Wayne looks at me with anger in his eyes and then he softens, raises a finger to his lips. “I asked Angela to the Valentines dance. I can’t have you going around saying I was with Sydney.”
“We aren’t saying, we’re asking, yes or no?”
“No. I was at home, in my room, watching Letterman. Ok?”
Tam shakes her head. “Knew it. Lying witch.”
Before I can think of what to do next, I’m chasing Tam down the hallway toward the music room. It’s obvious she’s going to go right after Sydney, but that won’t do us any good. Even if Sydney admits that she lied, she still has a talisman hidden away somewhere that we won’t be able to find. Getting her mad will only fuel the hex, which will only hurt Tam.
But before we can even get there, the sound of a girl shrieking echoes down the hallway. We were walking very fast before, but now we run. When we get close to the music department we see the door burst open and two girls push through the door, holding onto each other in a mess of flailing arms, wild hair and kicking legs. They cross the hallway and slam against a locker, both girls screaming and swearing at each other. It’s only when we get close that we can see that the one being slammed against the locker is Sydney, who screams in pain each time the other girl slams her into the steel lockers.
The other girl is masked behind a mess of hair, but when she talks I can tell who it is.
“I won’t let you do it again! Not Again!” she shouts, slapping and grabbing at Sydney. Sydney swings her arms up and down, trying to block incoming blows, but she doesn’t seem to know what to do and she’s really taking the worst of the beating.
“You almost killed me,” the other girl screams. “I was in a cast for two months because of you.”
Even Tam is frozen by the sight of our new student council president slamming a student into the lockers and slapping her in the face, even though Tam probably wants to do something similar.
Since there are still classes happening in third period, one of the nearby doors opens and Mr. Stevens, an old guy with a short grey beard comes out and sees what appears to be Dina mugging a defenseless Sydney. He shouts for the girls to break it up, running over to pull Dina off of Sydney. When he finally gets them apart, Sydney’s got some red marks on her face that will likely turn into bruises by tomorrow, and Dina finally pulls her hair back to show that her face is bright red with anger and there are lines on her cheeks where tears burrowed through her makeup.
Mr. Stevens tells them that they’re going to follow him to the office right now, then tells his own students to get back in the class and continue their reading. As he begins to lead the pugilists away, both Dina and Sydney notice us standing there. Dina looks apologetic, the look on her face seeming to say ‘I tried to help.’ Sydney looks at us like we must have put Dina up to this. She looks at me with pure loathing and when she passes us, she bumps Tam with her shoulder.
I see a student I recognize, Kim Kubert, who’s in the marching band and hangs out around the music department a lot, emerge from the music room door. “What was that?” I ask.
“I dunno. That other girl just came in and started accusing Syd of all kinds of things, and then she was shouting all this stuff like how Sydney tried to kill her and how Sydney was dangerous. Then Syd tried to tackle her and after that the other girl just beat her up. Wasn’t that the girl from the student council?”
“Yeah,” I say. “At least she used to be. Not sure if she has much of a career in politics after this.”
After a couple minutes of standing around, stunned that Dina would suddenly decide to vent her anger at Sydney, we decide to head to the front offices and spy on what’s happening. We linger just around a corner, looking through the large windows from the hallway into the front office, where Dina is waiting. The secretaries occasionally shoot her a disapproving look, but nobody seems to say anything to her.
After a couple minutes, one of the vice principals, Mrs. Grey, comes out of an office with Sydney trailing behind her. Mrs. Grey tells Sydney to sit down and wait, and then brings Dina into the office, and closes the door. As soon as she’s alone in the waiting area, Sydney leans forward and hides her face behind both hands.
The bell rings, ending lunch and starting fourth period. “Shouldn’t we go?” I ask Tam.
“Hell no. I’m staying right here and watching what happens.”
“If Mrs. Grey sees you out here she might think you’re involved,” I say.
Tam uses her left hand to point at the sling that holds her right. “I am involved,” she says.
