The Hex Breaker's Eyes

by Shaun Tennant

  We walk in small, silent steps to the side of the bed, and look down on the sleeping woman. She’s lying face-up, her long neck exposed. I move my hand, shaking with anxiety, and hold the tip of the dagger over her throat. Sydney reaches out and covers my hand with her own, and guides the blade lower, over Helen’s chest.

  “The heart.” She whispers. “It’ll be fast. She won’t have a chance to wake the others.”

  I look over at the mirror again. I’m too far way, at too much of angle, to see myself in it. But I can see through the doorway, out into the hall, and for a second I think I see Ryan standing in the doorway. I turn to look at the door, but there’s nothing there. I look back to the mirror, and the mirror reflects only an empty doorway and an empty hall.

  “What?’ Sydney whispers.

  “I thought I saw—”

  “Don’t let your nerves get to you.” She guides my hand upward a few feet above Helen’s chest, so I have room to swing down. “Kill her and it’s over. Kill her and we’re safe.”

  In the corner of my eye, there’s movement in the mirror. I look at it and in the moment before I can focus I think the shapes I see are Ryan and my dad, standing beside each other in the doorway. I blink and they’re gone. I turn my head again to look at the door, and I see that there are two people standing there, but not who I thought.

  The other two witches must have heard us. They’re standing in the doorway, watching us.

  “Mindee,” the redhead says. “Don’t do this.”

  The grey haired woman looks me in the eye, her bright youthful eyes seeming so out of place beneath her shaggy grey mop of hair. “Put the knife down. You don’t want to do this,” she says.

  “Do it,” Sydney orders. She’s not whispering anymore, and her voice is loud, commanding. Under my blade, Helen wakes up, sees what’s happening, and freezes in place. She says nothing, but when I look down at her, her brown eyes are pleading for mercy. The queen witch is afraid.

  “Do it now,” Sydney says.

  I look away, but not to the doorway. To the mirror. The shopkeeper told me that mirrors reveal truth. Something about a second sight. But this one seems to show me two different things. Ryan and my father when I’m not looking directly into the glass, and then the two witches when my eyes focus on the reflection.

  Sydney grunts in frustration and anger. “Would you stop worrying about the damn mirror?” she shouts at me. Leaving me by the bed, still holding the dagger over Helen’s heart, Sydney stops around the bed, past the two witches, who seem afraid to step through the doorway into the room with us, and to the corner where the mirror hangs next to the window. As she swings her arm, the moonlight catches on something, and the pale light glimmers from the neck of her sweater.

  She grabs the mirror off the wall and throws it to the floor, shattering it. “Kill her now, before they can stop you!” she screams at me. “What are you waiting for?”

  As she shouts, I see it again. Something shines, flicking moonlight in my direction. I have to know.

  I move the dagger, pointing the tip at Helen’s face. “Don’t even move,” I say. She nods in silence, and I see a single tear roll down her cheek.

  I flip the dagger in my hand, holding it blade-up instead of in the downward stabbing position Sydney wanted me to use. I stalk around the bed, holding the blade out in front of me. As I round the bed, the shards of mirrorglass on the floor reflect back me, my bright yellow aura littered around the cold wooden floorboards.

  “What is that?” I ask, jabbing the tip of the dagger toward Sydney’s throat. I’m still a few feet away, far enough that I can’t really see the shiny object she wears under the sweater.

  “What is what?”

  “Around your neck?” I ask. “What is it?”

  “Just my necklace. What are you doing? Are you going to turn your back on that psycho?” She points at the bed, as if commanding me to go finish the job.

  I step through broken glass to get within an arm’s reach of her, but I barely feel the shards cutting my feet. I raise the tip of the stone dagger to Sydney’s chin, and gently touch her skin with it. Then I drag the tip down, until I’m at what I think is her carotid artery. “Stay still,’” I whisper. Then I use my other hand to reach into the neck of her shirt, and touch the necklace. I pull it out where I can see. It’s a humble silver chain, with a small silver heart-shaped charm.

