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

a minute, and then chaos would break out across the school.

I knelt by the teacher and put my hand on his shoulder. It felt second-nature to me, as though I should have done this minutes before but had only started paying attention.

“Who are you?” I demanded. There was no time for the kind of sympathy he deserved.

“I couldn’t come see you without pretense,” he managed, “but I had to warn you. It’s my fault this is happening. I should have known he was planning something years ago. I wanted to talk to you after class, but it seems I don’t have much time left. You have to run. Escape the tests. They aren’t—they aren’t what you think they are. They can’t be. Not this time. He’s still alive, and he’s angry. I thought he’d calmed. I thought he’d backed down. But he’s been set off again. He’s here. It’s my fault.”

Vivi recoiled at that. She’d already been standing with her back to the door, as though the man might be able to see her, and now, she fell backward through it.

“Who?” I hissed. Ginger kept her distance instinctively. It would be mere minutes before some administrator got here.

“I can’t tell you,” he breathed. “I never learned his name.”

Well, shit.

The man grabbed my wrist in a grip that could bend iron and squeezed his copy of Midsummer into my hand.

“Be careful,” he said. “Don’t make our mistakes.”

I tried my hardest to summon whatever magic had killed Adrian the night before, but my bones shuddered with every attempt. Kneeling on the linoleum floor of my high school, chaos in the hallway, Ginger blocking the door from any unwanted intruders, I couldn’t do anything.

“It’s okay,” the man said. Through a haze, I realized I had never learned his name. He had said it, but I hadn’t paid close enough attention.

“It’s not okay,” I told him. Vivi leaned against the door and tried to look uninterested. She kept her eyes on me.

So did the teacher. His arms were gone. His face has started to turn an unnatural shade of grey.

“It’s been a long time coming,” he said. “I’m just glad I managed something worthwhile before it all ended. Please, run. We were no match for him. You won’t stand a chance.”

He couldn’t smile. If he’d still been able to cry, I knew he would be sobbing. And yet, as someone banged on the door and Ginger shouted obscenities through the wood, as fog crept tendrils into the room, the teacher turned his head toward the door.

There was Vivi, watching him warily.

“You,” he said.

He burst into ash.

XIV

Ginger and I found ourselves standing in a Starbucks an hour later. There are better places to go after a substitute teacher turns into ash in front of you, but we couldn’t think of any. Even Ginger, who had not stopped her sarcasm since I’d met her, couldn’t think of anything to say.

“So,” I started, then stopped. My hot chocolate steamed in the chilly Northern California air. The ocean’s waves kissed the shore a little way away, fog welling up on the horizon.

“So,” she echoed. “We know whoever is doing this can kill from afar. It was only us in that classroom.”

A table of fellow students glanced over at us with a certain degree of apprehension. Outdoor tables aren’t as private as they seem, after all. I waved them off.

“And whoever it is must be trying to send a message,” I added. “Two deaths in two days. After a ten-year hiatus…”

“Six deaths,” she said. “One in each of our worlds yesterday, and this one in your world today. Maybe more in our worlds. Whoever it is must be getting desperate.” She hadn’t touched her tea. The barista had written his number on the side of the first cup, so she’d asked him for another.

“Desperate for what?” I replied. “I don’t know what could...oh.”

Vivi hopped along the railing that spanned one side of the outyard patio and glared at me. Of course. How had the eight-year-old ghost thought of it before the eighteen-year-old magician-in-training?

“Oh?” Ginger smiled at the table nearby, which shut them up faster than my previous dismissiveness had.

“It’s what he said,” I told her. “‘You have to run. Escape the tests.’”

“Uh?”

“Someone wants us to fail,” I explained. “Someone wants us to run away from this. That guy said the tests aren’t what we think they are. That someone is alive and angry. That the same person has been set off again. This is a warning. The tests are dangerous.”

“I’m not giving up,” she said.

“Neither am I.”

She looked out across the ocean. I’d never had much appreciation for it, probably because I lived so close. Now that Ginger was here, I saw it through her eyes. There was so much of it—an endless horizon, a mystery that was too large to take in at once. A person could spend a lifetime studying a fraction of the ocean and make next to no progress in understanding it.

She jolted to her feet, the iron legs of her chair screeching across the cement.

“Lilac,” she exclaimed. I spun in my own chair as Lilac pelted down the cracked asphalt toward us, panting hard. She looked dishevelled: her embroidered dress shirt was buttoned wrong, her shoes were untied, and her pants were cuffed unevenly. Her eyes shone with exertion as she stopped next to our table and Ginger wrapped an arm around her waist to keep her standing. Even Vivi looked worried.

“What happened?” I demanded. Ginger lowered Lilac into her chair and leaned over her to check for injuries.

“Ginger,” Lilac said, unsuccessfully trying to bat away Ginger’s ministrations. “Really, I’m fine.” She laced her fingers through Ginger’s and stared at the eaves, trying to catch her breath.

At this point, the table next to us was outright staring.

Adrian arrived moments later, panting hard. Adrian took a deep breath, straightened his collar, and combed a hand through his hair.

He glanced at Lilac, then at her and Ginger’s clasped hands, and opened his mouth to