CHAPTER 1 - Prologue

Magic was ordinary, and hypothetically, anyone could use it. Spell books were sold like cookbooks, after all. However, powerful spells always came with a bigger price tag.

My family didn’t have a grimoire full of extravagant spells. We hardly had enough to bind inside a hard cover. A few pages of simple things were the best we could do. It was nothing significant.

So how did I do it? How did I curse myself to live the rest of my life forever as Danger Rabbit? It started as a small thing. Had I let it go, had I been able to move on, maybe things would have been different. But I was a kid back then, and sometimes the only way kids learned was after screwing up.

I had lost my pet rabbit, Mr. Nickels, my first pet.

Ironically, because my pet had cost so much to buy, my dad couldn’t afford a spell to find him. At eleven years old, nothing and no one was going to tell me no. So when Dad couldn’t help, I helped myself.

I searched for magic words, and I used spells that I already knew to fill in the gaps.

It took a bit of time, but I wrote something worth giving a shot. In the middle of the night, I finally had the chance to perform my first self-crafted spell. I should have known something would go wrong since I had to wait hours for my dad to go to bed before I could do anything.

All I wanted to do was find Mr. Nickels, my first pet. But I didn’t know the reason my rabbit had cost so much was because he was magic. That night, I learned why ordinary people never wrote their own spells.

New magic was dangerous and unpredictable. Spells were like complex formulas. Sure, spell books dumbed things down enough for kids to use, but coming up with something original wasn’t safe for an 11-year-old boy to do on a school night.

Strangely enough, the spell could have worked had I known about Mr. Nickels’ unique abilities. But, like always, I was clueless. When I said the words of my spell out loud, my magic mixed with his in a disaster. The next thing I knew, I woke up with my dad standing over me.

Something was weird.

I wasn’t hurt, but there was definitely something off. Dad assisted me up from the floor, and that’s when everything became clear. I was covered in white fur. My ears were long, and I had rabbit feet. Although my thumbs remained intact, I mysteriously found myself with only four fingers on each hand. I had turned myself into a sort of half rabbit creature. My dad should have been livid, but he was distraught.

I forgot about Mr. Nickels after that. Finding my lost pet was a small challenge compared to my new appearance. Sadly, there was no undoing the spell because I had transformed myself. Even if we had the money, undoing my transformation would have been nearly impossible for a professional magician. I was stuck as a half-breed for the rest of my life or until I could come up with a solution.

Dad wouldn’t let me out of the house for nearly a month while we tried to undo my mistake. Honestly, I didn’t want to be seen either, so I would have avoided going outside, anyway.

Life never slowed down. Eventually, we started getting phone calls from my school. Teachers wondered where I was or if something had happened to me. Dad could only tell them I had a cold so many times before they grew more suspicious. When we got a letter warning that if I missed any more days of school, Dad would be fined, I had no other choice but to return.

There was nothing we could do with the short time that we had left, so I reluctantly caught a school bus the next day.

As expected, I was the center of attention from the moment I stepped foot on the bus. Magical creatures, or Fae, weren’t anything uncommon, but my middle school had very few. Moreover, I wasn’t simply a satyr or an elf, or anything along those lines. I might have been the first half-rabbit the town, and maybe even the world, had ever seen, aside from the Easter bunny. Kids could be assholes, but during that fifteen-minute bus ride, everyone was too taken aback to be dicks.

I placed too much importance on what other kids thought when I shouldn’t have. Upon our arrival at school, the principal was waiting. Ms. Harper wanted to discuss how my grades had fallen during my long absence. However, the moment she saw my fur, my tail, and my long ears, I’m sure my classes must have become a minor talking point. She escorted me straight from the bus to her office, and everyone inside the building had a front-row seat to the spectacle. On the bright side, no one recognized me unless I spoke or outright told them who I was, but that didn’t stop them from talking. With my oversized ears, I heard every word spoken as I walked by with my head down.

All I cared about then were the rumors I thought would spread fast. The main issue went completely over my head. Ms. Harper and I spoke at length about my transformation, and throughout the conversation, I was honest at every turn. I was too young, or maybe too naïve, to realize my dad could have gotten into serious trouble. Magic was easy enough for kids to use, but children weren’t allowed to use advanced spells on their own.

There was too much potential danger to chance the possibility of kids being careless. Anyone can use a knife or a lighter, but you wouldn’t let children go around starting fires in the woods or cutting things down on their own. Advanced magic was the same way. With that in mind, my transformation was less than ok. Despite my explanation, Ms. Harper continued to believe my dad was negligent. In her eyes, my father had allowed a preteen to conduct a self-crafted spell.

