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

didn’t put his head in his hands or stomp off or complain. That’s the nice thing about Indigo. He takes what you say at face value. It makes him one of the fairest people I’ve ever met...and one of the easiest to trick.

“Did you stay behind for me or have the four of you already cased the place?” I asked.

“Neither,” he said. “Mint called.”

“From the grave?”

He shrugged. “He’s got a line to the world of the living when emergencies arise.”

“And?”

“And we’re in danger.”

XVI

“You couldn’t have led with we’re in danger?” I hissed.

“I thought it was obvious, considering the last few days,” he grumbled. I pulled him to my feet as I got up and raced to tie my shoes back on. “You can’t come back here, though.”

“Why?”

He paced to the window and gestured beyond it. “That’s why.”

I didn’t want to look, but my curiosity and fear forced me to. I leaned out the window, searching for fire, a flood, anything that could have been brought by magicians.

I didn’t expect ghosts.

“Holy fuck,” I shouted, and lunged backward, knocking Indigo to the ground in my desperation to get away from the specters pacing the sidewalk below my window. We tumbled to the floor together.

“What the hell is that supposed to be?”

“Uh,” he said. “I’m pretty sure it’s supposed to be ghosts.”

I gave him my best glare. “I know that, dummy. But I’ve never seen more than one at a time.”

He gave me a curious frown and untangled our limbs, pulling himself to his feet with the help of my hoverboard. I stood and started for the door, but I paused when I heard the stairs creak outside my apartment.

It was a chilling creak that could have frozen dust motes midair. It sent me lunging for anything that could be used as a weapon—a knife, a screwdriver, my calculus textbook. Indigo stopped me with a hand on my forearm and gestured to the window.

“Do you really think you’re going to stab a ghost?” he whispered, gesturing to the sharpened pencil I’d finally gotten my fingers around. “We need to get out of here before they get this far. Mint says we’ll be safe at the Hekataion.”

I wanted to tell him exactly how little I trusted Mint, but it wasn’t the time. Down on the sidewalk below, we’d seen ghosts just like Vivi—translucent, all too human, and clearly angry. What the hell Mint actually wanted from the five of us could come later.

“I need to pack,” I said.

“You what?”

“Pack.” I grabbed my schoolbag, which was a satchell stuffed with things I didn’t need, and emptied it out onto the sofa. Odds and ends flowed from it: textbooks and charging cables, yes, but also a bottle of rubbing alcohol, two notepads no larger than my palm, a torn piece of silk, and a roll of twine. Two needles and no thread followed.

“You’re the weirdest person I’ve ever met,” Indigo told me.

“Says the person who can move things with his mind,” I shot back, stuffing the copy of Midsummer deep into the satchel. After that went a jacket, a handful of pens, a box of those fruit leather strips, my laptop and charger, and a disposable camera.

“What’s that?” Indigo said, prodding at the camera.

“Family heirloom,” I said, deadpan, and almost laughed when he nodded. “Shall we?”

He opened his mouth to reply but was cut short by a rustling from the hall. It sounded like the rustling a pack of dogs makes when they’re chasing a rabbit through the forest: joyful, predatory, ready for the kill.

Or maybe I’m just unreasonably afraid of ghosts, I thought to myself. Maybe they’re friendly.

Indigo must have seen that thought in my face because he grabbed my waist before I could do something rash. He hauled me onto the driftwood.

“We really need to go,” he said.

I pressed my palm to the charm and glanced back at my apartment one last time. The door rattled, the knob scraping across the doorframe as some invisible force tried to pry it off its hinges.

This room housed my life’s work. It was a studio apartment full of almost-magic, books stacked along walls and in corners. There were notes everywhere. It looked as though a grad student had holed up there to write her dissertation, with all the research that entailed.

And then there were the personal parts of the place—parts I often forgot because of my focus on research. There were the family photos, my sister’s cheek pressed up against mine as we smiled at the camera on the beach. There were the little awards collected when I was younger and had been more interested in a variety of things: a spelling bee certificate for fourth place, a photo of me in costume from when I used to dance a little bit, a ribbon for a three-legged race.

It wasn’t as though I could never come back, but in a way, I hadn’t really come back after that first night meeting Mint. There was no way to come back to this place without thinking of it as the den of an obsessed, too-hopeful teenager, even though my obsessiveness and hopefulness had been what had got me to my seat on that flying piece of driftwood.

“Clementine,” Indigo said, which snapped me out of my meandering. I said a quick goodbye to the apartment and all it entailed: the eggshell walls covered with notes and paintings, the clutter across the furniture, the glass blocks of my makeshift coffee table, my bed in the opposite corner of the room, the peeling paint of my bathroom door, the tin tray of snacks I kept on the left end of the couch.

It shouldn’t have been so easy to fly off into the early afternoon, slicing a route into the sky above the heads of staring, unblinking ghosts.

As soon as we were high enough in the air that we might look like a hawk or a UFO to anyone who spotted us, I turned to Indigo. He sat behind me on the