by Scott Tracey
Woodbury, Minnesota
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Witch Eyes © 2011 by Scott Tracey.
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For Christina, and all the things you never got to see.
one
Binding circles were bad news, my uncle said. Since I was currently trapped in one, the word understatement came to mind.
“You think it’s going to be that easy to escape?” Across the field from me, the graying man snickered. The sun was just about to set, and the odds of help coming from somewhere in Middle of Nowhere, Montana, were slim.
Between him and me were a series of concentric circles dug into the ground, and I was in the center. Seven in total, and so elaborate they must have taken weeks to design properly. It was always important to be exact when tapping into powerful magics like a mystical prison cell.
That’s what the circles were for. “You know all it’ll take is one tiny flaw, and the whole thing breaks down,” I bluffed. But the truth was, my casual glance around hadn’t spotted a single flaw. That was bad.
“I’ve got you right where I want you,” he said.
If I hesitated for too long, he’d know I was intimidated. So I smiled. Leaned back and stretched. Pretended like I had all the time in the world. But behind my sunglasses, I waited and watched. The stretching was starting to aggravate him. He started scowling, right on schedule. Arms crossed in front of him, his face getting red. I knew all the signs.
After all, the man was my uncle.
He’d been the one to design the challenge—get trapped in a binding circle and then figure out a way to escape. Weeks of design meant weeks’ worth of energy building up the spell’s power, making it that much stronger than my uncle’s already impressive abilities.
For most practitioners, magic was like cooking. Mix the right ingredients in the right combinations, and boil for the desired effect. Uncle John and I were different—most of the time, if we knew the spell we wanted to cast, it was just a matter of gathering the magic around you and making it happen. Willpower.
But cooking had just as much a place in magic. Uncle John could have been listening to a book on tape or learning Swahili while he was putting the circle together, and the circle’s power would be the same. But if he’d just forced it into place without any tools, the slightest crack in his focus and the whole thing would have fallen apart.
“When would you use something like this?” he asked.
I looked around me. “Never.”
“And why not?”
“Because something like this takes a lot of work. It’s difficult to get someone to walk into a trap when there’s a big X on the ground, right?”
“So why use them?”
I looked blankly back at him.
“Some witches use them for summoning spirits from the other side,” he said, an unmistakable chiding to his voice. I should have known this. “And the most powerful spirits can only exist inside the circle.”
This part sounded more familiar. “You mean like demons.”
“Anything of a significant power,” he clarified. “Their power is too great—it forces them back where they came from. The stronger the entity, the less they can remain in our world. A binding circle is one way to hold them here.”
“Make them do algebra,” I muttered. “They’ll get so bored they’ll forget to leave.”
“Braden, now’s not the time for games,” he snapped. “What do we know about demons?”
I sighed, thinking back. Most kids took Math, English, American History. Mine was more Demons 101, AP Magical Defense, and Advanced Sorcery for Slackers. “Demons are too powerful to deal with, they can’t be controlled, and they have hungers that can never be sated. They exist to destroy and consume.”
“Tell me something that you didn’t memorize out of a textbook,” he chided.
“You can’t control a demon, but you can contain it. Trapping them in the circle limits their power.” I tried to think. “So if you could work out the properties of the circle, you could keep one trapped indefinitely, right?”
He didn’t exactly smile, but that twitch of his lips was basically the same thing. He took the magic far too seriously. Like it was life or death, instead of just another lesson. “So how long do you think I can keep you trapped?”
I started to smile. “Five minutes, tops.”
“How about all the laundry for a month?”
My smile widened. “Light it up, Uncle John.”
The binding circle was currently only half done. Anyone could walk in or out. In effect, it hadn’t been turned “on.” That changed the moment Uncle John struck the match and flicked it into the third circle.
As the fire started to circle, the magic started to spiral from one layer to the next. Each ring of the spell added its own unique energies. Fire, water, a ring of quartz, tree branches, and some I couldn’t see. I had seen glimpses of Enochian, some Latin, and even some Sanskrit scratched into the packed dirt of the field when I first stepped inside.
“Wow, you really went all out.”
His reply was distorted, warped like there was a curtain of water between us. “It’s even got an infinity charm,” he said, sounding far too smug. “Anything you throw at it will only make the bindings stronger.”