The moment Ms. Harper called my dad to come to my school was when I started to understand. We were both in trouble. I backtracked in our conversation, attempting to cover our asses, but it was too late. Ms. Harper wouldn’t listen to another word until my father arrived.

While my dad spoke with her and a couple of police officers, I was told to wait in the hallway. I could hear, with unease, every word spoken through the wooden door. I should have been in my English class. I would have killed to have been sitting at my desk reading some dead poet’s early work, but I couldn’t leave.

Maybe my fur was to blame, but I started sweating from an overwhelming heat. I couldn’t divert my attention from my dad’s attempts to salvage the situation. 

CHAPTER 2 - Rabbit Intern

Six years into life with my curse, it was a miracle I hadn’t died. Along with turning myself into a 5-foot-tall, half-rabbit half-breed, I had given myself incredible bad luck. I could make a house cave in on itself just by standing somewhere too long. It was one of many odd changes that came from unsuccessfully using magic to find my lost rabbit.

Though, if I ever had any good luck at all, I must have spent it finding my closest and only friends in the world, B. James, and Wesson. Our junior class was two weeks out from summer break. All the end-of-the-year testing was out of the way, so everyone was waiting for the school year to come to a close. That Friday afternoon, I walked BJ home. Despite my being close to Wes and BJ both, they never liked one another. Each day, I had to consciously decide who to hang out with. BJ won that afternoon because Wes had a meeting with the school principal.

Taking the bus home would have been faster, but walking gave BJ more time to work out new spells with me.

“So there’s this summer internship I read about,” BJ said as we walked under branches while leaves crumbled under our footsteps.

“What kind of internship?” I asked.

We stopped walking so she could take her spell book out of her bag. The pages of her handmade spiral held weight and took time to flip through.

“For magicians. I thought you might like to apply for it with me,” she added.

“You want me to be a magician?”

“You created a working transformation spell when you were 11.”

I laughed at her, calling it a “working spell.”

“Yeah, and I’ve been trying to undo it ever since,” I said, unamused.

We took a lot of back roads that afternoon that eventually spat us out into the Dead Woods, our town’s biggest forest. According to what we learned in history class, settlers gave it the name “Dread Woods” after Marwick Dread, the person who built the first house in that area. Only recently did the new name become popular, all thanks to the rise of common spells. To avoid causing damage, magicians in the early days of human magic practiced their spells in the woods. A lot of people died there, and eventually “Dread” became “Dead”. However, it continued to be a beautiful place, as long as we had a clear sense of direction.

“I could help you,” BJ said.

“I don’t want to be a magician,” I told her.

“But I do.”

I took a few steps back. Considering some of the stuff in her book didn’t need words to activate, I didn’t want to stand too close. As she flipped through the pages, there was a danger similar to hiding a grenade at a kid’s birthday party. Pages glowed and faded as her hands turned them over. I wasn’t sure how she carried something like that around without constantly hurting herself.

“Then you should do it... alone,” I said and crossed my arms.

As I leaned against a tree, she came near, and I knew to expect puppy dog eyes. That’s what people do when they want something.

“I need you.”

I asked, “Why me?” but she turned away.

“I need your spell,” I thought she said, but I couldn’t make out her words for sure, and with my big ears, that meant she was quiet.

“What?” I asked.

“I need your spell.”

I stood up straight.

“The spell that gave me fur all over my body? The spell that made my feet too big to wear shoes and ears long enough to hear my dad if he jacks off at night? You want to be a rabbit too?”

“I have to submit a working spell to be considered.”

“Then use one of yours,” I said.

“None of mine work.”

“What about the one you used to change your hair color?”

“It blinds anyone who sees me cast it.”

“Then use my spell without me. You don’t need me for this. I wrote the words in some book, and I can give it to you later.”

I wanted to get off the subject. Those who had known me for a considerable amount of time knew the length of my struggle to find a cure for my curse. After years of turning over stones to no avail, of course, I gave up hope.

“It wouldn’t be right to take credit for your work,” BJ told me.

“But, it’s alright to strong-arm your friend into working our entire summer break?” I didn’t mean to sound nearly as argumentative or sarcastic as I must have at that moment, but it came out that way.

“There’s a chance we won’t even get it,” she said, pleading with me at that point.

“If I say yes, will you leave me out of whatever spell you’re about to do?”

“But I had something special planned for today.”

“That’s my price.”

