The Hex Breaker's Eyes (21 page)

I wake up and
the door’s open again. Sometime, after I passed out from the agony,
the fire and the pain ended, and I can move again. No lights are on
out there, but it’s a little brighter than this room, and my
dark-adjusted eyes can see the difference. There’s a person in here
with me, crouching beside me, gently shaking me to wake up. I pull
away at first, terrified that she’s come to cause me more pain.

“Shh,” my
visitor whispers. “It’s OK.”

My eyes are
seeing static in this darkness, but I can make out enough of her to
see who has come. “Sydney?” I ask. “Is that you?”

“Shh. Quiet.”
Sydney actually smiles a little and I can see her white teeth in
the darkness. “I’ve been trying to see you for three days but this
is the first time they’ve all been asleep.”

“Where am I?
What’s going on?”

“You’re at the
farm. My mother’s family’s old house. They’ve been hiding you
here.”

“I have to get
out. They’re going to kill me in here,” I tell her. “I know you
don’t want that. I know that you aren’t a killer.”

Sydney nods.
“They’re too powerful. I can’t do anything to stop them.”

“Just cut me
loose. I’ll find my own way.” I get up on my knees, my hands
turning to pins and needles behind my back. They must have gone to
sleep while I was curled up on the floor.

“It’s minus
twenty outside, and you have no idea where we are.”

“Just get me
out of here, I’ll get to somewhere safe,” I hear my voice break up
as I beg, and realize that I may have given up hope of survival if
Sydney hadn’t come down for this visit. “Please, don’t let them
kill me.”

“Letting you go
won’t change that. They can drain your life from anywhere.”

“We have to
try. You don’t want to watch me die, do you? Will your mother make
you dig my grave?”

Sydney slumps,
shaking her head. “There’s no way. . .” she looks back at me again,
and perks up. If my second sight showed ideas, I’d be seeing a
light bulb over her head right now. “I’ll be back,” she says. “Stay
quiet. Don’t wake anyone up.” She gets up and heads for the door,
closing it behind herself and locking me in. I want to scream, but
I do what she said, and I wait for her return in silence.

Sydney comes
back after about five minutes, slinking down the stairs so quietly
even I don’t hear her. She opens my door again and slips into my
cell. She’s hiding her hands behind her back, keeping something
from my sight. “There is one way you can be free. One way we can
both be free.”

“Anything,” I
say. “Anything.”

She comes even
closer, whispering, “You have to understand. I’ve been my mother’s
hostage my whole life. I’ve been locked down here, subjected to all
manner of curses. I’ve had my blood drained for their rituals.”

“So...?” I
don’t know what she wants from me.

“Long ago, I
took rites that make me my mother’s servant. She is the coven
leader, the other two are apprentices, and I’m merely a slave to
them. I did everything I could to uphold that. I took part in their
rituals, I tried to have the perfect outward life so nobody would
ever know that witchcraft exists. I built a whole life around my
mother.”

“Sydney,” I
whisper.

“Shh. The whole
time, all I wanted was to get out, but I can’t. I can’t escape
after all the rites I’ve taken, all the blood-oaths I gave. I could
never kill her.”

“What?”

Sydney pulls
her hands from behind her back, and shows me what she’s brought.
It’s a dagger, made from black rock, with a red jewel embedded in
the end of the handle.

“If we want to
be free of her, no matter where we go, then she has to die.” Sydney
spins me around, grabs the straps around my wrists, and cuts them
away. That black blade must be incredibly sharp to slice the
leather so easily. Once my hands are free, she spins me around to
face her again.

“I can’t betray
her like that, it’s impossible.” She places the dagger’s handle in
my palm, and closes my fingers around it. “But you can. You can
kill her.”

I can’t believe
that this is happening. Sydney’s offering me a way out but at a
cost I can’t even process. Kill someone to save myself? I couldn’t
possibly do that. But then again, if I run away, what’s to stop
Helen from hexing me and draining my life anyway? I could still end
up dead, and so could all of my friends. Maybe, to protect them,
this has to be done.

The dagger
feels so light in my hand, like it’s barely there at all. The whole
thing, blade and handle, is carved from a single piece of some kind
of rock. The jewel is embedded at the very bottom of the handle,
and somehow, the jewel feels warm to the touch. I touch the fingers
of my left hand to the blade, and discover that it’s razor
sharp.

“Where did you
get this?”

“If we had a
gun or a kitchen knife I would have brought that, but nobody lives
here anymore. There aren’t any regular knives, just magic stuff
from all the rituals they do. That’s the only thing I could
find.”

She takes her
hands off of mine, and I’m holding the dagger all on my own now.
Somehow, this thing feels sort of natural, like an extension of
myself. It’s not cold, or heavy, or off-balance. It just fits my
hand perfectly.

“Let’s go,”
Sydney says.

Leaving behind
the straps that bound me, I leave the tiny little prison cell, and
for the first time in days, I can see farther than a few feet away.
It’s so strange that something as simple as peering down a basement
hallway feels like freedom, but after all that time spent locked in
a little eight by six room, it’s like I finally have my eyes
back.