“And this’ll really trap anyone stupid enough to walk into it?”
“Slacker nephews, demons, and anything in between,” he c
onfirmed. “Are you ready?”
I glanced around one more time, still not seeing the flaw that would get me out of this. Uncle John had been teaching me all about magic circles and their many purposes for the last month. Summer was winding down, and lessons outside would be fewer and farther between.
He preferred the outdoors, and not just because he was a nature lover. Magic that went awry was a lot easier to contain if it didn’t have walls to incinerate or a roof to tear through.
My magic, in particular.
“I’m not a slacker,” I said, hoping to buy myself some time.
He threw back his head and laughed. The fact that the distortion between us made him sound like a hyena was comforting. “When’s the last time you wrote in your journal?”
My journal, the bane of my existence. Uncle John was all about the organization. The house had to be perfectly in order, the refrigerator had to be stocked just so, and every spell had to be documented. How you cast it, what you cast, what tools you used. I could only imagine the indescribable glee he’d gotten from note-taking each stage of the jail-cell circle.
“Oh, come on!”
“Everyone else does it,” he said.
“So if everyone else jumped off a building, I should, too?”
His retort was almost instantaneous. “Well, if someone had written down the gravity-countering spell like they were told, that question would be rhetorical, wouldn’t it?”
“Like every other witch out there spends hours writing out all their spells.”
The smile eased back and he got serious again. “Quit stalling.”
“I’m not stalling!”
“Braden!”
Fine.
I looked down, one last time, looking for the flaw. But nothing jumped out at me. If I was any other witch, Uncle John’s binding would have trapped me perfectly.
Good thing I wasn’t like other witches. I pulled off my sunglasses and heard my uncle shout “Noooo!” before my eyes cleared and my vision exploded.
two
There was a moment where time seemed to fracture, a crystalline snapshot of the world where Uncle John had started raising his arm, his face full of fear and alarm. Where motes of sunlight lay poised above me, and the westerly breeze was tangible and tangled up against my skin. It was as if the world around me had called a time out.
Then the landscape expanded into something larger than four dimensions, the binding boiled itself down to an alphabet of magic, and the visions swallowed me up.
So many hunters, tracking weary feet on sullen soil brown with disappointment and impotence. The animals avoided this place of strange magic; ancient ways worked into the stone down to the very bedrock. Silver songs under the full moon, dark music of the fallen things when the sky grew dark. And a man, hiding and running and running and hiding. His fear soaked up into the roots like water.
The sunglasses were meant to keep my powers in check. With the ability to see the world as it truly was—not the filtered world that most people saw, but the true world—I soaked up everything like a giant sponge. Everything that has ever happened in a place, to a person, or because of an object leaves an imprint. The stronger the emotion, the more violent the death, the darker the spell, the impression will be likewise as strong.
My eyes—my power—was also my curse. Witch eyes, my uncle called them. A “gift.” I was “special.”
Sometimes being special wasn’t a good thing. It was every short-bus nightmare come to life. Normal people had eyes that stayed a solid color. Blue. Brown. Hazel. Their eyes weren’t on some sort of permanent screensaver, always moving and shifting around, never the same shade twice.
Every time I unleashed the power of my vision, it was only a matter of time before I was overwhelmed. Hundreds, sometimes thousands, of memories were in a place, and all of them funneled into me all at once. For as long as they ravaged through me, I’m at their mercy.
But my eyes also had another use. Magic had its own distinct presence in my visions, and spells had their shapes and forms. To look at the magic was like swallowing it up with my brain, dissecting it until I understood exactly what the spell did and why, and storing that information for later.
I could duplicate almost any spell I’d seen, but spells were fragile things, and they couldn’t hold up after being poked and prodded by my brain.
My eyes tore through the binding circle like it was no thicker than a blade of grass.
One hundred twenty-two hours. Seven thousand, three hundred forty-one minutes. Four charms buried to prepare the path, eleven spells to empower, thirty-nine pieces of quartz all mined from Arkansas, four candles hand-dipped by the woman who was so desperate she’d do anything. Ordered and neutral and everything has a face the facts he’s outstripped you with caramel drums pounding at dawn bursts of thundering waterfalls that used to filter through here.
