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

“That’s not nearly enough time,” I replied, but I clamped my mouth shut after he sent a glare my way.

“Adrian, you’re up.”

Adrian stepped out of line and strode past me as Indigo wrapped an arm around my shoulder.

“What do you want me to do?” he asked, completely unfazed by my failure.

And it was failure. A mere few minutes wouldn’t be enough for me to perform some incredible feat of magic. I would need hours to recuperate, or maybe Cecelia had performed some spell that had sucked all of my magic out of me, or maybe—

“Hey,” said Indigo, his voice breaking through my quickly tunnelling vision. “I know that look.”

I closed my eyes and tried to take as many deep breaths as I could manage without coughing. In the meantime, Mint had issued his instructions to Adrian, but I hadn’t heard them. I’d been too focused on my failure.

My failure.

When I opened my eyes, the failure felt almost inconsequential. My death was hurtling at me. I had no time to worry about school.

I didn’t want to think about it, but I would have to. There hadn’t been a death in a couple of days, but our realms hadn’t magically spliced together, which meant something bad was definitely coming...we just didn’t know when.

It was going to be us next. As soon as we were all home, I knew in my gut that we were going to die.

Adrian’s eyes glowed in the darkness and when he finally spoke, he spoke a little like Mint, his voice separating into a dozen.

“Tonight,” he said. This wasn’t mere prediction about visits from family or next moves in a fight. This was something else entirely. “A father, a sister, a mother, a cousin, an aunt.”

“Huh,” Mint said. He should have looked more surprised.

Adrian’s eyes faded and he almost crumpled, but Ginger caught him before he could actually fall.

“What the fuck was that?” I demanded, anxiety sharpening my anger and confusion.

“I don’t know,” he said. “It’s what I saw. I have to go now, though. One of the faces I saw was my father.”

“And the others?”

We all exchanged glances. If Adrian’s father was in danger, along with four other people...there was surely someone coming for our families.

A sister, he’d said. A sister. My sister had come to see me, to check to make sure I didn’t need to be committed after my apartment had blown up and I’d disappeared. She was here, in Half Moon Bay.

It couldn’t be a coincidence.

“Claire,” I breathed, and bolted. All thoughts of the danger of going home flew from my mind. I had to save my sister. My friends had to save their families. There was no other option. No other way out.

Mint’s voice stopped me in my tracks.

“If you go, you fail,” he said. When I turned to look at him, I thought I saw genuine pity in his face. It might have just been a trick of the light.

My friends streamed past me, headed up the stairs. Indigo gave me a kiss on the cheek as he headed to protect his family, and I squeezed his hand on his way past.

It was a goodbye. A real goodbye. We might not see each other ever again.

I would find Oberon. If I survived this, I would find Oberon, and I would kill him. That was just a fact.

Mint looked truly dead in the light of the ballroom. Maybe he’d lost all hope of controlling us, or maybe he’d finally started to feel bad for allowing us to be in such danger.

“Choose,” he told me.

I knew my choice, but it tore my heart in half to say goodbye to the world magic promised me.

“Claire,” I said. “I will always choose my sister. Tear down the barriers again so we can leave or I swear I will—”

“It’s already done,” he said. He couldn’t seem to muster the energy to look angry. He was too focused on the pain. “I’m disappointed in you.”

“I was never going to pass the test, anyway.”

“No,” he agreed, just as I began to turn away. “The best magicians never seem to.”

I was gone before I could fully understand the significance of what he’d said. It would be days until I realized the true implications.

XXVI

My driftwood had been destroyed by Cecelia’s incredible ghost strength, but Indigo had been thoughtful enough on his way out to telekinetically slice the legs off of a small, ornate tabletop that I could enchant with the flight rune. It took mere moments to accomplish it—by then, I’d had enough practice that I didn’t need to copy it.

I missed my driftwood, but the table provided a needed distraction as I soared toward the burned trees. The painting was unusually complex, done all in a monochrome bronze framed by the mahogany. Since I couldn’t keep my breathing steady, I tried counting the people in the painting to keep my mind busy.

There, on the outskirts, was a river, as bronze as the rest of the painting. Whoever had worked this magic—and it was magic, since it was so beautiful—had managed to make it look as though the river was rushing despite the painting’s stillness. Clambering out of the river and lunging for the center were women, some as young as I, and they were the biggest surprise of the piece.

Where other women in such grand, detailed pieces might have been naked, shrouded in gauze, eyeing the viewer with a certain lustful but oddly embarrassed gaze, these women were multitude and various: some wore armor and helmets, others lifted ball gowns from the tug of the river, more slid from the water in as many shapes and forms as you could imagine, and still others clambered out like those paintings of old, nearly naked, but confident and straight-backed.

I glanced up just in time to slide between the trees, the warm summer air near the house slipping away in favor of the briny chill of the sea air that reminded me so much of home.

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