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

away on the wind. I glanced back, searched the thick salt air for any trace of smoke, but there was nothing. Not even the searing red-orange of fire beyond the clearing. Still, we kept running, even though the fire was far behind.

If it crept beyond the circle of burned trees, we would be toast. Literally.

We raced down the hill, the sea air in our lungs, and I couldn’t help whooping from the adrenaline that filled my veins.

“Thank you, uh...?” he wheezed, between sharp breaths.

“Clementine,” I said. I’d felt too silly to use the name earlier in our conversation, but with fire raging behind us, silliness was at the very back of my mind.

Anyway, I’m Clementine, and I die at the end of this story.

II

My apartment was the only one with its lights still on, the pale orange buzzing against the foggy night sky. The rent was low enough for me to pay, largely since it wasn’t near a functional beach—it looked out on the water, but the building was so near the edge of a cliff, the ocean could have eaten it whole if it wanted to put in even a little bit of effort.

I say “my apartment” because that’s what it was—not my parents’, not my sister’s. Mine. It was cozy, packed with old textbooks and overdue library books, cheaply furnished with money from my scholarship. Indigo took one look at the stack of books I’d used to replace the front leg of my couch and set about searching for a safer place to sit.

I dropped my keys in the bowl near the door and helped Indigo move a stack of books about the history of Prague off of the desk chair and he took his seat, uncomfortable in my fortress of research.

“Go ahead,” I said, perching on the arm of the couch. “Ask.”

“Why so many books?” He picked up the closest stack and sifted through it. “A Complete History of Rome’s Augurs. And Magic, Marx, and More. Hmm, and The Tempest.”

He glanced up at me, hazel eyes through dark lashes.

“You’ve known about all this for years.”

“Sort of,” I conceded. “I’ve only seen magic once. It was...I’ve never seen anything more terrible. And yet…”

“And yet,” he agreed. “Me, too.”

We sat in silence for a few minutes. The night outside breathed slowly, careful not to upset us. Vivi was absent, at least for the moment. That was a weight off my shoulders. She had been here so often recently, I’d started to think of her as part of the furniture. She belonged between the garish ceramic vase I liked to keep artificial flowers in and the small wood bookcase I’d gotten last year from Goodwill—it had a suspicious set of slices down the side that looked as though they had been made by Wolverine.

“Why don’t you live with your parents?” he asked at last.. “If you don’t mind me asking. If they’re not…”

“They’re both alive,” I said.. “They’re safe and sound. Three years ago, they moved. They live in Dallas with my sister.”

“And they let you stay here?”

“I wanted to,” I admitted. “Here, I watched—”

“Magic.”

“Magic. I saw magic here, real magic, and I couldn’t leave. So I pleaded and pleaded and they said that if I could get a scholarship to a nice high school and if I promised to stay out of trouble, they’d let me live here. I pay my own rent, buy my own food. I’ll graduate in June, and...well, I don’t know about after that.”

“Hm,” he said, and fell quiet.

“Your parents?” I prodded. “They’re…”

“They’re still around—as around as they could be, of course. They’re librarians, so.”

He picked up a book and began thumbing through its index as though that was the end of the conversation.

“So?”

“So we live like librarians,” he said. “It’s a hard life. Lucrative, but hard.”

I thought of the librarians at the boxy public library down the street, preoccupied and exhausted as they organized the shelves or tried to find the DVDs children liked to hide between the books.

“Lucrative,” I repeated, my voice flat.

“I mean, living in the library is a little weird,” he said. “And managing the shelving system is incredibly dangerous. And the androids, gods, they’re huge, and when they malfunction...well, at least it pays well, but I don’t know a single librarian who hasn’t lost a limb.” He took one look at my expression, cocked an eyebrow, and looked back at his book.

That was too much to process. Androids, dismemberment…

I stood, clapped once, turned in a circle, and tried to remember how to act like a relaxed human even though my mind was abuzz with adrenaline. It was late. I had school the next day, and homework that had not been started. Winter break started in a week, so finals were piling up. The choices were between an all-nighter or three very unsatisfactory hours of sleep.

I chose the first and put the kettle on, the ancient stove rattling a little as it heated too quickly.

“Blankets are under the sofa,” I called into the other room. “The spare pillow is either in the hall closet or under the sink. You’ll have to do without a pillowcase.”

Soon, sounds of rummaging came from the living room, a reminder of the fact that I had let a complete stranger enter my house, and had offered him a place to sleep. To be fair, that place to sleep was my decaying sofa, brown suede patched in some places and stitched in others.

“No pillow,” he observed. I pulled open the doors in front of the kitchen sink and groped for the pillow.

“Eugh,” I exclaimed, hand on the damp pillow. The sink must have sprung a leak. “You good without a pillow?”

Pointed silence echoed from the other room. I chose to ignore him and turned my attention to finding tea in the cupboards, which proved difficult, since my cupboards were crammed with canned food and instant noodles.

There were so many questions that needed answering. Like what the hell did librarians do in Indigo’s world? And where