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

“No,” I told Mint, just to spite him. “Bring my sister back.”

I didn’t open my eyes. I didn’t want him to know that I’d been crying, even though the rawness in my voice belied that fact. He didn’t say anything for so long, I thought he might have walked off. I wouldn’t have blamed him.

Then, there was his voice again, closer this time. He must have been kneeling over me.

“Get off the floor,” he repeated, his voice colder than before.

I finally opened my eyes, startling him. He moved to step away, but I had his collar grasped in my fist before he could stand up.

“Bring her back and you’ll never see me again,” I hissed, unable to recognize my own voice. “Bring her back, Mint. Please. Please, I’ll pay anything. Bring her back.”

He stared at me for a long, long moment. There was no pity in that gaze. There was only an iota of understanding. I expected him to push my hand away, to turn around and leave without so much as a glance backward, but finally, he extended a hand down to me.

“Come with me,” he said.

I eyed his hand.

“Are you going to kill me or something?”

He just cocked an eyebrow.

Finally, I took his hand and let him help me up. The rest of the restaurant finally painted itself into existence around me: the customers, confused but not concerned by Mint and my little argument; the cashier, angry at me for occupying very valuable floor space; a couple swaying by the jukebox in the corner as a crooner hit in a language I’d never heard before played.

Peaceful. It was all peaceful, and that might have been the worst part of all. My world had been torn away, ripped to shreds, and there were people dancing, eating, living.

Mint pulled me along after him, headed for a door next to the hall to the bathrooms. The door itself was labelled with a single symbol: an infinity sign stamped into the cheap plywood.

Behind me, the song switched to Elvis’ “Jailhouse Rock.”

“Where are we going?” I demanded, yanking at Mint’s hand to stop him. He turned to me at last, washed-out and terrifying in the soft light of the diner.

“I don’t know what happened,” he said, “and frankly I don’t want to, considering Adrian’s vision earlier.”

“My sister—”

He held up a hand. “I died once before,” he said.

“You die every night.”

He thought for a moment, swaying a little from the pain, and then nodded, as though he’d only just realized it.

“I haven’t always been dead, though,” he said. “I remember...I was alive. I was alive a little while back. I—it was a long time ago. And then I died.”

“Yeah,” I said. “ I know. You’re Artie Lincoln.”

He stared at me blankly. “I don’t know who that is.”

My mind told me to back away slowly. My curiosity, however...well, my curiosity didn’t agree.

I needed to keep my eye on him. If he didn’t remember who he was, there was something truly wrong with the way he’d bee brought back. Wherever he was taking me, if it was important to him, it had to contain answers. I nodded at Mint.

“Take me there,” I said.

Mint pressed a hand to the infinity symbol on the door, reached for the doorknob, and finally opened the portal to Robin College.

XXVIII

Something you should know about Robin College: it’s not the kind of beautiful you’d expect. Sure, it’s grand in the way Oxford is grand; outside, there are stone columns and sweeping marble staircases. There are ornate spires on the top of the library dome, and there are ornate metal gates that open of their own accord.

But the school is so much more than that. The bricks, few and far between though they are, aren’t red; they’re a deep-sea blue. The library’s dome is comprised of several sheets of stained glass so thick that it almost defeats the purpose of having a glass roof at all.

From the meadow we stepped into, about a mile away from the school, it looked like a small town: a bunch of buildings squashed together into a bare approximation of a campus.

I sucked in a deep breath and tried to look as though my whole world hadn’t dropped out from under me. Claire was in my pocket. My friends were in trouble half the universe away. This was no time to marvel at architecture.

And yet…

If I’d passed Mint’s tests, this would have been my home. He let my hand go and led the way through the meadow toward the school. I reached down and plucked a flower, which was like nothing I’d ever seen before: a deep, impossible blue-green, shot through with orange as though it was marble. It looked like a distant cousin of the blue poppies that had frequented paintings in the mansion.

“This is…” I trailed off.

“Home,” he said. “It’s home.”

He was right. There was no word for it other than home.

It was somebody else’s home. Not mine. It would never be mine, I reminded myself. I had failed.

Mint stuck his hands in his pockets and strolled on ahead, relaxing as he went. His face was smooth and pale as death, his eyes glassy. He looked as though he belonged there, ethereal and huge against the delicate backdrop of the meadow and trees. Above, the sky looked almost painted: a still, strange blue, much deeper than the sky looked back home during the middle of the day.

I had so many other things to do. If our families had been targeted by whoever was vaporizing people, it wouldn’t be long until this invisible foe came for us. I should have been with my friends, back at the mansion, planning how to defend against a spell we didn’t even know the words to.

I looked back to find the door, but it had gone.

That wasn’t a good sign. I jogged after Mint.

He didn’t greet anyone as he passed by, but they made way for him. It might have been his stature