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

But this was Indigo, and he was doing his best to defend me. As soon as Cecelia raised her eyes to watch him, I turned my head to look at him and found the paper in Indigo’s trembling hands, the sheet crumpled under his too-tight grip.

I lifted myself from the floor and searched my mind for a spell that might help, or even an old wives’ tale. Maybe iron, salt, silver...or was that for werewolves?

It didn’t matter. Indigo was already prepared, of course.

He held one hand out toward the ghost of his sister, her pale glow unsteady as a fleeing moth’s wings in the rich darkness of the hallway. Indigo glowed in a different way, nothing supernatural about it, just the hallway’s warm golden light on his hair and cheekbones as he opened his mouth to speak.

“I banish you,” he began, his eyes on the paper. He couldn’t look at his sister. His voice was near-breaking. “To the—to the fields afar. To the golden grass and the—the skyless night and the realm where answers are. I—”

She flashed before him, sliding her head through the paper, and Indigo choked on his words as Cecelia lifted a hand to his face.

Never quite good enough, eh, brother? she said. You never were the favorite, were you?

In a moment, she was back in front of me, hovering a good two feet off the floor, a hand at my throat. Her grip should have been weak, but some power of the afterlife made her grip as strong as a baseball bat to my throat and she shoved me back, across the hall, my feet skidding over the floor until my head slammed back into a carved wall ornament.

Indigo repeated what he’d said before, then added a line I couldn’t hear through the ringing in my ears, but Cecelia’s hand had cut off my air. Whatever Indigo was doing wasn’t working fast enough, and as I listened, he faltered, guilt flooding his features.

I tried to suck in one last gasp of air, one more breath of the cool woody scent of the hall, to shout or scream or do something. Pushing Cecelia wouldn’t work; my hands went right through her even as her hand kept me pinned. Fire wouldn’t work on her, and the big magic that had blasted the ghosts away earlier didn’t seem to be coming back anytime soon.

My vision spiralled, faded, went grey and red, and finally—

“Oh, give me that,” came a distant voice. Lilac, or Ginger? Or another woman altogether? Or someone else?

I couldn’t keep my focus, even as the new voice steadied and ran like cool, calming ice across my skin. The hand on my neck was too strong, my magic too weak, and darkness too welcoming.

I felt myself fade.

And then there was warmth, a back pressed to my chest, and a voice, too loud in my ears: “Lia, get off of her!”

Words were exchanged, but the hand still bore down on my throat. My breath still faded. The warmth at my chest anchored me to this world, but I knew that I’d be gone soon enough.

XXII

I woke hours later, in a room I recognized as the one I’d laimed in recent nights. The light was all wrong, the deep red of the setting sun lighting my hands with a rusty glow. Then there was a comforter, my comforter, thick and white as seafoam.

Then there was a mass of dark brown hair, a rumpled white button down, a navy coat used as a makeshift blanket, and a black cat curled between us…

I tried to say his name, but my throat hurt too much to force sound out. Still, the cough was enough to wake him, and Indigo bolted up next to me, guilt flooding in right alongside consciousness.

“Clementine,” he said. “She’s awake!” he called out into the hallway.

“Shh,” I said, still bleary and struggling for every breath.

He set a hand on my forehead, my neck, my shoulder, as though there was something he could do to make me stop looking at him like that. There wasn’t.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “I’m so, so sorry.”

There was nothing I could say to that, not just because my throat had been bruised to the point of being unable to speak. In those early days, when he was still ruled by fear, Indigo had always been better at apologies than at taking actions that would not demand apologies from him. A senseless rage filled me at the inaction, at the pain in my throat, at the aching of my spine from Cecelia’s grip.

She was his sister, I reminded myself. What would I have done if Claire had been that ghost? What would I have done if she’d gone after Indigo? If the only way to separate them was to banish her?

I knew the answer. I would have done it. To save a life, I would have done it.

I am not as sentimental as Indigo. And I don’t have the same loyalty to my family, either, perhaps because I have spent so little time around them.

I couldn’t bring myself to blame him.

Besides, there was no lasting harm done. Maybe he knew I wouldn’t die. Maybe he calculated the risks and realized more lasting harm would come of banishing his sister than allowing me to be hurt.

But I doubt it.

He’d allowed me to be hurt. The guilt in his face and his endless apologies and his simmering rage at his sister told me he wouldn’t do the same thing again, but my memory of Cecelia’s hand on my throat and her merciless eyes mere inches away from mine would haunt my nightmares long after the bruises healed.

“I’m so sorry,” Indigo said again. Maybe it was my distant expression or my silence, but he’d never looked so fearful as when he thought he wouldn’t be forgiven.

Except for when his sister had grabbed me. That had been true fear, true and unending and paralyzing. He’d put himself between us, even though he knew