The school library was a bit of an oddity. Unlike most of the rooms in the school, which were pretty utilitarian in design, the library was more formal in appearance, put together in a sort of pseudo-classical style, bordering on rococo. It was absurdly out of place in the otherwise perfectly ordinary suburban high school, but on the other hand, it was the sort of place one would expect to stumble onto a magical tome of monster illustrations in.
As part of the rather overwrought architecture, the library had one wall that was an ornately framed mirror, giving the room the appearance of being twice as large as it actually was. A bit disorienting the first time you saw it, but Daryn was used to it by now. What he wasn't used to was seeing a demoness in the mirror.
And he definitely wasn't used to being the demoness.
Daryn's shriek should have woken the dead, but the library's heavy oak doors insulated the hall from the sounds of the library as well as it insulated the library from the sounds of the hall. He...she stared at the creature in the mirror.
She undeniably fit the image of a succubus: lithe, curvy, busty, and naked, with all the stereotypical demon features, from her spade-finned tail and crimson skin to her cloven hooves and bat-like wings. But she didn't actually look much like the picture on the page. For one thing, her wings were full-sized, but the bigger difference was that instead of the pictured demon's chiseled body-builder physique, Daryn looked more like a typical teenage girl.
A shapely teenage girl, granted, but certainly nothing like the thing on the page. She didn't have any body jewelry, either; she was naked as the day she was born. Her skin had a glossy, almost rubbery sheen to it, but she couldn't tell whether that was due to a trait of her new body or panic-induced sweat.
Because she most certainly was panicking. Not only had she become this monster-thing, but the book that had done it to her was gone! She looked all around,but there was no trace of it. And she couldn't go out in search of it, because she was this nude freak! If only there were a way to get out into the hall unnoticed...
To Daryn's amazement, her wings and tail vanished, and she was human again. Not male, but human, a decidedly un-monstrous human girl who happened to look a lot like the creature she had just been. Her skin was creamy white and her body was pure Homo Sapiens, but her shape and face and fiery red hair were all the same. And she was clothed, albeit in a far too girly skirt-and-blouse ensemble.
But she could feel the other self just beneath the surface. Wearing this human form was like faking an expression to hide one's true feelings; it was going to take effort and concentration to maintain. Daryn could use this form to get out among people and search for a way to change back, but underneath was the naked demon-girl, just waiting to be let out.