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

just a little. Not in the jaw or near the eyes, but around the very bone structure.

Amaranth had warned me about him, but it had a hard time being afraid of Mint when he looked so scared.

“He’s not looking so good,” Lilac observed, starting for him.

“Sick?” I speculated, waving off the diner’s hostess.

“Drunk,” Adrian corrected. “Sick people don’t pass out like that.”

He was right. Sick people pass out as though they’re going to sleep. Mint was just...stationary. Restrained. He looked as though he was afraid to move.

We stood in a semicircle around the man who was supposed to be our mentor.

I reached out to shake him, but Adrian got there first. He grabbed Mint by the shoulder and—

Mint recoiled, his hand up in self-defense, and blasted Adrian across the room. The young man’s back hit one of the square pillars holding up the ceiling and I tried not to flinch as I heard his head slam into the pillar, too.

Adrian slumped to the floor as Indigo and Lilac rushed for him. Ginger and I crowded around, too.

Lilac prodded his cheek with a finger. “If I have to bring him back again, I’m going to be so mad.”

Adrian opened his eyes a few moments later, fortunately not dead.

“Why do I always have to be the one getting magically KO’d?” he grumbled, letting us pull him to his feet.

Mint had recovered from the shock by then. He hauled himself out of the booth as though it pained him. His face smoothed, flattened back to what his features should have been, but there was something different about the slant of his forehead and the shape of his mouth. He had no visible injuries, which was good, but there are plenty of other ways a person can be in pain. Adrian groaned where he was curled on the floor and gestured at Mint with what was probably a rude signal in his world.

The other customers must have been accustomed to a certain degree of chaos (really, chaos is unavoidable in any place where magicians like us congregate). They glanced over at Adrian, some pitying and some annoyed, and then ignored us all.

“What the hell are you five doing here?” Mint demanded. His hair wasn’t quite right. A streak of deep brown cut through the back of it. That hadn’t been there before. And he had freckles.

“You called us,” I said. “And then you didn’t show.

He stared at me, face completely blank. “I didn’t call you,” he said. “It’s like you insist on being nuisances. These are off-hours for me, you know.”

“I thought you were supposed to be dead right now,” I told him. He waved me off.

“Time doesn’t pass here,” he said. “I can trick my physical schedule by stepping into this realm. There are consequences.”

“Consequences worse than being dead?”

“I—” his face flickered for real this time. His forehead rounded, his chin smoothed, the set of freckles I’d never seen before disappeared. “I think so.”

Adrian moaned again from the floor as a waiter rushed over with a bag of ice. “Death sounds quite pleasant compared to this headache,” he grouched.

“I’m sorry,” Mint told him. His voice sounded different. More normal. More him. He helped Adrian to his feet. “What are you five doing here? I didn’t see you come in.”

“Nice to see you, too,” I told him. “We’ve got a problem.”

“How can I help?”

This was different. I should have been more alert to the changes before, but that moment made me unable to ignore them. This Mint was different, concerned, caring. Before, I’d understood Amaranth’s warning that Mint was dangerous. Now, in that brief second, I couldn’t imagine he could be anything but helpful.

He should have intimidated me more. If I had been anyone else, maybe he would have given me the creeps. Mint’s many voices were enough to throw anyone, not to mention his stature and his...well, his deadness. And then there was the matter of his shifting features.

“There are ghosts everywhere,” I told him. “Is that the second test? Are we supposed to find a way to banish them, or something?”

“Oh, that,” he said. His eyes glossed over a little, as though he was reading off of a teleprompter. “Ghosts show up sometimes after a strong magical event—perhaps your brutal murder of Adrian triggered their arrival. It should be harmless. Don’t go near them, though.”

“Okay, but you see how that—”

“Go,” he told me, shooing at us as a group. “I can’t look at you all right now. Let me be.”

There was that sudden change again. His left cheekbone rippled. I took a step backward.

I gestured to Ginger and Indigo to help Adrian out of the diner, since he looked as though he was about to hit the floor again. I didn’t watch them go, but they were gone by the time I glanced back. Lilac raised an eyebrow at me and slid into the booth after I did, propping her elbows on the table.

Mint’s freckles were back. So was that different face—that sharp jaw, the pink hints of warmth in his cheeks.

Mint took a long minute before he spoke to us.

“I thought I told you to go,” he said. I grabbed his glass and yanked it away before he could do anything. If he wanted to, he could probably send me flying against the back wall or break the glass over my head just to teach me a lesson, but he just stared at me as though there was absolutely nothing he would rather do than sink back into the ground.

“You need to help us,” I said.

“Leave,” he replied, which was as good an incentive as any to continue interrogating him. He couldn’t sit still.

“Not in a million years,” I replied. “Mint. There are people dying in all of our worlds. Ten in the last two days, all around the same time. You can’t be so oblivious that you don’t know about the deaths.”

“I know about them,” he admitted, but said nothing more. He fixed his gaze on the tabletop and refused