  “This is my mother’s necklace,” I say. “Where did you find this?”

  I remember months ago, when my visions first started, when Marlene took us all to a trailer park and I learned my future. Two futures, Madame Knight had said, one superimposed on the other.

  Let your mother guide you.

  “You needed something of mine,” I say. “To target me.”

  Sydney snakes her head. “They’re confusing you. You hesitated too long. But it’s not too late to end this. Kill that bitch!”

  I ignore her anger, I ignore everything she says. None of it’s true anyway. “You had to get in my head, so you needed something personal. My necklace. My mother’s ring.”

  Sydney screams at me and grabs at the dagger, but I ‘m more focused on the necklace now. I let her pull my hand away from her throat, but my left hand closes around the thin metal chain, and pulls. One of the links breaks and the necklace comes away from Sydney’s neck, and the entire world shimmers like the surface of a pond.

  I drop the silver chain to the glass-covered floor as Sydney grabs my right arm with both hands and tries to pry the dagger away. It’s so sharp she can’t grab for it without cutting herself, so she’s prying at my fingers instead. With my free hand I grab not for her arms, but for her pockets. I feel around and find a small bump in her jeans and dig my fingers in after it. I feel smooth metal and soft wax. I feel my finger slip into the metal band. I pull the hand away as she screams, revealing my mother’s wedding ring, covered in lumpy red wax. With a swipe of my thumb I brush the wax off.

  This time the world doesn’t shimmer, it melts. The whole world melts.

  The first thing that changes is the light. Instead of silver moonlight, the room is light by bright overhead fluorescents. That bright light doesn’t appear all at once like flicking a switch, but spreads out along the walls, like the tide climbing a beach. The cracked old farmhouse wallpaper becomes a clean blue paint. The creaky hardwood floor turns into white linoleum tile, although the shattered glass remains. There’s still a window next to me, but instead of looking down on a snowy field, I see a parking lot several storeys below.

  I fall away from Sydney, taking the broken talisman with me, but she holds onto the stone dagger. I hit the floor, landing on shards of glass, and discover that instead of jeans and a knit sweater I’m dressed in sweatpants and a tank top. I look back up at Sydney, but Sydney’s not here. She never was. Standing in front of me is Helen, holding the stone dagger. Even as the world changed, that dagger remained the same.

  I look to the bed, wondering what’s going on. If Helen’s in front of me, then who’s in the bed? I see Tam sit up and look down on me, tears running down her face. There’s a commotion behind me, people being told to move out of the way, and I’m sure I hear my father behind me. Someone, a man, yells for Helen to put down the knife.

  “No spine at all. You know how much power I could have harvested if I got you to kill someone you loved?” Helen spits the words at me, slashing the air with the dagger. “But you’ll do. You’ll be enough. The soul of a seer is always strong.”

  She raises the dagger over her head, and dives at me, swinging it straight at my chest, looking to bury that ancient stone blade in my heart. Then there’s a spray of blood, and she twists in the air, and she lands on my legs, her arm hammering the dagger into the floor beside my hip. The impact snaps the stone blade, and the tip slides behind me somewhere. I scream and pull away, scrambling to get out from under her. She doesn’t fight me. She’s just dead weight, and it’s only after I scramble away that I realize I heard a gunshot.

&n
bsp; I turn around and feel a strong hand grab my shoulder and pull me toward the doorway, and as I face the man who guides me, I see that he’s an Ontario Provincial Police officer, and in the hand that’s not dragging me he still holds his sidearm. Once I’m behind the officer, another set of hands pulls me close, and I’m hugging him. I can tell by the way he smells that this is my dad, even before I really see his face.

  When I pull away from the hug and look around, I see the real world for the first time in days. Ryan’s in the hallway, and Tam’s parents, and my little brother Devon. There are a half-dozen nurses in the hallway, and a couple of doctors, all drawn to the commotion. I’m in the Blue Ribbon hospital.

  And I realize that I have been here all along.

