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

We continued through a dozen more rooms: bedrooms, bathrooms, two kitchens that were mirror images of each other down to the arrangement of the fruit in the fruit bowl. Finally, Lilac ducked into a greenhouse attached to the side of the house and flopped onto a window seat.

“Sit a minute,” she said. “This is too much to take in.”

I propped my driftwood against the doorframe and sagged onto the seat, too. The fabric was damp with the moisture of the greenhouse, but the reality of damp fabric was a comforting reminder of normalcy in the grandest place I’d ever visited. Blue poppies bloomed around the edges of the room. Vivi stayed at the threshold, reluctant to approach the flowers.

“Look,” Lilac said, gesturing to the window across from us. I could have sworn there was a room on the other side of the glass before I’d entered the room, but now, rain sleeted down outside the panes. Further on, willows lined a lake, their leaves torn from them with the wind.

“This is too much,” I said, echoing what she had said earlier. “I don’t know how much more I can take. I just wanted to learn a few spells. Make some stuff float. Not...whatever this is.”

“No,” she replied. “This thrills you, doesn’t it?”

I shrugged, which was as good as agreeing. “I wish it didn’t.”

“Why?”

I glanced at her to check if she was making fun of me, but she looked genuinely curious. Lilac raised an eyebrow and gestured for me to explain.

“You’re all here to look into why someone you loved died,” I said. “I’m here to learn magic. I mean—I don’t know. I want to know how she died, too. It’s not that I don’t care about her death, but we weren’t close.”

Lilac sighed. “I wasn’t close to Seb, either. He was a classmate. We got along, but he was a little boring. I think he was sweet on me. He came over to do homework together one day. It happened when we were in the living room. I couldn’t explain the ash to my parents because I was so hysterical.”

“Damn,” I breathed. “That’s…thank you for telling me.”

“You?”

“Vivi and I hated each other. I don’t remember why.” Vivi rolled her eyes at that, but didn’t say anything.

Lilac smiled softly and looked back at the rain, which drummed on the roof of the greenhouse even though we both knew there was a floor above us.

Lilac shot to her feet and grabbed my driftwood from where it leaned on the wall.

“This thing flies, right?”

“How did you—”

“You wouldn’t have brought it if it wasn’t useful. It’s too big to be a wand, and it’s clearly not a spellbook. It would make a terrible weapon, too, so it’s got to be some kind of transportation.”

I gaped at her. “Okay, Nancy Drew,” I said.

“I don’t know who that is.”

“She’s like a...a fictional teenage detective in my world.”

“Like Eve Edwards. Cool.”

She tugged open the door in the glass wall. Back home, it had been well past midnight, but it looked like mid-afternoon out here. Rain spattered the floor and the sound of thunder echoed through the room. The wind battered the orchids on the table next to me, tearing petals from flowers and scattering them across the green metal tabletop. Vivi winced away from the rain—perhaps it reminded her of the day she died.

Lightning flashed outside, which was enough to get me moving. Lilac has always been the best of the group to go on adventures with. She’s not cautious, like Indigo, or reckless, like Adrian. She’s not randomly sulky, like Ginger. And her deductive reasoning is unmatched by anyone I’ve ever met.

We left our phones on the table. They didn’t work in the house, anyway.

Lilac and I jogged out into the rain, our shoes squelching through the grass. Vivi didn’t follow us out. The clouds above thundered a deep grey, bruised with bits of blue where the sky showed through. Lightning crackled in the distance.

I accepted the driftwood from Lilac, whose tight curls had been plastered to her cheeks by the rain. She laughed at the sky and plucked a pale pink rose from the grass near her knee.

The board hummed to life as I set it in midair and clambered up onto it. I hauled Lilac onto the board next to me, glad that I’d made it big enough to fit two people, and we shot into the sky as soon as I set my palm against the silver charm.

“If I get struck by lightning, you’ll resurrect me?” I called back to her over the sound of rain and wind.

“No promises,” she replied, but she was beaming too much to mean it.

We whooped as the willows swayed and shuddered far below us. Every scary moment from the night—Amaranth, the warning about Mint, everything—left my mind as the sound of rain and the glint of lightning replaced them. Euphoria filled me even as rain soaked my shoes, even as thunder made my heart skip a beat. Lilac linked her arm through mine for balance and leaned back off the driftwood to catch at the willow leaves below us.

“Oh!” she shouted. “So this is why we’re going through all this hell!”

I grinned back at her and directed the board toward the lightning.

“You know a spell to ward off lightning or something?” she asked as she pulled herself back up to a comfortable seat.

“No!” I shouted back, and shot toward the lowest-lying clouds a couple hundred feet above the ground.

This high, my stomach bottomed out. The board didn’t have seatbelts; both of us were clinging to it by the edges where branches had been attached when this had been a tree. Still, there was no way we’d miss this.

“You’re insane!” she yelled over the sound of the wind. There was a laugh in her voice.

I bet we all are, I thought. All five of us.

The clouds were not soft or buoyant when we hit them. They were wet and cold and tough to see through, and there was