The Hex Breaker's Eyes Read Online Free Page B

it as a
threat, just a statement of fact. Tam goes silent, and I can hear
Ryan whispering something to keep her calm.
    “Anything else?
Can I help this girl?” I ask.
    “Your future is
very confusing,” she says. “I see two possibilities on top of each
other. Normally I see one image clearly but with you I never get a
single image. Always two, superimposed like a double exposure. It’s
hard to make out.”
    “Convenient,”
says Tam, her voice absolutely icy.
    “And the person
who kicks your ass will break your arm, too. You might want to look
into your parents’ health plan, kid.” Again, it doesn’t sound like
she’s threatening Tam, just offering a tough truth. She looks back
at me.
    “It’s a mess.
Whatever’s ahead of you, it’s going to define who you are. And at
the end of this stream of double exposures there’s just one thing I
see. Well, not really a vision, more like a feeling. It’s very
familiar to me, since it’s the most common feeling people have me
seek out when they come here.”
    “What?”
    “At the end of
this, it’s your mother. If you listen to your mother, you’ll be
OK.”
    I yank my hands
off the crystal and stand up. Tam gasps behind me and I’m already
heading for the door. “Something bother you?” the phony in the robe
asks.
    “Some psychic,”
I say. “I can’t believe I almost fell for it.”
    “Excuse me?”
she asks, indignant.
    “Listen to my
mother? How can I do that?” I’m absolutely seething that this phony
psychic almost made me believe her. How dare she? I shout, which I
don’t like to do, but I just can’t help it. “My mother’s dead!”
    I storm out of
the trailer before I have to listen to another word from Madame
Fraud. Tam and Ryan follow right after me, and we’re twenty feet
away before Marlene comes out of the trailer, running to catch up.
There are tears in my eyes but I’m holding them back. I’m not gonna
let some trailer trash fraud see me cry. We get to the car and Ryan
uses his remote to unlock it so I can get in. Tam climbs in the
back next to me.
    “I’m so sorry I
made you come,” she says.
    I just want to
go home. Not even Ryan, the eternal optimist, tries to say anything
to lighten the mood. We ride back to Blue Ribbon in silence, except
for the radio, which none of us are listing to.
     
     
4

Wednesday,
November 7
     
    My mother died
three years ago. When I was little she was a great mom, the sort of
person that happy kids remember when they grow up. Then she
changed. Actually, maybe she never changed, I just became smart
enough to see what she was really like. By the time I was nine, I
realized that other adults were uncomfortable around my mother, and
that they often talked behind her back. Pretty soon I figured out
that my mother had a reputation as the town’s crazy lady, and soon
I started to see it too.
    I know that she
definitely got worse that year. She went from being a doting mother
who sometimes spaced out or said strange things, to deliberately
going out to harass people. We had the cops called to our house a
lot. I don’t recall any police visits when I was little, but in the
year I was nine they came seven times. The neighbours saw it, and
soon enough I was hearing about it at school. I went from being
just like any girl to being the daughter of the crazy woman.
    Eventually, my
mother harassed somebody enough that she had a restraining order
put on her. (An order which Mom broke repeatedly.) Eventually, her
harassment of this other woman got so bad that she was arrested and
jailed. Soon enough, the doctors were saying she was insane, and
they locked her in a facility a couple hours south of here.
Something about being locked up must have just killed her inside,
because every time I went to visit her, she was thinner, paler, and
crazier. She went from being a healthy, round-faced woman to a
skeleton with wild eyes. For the first little while, she’d hold it
together when we visited. She’d smile and ask