The hallway
leads down to some kind of large fruit cellar, but we’re not going
that way. Sydney leads me toward the stairs. This is an old
farmhouse, and the bare foundations radiate cold out here more than
they did inside my little cell. I guess maybe my body heat was
keeping that small space warmer than it would otherwise be. We
begin to quietly slip up the stairs. The risers are just bare
wooden boards, and even though we’re both in sock feet, our steps
make noise because the wood creaks and groans underfoot. Sydney
opens the door to the ground floor, and light floods in on us.
There are no electric lights on, not even so much as a candle, but
after days in that windowless cell, just the moonlight through the
windows looks like floodlights to me. As I step through the doorway
and into the old country home, the world seems coldly beautiful.
Outside, the sky is cloudless, allowing the full moon to shine down
like a pale sun, its light amplified and reflected by the perfect,
untouched snow in the fields outside. We emerge from the staircase
into a large room, where one side is kitchen, and one side living
room. There are still signs of life here, but it’s obvious nobody
really lives in this house. The kitchen has an old stove, but
there’s an empty gap between cabinets where a fridge should be.
Many cabinets and drawers are open, revealing that there’s nothing
much inside. Perhaps they’re open because Sydney was searching for
a knife, or maybe they’re just always like that. In the kitchen, a
garbage bag and packages of paper plates and plastic forks are the
only signs of the women who have been keeping me hostage.

In the living
room, it’s a different story. The walls are painted with symbols,
including pentagrams, hieroglyphs, and several circles. There’s no
furniture to get in the way, so the empty floor is covered in
several concentric circles. Some of the circles are painted on,
while the smallest looks like it was created by pouring salt on the
floor. In the middle of the ring of salt is a plate, holding a blob
of reddish clay about the size of a fist.

“That’s the
clay they’ll shape into a new urn. First they have to add the last
few ingredients and incantations, before it’s ready to be shaped
and fired. In another day or so, they’ll be able to drain your life
away,” Sydney whispers when she sees where I’m looking. “If you
leave them alone, if you let them live, they’ll just kill you
anyway.”

“I could take
it with me, get rid of it,” I say about the ball of clay, stepping
towards it.

“Don’t go
close. It’s protected by a sacred circle. If you breach it, they’ll
know. And it would only take another week or so for them to replace
it anyway.” She places her hands over my right hand, making me
squeeze the dagger’s handle. “This is the only way your friends
will ever be safe.”

She pulls me by
the hand, leading me across the kitchen and to the bottom of
another staircase. These steps lead up to the top floor, to the
bedrooms where my would-be-killers are sleeping. Sydney lets me go,
and guides me to take the first step. She slips around behind me,
her hands on my back pushing me up the stairs. I know she’s right,
that the only true way to ensure that we’re safe is to get rid of
these witches, but my feet just don’t want to take the steps. I’m
not scared. I know they’re sleeping, that with the blade in my
hands, I’m the one in the position of power right now. It’s just
that I’ve never had to do anything like this. It’s one thing to
know that it’s necessary; it’s another to actually kill
someone.

“You have to
get my mother first. She’s the most powerful. Once she’s gone, the
others will be easier.”

We reach the
top of the steps, and before me there’s a hallway with five doors.
Four of the doors are closed, and one—the bathroom—is half-open.
Nothing up here makes a sound. Sydney pushes me past the first few
doors, all the way to the end of the hall. The master bedroom. She
turns the knob and swings the door open. I was worried an old door
would creak, but it swings in perfect silence. Inside, the moon
peeks through the blind, drawing horizontal lines on the floor. The
room is sparse, containing only an old dresser and double bed,
where Helen sleeps. There’s a duffel bag of clothes in one corner,
and a few pieces of art on the walls, but I can tell that this
isn’t a place where anybody normally lives. I walk into the
bedroom, and stand at the foot of the bed, looking down on the
sleeping form of the woman who is trying to kill me.

“Don’t think
about it. Just kill her,” Sydney whispers in my ear.

I wish I was
stronger, but still I hesitate. I look away, not wanting to look at
Sydney or at her toxic mother, and something catches my eye. In the
darkness, I’m seeing everything in virtual black and white and
shades of silver, but when I turn my head I see a glimpse of bright
yellow. I look closer, and it’s a mirror. In this whole house, in
all the darkness, one thing shines brightly.

Me.

In the mirror,
I can see the hex that flows all around me, a yellow flourish of
light that looks like someone shining a golden beam of light
through a thick fog.

“I’m hexed,” I
say.

Sydney leans
around me and sees the mirror. “Well of course you are,” she says.
“They had to keep you weak and tired, keep you from making too much
noise. I bet you’ve spent most of the last four days sleeping,
haven’t you?”

I don’t know
how many times I’ve slept, or for how long. In the perpetual night
of the prison cell, there was no way to know. “I guess so,” I
say.

“So why are you
surprised? You made three powerful witches target you. It would be
a shock if you weren’t hexed.” She touches my right hand again.
“Don’t get sidetracked. We have to act before they wake.”

“We should find
the talisman,” I say. “Break the hex. I mean, break this one before
I…”

“There is no
talisman,” she says. “My mother has grown beyond the need to
channel her emotions through magical objects. The only way you’ll
ever break the curse is to stop her from willing it. You have to
destroy her.”

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.