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

if I’d ever imagined doing that before I did it. Or maybe it happened so fast that by the time my mind caught up, it felt as though it had been minutes. Maybe it had been minutes.

What I do know is that the tomatoes Racquel had dropped were gone. They weren’t even mush. They were just gone, probably specks somewhere. She was safe, fortunately, but absolutely terrified, her back to the chain link fence that separated the property from the street. I cried out from above and Racquel glanced up to get a look at me. The look in her eyes—shock, fear, anger—caught me by the throat even from meters away.

I’d made a huge mistake.

The sound of the blast caught up to me in the next moment—or, really, the lack of sound caught up to me. It wasn’t the way you think of explosions. It wasn’t loud. It was just a sigh, like the whisper of wind in the rafters of an empty hall, and then my apartment was rubble and the tomatoes were gone.

I couldn’t think. I could barely see. The hoverboard shook along with the unsteady beat of my heart. Where were the tomatoes?

The ghosts were gone, too. That was the important part, but it took me the better part of a minute to realize that they had disappeared. I couldn’t figure out whether they had fled or been destroyed, but in that moment, I didn’t care. I just wanted to go, to get away from that stare, to stop imagining witch-burnings and ghosts coming back for me.

The ghosts were gone. Someone finally screamed from a nearby apartment. A huge portion of the outside wall of the apartment below me peeled off and slammed into the ground with a dull thud. The roof was singed, the building cracked near one corner.

And my own apartment was nothing. It was a fluttering of pages as my stacks upon stacks of books had been ripped apart by my magic. The walls had crumbled into ashes, falling a story to the ground. Inside was glass and metal and wood, all ripped apart like a bomb had gone off. There was my mattress, torn in half. There was the sheet, stuck to the wall by shrapnel. There was my stack of books on magic in the eighteenth century, all shredded, only identifiable by the distinctive red cover of my favorite of them. There was half of my refrigerator, the door torn off, the box of eggs still intact, the light inside the fridge still humming. And there—there—was Vivi, standing in the middle of it all, my little ghost.

My magic had protected her, and I hated myself for it.

She gave me an awful, gruesome smile and gestured to my apartment door. The door itself had collapsed into the hallway, but I could still see a note, untouched by the blast where it sat on the doormat outside. Everything else looked wrong, different. The grass outside had been scorched.

The smell brought tears to my eyes. I wanted to hit something.

I gave Vivi a look that said, I’d kill you if you weren’t already dead, but I swooped from the sky anyway, ignoring Raquel’s second scream. I’d seen the blood on her cheek, the bruise beginning to form on her leg. I wasn’t about to get closer, in case my magic was still volatile.

It was second-nature to land on the floor of my apartment, and when my weight made the floorboards buckle into the next unit down, it was also second nature to catch myself on the driftwood.

Someone’s footsteps echoed on the staircase below my apartment, reminding me that I didn’t have much time before a lot of people with really uncomfortable questions swarmed my apartment—not much of an improvement from the ghosts that had crowded into it before. I hauled myself onto my driftwood and guided it along floor level until I reached the pale ivory envelope in the middle of all the rubble.

I closed my fingers around it and turned to go, but I caught the eye of one of my neighbors as I made to leave. I’d never learned his name, since he’d only moved in two weeks before, but he’d made an effort to introduce himself to me.

“Hey!” he called. “Are you okay?”

In the middle of the rubble, I must have looked as though I’d just survived some sort of bomb blast. The pipe under my sink oozed water that turned the dust on my kitchen floor to a mushy cocktail of ash and grout. What had formerly been my ceiling was a pile of splinters on my floor.

I couldn’t breathe. I couldn’t think. I could only see the little green envelope with a daub of red sealing wax.

Amaranth had been here and hadn’t done anything about the ghosts. There had been ample time to get rid of the ghosts, but whoever wrote me these notes either wasn’t powerful enough to banish them or wasn’t willing to help me.

Neither of those were good signs.

I started to unseal the note when a hand grabbed my arm.

“Fire,” I breathed.

My hand moved before my mind acknowledged that his face was a friendly one. Flames spilled into the space between us and didn’t stop coming.

My neighbor coughed, fell backward, slapped at the fire across his shirt. At that moment, I recognized him—I hadn’t seen him approach, and if he had said anything, I must have tuned it out. I jumped after him, trying to swat out the fire’s course across his shirt, but he kicked me away with one leg and scrambled away, shirt still smoking.

“What the hell?” I heard from the hallway—a different voice, maybe a woman’s this time.

“Fire!” my neighbor yelled, his balding head receding through my doorway. “Fire!”

That was enough to get people moving. When girls are young, we’re often taught to scream “fire” if anyone ever tries to assault us. The assumption is that people will pay more attention to a woman shouting “fire” than a woman shouting that she is being