The Crumpled Mirror by Elizabeth Loea (free novel reading sites TXT) 📕

didn’t yet know that I wouldn’t collapse like that, particularly as Adrian squared his shoulders and readied his fists.

This was a fight with real stakes. There was magic on the line here—magic and truth and an entire world. I wouldn’t lose to Adrian, even if he was clearly more prepared than I was.

Behind Adrian, Indigo and Ginger faced each other. I kept my eyes on Adrian, whose hair was coming undone. In the moonlight, his face was all bones—cheekbones, a jaw, a crooked nose, a forehead. He smiled, which didn’t soften his features.

“What’re the rules, Mint?”

“First to yield or pass out loses,” he said.

“You’re really pitting kids against each other?” I demanded, backing away from Adrian.

“You’re all legal adults.”

“Barely.”

Adrian moved closer, a little unsteady on his feet but much more confident in his ability to win this than I was. To be fair, my confidence was well in the negative numbers at that point.

“Do you know how to fight?” I asked.

“No,” he replied, and struck at me.

His first blow was easy to dodge. The second one, not so much. His elbow hit me hard in the shoulder, a clumsy blow but an effective one.

“Goddamnit, Adrian,” I hissed. The few basic self-defense lessons my mom had made me go to when I was little had not prepared me for this. Adrian directed a second strike at my jaw and sent me reeling. I barely caught myself against one of the burned trees, pain flooding through my gums and jaw.

I ducked underneath Adrian’s arm and struck him in the spine with the back of my forearm, twisting so that the weight of my torso was squarely behind it.

The breath went out of him briefly, but he spun to face me and tried to grab me by the shoulder.

I weaved around and away from him, but ducking and weaving wouldn’t be sufficient to win the fight.

The night was cool against my back. I was fistfighting a stranger in a clearing mere miles from my apartment. What the hell was I doing?

The first odd moment happened when I tried to run, just to put distance between myself and him. He took off at the same time as me, reacting not to my movement but to some planned version of this fight that had prepared him in advance. When I ducked backward, he followed, ducked low to the ground, and spun, the top of his foot striking me in the side of the knee.

Down I went. Adrian wasn’t all that agile, but I wasn’t a great defender. Behind him, Indigo and Ginger’s fight was equally one-sided, but I couldn’t look away from Adrian.

“Yield,” he said. I tried to climb to my feet, but the side of my knee ached as if something had popped out of alignment. I doubted it had, but I would definitely have one of the worst bruises of my life the next morning.

“No,” I said. This was a fight for my life—not for my literal life, but for my future. What would I be without the answers I needed right now? Just another nutcase searching for books about magic in the library.

One day, would I just be a grandmother waiting for another taste of the greatest mystery of her youth?

The next time Adrian struck, I lifted my hands to block him and something happened.

I didn’t know where it came from. Within, of course, but it wasn’t my stomach or my heart or my lungs. Maybe my diaphragm, because the magic felt like an exhalation, but that wasn’t quite right. There was more to it than that, as though everything was slipping into alignment at the same time as it was something entirely new.

One thing I wanted to know when I was little was how magic felt. I had no idea, since everything described it so differently. Some sources described it as a sort of fizzing feeling in the blood, others a tug in the lungs or gut or throat. Still others said there was no feeling at all, or that it was all in the muscles, like running.

I would say it’s like falling out of a tree with your back to the ground. It’s like plummeting out of those uppermost branches, the sky above you, knowing that you wouldn’t be able to protect yourself any better even if you could flip onto your front. It’s like hitting the ground hard, feeling the wind knocked out of you, feeling that gasping for air and desperate emptiness that comes with the breath being pushed out of you.

That’s how it is for me, at least.

That was the first time I felt magic fly from my fingertips. My eyes were screwed shut, so I didn’t see the brightness of my magic. Later, Mint would describe it to me as a fluid flash of light in a color he’d never seen before. Apparently, it seeped into reality fluidly, like a wine stain spreading, and then disappeared all at once.

I opened my eyes in time to see Adrian collapse to the ground with a whimper.

“Damn it,” I heard Mint say, even as my vision narrowed to Adrian’s distinctly unconscious expression. “I’ll have to write up a report about this.”

Spots buzzed in the center of my vision, grey swarming across my eyes as I stared at Adrian.

He didn’t move. Let me rephrase: he didn’t move at all—not even his chest. Sorry, let me rephrase again: he wasn’t breathing.

Mint noticed Adrian’s predicament when I did, and we knelt by Adrian at the same time. I put the back of my hand to his forehead, which had already gone waxy. Mint pressed two fingers to Adrian’s neck and grimaced.

“No pulse,” he told me.

Something about Mint’s expression took me by surprise. There was the usual blankness, the usual rage, but next to it, there was something different: guilt, fear, memory. At the time, I wrote it off as a mere effect of trauma; he had died during the tests, so of course he wouldn’t react well to someone else dying, too.

What