The Hex Breaker's Eyes (14 page)

“Ladies, keep
it down,” calls the teacher. Tam shakes her lifeless hand, then
shakes her head; it’s not waking up. I stand up.

“We have to go
to the office,” I say to the teacher. “I think there’s something
wrong.”

“What is it?”
he says, sounding more annoyed than concerned.

“I can’t move
my arm,” says Tam, standing beside me. “It just stopped
working.”

The teacher is
a little incredulous at first, but once he sees the fear in Tam’s
eyes he agree that we can go. “OK,” he says. “You can take to her
the office to wait for a nurse, and then come right back.”

I lead Tam into
the hallway, and outside, I grab her hand. “Can you feel this?” I
say, squeezing in little pulses.

“Nothing. It’s
just tingles like it’s asleep.”

I bend a few of
her fingers, then open them again. “Anything? Feel the
movement?”

“Nothing. It’s
just not there.” She looks really scared. “Is it glowing? It is
attacking me?”

“Nothing,” I
say. “Your hand is no different from the rest of you.”

Now she looks
terrified. “Does that mean the rest of me’s going to stop working
too?”

While Tam’s in
the hospital, waiting for another doctor to examine her (the first
two found nothing wrong), I’ve invited Marlene over to comb through
the books and websites and figure out what kind of hex Tam’s
dealing with.

“Worst case
scenario,” Marlene says, handing me her big leather-bound
spellbook, open to a certain page, “is the death curse.” The
picture on the page is some kind of old etching, showing a man so
emaciated you can see his skull under the skin. Reading the page, I
see that Marlie was right to think of this as the worst possible
hex. It details a long, painful draining of the victim’s life,
shrivelling them down to nothing and gradually weakening the body
until they cannot move or stand, and then they finally die, after
what the book calls ‘a year of torment.’ It sounds horrible, but I
don’t think that’s what Tam’s got.

“This says it’s
very painful. You lose the use of your body but the pain only gets
worse. Tam lost feeling. No pain. And she looks the same, not all
skinny like this guy.”

“Hopefully that
means this isn’t it then,” Marlene says, taking the book back from
me. “Plus, it says you need to speak the hex into an amulet
containing a trapped human soul, and I think that’s a bit hardcore
for Sydney. Also, it says you need fat from an ox.”

“Ew.” I get
back on my computer and look through a website that lists various
spells. “Tell me if any of these sound close,” I say. “Sleep spell?
Maybe it went wrong and only hit her hand?”

“I don’t think
that’s how it works,” she says, her tone not quite hiding the ‘duh’
she must be thinking.

“Paralyzer?”

“Doubt it. It
wouldn’t take all day to work and then only affect a hand. It would
either paralyze her completely or it would do nothing if they did
it wrong.”

I scroll
through some more spells, but the website contains a ridiculous
number of ‘modern’ magic, like love spells, weight loss,
aphrodisiac spells, even a hex to make someone stop smoking.
Nothing that would freeze a girl’s hand.

“I have
something here,” Marlene says. “But you won’t like it.”

“What?” I ask,
worried that she’s found the hex, and it’s something that will doom
Tamara. Instead she surprises me with a solution.

“Seerseye
Potion. It’s a magic tea you can drink. Sort of a hallucinogenic,
maybe? It says it can boost a seer’s power and give them greater
insight.”

I take the
book, but I don’t understand how that could help Tam. “So
what?”

“You’re a
seer,” she says. “You have the second sight, or the third eye, or
the sixth sense. Whatever numbered thing it is.”

“Two times
three is six,” I say, smiling at the joke. “Second sight times
third eye—”

Marlene gives
me the same look I give her when she’s talking about her role
playing games. “I get it.”

“So this tea
will make me see even more crazy things? That sounds...” I say,
thinking about it, “...horrible. But it could help Tam?”

“Maybe. I think
it might make it so you don’t just see hexes, you see the magical
people who cast the spells. You’ll generally just be more open to
the magic around you. Sort of like how a long exposure on a camera
lets in more light.”

“Allowing me to
track down whatever witch is doing this to Tam.”

“Exactly.”

I read the page
in the book, and then I come to the part that Marlie knew I
wouldn’t like.

“Warning: this
potion will open the mind to an unnatural state of awareness that
cannot always be reversed. In any case, ordinary folk who consume
the potion often fall into raving madness, and even gifted seers
may not return to sanity. Consume at your own risk.”

“If you drink
it, it might make you crazy,” she says, pulling the book out of my
hands.

No wonder she
warned me I wouldn’t like it. If there’s one thing that I can
firmly promise myself, one belief that I hold dear, it’s that I
will never let myself end up like my mother. There’s no way I will
ever get to that point. The anger, the mania, the years locked in
padded rooms. Not a chance.

“We won’t need
to use it. I’m not going crazy,” I state firmly. “I stopped the
last hex without magic potions, and I can stop this one too. We
just have to find the right hex, then we’ll know what kind of
talisman we’re looking for.”

“On it,” she
says. For a little while we research in silence, me on the internet
and Marlene reading her antique book, but neither of us finds a
spell that matches what Tam’s experiencing. By the time Marlene
goes home, we still haven’t got a clue. I call Tam’s cell, leave a
message, and wait for someone to call back to tell me she’s OK.