The hallways flood with students as hungry kids are set out on lunch and others return to class after their own break. For five minutes we have to stand against the wall just to avoid the flood of bodies, but as half the students find classrooms and the rest find a place to socialize, we are able to get back to the corner to spy on Sydney some more.
Mrs. Grey comes out and sits Dina on a chair right next to Sydney, at which point Sydney sits up straight again, revealing a flushed face and red eyes. Mrs. Grey starts to lecture them both. I’m not able to read lips or anything, but I can tell she’s really laying on a guilt trip. I’m sure it’s not ideal to have the student council president beat up another girl, so it’s no wonder that most of Mrs. Grey’s attention is focused on Dina.
Eventually Mrs. Grey goes back to her office, this time leaving the door open, and Sydney are Dina are left sitting in the office. After a minute or so, Dina moves a couple chairs over so they aren’t sitting right next to each other, but I don’t think either of them actually said anything before she moved.
The main doors to the school open and a woman enters. With her brown hair and tall, lanky frame, it’s obvious this is Sydney’s mom. She heads into the office, says something to Sydney, and then talks to one of the secretaries. Sydney doesn’t say anything, or even look up to see her mother. She just stares at the floor and waits. Mrs. Grey comes out and talks to Sydney’s mother, and after a couple minutes, Sydney and her mom leave the office. Once they’re out in the hallway, both women see us standing around the corner watching them.
“Is that the same one?” Sydney’s mother asks. Sydney nods, and immediately her mother is marching over to us, looking straight at Tam.
“It wasn’t enough to attack my daughter once, you had to get your friend to do it again?” she accuses.
“I didn’t do anything,” Tam says weakly.
“And this one,” she says, looking at me, “must be the one that broke into my home and climbed out a window like a little thief.”
I can’t say anything. Even though I heard her voice when I was inside the house, I’ve never seen Sydney’s mom up close before. She’s beautiful despite the big chin, with long wavy brown hair and high cheekbones, but what’s striking are her eyes. This woman has eyes that seem to be brown with flecks of red. There’s one guy in town who works at the grocery store, who has pure red eyes, but he’s kind of freaky looking and that guy’s legally blind. Sydney’s mother’s eyes are more normal than that, and we know that she drives so she can’t be blind, but the little hint of red makes her seem very unusual, and I find it very hard to look her in the eye, or to say anything at all.
“Well?” she demands.
“I, um, don’t know what you mean.”
“Of course you don’t.” She holds Sydney’s hand and starts toward the doors. “You two stay away from my Sydney or I’ll file a restraining order, got it?”
We say nothing as they leave, and even after they’re gone, Tam and I just stand at the corner, not sure how to react. “I guess breaking into her house again is probably a bad plan,” I say after the silence becomes unbearable.
“Yeah.” Tam agrees. “But now we’ve got no proof, no confession, and we definitely can’t break in and find the charm. What are we going to do?”
“We’re gonna go back to class, and deal with this later.” Tam looks annoyed that I still expect life to go on even though she’s hexed, but there’s nothing we can
do until we know for sure that Sydney has the talisman that made the hex.
When we get back to our lockers, Tam’s leg buckles and she falls to the floor. I let out a short, automatic yelp at the sight, and then I try to help her up. She tries to climb to her feet, but can’t get up, even with me pulling on her good arm.
“My leg doesn’t work,” she says. I look in her eyes and all I see is terror. “I can’t feel it at all!”
They call an ambulance to take Tam to the hospital for more tests, and I just know that she’ll be staying at the hospital overnight. This thing is still spreading, getting stronger each time we confront Sydney. We know she lied about where she was when the hex was cast, and every time her emotions flare up, Tam gets worse. That’s enough proof for me. Sydney’s guilty.
“What can we do to help?” Ryan asks me. It’s after school and Ryan and Marlene came to my locker straight away, as if both of them heard a call to arms.
