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

the realms, either. So now, ten years later, he’d started killing again...but why?

I needed to find my friends. Then I could find Oberon.

There was only one place my friends could be, unless they were still with their families. I couldn’t get back into the mansion, since I’d failed the test—that much was obvious—but I could warn them. I could leave a note. Indigo would come through the portal to check on me. I could stick something to a tree, or…

But they didn’t know enough about Oberon or the other four who’d gone through this test with him. In my self-isolating idiocy, I hadn’t thought to clue them in on nearly enough of what I’d been learning. If I just wrote Oberon, they’d have no idea what I meant.

I’d worry about that later. First, there was the matter of getting home.

I skidded to a halt and grabbed a guy by the shoulder, spinning him toward me from where he stood with his friends, debating where to go for lunch.

“Excuse me,” I said, out of breath already. “Excuse me, I—”

“No,” he said, and turned away.

“Dick,” I grumbled, and headed for the nearest classroom door. It went against every instinct in my body, but I pushed the door open and poked my head through.

Students glanced up from desks. The lecture hall was much bigger than I’d expected it would be, and when I spoke, my voice echoed off of the polished oak walls, the intricately painted ceiling, and the smooth marble floor.

“Shit,” I breathed. “Uh, sorry.”

Someone laughed in the back of the class, but dozens of exhausted students just sat and stared. I closed the door slowly, waiting until it had clicked shut completely before turning to go, but I heard it open again behind me and spun back around.

“You’re looking for something, aren’t you?” said the young man who’d followed me into the hallway. “The professor said to come help you.”

I hadn’t even seen the professor. My embarrassment had blinded me.

“What’s your name?” I asked.

“Ezra,” he said, without blinking. That caught me off guard—what magician worth his salt would just tell me his real name?—but I didn’t have time to wonder.

“How do I get to the diner?”

“The diner?”

“The, you know, liminal space between worlds. You take a mirror to get there?”

“I don’t know about—”

“Fine, then a bathroom? Anywhere with a mirror will do.”

He raised an eyebrow and gestured at a bathroom sign at the end of the hall. “Why the hell would you need a mirror?”

I was already running, but I turned back to explain. The classroom door swung shut behind him.

I didn’t even glance at the bathroom as I headed for one of the mirrors at the end of the row. There had to be some sort of penalty for opening a portal in school—least of all that it would help students skip class—but my mind was only on my friends. The mark took no time at all to draw, but the moments between its completion and the magic taking effect were excruciatingly long.

I closed my eyes, clutched the Coke bottle in my pocket, and took a couple of deep breaths.

I was alive.

My friends were, too, as far as I knew.

Oberon was only one man. If he was behind this, there was only one of him to stop.

But he clearly had control over Cecelia, and possibly the other ghosts. Vivi had disappeared, too, and that wasn’t a good sign—she’d never leave me alone unless she was forced to, and anyone who could force a ghost to do something was not a person to be messed with.

I opened my eyes, shook off my worries, and reached through the mirror in front of me. There was nothing to do but move forward. I clambered onto the sink and pushed myself through the mirror, bracing for the fall to the floor.

As my shoulder hit the ground, Adrian’s voice reached me from across the diner.

“Clementine!”

XXIX

Ginger helped me to my feet as Adrian went to fetch an ice pack for my shoulder. I tried to shake off the headache that was starting to bloom in the base of my skull from the impact against the ground.

“What happened?” Ginger demanded. “We’ve been looking all over for you.”

Now that I got a good look at her, I noted that she’d been crying. When Adrian returned, his eyes looked reddened, too.

We’d all lost someone that day, I realized.

We weren’t children anymore, if we ever had been.

“Mint,” I said. “He’s...well, I don’t know what he is, exactly. I’d say dead, but he’s always dead. He took me to Robin College and then he...uh.”

A lump had started to form in my throat and I couldn’t quite talk around it. It didn’t make sense—I hated Mint. I’d hated Mint since the beginning because he’d failed to keep us safe. In that moment, though, I felt as though I’d lost one of the only people who really understood the world I wanted so desperately to be a part of.

Ginger set a reassuring hand on my arm, even though she looked just as shaken up as I did. She’s always been stronger than me.

“Where is he?”

I gestured to the door in the back of the diner that Mint had taken me through. “He’s in a big hall. The door is on the side of the school you face when you walk right for it. He’s not...he’s not moving.”

Adrian nodded and tapped Ginger’s elbow.

“Let’s go,” he said, his eyes on me. “It’ll be okay.”

How were they being so comforting? They’d lost as much as I had that day, but Adrian was calm and Ginger was almost maternal. It was a day of firsts.

I tried not to cry.

“There’s something I haven’t told you,” I said.

They glanced at each other, then at me. I expected more surprise, or outrage, or at least some reaction.

“Duh,” Adrian said. “Finally. What is it?”

“What?”

He gestured at me, head to toe and back again. “You wouldn’t leave us alone for hours every day if you wanted us to know what