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

I didn’t really register at the time was the final emotion, traced around the corners of his mouth: absolute, vicious joy.

That joy was not Mint’s joy at all. It was something else.

Indigo and Ginger discontinued their fight, a fight that Ginger was very obviously winning, and joined us next to Adrian. Lilac crouched at my side, too, her brow scrunched.

“Is he—” Ginger started, then swallowed her words.

“Dead,” Mint said. “He’s dead. Fuck, not again.”

VIII

I collapsed backward, as far from the corpse as possible. Indigo seated himself next to me, as did Ginger. She propped my head up on her lap, but she couldn’t stop staring at Adrian.

His eyes were still open: bright blue like the trees in Ginger’s forest, and as dead as a drowned man’s eyes.

I had killed him. I had killed him. What the hell had I done?

“He—” I began, but I couldn’t finish the rest of the word. I needed to be home right now. I needed to be as far away from the dead man as possible. At the same time, I needed to stay, needed to take responsibility for the worst mistake of my life. “I’m so sorry.”

A great silence swelled through the clearing, close to bursting. Mint stared at the body as if he had just been sucker punched. Indigo watched me, as did Ginger. And Lilac...I still don’t have a good way to describe Lilac’s expression. A calm washed over her, as though she was looking out over a busy street in the middle of the morning. Something about her detached, pushed away from her eyes, settled into the recesses of her mind, and stuck there.

I couldn’t breathe. I couldn’t say anything, or move. Ginger held me in her lap, her arms so tight around my neck that I couldn’t tell if she was hugging me or trying to restrain me. Perhaps both.

Everything went bright, then dull. For a moment, Adrian was a caricature of a young man—pale as death, his hair a blot of ink against the grass, his eyes open and immortal. He was Byronic. Made to be mourned. Then, as my adrenaline receded just a little bit, he suddenly seemed too grey, too gone. As though I was looking at his ghost, or looking at him through a great swath of fog.

“Oh,” I said at last. There was nothing else to say. “Oh.”

Mint sat back on his heels, away from Adrian, his eyes flickering from me to the corpse and back again. Lilac stepped forward, compelled by some strange force, pressed her hand to his chest.

“CPR isn’t going to work,” Mint told her. He dug his fingers into his thighs as if to keep himself from doing something.

“I know,” she said, and pressed harder. Adrian’s skin began to glow—not a particular color, but the glow of sunlight through a dusty window. An old sort of sunlight, a recycled kind of light. Lilac didn’t glow the same way, her hand began to ripple with lines of gold that undulated like sunlight across the bottom of a pool.

I didn’t breathe. It took an interminable ten seconds—the longest ten seconds of my life—but Adrian took a huge gasping breath of air. It sounded like ripping fabric apart, like the tearing of a chest. If his death hadn’t broken my heart, that one great breath would have done the trick. I had never heard anything so painful.

“Holy shit,” he said. “I think I just met God.”

Mint cocked an eyebrow at him.

“I’m kidding, jeez,” Adrian said. “Lighten up. I was just unconscious, right?”

Lilac looked to me, then to Mint, then back at Adrian.

“You were dead,” she said at last. “I...I brought you back.”

“Huh,” Adrian replied. “Huh.”

He stared at her as though she was the center of his world. At this point, it would have made sense for that to be the case. Ginger watched him warily and I got the sense that as glad as she was that nobody had died that night, she knew it would be somewhat more convenient for her if Adrian hadn’t stuck around.

“Huh,” Mint said. “I was sure you were lost for good.”

Half of him sounded relieved beyond belief. The other half...didn’t.

Mint’s several voices spurred Indigo and Ginger into action. Both rose to their feet, although they kept their distance from Adrian, who hauled himself to a sitting position with Lilac’s help.

“You killed me,” he said to me.

“I—” I started. “I’m so sorry.”

I wasn’t very good at apologies back then. I’ve gotten better since, but they’ve always sounded stilted coming from me. Insincere. Nevertheless, Adrian waved me off.

“Don’t worry about it. Happens to everybody.” He must have seen my apologetic grimace, because he added, “At least I got to see what happens to you after you die.”

“Huh?”

“I’m not telling,” he said.

I couldn’t say anything. I just stared. I’d never done something like that before—at least, not really. Vivi’s death had been my fault, sure, but it was vastly different from if I had actually killed her. Adrian had died. He would have stayed dead if not for Lilac.

“Lilac, a necromancer,” Mint said, his hand shaking a little as he jotted down notes. It was his only sign of emotion. “Adrian...a seer. And Indigo…a telekinetic.” He looked to Ginger as Adrian stood and brushed himself off. “Sympathetic.”

“Meaning?” she asked.

“Not quite a mind-reader, but you...read emotions. You might get images from other people’s minds, if they’re attached to strong emotions.”

“Sympathetic. That’s ironic,” Adrian said.

I couldn’t stop looking at him. He had been dead a minute before. His breath had stopped in his lungs. His blood had drained from his skin. His eyes had stared, unblinking, at the sky.

Adrian turned to look at me. Framed in the starlight and the glow of the portals, he looked more like a corpse than ever. He still had that waxy, distanced look of someone who had just woken up from a long nap.

“I’m sorry,” I repeated. Mint’s frown deepened at my apology. Here’s one lesson about magicians: they don’t apologize.

You stop apologizing when you