster's tail sticking out of Ashton's mouth. His lips made an O around the base, and it flapped this way and that, smacking him in the face once or twice before sliding down his gullet.
Ashton collapsed to the ground, gasping for breath. He wiped the tears from his eyes and found himself back in the green room. The lights were back on, the wind had settled, and the only sign that anything unusual had happened at all was his aching jaw and a feeling in his stomach like he'd swallowed a bucket of ice cubes. He glanced down and yelped. His belly bulged from his shirt like he was carrying twins. He laid a hand against the taut skin and gasped a quavering breath. It was cold to the touch.
"What. The. Fu-"
He was interrupted by a sharp motion inside his belly. The thrash distorted its shape like the beast was shifting into a more comfortable position, and then it began to deflate. His stomach shrank back to normal in a matter of seconds and settled. He stared intently, waiting for what he didn't know, perhaps a bout of the most heinous gas the earth had ever seen. Instead he saw hair. Hundreds of delicate filaments growing on his skin, looking like a time-lapse shot in a nature documentary. Soon there was enough to form a patch of tawny-
"Fur?"
Here again his stomach flipped, and the chill in his belly spread through his abdomen. His mouth flooded with saliva, and Ashton hoped he was about to vomit up the ghost. He clutched the recliner, pulled himself to his feet, and staggered toward the bathroom door, swallowing excess spit again and again and holding onto the one bit of social conditioning that seemed to apply to this insane situation: get to the toilet before you barf.
The cold region inside of him moved, jerked, and then split, like a massive amoeba, into four distinct parts. Each piece raced down the nearest arm or leg. He reached to turn the doorknob and saw- actually saw- a bulge rolling down his forearm like someone had set a marble loose under his skin. It left a trail of sprouting fur in its wake and disappeared into his wrist, spreading its icy chill up his tendons and into his bones.
Ashton slammed the bathroom door. He had only taken a single step toward the porcelain throne when a loud snap rang out from beneath him and he collapsed. The chill squeezed his feet like a pair of frozen socks. The pressure was intense, but the only pain came from his shoes pressing into his toes. He clenched his teeth as the cramp became severe, then there was a riiip as his toes tore through the fronts. He sighed with relief, relaxing his face rest against the cold tile. The fresh openings in the fronts of his shoes scraped up the underside of his lengthening, narrowing feet. His toes felt big and clumsy and swollen, and each time he kicked his legs, his nails clicked against the floor.
Ashton propped himself up just in time to see the changes take his hands. A coat of dark fur erupted from his skin, leaving bald patches on his palms and fingertips. Here, his skin cracked and swelled into thick, meaty pads. Blunt, black claws erupted under his fingernails, pushing them loose to fall on the floor below.
"No, no. . . not paws," Ashton begged, drool dripping with each word. Then, as if the creature reshaping him had listened to his pleas, the chill swept back up his arms, leaving his hands mostly human-shaped save a coat of hyenine paint.
The trails of fur down Ashton's arms spread over his skin like spilled coffee. Wherever the new hairs touched his t-shirt, little green embers appeared on the fabric and began to eat it away. He patted at himself frantically to put them out, but his furry palms had the opposite effect. Soon his tattered shirt fell, revealing a carpet of spreading cappuccino fur. His pants were similarly reduced to rags, and behind him, his ankles burned through the tongue of his shoes until they clattered to the ground.
Ashton gripped the sink with a furred hand and lifted himself to an unfamiliar tip-toed stance. The four points of demonic chill reunited in his chest and raced toward his head. The entity lingered in his neck, and for each second it stayed, Ashton's neck grew. Longer and thicker with bigger muscles and heavier bones. The amulet's chain stretched around his throat as tight as a dog's collar.
When he finally managed a glimpse in the mirror, he found his human head perched atop an oversized neck that could only look at home on one animal.
"Hyen-" Ashton started. He looked absolutely ridiculous. "Heh-hyee- HehehHeyee YeeYEEYEE!" he yelped in a shrill laughter that echoed off the walls. He slapped his paw-hands over his mouth, and the chill rushed into his face to meet them.
First, his nostrils turned upward and flared against his paw pads. Next, his jaw lengthened, pushing his hands away until a blunt, black-tipped muzzle filled the lower portion of his vision. Teeth scraped obnoxiously against each other as they shifted to fill the extra space. He opened his mouth to get a look, and it complied too eagerly, spreading so inhumanly wide he could see his shifting molars as clear as day. He snapped his predatory maw shut with a loud clap, and the jaw muscles responsible swelled with bone-snapping strength. The demonic chill flooded his skull with the worst brainfreeze imaginable, and Ashton's entire head reshaped with a series of sickening cracks. The bridge of his nose broadened, his forehead shrank, and his ears stretched and flicked about, feeling heavy and floppy on the sides of his head.
When Ashton once again opened his eyes, the large, dark pools of a hyena stared back from the mirror. He opened his mouth in shock, and the mirror hyena's muzzle opened just the same. Its ears flicked backward, and Ashton felt new muscles at the top of his head twitch to enable to motion. The beast's face mirrored each emotional beat: surprise, terror, curiosity. He found the synchronicity strangely disarming, but that made sense, didn't it? He was that monster, after all.
The demon did not spare an instant to let its victim reacquaint himself with his reflection. It raced down Ashton's spine, raising a spotted mane along the nape of his neck, and landed with a jolt in his coccyx. Here budded the first hint of pleasure in Ashton's transformation. The vestigial bones jerked to life with an unexpected tickle of bliss. In the mirror, he watched an ungainly, bony length stretch upward behind him, twitching and straining as it grew. Then there was another shutter of tingling pleasure as a coat of long, black hair sprouted to cover it. The demon freed his tail new from its frozen grasp, and the new limb immediately curled between his legs, shivering against his junk and tickling his balls.
Everything paused, leaving Ashton panting, his flattened tongue hanging from his maw dripping drool. He had only enough time to wonder if the violation of his body was over before the demon gave him an answer. The chill wrapped itself around his midriff like a corset and squeezed, reshaping his furry stomach into a well-toned tummy.
"Www-what now?" he stammered, surprised he could form any words with his thin lips and floppy tongue.
The icy constrictor swept up his ribs, narrowing them subtly as it went, and concentrated itself into his nipples. They tingled furiously and immediately grew as hard as chips of ice. Ashton pinched one between the rough pads of his fingertips and gasped. The nib of flesh was unusually sensitive. More than that, it was bigger! His nipples doubled, tripled, quadrupled in size, spreading his fingertips as they swelled. He rolled the rubbery points between his pads and was rewarded with a shock of pleasure that echoed, through some trick of the wiring of his nerves, in the tip of his dick.
