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

but saved the envelope on a whim. Grabbing a piece of scrap paper from between TheJoy of Cooking and an older tome written in mangled Aramaic, I scribbled out a note of my own.

Amaranth--

Who are you?

It was a stupid question. Nobody in their right mind would answer that in a straightforward way, and magicians have always been notorious for the way they wield words to fit their own agendas.

I crossed it out, grabbed a receipt from the dining room table, and tried again.

Amaranth--

Tell me what you want in plain terms, without pretense, and you might get it, if you give me what I want, too.

Clementine

Maybe this Amaranth would be an ally. They clearly intended to warn us about the same danger the substitute was scared of. These tests must have been tied intimately with death.

I wasn’t about to cut and run now.

Whatever had happened during that last round of tests—whatever had made that man so scared that he’d come to my school to warn me—would not stop with us unless we stopped it. Amaranth might be an ally, and I’d take all the allies I could get.

I shoved the receipt into the envelope and left the envelope tucked under my door. It would be a good idea to go soon. I had deaths to investigate, friends to meet, magic to learn, a test to take, but I just grabbed the copy of A Midsummer Night’s Dream that peculiar substitute had left me and began reading.

There was nothing to do except take a few minutes off. Amaranth, these secrets, the names, the ashes, this history that I was not yet privy to but knew existed...that would have already been too much. Then there was the magic, the tests, the house rising from empty ground. Any sane person would have turned around as soon as they’d seen that clearing

I turned to Vivi.

“He saw you,” I said. “He saw you. Are you real?”

She didn’t even bother to look at me. For a brief second, I tried to recall the last time I’d seen her smile, and came up blank.

“You need to tell me what’s going on,” I said. “I know you can talk. This test went wrong ten years ago. You died ten years ago. I don’t expect you’re completely ignorant about the connection between those two events.”

She finally met my eyes. She sighed, although I couldn’t hear the sound, and she looked away again.

I slumped onto my couch next to her. Maybe I was talking to nothing. Maybe my magic had made the substitute hallucinate Vivi, too. I had no idea how it worked, so that seemed plausible.

But the writer of the journal had seen a girl who looked an awful lot like Vivi.

I should have gone to meet the others. I’d told them I was going to stop at home briefly and then find them, but now I was just curled against my sofa cushions, trying not to cry. I didn’t know if I could handle reading the second page Amaranth had left behind.

Vivi reached over as though she was going to stroke my hair, but Indigo arrived before Vivi could set her hand down. Vivi disappeared as soon as Indigo’s face appeared outside my window. He knocked at the window and took my silence as permission to enter, which it was. Feet hit the ground, then the rustle of fabric and the sound of someone else’s breathing approached.

“We should run,” I said. It wasn’t a suggestion. Just an observation.

“We should,” he agreed.

He took a seat next to my knees and out of the corner of my eye, I saw him keep himself from resting a hand on my hip.

“Are you scared?”

I thought for a moment. Amaranth had said I couldn’t tell the others about the notes and the help lest I stop receiving it. That superseded any need to tell Indigo the truth, but still...I couldn’t help feeling bad about my dishonesty.

“No,” I said, sitting up. “I’m not scared.”

“But?”

“But what?”

He glanced from me to the book and back, spooked, curious, and...something else.

“You’re not scared, but…?”

I sighed and looked at the ceiling, but there was no wisdom to be gleaned up there.

“I’m not mad, but I wish I knew who the hell the four of you are,” I said to him. The writer of the journal pages had complained of dishonesty from the unnamed magician. What if that was what tore us apart? And what did that say about me lying to Indigo?

He didn’t flinch—he stilled, instead. That was worse, somehow. It meant that on some level, he’d been expecting my words.

“We’ve only known each other for three days,” he told me. Had it been that short of a time? It felt like half my life. Maybe it was the sleep deprivation.

“I need to know I can trust the people I work with,” I said. My voice was too clinical, too clipped. I couldn’t figure out why, why the hell this bothered me so much. I’d never had friends like Indigo before—friends who paid close enough attention to me to figure out what I was thinking without my having to tell them. For a moment, I wished I could go back to being a face in a crowd.

“You can trust me,” he said. “I’ve told you some of my secrets. One day, you’ll know them all. We all need time with this. And I don’t see you asking Ginger or Lilac or Adrian about what they’re hiding.”

I wanted to say, We don’t have time. A man today told me to run from these tests and then he burst into ash. We could be killed just like that at any moment if we don’t figure out who the hell is doing this, and why. And I’m really, really scared that the very person who’s supposed to be helping us is putting us in grave danger.

I needed to talk to Mint.

I didn’t say that. Instead, I just said, “Okay.”

It wasn’t a passive-aggressive okay. I don’t do passive aggression. It wastes time. And Indigo