The Hex Breaker's Eyes (22 page)

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.

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.

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.