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

for fear that the kid would do something really awful. Rose tried to put the trees out, but the fire wouldn’t stop even when she poured water on them.

I’m worried that guy will try to hurt one of us. There are four tests to go, and if this is how it started, who knows how it’ll end?

I saw a vision during the test, too. I should keep track of those, in case anything comes of it. It was a young girl with dark hair in a mansion hallway, strangling an older girl. The young one looked blue, and a little translucent. The weird part was that when the young woman tried to escape, she couldn’t, since her hands went right through the girl’s arms. I wonder what it means.

The page left off there. Why did Amaranth want me to have this?

And who was this young, translucent girl with dark hair?

My mind flashed to Vivi’s inhuman sound when she’d heard Amaranth’s name. She was a young translucent girl with dark hair. I was a young woman. But she wasn’t real. She was a manifestation of my grief and anger. I’d been telling myself that for so long that I’d finally started to believe it.

If magic existed, though...maybe she was real.

I tried to take a couple of deep breaths to calm myself, but I couldn’t. I was too excited, too afraid. And, more importantly, I was finally part of a real mystery—one I had to solve.

Gods, this was getting complicated. Too complicated. Fun complicated.

I don’t want to admit that I started smiling then, but I was beaming. I shouldn’t have been. A strange person knew where I lived, had delivered a note to my house, had told me I was their favorite.

I glanced at the charm again. It was a plain circle, nothing special at first, but the edges were gently uneven, like the outline of a flower. At its center was a character made of a single stroke of the pen, intricate but all one unit. Its twists and turns surrounded the end of the line, which concluded at the center of its complex, labyrinthine structure.

A smarter person would have burned the paper. Particularly considering the torn-out journal page, which could read like a threat, if I thought about it—a warning from Amaranth that I could be in danger and that they would not help me. Moreover, the spell could well have been a curse, of course. It could have summoned a monster, or made my blood quite literally boil, or hypnotized me. I knew that, too. It wasn’t as though I was ignorant of the dangers of magic, although I hadn’t yet learned the rules of the particular kind of magic I was being tested to study.

I just thought that it was worth the risk.

Whatever happened, there would be a flash and a bang, or at least the sizzle of magic in the air. Boiling blood or a monstrous invasion or permanent hypnotism was worth the satisfaction.

They say curiosity killed the cat. What they don’t say: magicians are significantly more curious than cats, and almost as reckless when it comes to breaking stuff.

I pushed all thoughts of Amaranth and secrets and whatever Mint might have been hiding to the back of my mind as I combed through my apartment for something big enough to sit on. A chair was the simple answer, but if it was going to be replacing my bike, I wouldn’t want to be zooming down the road in a rolling desk chair.

I swept the books off of my coffee table and yanked the driftwood plank off of the glass blocks that held it up. The table had been an improvisation: I’d found the blocks at a neighbor’s estate sale and one of the older men down the street had given me the driftwood out of his collection when he’d needed to make room for more.

Soon I had a Sharpie in one hand and the note in the other.

Fortunately, I stopped myself before I could do something completely foolish. A Sharpie was not suited for my first ever spell.

I switched the Sharpie out for a marker with silver ink I’d used for a science fair poster back in freshman year and started sketching.

It came naturally, which shocked me more than the note itself had. Art has never been my strong suit, but the lines seemed to draw themselves. The center of the rune was the hardest, of course, with its curves and its intricate loops encircling each other, but when I finally capped my marker, the charm looked almost identical to its counterpart on the note.

“Fly?” I suggested, my finger on the mark. The board did nothing.

I put the note and the marker down and waited. A minute later, I started pacing. There was really nothing left to do except my homework. But what was the point in homework if my next school was Robin College? Mint had never asked about my grades in physics or my most recent essay for English…

I’d give up this life in a heartbeat if I could see beyond this horizon into another world. There was so much more to know. Being privy to secrets this big and magic this important was worth everything from my current life and more.

Still, I managed to scribble out a couple answers to my Spanish homework questions before the driftwood started to clatter. The sound wasn’t exactly a clank and wasn’t exactly a chime, but it rested somewhere between the two and didn’t stop for a few seconds.

I threw my homework aside and slipped on the wood floor as I rushed to crouch next to the board. The warm light above washed across the board as something odd and beautiful began to bloom across it.

Or, really, something began to bloom out of it. The pale brown of the driftwood began to seep into the air. I reached out my hand to catch the color, to figure out what, exactly, it was, but it slipped through my