After spending
much of the night hogging my family’s phone to keep in touch with
Tam, I finally slept for a few short hours, waking repeatedly in
fits of worry that my best friend was being somehow taken apart by
something I couldn’t stop.

The school’s
nurse sent her to the hospital. The hospital doctors poked and
examined her hand for a couple of hours. They found nothing wrong.
They x-rayed her hand and then sent her for another scan to look at
the whole arm. Nothing wrong. The arm has no swelling or
tenderness, just a lack of feeling that appears around the wrist
and consumes her hand. They scheduled an MRI for Tuesday down in
Toronto, so Tamara’s mom will have to take a day off work to take
her.

I’m at our
lockers waiting for Tam when Ryan comes over and joins me. “How is
she?” he asks.

“Can’t use her
right hand.”

“Wish there was
something I could do.”

I don’t want to
mention any suspicions I may have had about Ryan, since he’s here
and he’s concerned and he seems to be really upset. He drops his
heavy bag on the floor and looks at the corner where sometime soon
Tam should appear. “Is it a curse?” he asks without look at me.

Now there’s an
interesting question. “Did she tell you that?”

“No, but what
else could it be?” he says with a slump of the shoulders.

I nod. “It is.
I’ve being seeing Tam in blue for the last couple days.” He still
doesn’t look at me, or even express any surprise.

“Since before
or after...” he says, “she broke it off?”

“After. By a
few hours.”

He shakes his
head a little. “I feel so bad,” he says. “I know it’s awful but I
was kind of hoping she was hexed somehow.”

“So she’d know
how bad it felt when she dumped you?” I say, and immediately
realize that was both too harsh and completely without tact. He
finally turns and looks at me, his eyes opened wide with
surprise.

“No way! I
meant I hoped that it was some outside force that broke us up, and
not just Tam deciding we were done. If she was cursed, then maybe
someone fooled her mind into wanting to break up. Then we could
break the spell and get back together. But if she wasn’t cursed,
then she meant it, really meant it. . . ”

“I don’t think
it was over,” I say. “She did nothing but regret it, at least from
my point of view.”

Ryan shrugs.
“She never called, or even said hi in the hallway. I was so busy
thinking about myself, how she was hurting me, it never really
occurred to me that she had bigger problems the last couple
days.”

“I thought you
said you hoped she was cursed?” I say, since he seemed to have both
hoped for it and been oblivious to it at the same time.

“You know what
I mean. I hoped for that like you hope for a million dollars. It
wasn’t a real thought. Not until I heard she lost the feeling in
her hand yesterday. I called her cell, but she never answered.”

“Maybe the
hospital has rules against it,” I lie. I talked to Tam three times
while she waited for doctors and tests.

We both settle
into waiting by the lockers and looking for Tam. Finally she comes
around the corner, her right arm in a sling, her winter coat draped
over that side of her body like a cape.

“Hey,” she says
to me as she reaches for her lock. After a long pause she nods
toward Ryan and repeats “hey.”

“So how is it?”
I ask.

“You tell me. I
feel the same but I can’t see the real problem. You’re basically my
doctor now.”

I look her up
and down. She still has a blue light all around herself, but it’s
completely even and uniform. It doesn’t glow or move or target any
part of her more than the rest. “It’s the same as yesterday.
Nothing special about your hand.”

“Is that good?”
Ryan asks.

“I guess you
told him?” she says to me.

“He
guessed.”

Tam finally
faces her ex, and he looks at her with the same kind, loving look
he had for her two days ago before she broke his heart. “Are you
helping?” she asks.

“Of course. I
can’t exactly watch you fall apart.”

“OK. And just
to be clear, you didn’t do this to me, right?”

He looks
shocked. “What?”

“It was
Mindee’s idea. She thought you had motive.”

Ryan looks at
me like I betrayed him. I want be small enough to hide inside my
locker, but all I can do is shrug. “I wanted a list of suspects,
and you would have every reason to be mad.”

He shakes his
head but says “I get it. It wasn’t me, but I get it.”

“OK,” Tam says.
“I knew it wasn’t you anyway. We confronted Sydney, and as soon as
we pissed her off this happened to my hand. It got worse when her
emotions got stronger. She even made sure to point out that she got
a security system so nobody can break into her house to steal the
talisman this time.”

Ryan nods,
always the one looking for the non-criminal solution: “Maybe we can
find some proof
without
committing a felony?”

I agree: “She
says she has an alibi. All we have to do is talk to Wayne Shepherd
and we’ll have a better idea.”

So we decide
that since we’re on the same lunch as Wayne, Tam and I will try to
get him to say whether or not he was with Sydney when the spell was
cast, and the once we know for sure that Sydney’s lying to us,
we’ll come up with a plan to track down the talisman that’s
creating the hex.

We find Wayne
eating his lunch with some friends in the cafeteria.

“Can we talk to
you a second?” I ask.

“I’m not on
council anymore. If you have a question, ask Dina,” he says. We
haven’t talked to him since before the election last term, so I
guess he still thinks of us as helpful student council
volunteers.

“I know that,
but I had something to talk to you about.” Wayne’s friends, all
seniors, look at him like this visit by younger girls is somehow
funny, but he gets up and comes over to an empty table with us.