  As the superimposed world was lifted from in front of my eyes, it was also lifted off my memories. In a flood of images and disconnected sounds I can remember what happened to me these last few days. I was knocked out by the explosion. Taken the hospital by the first responders who Marlene called to Sydney’s house. But I saw the hospital room as a prison cell, screamed in anger at the nurses. I even knocked one nurse unconscious, and threated to cave her skull in. They had no choice but to sedate me, to make me sleep so much. To bind me to the hospital bed with leather straps around my wrists.

  I was moved to a secure room in the mental health ward, which is why the orientation of my door suddenly changed. I was bound in a straitjacket to keep me from attacking any of the staff. And then Helen came to me. The Seerseye Potion had opened my mind to the world of magic, so it was so easy for her to get into my head, to shape what I saw. She looks so much like Sydney, that’s what my mind saw. I look down at my mother’s ring and see that there’s a small ball of wax on the back of the heart charm, and inside the wax is one of Helen’s brown hairs. She used the ring, the very same thing I used to make the potion, to keep up her hex. The potion left my mind open and vulnerable, and she made sure I saw what she wanted me to see.

  And then she gave me a sacred knife, something used to harvest souls, and convinced me that I had to kill. I can see it all now so clearly that I wonder what I could possibly have been thinking to have believed it.

  After they’ve wheeled Helen out in a body bag and the commotion dies down a bit, a doctor and several nurses come to see me. They talk slowly and quietly, like they don’t expect me to understand what they’re saying. I get it. From their point of view, I’m a raving violent lunatic who thought she was locked in a dungeon. I listen as they tell me that it’s time to go back to the mental health ward for the night. I agree to everything they say, not trying to protest or explain that I was under a spell. I simply accept that this is what I have to do now. I have to show them that I’m sane. I am not Edina Vefreet.

  “Can I go see Tam?” I ask. “Make sure she’s OK?”

  “I don’t think that’s appropriate right now,” the doctor says. “She needs rest, and her family has been through a lot.”

  I know what that really means. I held a knife over Tam and almost killed her, and now her family thinks I’m psycho. They think I’ve finally become my mother’s daughter and taken my place as the town lunatic. I guess I’ll have to accept that, too. For now, anyway. Once everyone sees that I’m OK, things will get back to normal. At least, I hope.

  “Did her hands and feet come back?” I ask. “I mean, can she feel them again?”

  “She’s fine. She was home for three days until she came back with pain all over her body. She kept insisting that she was on fire. She says she’s back to normal now.”

  The doctor walks with me back to the psych ward, and the nurses follow behind us in a cluster, ready to intercede if I go crazy. I get to hug my dad once more, and I tell him everything’s fine now, and I think he might even believe me. He’s been through so much of this, watching both of his women slip into deranged madness. I feel so sorry for ever drinking that potion, just because of the look in his eyes. I know that the Seerseye is what allowed me to save Tam and stop Helen, but the cost was so high. I remember the sad, heartbroken look on his face after every visit to my mother. That’s how he’s going to look at me, too.

  The doctor walks me into the room, which is padded on the floor and the walls, and sees the straitjacket on the floor. The one that Helen cut off me when she came to use me to kill Tam. He picks it up, tells me they won’t need one of those tonight as long as I’m calm, and smiles reassuringly.

  “You’re much better than you have been,” he says. “You know that, right?”

  “I’m fine now.” I say. “She’s gone, so I’m myself again.”

  “That’s not exactly how it works, but some things, especially people, can be powerful triggers for events like what you’ve had tonight. I think she may very well have triggered you see things that weren’t there, but you have to realize that she wasn’t the cause.” He gently pokes at my forehead. “That noggin was the cause. And we’ll have a lot of work to do to make this sort of violent outburst doesn’t happen again, right?”

  “Fine,” I say. “There’s no such thing as magic and I’m going to be a model patient. Better?”

  The doctor smiles his calm, bedside-manner smile and steps back into the hallway. He pulls out a key ring and starts searching for the key that locks my room. “The lock’s not broken,” I say.

  “What’s that?” he asks, looking up from the keys.

