The Hex Breaker's Eyes (18 page)

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Authors: Shaun Tennant

Tags: #paranormal, #magic, #young adult, #supernatural, #witchcraft, #high school, #ya, #contemporary fantasy, #ya fantasy, #ya mystery

BOOK: The Hex Breaker's Eyes
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“It’s nobody’s
fault. Not mine or yours. There’s only one person to blame and we
should
only
blame them. Not ourselves,” I say.

I don’t want to
get caught up in a circle of everyone blaming themselves for what’s
happening to Tam. The only person responsible is the jerk who cast
the hex. I’ve been forgetting about that all night and all morning.
I’ve been too busy feeling sorry for myself that I’ve forgotten to
feel angry at the real culprit. I open my locker again and pull out
my coat and my hat.

“What are you
doing?” she asks.

“I’m getting
out of here. I just realized it’s been too long since I hung out
with my best friend.”

“You’re
skipping the afternoon?” she says, sounding shocked.

“Yes, Marlene.
I’m skipping class.”

Marlene looks
baffled for a moment, like the idea of not attending class is
impossible to comprehend. Then she nods and says “Wait for me. I’m
skipping too.”

It’s a long,
cold walk down Main Street to the hospital, and Marlene seems
skittish, as if she thinks being out on the town during school
hours is a felony offence. We don’t say much. We just keep our
heads down so the wind doesn’t freeze our faces and we march across
the town.

In the hallway
on the second floor of the hospital, we see Tam’s mom at the
vending machine.

“Oh, have you
girls come to visit?” she says, smiling a bit.

“Yes, but it’s
our lunch hour. We’re not skipping school,” Marlene blurts.

“I won’t tell,”
she says. “Tammy’s in room two-twelve.” Nobody but Tam’s mom is
ever allowed to call her Tammy. Tam hates it. But I haven’t heard
it in a while, and I actually smile a bit as we head into the
room.

Tam’s propped
up in bed, watching the TV that’s hanging from the wall. In a
second bed by the window there’s an older lady who Tam’s sharing
the room with, also watching the TV. I guess we’ll have an audience
for this conversation.

Tam is looking
OK. Her arm is still in a sling and her hair’s a mess, but she
seems fine. Other than the blue aura that still covers her, that
is.

“Hey,” I say as
we enter.

“Hi,” she says,
happy to see us. “Skipping school, Marlene?”

Marlene
blushes. “Peer pressure!”

“So what
happened?” Tam asks. “Ryan told me you guys went to the city for
some supplies. Did you try it?” She’s obviously trying to talk in
vague, non-magical terms so the lady in the other bed doesn’t
realize what we’re talking about.

“We tried it
yesterday,” I say “Didn’t work.”

“What do you
mean?”

“Nothing
happened. No effect.”

Tam’s face
darkens with disappointment. “I thought the book said...”

“I know. We did
too. But it didn’t happen. I’m sorry.” I’m not sure what to
say.

“I’m the one
who should be sorry. I got everyone’s hopes up for nothing,”
Marlene says. “Have the doctors found anything?”

Tam shakes her
head. “It’s nothing they can help. They’ll probably send me home
tomorrow if nothing changes.”

“Has it gotten
any worse?” I ask.

“Same. It’s
like my hand and leg just stopped talking to my brain. Network
connection error.”

“Dina and
Sydney got suspended for that fight. Neither one was at school
today.” I hope changing the subject will get our minds off things a
bit.

“Good. I don’t
like either one of ‘em.” Tam smiles a little, but I can tell she’s
trying to look happy for our sakes.

Marlene pulls
up a chair and sits down, opening her bulky coat a little. I don’t
see another chair on this side of the room, So I stand.

“There’s a
chair over here,” says the older lady in the other bed. You can use
that.”

“This is
Phyllis,” Tam says. “She had some stomach surgery two days ago.
She’s rocking the liquid diet hardcore.”

“Sounds like
fun,” I joke. I head over to the far side of the room and take the
chair from the other side of Phyllis’s bed. While I’m trying to
lift the chair without knocking anything over, I look at Tam and
see something strange.

Under Tam’s bed
there is a small and very, very faint blob of blue light. It’s so
pale I can hardly see it, but it’s there. It’s not connected to
Tam’s hex, but rather a paler version of the same blue light,
floating beneath her but separate from her hex.

“Marlene,” I
say. “Turn the light off for a second.”