“We have to find the talisman and destroy it, but we can’t just break into Sydney’s house and get arrested,” I say. Although now I’m thinking it might come to that if Tam gets any worse. I know I’d break the law to save her, but I just don’t know what kind of resistance Sydney and her red-eyed mother would pose if they found me breaking in. Not to mention the fact that if I get locked in jail or something then I’d be useless to help Tam.
“There’s only one thing left to do,” I say. “I have to boost my power.”
“How do you do that?” Ryan asks
“There’s a potion we can make, that might let me see who’s doing this. Maybe even show me where the talisman is hidden.” Even as I say it, Marlene is shaking her head at me.
“So why haven’t we done that already?” Ryan asks, knowing there must be a catch.
“I just didn’t think it was necessary until now.”
If I told Ryan that the potion might drive me insane, he’d tell Tam, and they wouldn’t let me do it. But without the potion we’ll never stop the hex, so I won’t tell him the risks. I grab Marlene by the shoulders and look into her eyes. “Tell me what we need to make Seerseye Potion.”
16
Saturday, January 26
It turns out the potion contained a lot of things not commonly sold in Blue Ribbon’s IGA grocery store. For example, one of the things we need is called ‘black root,’ and another is apparently ‘eye of a rat.’ When Marlene showed me the book I couldn’t believe that things like that were actually required for working spells. I suppose I was thinking of it as chemistry; you put the right elements together to trigger a reaction. But this is the world of magic, where you put things together that should not react, and then they react anyway. So by boiling a concoction of herbs, roots, and animal parts, while reading the right spell out loud into the pot, we should be able to create something that will make my sixth sense much more sensitive.
Marlene tells me that this is how magic works: you take a human emotion or desire, and then you filter it through a connection to the physical world. There are two types of hexes: spells and potions. Spells are tied to the physical world through talismans, and potions have to be made of things tied to the earth: plants, animals, stones, etc. A spell is tied to its victim because something they own is included in the talisman, while a potion also has a talisman, it only works if it is actually ingested by the person you’re targeting. You can’t get away with making a potion out of artificial ingredients, it all has to come from the Earth naturally. We need to find the real ingredients somewhere.
After some research, Marlene found that there is a magic supply store in Toronto that offers what we need. It’s a two hour drive, so it’s lucky that it’s the weekend. Ryan made up a story about going to the city to get a get-well present for Tam, and his parents let him borrow the BMW. Marlene brought the big leather book, but I made her write a list on a normal piece of paper so we seem slightly more normal when we go into the store.
We eventually find the place, a small shop in a strip mall in a mostly industrial area in northern Toronto. The sign above the store is red with black letters in an old-timey sans serif that might better suit an Irish pub. “Cauldron Bubble,” it reads.
We enter the shop and are greeted lazily by a middle-aged man sitting on a bar stool behind the counter, who then goes back to reading his comic book. We take a couple minutes to walk around. A lot of the store is devoted to candles, some to dried herbs, and a shelf near the back holds jars and vials of various animal parts. (Yes, there is a section of glass tubes containing eyes of newt. But I don’t need those, I need rat eyes, which are farther down the same shelf.)
Marlene is intrigued and distracted by a section of spellbooks, and Ryan is picking through jars in the animal parts section. He picks up a small jar and rotates it, make a face, then reads the sticker on the jar with the hand-written note explaining that this is a dog’s liver. He moves on to a small vial and looks at the lizard’s tongue contained within.
“This is so gross,” he says.
“Very gross,” calls the shopkeeper, not even looking up from his comic. “And if you kids feel like stealing, I’ve got cameras on every square inch of the place.”
Ryan carefully slots the vial back into its holder and we settle into choosing our ingredients so we can make the potion. Marlene also picks out a few spellbooks and I offer to split the cost on them with her, since I’m the one who seems to need the knowledge anyway. There’s only one ingredient we can’t find, so we bring everything up to the counter and set it down, then I ask. “Hey, do you sell any black root?”
The shopkeeper sets down his comic book and cracks his neck. “Why would you want that?”
