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

driftwood and clung onto its sides as though he was in the middle of a heart attack.

“You’re scared of heights,” I observed. “But you flew to my apartment.”

“Hngh,” he replied, which was about as good as a person can expect from someone who is, in fact, deathly afraid of heights.

“Why would you be scared of heights if you can fly?” I asked him.

He shook his head and stared at the driftwood as though his gaze was the only thing keeping it from crumbling beneath him.

I didn’t bother asking any more questions, but directed the board toward the forest. The sky was a pale grey, as usual—the NorCal sky is a brilliant baby blue, but the Half Moon Bay sky is invariably grey in a way that always reminds me of a watercolor painting done over a pencil sketch. I hoped that Indigo might come to appreciate the beauty of the place as much as I did, but that was unlikely; the town had its charm and the forest was breathtaking, but it wasn’t like the futuristic and mechanically refined world he came from. Half Moon Bay was a whisper to the rest of the world’s shout, ready to comfort or to freeze at any moment. The forest itself was almost exclusively redwoods, tall and sharp like the bristles of a wire brush. I wished the fog would clear one day so that I could take my friends on a tour through the brilliant green of the place, circling the thick dirt roads and conjuring magic on the most isolated trails.

I spotted Adrian as we veered along one of the forest roads.

“Adrian!” I called down.

He didn’t bother looking at me—really, he just hovered and smoked a cigarette, his head tipped back against the bark of a great redwood.

“You’re not old enough to smoke,” I told him. It was hypocritical of me, considering the pack of cigarettes I kept in my utensil drawer back home, but it was the only thing I could think of in that moment. Ghosts were afoot. Indigo leaned against my back. I was flying. A lot of things made Adrian’s smoking seem usual and, I supposed, it was. Or it would have been if I’d had many friends my age.

“I was looking for you,” he said. “I need something to take the edge of the stress away.”

“You weren’t going anywhere!”

He rolled his eyes. “Okay, I wanted to wait until you went back to join you. I didn’t want to go inside without my favorite murderer,” he shot back, and stubbed out his cigarette on the ground beneath his heel. “After you, Clementine.”

Indigo shot him a look that could burn through metal but Adrian just soared up to meet us, already a natural at flying on the pane of glass I’d enchanted. I wondered idly how he’d react if he every found something challenging.

Probably not well.

Indigo took one look at the glass panel and made a gagging sound, but he managed not to throw up from his fear of heights all the way to the clearing. The hill was easier to manage when I could fly, but there was still the matter of treetops, wind, and an incline that was frankly criminal.

“Where are the ghosts coming from?” I asked either or both of them. I didn’t much care who answered.

“I don’t know,” Adrian replied, pulling his tailored coat tighter around himself. “But some of them are the people who have been killed recently—that’s for damn sure.”

I hadn’t noticed Marie’s face in the crowd, but to be fair, I didn’t know her all that well.

I wanted to ask how he knew, but I remembered that a cousin of his had been killed earlier that day. He’d probably recognized the face in the crowd, but…

“There are so many,” I breathed. “There must have been at least fifteen outside my apartment building. If there were more with you guys, that means…”

“Either whoever this is has gotten to a lot more people without our knowledge, or they’ve got a way to summon ghosts of people they haven’t killed,” Indigo breathed. “This is really, really bad.”

“Astute observation,” Adrian replied, tone dripping with sarcasm.

Lamps lit as we passed on our way to the house. In the dim orange glow, the grass looked more alive than ever, as though it had been lit from within.

Lilac and Ginger met us in the main living room. Ginger took the driftwood from me and propped it up against a wall that she and Lilac had designated for our transportation.

“Can the ghosts get us here?” I asked.

“We should ask Mint.”

We waited—minutes upon minutes, well over an hour in the end. Mint didn’t show. Not even the slightest tremble of the ground bothered to hint at his resurrection.

There was nothing to say or do. We didn’t know each other well enough to figure out a way to distract ourselves as a group, and we were too impatient for Mint’s arrival to start in on individual tasks in the meantime.

I traced the outline of Amaranth’s note in my pocket and contemplated telling the others about the journal pages and the notes. I knew I wouldn’t, but every second I kept the secret was more painful than the last.

“I think I know how to make a portal,” I said at last. “A proper one, not just a doorway. Maybe we should do that while we wait.”

“All that research,” Indigo grumbled, “and of course you figure it out without my help.”

“It might not work,” I said. “The doorway should be useful, too.”

“You are both the most useful and the least useful person I’ve ever met,” Ginger told me. I shrugged and stood, reaching for a thick black pen from the table.

“Where should we put it?” I asked. “I think it should be somewhere pretty isolated so none of us risks switching worlds on accident.”

Amaranth had advised caution with this one. Considering that none of the others had labels of caution next to them—including one that just said “reverse dismemberment” right next to it—the