B James and her family moved from Japan to our town a few years after my curse. Her parents were professional magicians, so I did my best to get in their circle. BJ’s fascination with my half-breed form made my work easier. My ability to create spells at a young age impressed her. Transforming myself was an accident, but she never seemed to care. BJ wanted to make new magic like her parents, and I suppose she thought I could help.

I appreciated her willingness to overlook how the rest of our school avoided me. However, that might have been easy, considering no one flocked to her lunch table any more than my own. We hadn’t even graduated high school, but BJ had more spells than a person could count. While most of them had adverse effects or didn’t perform as intended, they still had an effect. That was impressive if nothing else.

“Deal, but you have to stick around to watch,” BJ answered.

“In case something goes wrong?”

“I didn’t say that.”

“You didn’t have to,” I replied.

We exchanged a mutual grin before she adjusted her glasses and finally flipped around in her book to find the newly crafted spells. We spent most of the afternoon in the woods. BJ wrote a spell for growing plants faster, but it made anything made of wood burst into flames, including all the papers in my backpack. She tried to put out the fires with another spell meant to create rain clouds, but it summoned a swarm of butterflies that flew into the flames. Needless to say, they all died. They died quickly, but at least the fires went out.

By that time, we had spent hours in the woods.

“We should get moving,” I said as I picked our bags off the ground, burnt as they might have been.

“We will never speak of what happened here to anyone, right?”

“Like always,” I said with a chuckle before handing BJ her ruined bag.

We started on our way out of the woods.

“Do your parents know you’re applying for this internship?” I asked.

“Not yet.”

“Don’t you think they should know?”

“I’ll tell them once I,” she started until I cut her off asking, “Did you hear that?”

“Hear what?” she asked.

There was a sound coming from the bushes ahead of us. It was too big to be a cat, dog, or rabbit.

“Stand back,” I said as I put my arm in front of BJ.

“Is someone there?” I called out into the distance, but no reply was returned.

Only the rustling of the bushes broke the silence as something or someone came near. It was close. There was a momentary pause of nothing but the bugs around us falling silent. Then, whatever it was, lunged out at me.

It was my other friend. He made me fall backward and rip the arm of my button-down shirt as I shouted at him, “Wes!”

Despite his speed, he failed to catch my arm as I fell.

“Sorry, dude,” Wes said with a laugh before he helped me to my feet.

“What are you doing out here?” BJ asked, more annoyed than me, though I was the one with the ripped shirt.

“I need Pitch,” the satyr said.

I met Wesson in my freshman year of high school. Neither of us liked to use spells. To be fair, most fae, because of their natural magic, didn’t need spells as much as humans did. Even I had natural abilities after my transformation, like better hearing and invisibility.

Wes, being a satyr, demonstrated impressive speed and strength, among other abilities. Given enough motivation, he could probably come out on top in a fight against a troll.

“Well, he’s walking me home from school,” BJ said.

“Schools been out for 3 hours now, and you know how to get home,” Wesson remarked.

“You want me to walk by myself?” BJ asked.

“No one walks me home, but we’re the same age,” Wes said sarcastically.

I cut in, “Wes, what did you need my help with?”

“I need your ears,” he said.

“Let me get BJ home, and then I’ll swing by your place.”

Neither of them was even looking at me anymore; they were staring one another down.

“Alright, just make sure ‘Bug Burner’ isn’t with you.”

“You saw that!?” BJ exclaimed.

“I’ll be there, alone,” I said as I held BJ back from Wes.

We took to our separate ways after they exchanged a few aggressive glances I had to step between.

“I don’t know why you hang out with him,” BJ argued.

“Wes is cool,” I said.

“Wes is just short of being a toddler. He doesn’t use magic.”

“Wes uses magic. He doesn’t use spells. Plenty of people don’t use spells. You know I don’t.”

“That’s different; you can’t afford them.”

“That hurt,” I said.

I didn't find her remark painful, but I was offended by her blunt delivery.

“You know what I mean,” she said.

By the time I got BJ home, it wasn’t dark yet, but I still had a walk ahead of me. With it being the weekend, I knew Dad wouldn’t mind my staying out a little long. Regardless, I had to spend some time trekking from one side of town to the other, since I couldn't walk any faster. BJ and her family stayed in West Point while Wes lived down the street from me on Optic Road on the far east side of town. 

CHAPTER 3 - Camping

Fae were a small minority in our town, but common around the world, even outnumbering humans in some places. Their homes could be far from ordinary. On a single street, there were typical houses made from brick and stone next to odd properties constructed on clouds or even underwater.

