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

until we can come up with a way to catch them. Or a way to get Mint to help us.”

“A rare bout of strategic thinking from you,” quipped Ginger. “Sorry. Not the right time, huh?”

Adrian waved her apology off. “Banishing the ghosts should just be a matter of magic, and if Indigo can get his act together, maybe he’ll be able to find a spell for that, hm?”

Indigo raised an eyebrow but didn’t protest.

“And as for the killer…” he trailed off.

“Mint knows who it is,” I said. “Or at least he’s got some inkling.”

“Maybe they have the ghosts do it,” Indigo mused. “The ones that showed up around us today. Or maybe it’s a spell done over a long distance. All bets are off.”

I sighed. This was all too much to handle.

“So,” I said. “There are ghosts on the loose who could kill us. There are people dying in each of our realms. Mint’s going to be of no help. That substitute today tried to help us. The names in that book he had…Mint is one of them. I think that whoever was killing during the last test is killing again, too. I just don’t know why.”

I didn’t mention the tests. I didn’t mention where I’d heard the names before. There was too much at stake to bother with honesty right then.

“Artie Lincoln,” Lilac said. “Penelope Hsu. Jamie Jacobs. Gavin Hernandez. Oberon.”

“We won’t be able to find them,” I said. “Unless Mint helps us, we’ve got no way of finding who those people are. For now, I think we need to get strong enough to fight if they come for us.”

“Fight how?” Ginger interjected. “How are we supposed to stop from being vaporized?

“I don’t know,” I said. “I just think it would be a good idea to get stronger. Just in case. And what other route can we take, unless Mint helps us?”

There were several routes: talking to the other people in the diner, searching for Robin College by ourselves, running away. I hoped against hope that nobody else would think of those. I just needed a distraction so I could comb the library for any references of the names in that book. I needed to know what had happened.

I needed to know how Mint died, and what had happened after.

“Okay,” Lilac said. “That’s a concrete step. We train. One problem, though: we don’t have a teacher.”

Indigo leaned against my shoulder. “We’ve got guts, though.”

I leveled a glare at him. “Oh, yeah, guts will help when a well-trained magician is coming at you with a spell you don’t understand.”

Ginger interjected. “We’ve got a library full of books. We’ve got a mind-reader, a necromancer, a seer, a telekinetic, and whatever the hell Clementine is. We’re not exactly unequipped for this. Just unprepared. As long as we have another step to take, all is not lost.”

“I never thought you’d be the cheerful one,” Adrian told her.

They bickered all the way down the stairs, Lilac offering interjections every so often. I followed, with Indigo at my shoulder.

“Good job,” he said.

“Is that sarcastic? It’s hard to tell with you.”

In the afternoon light, his features looked soft, his eyes a pale hazel. The lighthouse was chilly, but his presence warmed me to the bone.

“No,” he said. “We could have fallen apart back there. We didn’t.”

“That was Ginger.”

“Maybe. But it was also you.”

We walked back to the house together behind the rest of the group. I spend the time trying to figure out why I was so comfortable with Indigo, even though I couldn’t really trust him yet. He cast a smile my way and I went, oh.

That’s how it goes sometimes, I guess. It’s just a subtle oh in the back of your mind, a little ways above the base of your neck. It’s not in the heart so much as the lungs. Your breath changes for a brief moment—so brief, you don’t notice it’s changed until after it’s back to normal. And then there’s this quiet in your mind, this subtle exhale.

It’s as natural as breathing.

I didn’t know what to do with this new information. Even if he felt the same way—even if he also had the slight inkling that there might be something there, that if something came of this after the ghosts were gone and we were free to learn magic, that wouldn’t be so bad—I wouldn’t know what to do with that. It was already too much to be walking across the purple field next to him.

I’d never had that feeling before.

Sure, I’d dated here and there. But I couldn’t share the biggest part of my life with them—I couldn’t even mention it. I could actually think about this, instead of being pulled in two directions, between the mortal and the magic.

Indigo was of magic. He was like me in the ways that mattered, even if we came from quite literally different worlds.

I smiled at him at last.

“Are you sick?” he asked. “You don’t look so good.”

Probably not the best thing to say to a girl having her first real crush. I glanced away, at the ground. It was purple. That made it all worse because there was nothing familiar here.

That was when it struck me at long last. The last three days had been so surreal, so odd, and I’d had so little sleep that I hadn’t bothered to state the truth of the matter to myself: I was in another world, with magic bubbling through me. I’d killed a friend the night before. I’d seen him brought back to life before my eyes. I was receiving spells in secret from a person I had never met. A dead man rose from the ground every night to test me for a magical college.

It was all ridiculous. The week before, my biggest concern had been finishing my college applications on time. Now, my biggest concern was the swarm of ghosts in my world and five others. No, actually, my biggest concern was the person who had killed ten people in the