Danielle and Kat's mother smiled wistfully. "Yes," she said. "Yes, she did. I suppose I might as well tell you, Danni, now that you've been dragged into all this. Actually, I don't think I've even told Kat the full story."
Danielle stared, slack-jawed. Her mother had been...? It couldn't be! Now she had to hear what this was about. She took a seat on the dungeon floor, as did her mother and sister.
"That is your aunt Mary in there," she said. "My older sister - eight years older than me, to be precise. Back then, I was Julian - yes, Danielle, I was a boy. Not a real roughhousing macho type, but a fairly average boy. For the first ten years of my life, I lived in complete ignorance of real magic or anything paranormal."
She sighed. "But then my sister turned eighteen. Your grandmother had been training her all along, or at least trying to. Unfortunately, she wanted the power solely so she could abuse it, and the evening after her birthday party, she went on a full-scale rampage." She saw Kat's face fall, and put an arm around her daughter. "It wasn't even like Kat's, with misguided, thoughtless actions driven by some good intentions. Mary just flat-out enjoyed screwing with people."
She looked at her sister, who just smirked at her. Shaking her head sadly, she continued her story. "Well, the first thing she did was to turn me into a girl. While I was still trying to comprehend that, she went on to blaze a path through the town leaving all kinds of dazed, devastated transformees in her wake. When they finally caught her, it took the Order of Hunters a full three months to sort out and enact a coherent 'cover story' history change for everybody."
"That remains the finest cleanup work we've ever done, I'll have you know!" Emily interjected.
"What happened then?" Danielle asked. Grandma's town had always seemed kind of strange when they went to visit, and she was beginning to suspect the reason.
"Well," her mother replied, "let's put it this way. Mary's actions would have earned her a permanent transformation into something non-magical and non-human, once the Hunters got ahold of her. Unfortunately, changing a magic-user into something incapable of magic doesn't dispel their spells, so instead they put her in here, in an anti-magic cell." She looked at Mary again, but the older witch was pretending not to be interested.
"For the past twenty-eight years," she said, "they've been offering her a plea bargain: change her victims back and get off with becoming a mundane human. They've even offered to make her a little girl again and place her with a family who might raise her to not be a psychopath. She's turned them down every time."
"Then all the people...?" Danielle couldn't believe what she was hearing, but it did explain a lot of odd incidents from her childhood. Now that she thought back on it, so many strange or slightly off-kilter things had happened around her Grandma's that she wondered why she'd never caught on before.
Jill nodded. "Still transformed, yes. All getting on with their lives as best as possible. Some of them have made their way out into the world at large, but a lot of them still live in that very town. You remember Aunt Daisy?"
Kat and Danielle nodded. Daisy was one of those family friends who's not actually related but you call "aunt" or "uncle" anyway because they fill that role. Jill smiled. "She's actually a pixie. Only six inches tall, but she puts up a good illusion of being human when necessary."
"But...what about you?" Danielle asked. "Did she make you into a girl mentally?" She wasn't sure it was a very polite question to be asking, but she had to know. Her mom had never seemed like anything other than a woman to her, even if she did have a strong preference for T-shirts, jeans, and short hair. All she wanted was to know that her mother's femininity was magically-induced, and wasn't something that could happen to her.
The wistful smile returned, and her mother shook her head. "No, dear. She only ever changed anyone's body. As for me...I won't lie; it was hard, sometimes. I think it helped that I had never gone through puberty as a boy; for all intents and purposes, I only ever grew up as a girl. And it definitely helped that I wasn't the only one, not even in my age group. But it still took me a long time to get used to."
She chuckled. "But I guess I did it with a vengeance, didn't I? Six years of struggling with a new body and a changed identity, and all of a sudden I came to terms with it, got comfortable with it, fell in love, got married, and had a daughter, fresh out of college." She smiled warmly. "And you know what? I wouldn't trade it. Not for anything. Which is why I had your grandma purposefully toy with magic interactions; I'm stuck as a woman even if Mary ever agrees to lift the spell."
Danielle stared at her mother, finding herself at a loss for words. Instead, she just crawled into her mom's lap and let her embrace her.