Faster and faster, images and memories and distances pulsed in front of me as the spell unraveled and laid its essence down in supplication. The fire shot up around me, rivaling the sun, and then was snuffed out. Beyond the spell, I saw the field for what it was.
Lavender air wafted down the path he shouldn’t have taken if he knew what’s good for him leaving me for that dark angry sun red hate working here everyone’s so rude with their cowboy hats and expensive jade ambivalence like anything really makes a difference anyway, you’re never getting out of the darkness.
“Focus on the spell,” someone called out, their voice ringing like it was coming from down a dark hallway. But their advice was sound. I looked, and remembered, and felt.
Seven layers to the spell, seven different elements and in different numbers. Frequencies and patterns and words and lines that draw a picture in the air. I could see how all the pieces fit together, and how they’d been so carefully arranged. Magic was normally paint by numbers, but this was very nearly a masterpiece. It was the design that caught my attention and allowed me to focus until John could react.
Blessed quiet settled over me, and my eyes settled behind darkened shades. “You cheated,” my uncle whispered, his hand against my head.
I counted my breaths, getting to twenty before I tried to move. Or think. I realized something was pressed against my nose, and my eyes closed involuntarily. Another nosebleed? My gift came with a price. Headaches were the least of it, then nosebleeds, then migraines, and then unconsciousness.
I tried to sit up and started coughing instead. It was like I’d suddenly inhaled a tobacco farm. “Not such a badass spell after all.”
He started rubbing my back like I was a toddler needing to burp. “I should make you put it all back together,” he said. “Any idea how long that took me?”
“Seven thousand, three hundred forty-one minutes,” I managed, through another round of coughs.
“Migraine?”
I closed my eyes and focused. Usually, the migraine came blistering forward, like a flag corps in a parade. But there wasn’t anything at the moment. “Nothing yet.”
“Good, because I’m not carrying you back to the house,” he said, grabbing my arm and helping me back to my feet, before adding, “Slacker.”
“You’re just mad everything fell apart so quick.” I kept my hand on his shoulder as we headed back toward the house, my eyes on the ground watching every step I took.
“That spell could have held a demon for days. The point wasn’t to use your power to break the spell apart,” he said, his voice again taking on that chiding tone I hated. “It was to try doing it the hard way. To try to rely on yourself, instead of your gift.”
“But you say that like I’m going to wake up someday without the curse. It’s always going to be there.”
My footing grew surer the closer we got to the log cabin. We’d lived in Montana since I was thirteen, moving away from the hellacious summers in
Arizona where I’d grown up. In Montana there was actual snow, and trees, and rain. We still lived in the middle of nowhere, but at least we were hermits with actual weather.
Uncle John stopped suddenly, and I almost ran into him. “You know what using the witch eyes does to you,” he said, looking away from me. “That’s why we have to work so hard at containment.”
As long as something can create a filter between me and the visions, I can look out at the world like everyone else. Sunglasses are the only real option—the dark lens focuses my attention. If I wore regular glasses, it would be almost impossible not to look out of the corner of my eye, or at things just outside the lens. Once the visions started, it was harder and harder to pull away.
“I get it.”
“Do you?” He shook his head and chuckled. “Your grandfather would have beat the ever-loving piss out of me if I’d ever tried to take the easy way out. Nothing worthwhile came without adversity.”
We climbed the stairs and headed inside the covered deck. “You don’t talk about him very often.”
Uncle John looked back at me, almost as though he was remembering I was there. “No sense in dwelling in the past. Nothing there but bad memories and regrets.”
I hesitated, wanting to push but afraid of shattering the moment. He didn’t get in one of these sharing moods very often. “Like … like my dad?”
Whatever he was about to say was cut off by the shrill ring of the telephone. I watched his face close up, all those secrets about his life before me locked back up in the vault.
“I’ll get it,” I said, hurrying into the house. Just as much to get away as anything else. Family was one of those things that Uncle John got funny about. I knew he didn’t get along with his father, and I knew my dad was his brother, but that was almost all I knew. My dad hadn’t wanted me, was going to give me away, and Uncle John stepped in and took me himself.
“Hello?” I cradled the phone against my ear and reached for the refrigerator door.
Static hissed on the other end of the line.