Phyllis
objects, but Marlene does what I ask, and in the dark I can see the
light a little better. The blob of blue is floating under the bed,
and then it floats downward like it’s being pulled by gravity, and
begins to pass through the floor. A few seconds later, a new blob
of blue starts to droop down from Tam’s blue aura, and I watch as
this little ball of light separates from the aura like a drop of
water.

“What is it?”
Tam asks.

“I think the
potion worked.”

“What?”

“It
worked.”

Phyllis looks
at me like I’m a babbling idiot. “Can you turn the damn lights
on?”

I leave the
chair where it is and rush over to Tam. “It worked. I can see a
trail. A series of little blue lights that are trailing away from
you. I think it’s what powers the hex.”

“The what that
powers the what?” Phyllis asks.

Tam yells at
her, “God, Phyllis, keep up!”

“I can see it,
and that means I can follow it back to the source!” I smile at Tam
and wave at Marlene to follow me, and then rush out into the hall.
We head past Tam’s mom and I don’t stop, just shout over my
shoulder. “Tammy’s going to be OK.”

I take the
stairs down to the ground floor, and find room one-twelve, right
below Tam. It’s an administrative office, but I ignore that and
barge inside, startling the lady who’s working at a desk in the
office. I stare at the ceiling, and can see a hint of blue.

“Can I help
you?” the office lady asks. I don’t answer, just turn off her
lights so I can see the blue magic better. There are four of those
blue lights in here, forming a straight line through the wall to
the outside.

“Outside,” I
say to Marlene, and we run off, leaving that lady at her desk,
confused and in the dark.

We get outside
and follow the wall until I can see one of those blue orbs pushing
its way into the hospital wall. “There’s a trail of them,” I say to
Marlene. “A trail leading directly to Tam. And I bet the source of
the trail is either the talisman or the witch. We just have to
follow it.”

I point at the
blue, and then try to follow the trail of lights, and right away I
hit a serious problem. The little blue lights are pale blue, and
I’m trying to see them against a daytime sky. Other than the one
that’s halfway inside the brick wall, I can’t detect a single
one.

“What?” Marlene
asks, when she sees the disappointed look on my face.

“The light is
blue. Pale blue.” I point at the sky. “
Sky
blue. I can’t see
it anymore.”

We have to wait
for it to get dark, and hope that the potion will continue to be
strong enough that I can still see the trail. We head upstairs to
let Tam know that we’ll track this thing after dark, and then we
leave.

We decide to go
back to school for the last class of the day, so we only missed
lunch and fourth period in our escape to the hospital. When I get
home I find a message on the answering machine from the school,
informing my dad that I was absent from class. I decide to delete
the message so he won’t know. I can’t afford to be grounded when I
need to go to the hospital tonight.

Just as the sun
is touching the horizon, I get a call. Tam’s being sent home from
the hospital. I tell her we’ll just have to track the trail from
her house now, and call Marlene to let her know.

We meet outside
of Tam’s house after dinner. It’s quite dark now, and we’re bundled
up against the cold. I head inside, telling her folks that we’re
visiting Tam for a moment, when really I just want to see what
direction the trail is flowing. Tam seems happier to be in her own
bed again. “I’ll have so much free time to watch TV now that I’m
super crippled,” she jokes. “I’m starting to wish you really did
have brain cancer.”

“Oh, shut up,
Tammy
,” I say, flipping the light switch.

I can see the
blue orbs again, flowing down and away from Tam in an almost
perfect straight line. They head out through the back wall of her
house, heading north. I point the direction so Marlene knows, and
promise Tam that we’ll stop this thing before it spreads.

Outside, we run
around the back of Tam’s house, where I look up to see a line of
blue orbs sticking out of the wall, and floating over the yard. The
orbs pass over the neighbour’s yard and into their house.

“Next street
over,” I say. We have to go back to the sidewalk and run around,
since I don’t feel like climbing a fence into some stranger’s yard
right now. I wish the streetlights weren’t so bright because they
drown out the pale orbs of light, but once we get close I can see
the blue trail again. They emerge from the neighbour’s house, a
little closer to the ground, and run across the street. I let my
eyes adjust a little, and I’m able see that there’s a slight curve
to the blue line, so it doesn’t run completely straight back to its
destination. We’ll just have to follow it.

We cut through
a few more streets before we find a house where the line of blue
light goes in one wall, but does not come out the other side.
Somewhere inside this house, the blue line stops.