“Um,” I stammer. “It’s on the ingredient list.”
“For what?”
I don’t really think that’s any of his business. “We’re just making a potion and the book said we need black root, so…”
“Back root is a hallucinogenic,” he says. I think this is a practiced speech he’s said to a lot of people. “I cannot sell you an illegal substance. I am not a drug dealer. I sell legal, natural products for the practice of a legitimate religion known as Wicca and I will not sully my noble practice by selling dope to teenagers.” He looks at all three of us. “How old are you, anyway?”
“Fifteen,” I manage to say, then point to Ryan. “He’s almost seventeen.”
“I’ll sell you anything on the shelf, but I don’t deal drugs. So you want to ring this stuff up, or not?”
I look to Marlene. “Will it work, without the root?”
She shrugs. “Doubt it.”
The shopkeeper is looking at the things I’ve set on the counter and typing them into his old mechanical cash register. “What are you looking to brew?” He asks, punctuating with a bored sigh as if to say he’s completely above us and our teenage dalliance with witchcraft.
“Seerseye,” I say. “Seerseye potion.”
He stops typing. “That stuff’s dangerous. It’s like PCP and peyote had a baby. I’ve only seen one person drink it, and she ended up in a psych ward for eight months before they let her out again. Trust me, kid, you’re better off smoking pot.”
I realize that he thinks of us as nothing more than annoying kids who don’t realize what we’re messing with. Heck, that’s probably most of his customers. But I have a genuine second sight and I won’t be talked down to like a small child. “I’m a seer,” I say, my voice more confident than I am actually am. I’ve never said it out loud, or really even thought of myself that way, but there it is.
“I’m a seer and back in our hometown there’s a girl with a nasty hex on her that’s taking her apart piece by piece. And if I can’t track the source of that hex then our friend will die. And if I have to risk going crazy to save my best friend then I’ll do it. So I’d prefer if you would stop mocking us, ring up the sale and tell me where I can get some goddamn black root.”
The shopkeeper is taken aback. He raises his bushy eyebrows and nods. “A seer, huh? What do you see?�
�
“Hexes on people.”
“Prove it.”
“What?”
“Prove you have the sight.” He takes out a shoebox from under the counter, containing various trinkets and items. “I’ll hex one of your friends, and you tell me which one. Get it right a few times and I’ll let you know where there’s some black root available.”
“You’ll take the hex apart as soon as I get it?” I ask.
“Obviously.”
“Then do it.” Marlene takes a small step back, and I realize that maybe I should have asked their permission before volunteering my companions to be hexed.
“I’ll need an item from each of you,” he says, and holds out his hand.
Marlene takes a pin from her hair and hands it to him. Ryan slips a rubber bracelet off his wrist and hands it over. The shopkeeper slips both under the desk, where I can’t see. He takes his own possession—his glasses—and ties them to a rock while whispering a hex. He then slips the whole works under the counter, and finishes the hex by tying his item to one of my friends’ possessions. As soon as he stops whispering, The light around Ryan turns red.
“Him,” I say, pointing. I didn’t even wait for the shopkeeper to tell me to guess. “He turned red.”
“Lucky guess.” The shopkeeper pulls the string away, breaking the talisman, and the red light disappears. “Let’s try another.” He repeats the ritual, whispering something a little different, and this time tying a small twig, which is tied into a circle like a tiny wreath, to his glasses. He slips his hands under the counter and chooses an object. Once again, Ryan lights up, only now he’s green.
“Him again. Different hex, now he’s green.”
“Still could be luck,” the man says. “Get one more and I’ll believe you.” He breaks this new talisman and Ryan returns to a normal colour. The shopkeeper follows his familiar hexing routine again, tying his personal item to a bone and then slipping his hands out of sight. He whispers so quietly and fast I can’t make out the words, and then I realize he’s speaking in Latin. He finishes talking, and looks at me expectantly.
The Hex Breaker's Eyes Page 11