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

He’d known me less than a week. He’d known Cecelia his whole life. That choice was...it meant something. Something big.

I managed a raspy reply. “It’s not difficult to forgive a person for loving his family too much to hurt them.”

“No, but—”

Ginger hurtled into the room and cut Indigo off with a hand to his shoulder. She pressed two fingers to my sternum as Lilac and Adrian jogged in to join us.

“Touch makes me better able to sense what’s going on inside your head,” she explained. “And your physical state, with a spell.”

She breathed a few words, a little ditty of a poem, and sighed a long breath of relief.

“You’ll heal soon,” she told me. “Your fearless protector over here refused to leave, but we brought him those books and he managed to cobble together a healing spell of sorts. It seems to be working.”

I nodded, since I didn’t have the strength for anything else.

“We’ll leave you,” Lilac told me, nudging Ginger away from the bedside and giving Adrian a significant look that he promptly ignored. “If you hear voices, that’s the loudspeaker.”

“Loud—” I tried, but I couldn’t finish the word.

“We recorded the banishment spell and we’re playing it from around the house,” Adrian explained. “The blue poppies don’t seem to be working well at this point. They’re too old. I found a mark that takes magic from the air here and uses it to put power behind the words, but it’s not a long-term solution.”

“Yeah,” Ginger agreed. “It’s fucking insufferable.”

Lilac snorted and gestured again toward the door. “She needs to rest to heal,” she reminded the others. Toto slid from the bed to the floor and padded out of the room.

Indigo glanced down at me, still guilty. I wanted him to stay, but I didn’t want to spend the afternoon reassuring him. I needed to heal. I’d spend my breath on that once I had more to spare.

The four of them left me alone, even though I would have preferred the company. Even with their assurance that no ghost would pass into the house soon, I couldn’t help but be wary. If Vivi showed up, she’d have no difficulty completing the job Cecelia had started.

My muscles ached. Breaths came easier now, one breath drifting into the next with little effort, but my neck still throbbed, even long after the sun had set. I lit a lamp on my bedside table and pulled the small leather-bound book out of my jacket, which someone had taken off of me, gently folded, and set down on my other side.

It was the book Cassie had allowed me to keep.

I flipped it open, scanning the runes in the flickering flames of the kerosene lamp, but the runes were as incomprehensible as ever. More than anything, they looked like diagrams out of one of my algebra textbooks, round and marked with smaller lines that seemed to measure units. Occasionally there were simple letters—so simple, they might have been Arabic numerals—but I couldn’t read them either.

If only…

The realization hit me as hard as Cecelia had earlier. I tumbled out of bed, my joints still aching, and my vision went splotchy grey, but I didn’t pause for breath or a calm mind as I switched my clothes out for sweats and a sports bra.

I grabbed the book, a sweatshirt branded with a college logo in an alphabet that was definitely not of Earth (the letters rotated of their own accord), and a pair of socks. I searched for my driftwood, only to remember that Cecelia had splintered it. Surely, it was still leaning against the fence outside, broken in two.

It had been a good steed.

I ran the old fashioned way up to the library, then up to the top floor, my feet pounding on the steps of the spiral staircase. Someone exclaimed from the first floor when they spotted me, out of bed and running, but I made it upstairs without event.

The top floor was dedicated to spellcraft. We hadn’t been up there much yet, mostly because we still didn’t understand the math of magic—so far, I’d only been able to do spells that involved copying a symbol and then summoning magic through speech.  This floor had no easy explanations, just a spell’s title and then a symbol. Usually the spells’ titles weren’t in English or any language that could be translated in a dictionary found on Earth, but I’d wandered up to this floor the other day and had found…

“Ah!” I breathed, pulling a flimsy blue volume from between two much fancier leather-bound tomes. The title was in English, which was why I’d opened it the other day, and there, on the tenth page, was the spell I’d stumbled across.

“Translate,” I breathed, my finger on the spell’s title. I pulled my Sharpie from my back pocket and scrawled the rune on the spine of the book Cassie had let me keep. I could almost hear my father lecturing me about marking up library books, but this wasn’t the time.

“Traduisez,” I said, reading the spell’s title out of the little blue volume, and then waited a moment for that familiar whoosh of magic. It was smaller than the gust of air that came with my big magic, but it was still there, whispering over my cheek like a raindrop gusting by.

I waited a few moments, since I knew magic sometimes took time to work, and then opened the little brown volume again. There were the explanations, translated for my eyes, and the mathematical symbols, now familiar runes I could replicate if need be.

Adrian’s face appeared at the top of the spiral staircase and I turned a smile bright enough to light a cavern in his direction.

“Woah, chill,” he said. “I’m just coming to check on you.”

“I did it,” I told him. “I did it.”

“Okay.” He offered me his arm. “I think you need to go back and lie down now, hm?”

I almost argued with him, but then I saw myself in one of