Fairies were tiny creatures that didn’t need a lot of space, so they could turn a single tree into a nest for 20 or more. Seeing unusual homes was something I and most people got used to. Still, it was always like wandering into another world when I got to visit Wesson’s house.

When I made it to Wesson’s place, he was waiting for me on the front porch. He let me inside and took me to his bedroom upstairs. His parents didn’t own cars, so I wasn’t sure whether we had the place to ourselves. Once inside his room, he shut the door behind us.

“You said you needed my ears for something,” I asked while Wes jumped into his bed and lay in it.

He stretched out while I took a seat across from him in a wooden chair at his hand-crafted desk.

“Yeah, man,” he sat up before he continued. “So I have this snake in my wall,” he said.

I’m sure there were several animals throughout his house, but how he spoke told me the snake was an irregularity. His family’s home had windows and doors, but those were the only normalities clearly present.

Of course, a family of satyrs lived differently from a family of humans. Their house appeared to be carved from a single dark wood tree with bark strong enough to stand changing weather. Their plants grew like a garden on steroids. The sides of their walls were covered in vines, moss, and various overgrowth. There were always wild animals like squirrels or raccoons in their bushes.

Most satyrs were animal-loving, light-hearted naturalists, so it made sense that they preferred to live in a place similar to the wilds of a forest. Their house took every opportunity to mirror the outdoors. The floors were a type of lush grass that imitated carpet. They had electricity and running water, but it was sparingly present throughout the house.

I loved visiting Wes at his place. Hanging out in his bedroom was like going camping without giving up Wi-Fi.

“Why is there a snake in your wall?” I asked.

“It got out of its tank,” he said, as if he’d answered the actual question.

“Since when do you have a pet snake?”

“It’s not mine. It’s the schools.”

“But why do you have the school’s snake?”

“They were gonna cut him open in biology class.”

“Ok...” I said, waiting for him to continue.

“Ms. Harper told me to bring him back, and if I don’t, they’ll expel me from school.”

“There’s only a week left in school, though.”

“My dad won’t care if it’s one week or 10,” he remarked.

Wesson’s parents weren’t strict by most standards. They let him go to school without wearing pants after all, but the standards magical creatures held their kids to in our town could often be high. Or so I was told.

“I’ve never hunted anything before,” I said as we stood up.

“You can hear really well, though, can’t you?”

“Sure, but you can talk to animals.”

“I have to know where it is before I can talk him out. Come on, man, I’ll owe you.”

“Alright, Alright.”

I didn’t want to promise I’d find his snake when I still hadn’t seen my pet rabbit after six years. Unsure of where to start, we both stood around, waiting for me to do something. It felt awkward, but eventually, I did the only thing I could logically think of. I put my ear to a wall and tried to listen.

I usually tried to tune things out. The constant barrage of loud noises could be bothersome, so it was often best to avoid focusing on the surrounding clamor. That may have been my first time legitimately using my ears like sonar. It was a little surprising how well it worked.

I could hear the sound of pipes first. The AC was the next thing to catch my attention before I started to notice things moving around. Every home had some amount of bugs in its walls, and some houses even had rats or birds that could go completely unnoticed. I had to tune everything out before I could focus and make out the sound of slithering. I followed the sound throughout the house, keeping my ear to the wall. Wes stayed behind me, watching me work. He tried to be supportive, but couldn’t follow how I was making progress well enough to know when to cheer or stay silent. After a while, we ended up in the hallway outside of Wesson’s bedroom. I took my ear from the wall and held my hand to the spot where the snake was resting.

“It’s here,” I said

“It’s there?”

“Yeah.”

“Ok, watch out,” he said before moving my body out of the way.

“What are you gonna do?” I asked, but I got my answer just as quickly.

Without any hesitation, Wes punched a hole in the wall. It wasn’t my place to tell him what not to do in his home, but I was pretty sure no one’s parents would be happy to come home to holes in the wall.

“Wes,” I said, still shocked at how reckless my friend was. I laughed, but I was concerned.

“Don’t worry; the house is made of living wood, remember? It’ll fix itself,” he said as he reached his hand through the hole and dug around.

“If you say so,” I replied while I watched.

He must have found the animal because he started speaking in some language that mimicked snake hissing. Before long, he pulled the scaled creature out and held it around his arm.

“Thanks, man,” he said as he turned in my direction.

“Any time.”

He tried to hug me, and I might have let him, if not for the snake jumping from his arm. I should have seen it coming; of course, a snake would see a man-sized rabbit and think, “That’s my next meal.” It wasn’t venomous, but it was big. As it sank its fangs into the palm of my hand, I thought for sure it was going to come off.

