Free Unbound by April Vine Page B

see her aunts.
    The three sisters sat huddled together on a white sofa in his study. Nick and Zach had kept them company and were now organizing some food.
    “The color of her eyes changed. What does that mean?” His question met foreboding silence. He plowed his hand through his hair and rubbed his stubbly jaw as he stared at her quickly paling aunts, years of control training deserting him when he needed it most.
    “What color did they change into?”
    “Red.”
    “Oh, this is our worst nightmare come true. There’s nothing that we can do now,” they whispered.
    “Once her eye color changes, we can’t go back and fix it. It’s impossible. We never thought it would come to this.”
    Worry lined their bubbly faces. He hated seeing Michelle’s aunts so helpless and scared.
    “What will we do, Sebastian?”
    All eyes turned to him, fearsome and pleading.
    “What will happen to her now?” Sebastian tapered his voice and curbed his impatience. He raged with the helpless feeling inside him, driving him desperate enough to want to shake her aunts into giving him the information he wanted immediately. His power of command died a quick death. Was he going to lose her forever?
    “She’ll shift.” Lindie wiped tears dripping down her face.
    Esmie offered further explanation. “The lust spell requires incantations pertaining to animal lust instinct as we said before.” Seized by a flood of tears herself, Surtie took over when both her sisters were unable to continue.
    “We are able, through magic, to instill those chemicals that make animals behave instinctively sexual into a human subject…in this case our beloved Michelle. It’s what the lust spell is, basically. She’ll change and it’s all our faults.”
    “Into what?” Did it even matter into what she shifted? He still stood to lose her.
    “We can’t say for sure. Feline. Canine. There’s no bringing her back from this.”
    “What’s happening to her right now? She said she feels normal, as if the spell had passed. Could she be in pain now?” His voice was in direct contrast to the vicious, violent storm brewing inside him, quiet, leveled, restrained. He clenched his fists, squeezing the blood from his hands to stop him from turning over every piece of furniture in the room.
    “Nothing is happening to her right now,” Esmie said. “At this moment she is her true self, as she says. The lust spell has worn off for sure. She is exhausted as she is and will sleep for a few hours more, but then give or take a few more hours or even a day after that…”
    “No human, animal, witch or wizard can bring our Michelle back, Sebastian, not even you. She will shift. There’s nothing we can do for her.”
    “Now only she holds the power to change this except we know she won’t use that power even if her human life depended on it.”
    “What would she need to do?” he asked.
    “She would need to accept the shift, nothing can be done about the initial shift, it must be realized first. And once in her shifted state, only then can she accept herself as a witch. Become one with the Goddess and return to us.”
    “How long will her becoming one with the Goddess take?”
    “We can’t say. A minute. A year. It all depends on Michelle.”
    “We have tried, incessantly, for twenty years to bring her around. We were shocked she even allowed us to cast a spell on her in the first place. She had to be susceptible to the lust spell or she could have rebuffed our efforts until the end of time. Only she can change this and we’re worried she won’t want to.”
    He knew Michelle well enough to know she’d never take on her ancestry, even with something as serious as this. Damn, she’d prefer to die in the wilderness than meet her true self.
    “Oh, what have we done to our beloved child? This is the point of no return for us.”

Chapter Six
     
    Point of no return.
    Michelle kicked the covers off her body as she thrashed around the bed. Her sweet dreams had