  “Helen cut me loose, you saw the straitjacket. But the lock’s fine and you still have the key. So how did she get in?”

  The doctor looks confused, looks at the nearest nurse, then looks back at me and shrugs. “There are many reasons more plausible than magic. She could have gotten one of the other copies of the key, or she could have picked the lock.”

  I nod as if I accept his explanation, but I know he’s wrong. That’s a busy hallway, even at night, and for Helen to stand there and pick the lock without anyone noticing would take a miracle. Plus there are security cameras in all the hallways, probably extra cameras in the mental health ward. Yet nobody saw her come to get me, and nobody saw us go to Tam’s room upstairs until Ryan and my dad saw us in that little mirror. Pulling off a trick like that in a small hospital is impossible.

  I sit on the padded floor, leaning against the wall, and look at the door as the doctor pulls it shut. I might not be able to read minds, but I know he’s realizing the same thing that I just did. The only way Helen and I could get to Tam’s room, unseen even with all of those relatives and visitors, is if we were invisible. I doubt the doctor will ever mention the subject again. It’s more comfortable for him to think I’m crazy, than to consider that I might be right.

  Epilogue

  Monday, February 25

  I missed almost a month of school in total. First I had to get out of the psych ward and into my own house, which took a few days after Helen died. Then I had daily sessions with shrinks, group therapy, and a few different medications. Nothing says crazy like seeing the word ‘antipsychotic’ on a pill bottle every day. I considered dumping the pills down the drain every day, but in the end I decided to take them. I don’t know how long the effects of Seerseye last for, so it’s possible my mind is still vulnerable to hexes. I keep hoping that maybe by messing with my brain chemistry a bit, these pills will protect me if the red- or grey-haired witches ever come for revenge.

  Then I had to get permission to attend my school. I guess after the police said I held a knife over Tam, there were concerns that I would have a violent episode at school. Thankfully, Tam was able to persuade her parents to fight for me, and their voices joined with the doctors who said my condition changed like night and day. After a series of meetings, I was allowed to attend school, as long as I passed sporadic blood tests that proved I was taking the medication.

  Today’s my first day back. I know there are rumors about me. Everyone in town knows that Sydney’s mom was shot by a police officer, that I was locked a padded room, that Sydney vanished without a trace after the fight at her house.

  Tha
t was in the news too. After I smashed that little clay pot, it exploded with enough force that the police thought there must have been some kind of bomb. They never found any trace of explosives, but what else could they conclude? I had been hospitalized, along with Helen, and the other two women were taken to the emergency room but left before being treated. They’ve not been found. Sydney gave a statement to the police officers, and was taken to the station. Then somebody left her alone, and she vanished. Supposedly a camera at a back door caught her walking out alone, and just running into the night.

  I come back to my locker, and find Ryan, Tam, and Marlene have all gotten there before me. There’s a big paper heart taped to my door, signed with lots of students’ messages to me. They’ve even stuck bows and streamers to my locker door and a big sign that says “Welcome Back.”

  I give everyone hugs and read all the little notes. Even Dina managed to write something nice for me. I have to bend the big paper heart just to open my locker and get the books for my first class, and the prospect of making up an entire month of school sinks in when I see the long-neglected binders on my shelf. Closing the door, I see Ryan and Tam settle into a comfortable pose in each other’s’ arms as we talk about what I’ve missed in some of our classes.

  “So you two?” I ask.

  “Us two,” Ryan says.

  “We’ll see,” Tam says. “I mean, it better not take a hospital stay to make him skip practice next basketball season.” He grins and gives her a kiss.

  We do our best to settle into the old routine. School, classes, the same old same old. Despite the welcoming heart on my locker, the old poisonous opinions are still around. I hear a few whispers, some of the students whisper “psycho” as they pass me in the halls. Often it’s the same people who used to call me crazy because of my mother, acting like they were right all along because I turned out to be just as crazy as they taunted me for all those years ago. Part of me still wants to shrink into a little ball and cry when Ashley Horton passes me on the stairs and whispers “Like mother like daughter,” but I won’t let them see me crack.