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

over his shoulder. His youthful face was the only giveaway that he was in his late teens, like me; Indigo has always dressed as though he’s going to an interview for a job as a librarian’s bodyguard.

“Wizard,” he repeated, his voice flat. “Who, exactly, are you?”

“Uh,” I started. I hadn’t come up with a fake name yet, and I sure as hell wasn’t telling him my real one.

“Whatever,” he said. “I’m Indigo.”

He held out his hand to shake, then, as I crossed the clearing to greet him, retracted it.

“Indigo,” I repeated. “What kind of name is that?”

“The note suggested a color or an object,” he shot back. “Did you not read that far?”

“Who says I got a note?”

“Oh, so you’re wandering around a forest in the middle of the night because you want to be?”

“Maybe I am.”

Indigo irked me. It wasn’t that he was particularly annoying—I had met teenage boys before and wasn’t about to be thrown off by another one—but this was supposed to be a night of magic, adventure, and mystery. Something so mundane and annoying as a person questioning my right to be there broke the spell.

“What’s your name?” he asked, his voice slow and slightly patronizing.

Before I tell you how I introduced myself to him, I’ll introduce myself to you. Serves him right for being such a dick when he introduced himself to me.

It’s nice to meet you. I’m Clementine.

My real name is not Clementine, but that’s what everyone calls me now. That’s a rule of magicians: no real names. Names have power. Names are what you use to curse people, to bewitch them.

So please excuse me for not telling you mine.

I’ve always wondered if magicians do the fake name thing to make themselves more mysterious. If there’s one thing I like, it’s a good mystery, which is why magic is perfect for me. Magicians try to make the craft as enigmatic and intricate as possible for newbies, which is intriguing at best and downright dangerous at worst.

It’s probably obvious by now that I’m a magician, but I wasn’t when I met Indigo. I was as much a magician as you are right now.

“What’s your name?” Indigo repeated.

I didn’t say anything, partly out of spite.

He rolled his eyes and slumped back against a tree. In the moonlight, he looked a little like an overgrown bat, dressed in muted greys and greens and shaded beneath the fragrant redwood branches.

We waited for a couple minutes and I hoped that Indigo knew what we were waiting for. As much as I love cryptic notes and mysterious letters, there is little more inconvenient than being invited to the top of a hill in the middle of the night and not being met with answers.

Fortunately, Mint rose from the not-quite-dead at around one in the morning.

His hand shot from the ground with the sound of cracking bones, pushing a large rock—a makeshift headstone—out of the way in the process.

I shuffled back, my racing heartbeat begging me to retreat, but once my back hit the closest redwood, I clutched at the bark and refused to let myself flee.

I took an embarrassing pride in the fact that Indigo was just as disconcerted by Mint’s arrival as I was.

Mint clawed his way out of the ground as desperately as any corpse might be expected to, spewing dirt from his mouth as his head surfaced. He ripped the ground around him to shreds, his inhuman strength sweeping through the dirt like wind through grass, and soon, he stood before us, eight feet tall and dusty as, well, the grave.

“Hi,” he said. “I’m Mint.”

His jaw ticked a little. Even when we first met him, Mint always looked as though he was in pain. Since it wasn’t the weirdest thing about him, I didn’t even think to question it.

“What the hell was that?” Indigo breathed.

Mint wore a “Hi, My Name is ___” sticker on his blue polo, but the spot for the name had been scratched out in an angry hand. He was blond, so blond his hair was practically white, and when he spoke, his voice sounded myriad, as if there were several versions of him trying unsuccessfully to speak in a single tone.

“Sorry,” he said, although he didn’t sound especially apologetic. “That can be alarming to people.”

Indigo and I glanced at one another, united in our mutual confusion and distress.

“You’re dead,” I told Mint. Of all the things that could have happened that night, somehow that didn’t strike me as odd at all.

“No,” Mint said, turning to me. “Not exactly.” He looked me up and down. “I assume you’re the troublesome one?”

He didn’t explain, but I assumed that it was because I had spent my teenage years poking around the Half Moon Bay library for any books on magic I could get my hands on. I’d read enough as a kid to know that, at least in literature, magicians don’t want to be found.

Everything else you’ve read about us might be wrong, but they’ve got that part spot on.

“You were dead, but now you’re alive,” I corrected myself. I’m usually more articulate, but I was at a loss for words when faced with the spectacle of resurrection.

“No shit,” Indigo interjected. He’s never been able to keep himself from sarcasm, even at his own peril. Especially at his own peril.

Mint shrugged. “I die every morning. I am born every night.”

I had nothing to say to that. What could a person say to that, anyway? “Oh” or “that’s nice” didn’t seem to cut it.

“I’m here to extend an invitation,” Mint continued. “But first I need to swear you both to secrecy.”

Indigo scowled. “Not until we know what we’re swearing to keep secret.”

“That defeats the point, doesn’t it?” I asked. “Sorry,” I added. I’ve never been able to stop myself from asking inconvenient questions.

Mint gestured expansively. “There are three others who have been invited to this test,” he said. “You can go home right now and never meet them—never learn the answers to the questions you came here