I know this
house. This is where Sydney lives.

“Isn’t that—?”
Marlene starts to say.

“Sydney’s
house. Which has an alarm now.” I don’t really want to get arrested
tonight, but I don’t know a polite way to ask Mrs. Leave My
Daughter Alone if we can search her house for magic blue light.

Marlene’s phone
rings. It’s Tam. Marlene puts her on speaker.

“What’s up?” I
ask.

“My other foot
just died. I was walking on crutches and just collapsed. I think I
might have broken my arm but the whole arm has no feeling so I’m
not sure.” She sounds terrified, but manages to turn the fear into
anger and mutters “That damn fortune teller...”

“Crap,” I
whisper.

She lets out a
wail of frustration and anguish, like an animal trapped in a cage.
“I’m getting really tired too. It’s like I can’t find any energy.”
She says something else, but she’s too far from the phone for me to
make it out. Then she comes back. “My mom’s running me back to the
hospital, guys. If there’s anything you can do, maybe like, get on
it!”

“We will,” I
say. Tam’s mother and father are in the background, telling her to
hang up.

“Gotta go,” she
says.

“Stay strong,”
says Marlene.

“We love you,”
I say. Tam hangs up.

I look at the
line of blue lights heading into the house and know that we have to
get inside. It would be easy to work up the nerve to break into an
empty house, or even if we knew that the only person home was
Sydney. Unfortunately, there are three cars in the driveway, so the
house is busy. I don’t know how many people are in her family, but
several of them are home right now.

“We need to get
inside and follow those lights back to the talisman,” I say.

“How?” Marlene
says.

The line of
blue lights shifts a little, swinging to the side, and I realize
that Tam must be in a car moving through town now, so the tether to
her body is swinging away.

“We’re going
right in the front door. I don’t care if we get arrested. I don’t
care if they get in my way. I’m smashing that talisman.” I look at
Marlene, who is so quiet, so nice. She never even skipped a class
before today, and now we might be walking into a situation where we
have to punch someone to get through. “You can stay out here,” I
tell her.

She nods, but
after a second, she says “I’m coming with you. I won’t let Tam get
any worse.”

We walk up to
the front door and Marlene reaches for the doorbell. I hold her
hand back and shake my head. I grab the knob and turn it. The house
is unlocked. “When I point to something,” I say, “smash it.”

I open the
door, and we barge inside like it’s a police raid. Immediately,
we’re hit by a wall of heat.

The house is
lit up by candles. Everywhere along the main hallway and through
the living room, hundreds of candles, most of them made from black
wax, are burning. It’s as bright as any house I’ve been into, but
there are no electric lights turned on. It’s all lit by flame. As
the door opens I can hear voices joined together in a rhythmic
chant, but the voices go silent when I step into the house. All of
the candles are so warm it’s like standing beside a fireplace. The
house smells of candle smoke, like a child’s birthday party, but
beneath that there’s a smell of something pungent; sulphur or burnt
hair or rotting eggs. As I step past the entranceway I see three
women in the front room. They are seated cross-legged on the floor,
arms out to their sides, holding hands to create a circle with
their arms. In the middle of the circle is a small round table,
just an Ikea end table or something similar, which is covered in
designs drawn by pouring coloured powders across is surface.
Resting on this table is a single object, a small clay pot with its
lid removed, and the line of blue lights heads straight into the
mouth of this little urn. I see one of the lights disappear into it
and vanish, not to come out the other side.

I realize now
that the blue lights coming from Tam to the urn don’t simply tie
her to the hex. The blue light is Tam. The urn is draining her,
taking her piece by piece. The witches are sucking the life right
out of her and storing it in this little urn.

One of the
women, the only one I recognize, is Sydney’s mother. When she sees
me, her eyes go wide and she screams. I see the red colour of her
irises has gotten brighter, and now her eyes glow with the colour
of fire. When I met her at school, I thought her red eyes were just
a rare eye colour, a disorder of pigmentation, but that’s not true.
She must have normal, brown eyes to anyone else. It was my gift
that made me see those eyes as red. She glows, just like a hex
victim, but her glow isn’t floating outside her body, her red light
comes from within. I’ve heard people say that eyes are a window to
the soul and now I understand why. This woman is filled with power,
and unlike a hex that sticks to you from outside, her power flows
inside of her, and only I can see it, and only through her
eyes.

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