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

become a magician, partly because it’s a waste of magicians’ valuable time and partly because it’s generally acknowledged that most apologies are insincere. There’s nothing magicians hate more than insincerity.

“Really,” Adrian said. “Don’t worry about it.”

There aren’t many people who can come back from the dead and say something like that afterward, but Adrian was one of those people.

Five sets of eyes examining me like a specimen was five too many, so I tried to turn away. Mint stepped forward and crouched in front of me.

“That was big magic,” he said. He reached to clasp my shoulder, but dragged his hand back with some effort.

Adrian snorted. “Obviously.”

“No, I mean...there’s no fancier term for it. It’s just... unpredictable and dangerous. It’s called big magic.”

“Unpredictable and dangerous,” I repeated.

“There isn’t really a name for it,” he said. “It’s not like being a necromancer or a sympathetic. It’s just...big magic. Few people have it. It’s difficult to control, since it only works in situations where you’re experiencing intense and overwhelming emotions.”

“Like fear,” I surmised, glancing at Adrian.

“Like fear,” he confirmed. “So I’d be careful in terms of strong negative emotions. Joy is fine, I think. But anger or sadness or bitterness can be…”

“Dangerous,” I breathed. My eyes were still on Adrian, who was picking a pellet of cotton off of his sweater.

Mint nodded, grimaced in pain, and turned to Adrian.

“You’re okay?” he said. “No zombie stuff? Nothing like a weird craving for brains or blood or...whatever?”

Adrian shrugged as though he hadn’t been dead a mere two minutes ago. What kind of past could provoke such an accepting and passive reaction to being brought back from the dead?

I looked to Mint, then Indigo, Lilac, Ginger, and Adrian.

“I think I’d like to go home now,” Adrian said.

IX

I hadn’t been in Half Moon Bay by myself in twenty-four hours, which wasn’t actually that long, but it had been such an eventful twenty-four hours that I might as well have been away from home for a week.

It was a little strange to feel so lonely, especially since I had spent most of my life alone.

Being alone isn’t all bad. Sometimes, it’s much better than the confinement of being social. If you’re like me (and I suspect you are), you might understand firsthand how freeing being alone can be, compared to the insular and often petty or stressful experience of having friends you don’t like all that much.

I’ve always prided myself on holding that opinion, but being alone after that incident in the forest gave me the sense that I was being watched, which made me feel very much not alone.

Rather, it made me feel lonely.

And nobody likes feeling lonely. Loneliness isn’t the feeling of being alone. It’s the awareness that you couldn’t stop being alone even if you tried your damndest. And you can feel it anywhere.

I couldn’t help but feel lonely in front of a hardware store on Main Street—lonely and afraid.

Half Moon Bay doesn’t have many streets in its main area, although the whole place is scattered across bluffs and fields for miles. Since it’s between San Francisco and Santa Cruz, people mostly come looking to get away from their work or their vacation, so we manage something in between: no touristy stuff, just a quaint little town (technically a city, but anyone who takes a look at the central few streets will know it’s not a city in the same way San Francisco is).

I’d like to say I’d fallen in love with the place when I was younger, and really, I should have. It’s the perfect place for magic, and I am—as Indigo has so affectionately put it so many times—a magic leech. I’d prefer to describe myself as an obsessive magician, intent on hunting for every scrap of the magical world I can find.

Something about Half Moon Bay screams magic. It’s not the Safeway on Cabrillo, or the huge house with glass walls just off the highway, or the Mr. Pickle’s Sandwiches up in Montara. It’s not the fields of pale green lettuce peeking out of the soil, or the lines of expensive, empty beach houses that wait for the sea to swallow them, or the parking lots clogged with old pickups painted in muted colors. It’s not the Army surplus store that looks like a beach shack, it’s not the fog that sweeps up from the ocean in great seething waves in the evening, and it’s not even the redwoods crowding the ridges of the mountains blocking Half Moon Bay from the rest of the world.

The magic lies where the ocean meets the beach, where the sand sticks to skin, where the salt spray erodes the pastel paint on house sidings. It’s so magical, it makes me want to cry sometimes. Which is odd, since magic never really makes me want to cry elsewhere. There’s just something wrong, something odd, about this place being so special when almost nothing unusual has happened here in recent history. It’s a quiet town with quiet people who like the fog and the ocean. There shouldn’t be anything all that magical about it.

Speaking of unusual, I should have expected Vivi’s reappearance in front of that hardware store on Main Street. It would have been too good to be true if she had actually left me alone for good, and especially considering what had happened earlier that night—who I had killed—maybe I didn’t deserve to be alone.

Maybe I didn’t deserve to have the peace I so desperately wanted.

Just so you know, Vivi never talked after she died. Even ten years after her death, I didn’t know whether she was silent by choice or not. Some part of me was sure I was imagining her, and that my mind had silenced her for my own good.

I could see the sign for the two-for-one wrench sale through her left shoulder.

She stared at me. Like Mint, she only blinked occasionally and with purpose, so she blinked a greeting at me and then stood uncomfortably close to my side.

A