“Shit,” I exclaimed as I threw the green reptile away.

Wes scolded the snake as if it were a child while I held my hand, trying to stop the bleeding. That’s when I heard Wesson’s mom yell up at us, “boys.” So they were home. Wes put the snake away in his room before walking me to the bathroom and helping me clean and wrap my hand. He thought it was funny.

“I hope they cut that thing open twice,” I said.

“He didn’t mean anything by it.”

“It was going to eat me.”

“Harold was not going to eat you.”

“Why did you name the snake!?”

“No... he already had a name.”

I couldn’t help but crack up. I was still pissed about my hand, but the way Wes was with animals was nothing short of endearing, if not adorable.

“Sorry about the jacket,” I said, noticing I had ruined it with my bloodstains.

It’s a good thing it wasn’t his usual jacket. He always wore the same hoodie I got him a couple of years back for his birthday. Come to think of it; I doubt he wore clothes before I got him that jacket.

“It’s cool, man. You mind if I take it off?”

“You know I can see your dick every time you stand up or stretch, don’t you?” I replied in a joking tone, but I was serious to some degree.

His fur often covered enough to forget he didn’t wear anything below the belt. However, things would slip through or be easier to notice depending on how he stood or walked.

“Sorry, nature endowed me so well my natural coat can’t hide it all.”

He shed the extra layer, and for a moment, I couldn’t help but realize we were sitting in a bathroom together. He was naked aside from his fur, and we were all but holding hands while he helped me with the bandages. I didn’t mean to spaz out, but I yanked my hand away to finish wrapping up on my own. I don’t think he was bothered by it, but he must have noticed the unusual tension sitting in the air.

Satyrs had a reputation for being sexual creatures. I couldn’t look them up online without finding porn or stories of lustful exploits. Wesson never tried anything with me, and we were friends, but knowing what he was, I figured it was best to avoid provoking any of his “natural” instincts. I felt a little racist for thinking Wes would be so stereotypically sexually charged that he’d suddenly do something like that. Still, it was better to be safe than awkwardly sorry, in my opinion.

“What were you and Bug Burner talking about earlier?”

“BJ wants me to apply for a magician’s internship with her,” I said while we left the bathroom together.

“I thought you hated magic,” he said.

“I hate being a rabbit.”

“But rabbits are cool.”

“No one wants to fuck a rabbit,” I joked.

We went back to his room. I stood by the window, looking through it up at what might have been stars or satellites. My dad had to have made it home from work by then.

Wes came and stood by my side before asking, “Is that why you’re doing the internship?”

“I don’t know if I’m doing it yet. BJ said even if we apply, there’s no guarantee we’ll get in.”

That tension was ever-present, less dense, but floating around. I didn’t think a jacket mattered much when Wes never wore pants, but it made a difference. With his chest and abs out, he was more naked than usual, and I’m not sure how I felt about it.

“For what it’s worth, I hope you don’t. There’s this festival coming up in a few weeks. It’s supposed to be one of the longest ever held, and if my parents let me go, I thought maybe you could come too.”

“What kind of festival?”

“STR,” he said as he left my side to find the laptop on his desk. He pulled up a website with information and brought it to me. The first thing I noticed was the lack of humans in all the advertising pictures.

“Isn’t that a Fae thing?”

“Which we both are,” he said, taking a seat in his wooden chair while I leaned my back against his bedroom window.

“I’m not,” I said.

“No one would know unless we told them, and if you’re trying to get some action, maybe you’ll have better luck if you’re open to more than human options,” Wes added.

“You mean date an elf or a troll?”

“Or a satyr.”

“Maybe,” I said, and with a grin, I added, “but let’s worry about getting the snake back to school first.”

I almost couldn’t believe Wes was my friend. Considering how popular he was compared to me or BJ, sometimes it didn’t make sense how close we were.

Our paths had initially crossed when I tried to join the high school Fae Club. There weren’t many Fae that went to our school, and the club was a way to let them all meet one another. Unfortunately, when I tried to join, someone pointed out that I was born human.

I was only a half-breed because I cursed myself.

I couldn’t join the club, I wouldn’t. Technically, they weren’t allowed to exclude me or anyone else, but I thought it best to let things go. Wes, being the best guy in the world, found me the very next day. After telling me the other kids were dicks, he deemed me worth hanging out with. From that moment on, I couldn’t remember a day Wesson and I didn’t see one another.