The Crumpled Mirror Elizabeth Loea (best historical biographies txt) 📖

about fifty meters feet away, lit with artificial street lamps. Two figures struggled in the middle of it, one taller and broader than the other. In the middle of the island was a dark monolith.

A shout rang out. It took a second for me to realize that I was the source of the scream.

I should have guessed. Oberon clearly loved poetic deaths, and there was little more poetic than killing Indigo on his sister’s island.

“Go,” I said. Solid ground would be better than anything inhabiting the depths of this awful underground lake.

“Wait,” Ginger interjected. “Float on your back.”

“What?”

“Just for a moment. I’m going to try something.”

Lilac kicked me in the head as we flipped onto our backs. It wasn’t long until Ginger’s plan revealed itself; a chill spread across my body, starting at my back.

“Okay,” Ginger said. “Sit up. Carefully.”

Ice cracked and fell away from me as I sat up on the frozen lake. I still couldn’t see any of my friends, but at least we were standing on semi-solid ground.

“I didn’t freeze it all, of course,” Ginger said. “So walk carefully—”

I was already racing for the island. She muttered something distinctively derogatory behind me, but I didn’t pause to listen. There was Indigo, and there was Oberon, pinning him to his sister’s grave marker.

How had he subdued a telekinetic?

Indigo glanced up at me over Oberon’s shoulder and opened his mouth to yell. A bruise had started to spread from his left eye down his cheek. A thin layer of water coated his body, all except his mouth, which had been left free to speak.

What did Oberon want?

Oberon shook him again.

“Name,” he said. “Her name!”

What the hell? I thought. Whose name?

Indigo shook his head and coughed. The cough was much too deep, much too breathy, for his lungs to be okay.

“I don’t know,” he said. “I don’t know!”

Oh, gods.

It was that moment—that moment—that I finally began to mourn Vivienne. I’d used her as an excuse for a decade. It hadn’t been fair to her. She had been silent for a decade. She should have been eighteen, like me, but she was stuck as a ghost, and even though her one human contact had ignored her and resented her, she had protected me.

She hadn’t succumbed to the appeal of a family. Clearly, Oberon had tried as hard with her as he had with the others. She’d said no. Maybe she didn’t feel as wronged by me as Cecelia felt wronged by Indigo. We hadn’t been close. It was very different to ice out your enemy than to ice out your sister.

Whatever the reason, I was...safe.

She’s never even talked to the rest of us, Cecelia had said. Vivi had never talked to the other ghosts. She’d never talked to Oberon. She’d never revealed my name.

Oberon needed my name. I sure as hell wasn’t going to tell him.

He turned to me at last.

“You know,” he said, “I don’t even need you to be in each of your realms to work this spell. Since you’re of five realms, it should work just fine if I kill you now.”

I couldn’t think of anything to say. I couldn’t think at all.

“I should have kept your sister around,” he said, and this time, there was no feeling in his voice. Just endless, mindless anger. “Children are easier to control, but maybe your sister would have told me. Poor Claire. Her afterlife will be so—”

Lilac tackled him before he could finish his sentence. They hit the ground together, but Oberon took the brunt of the fall. I heard the pop of his shoulder as he slammed into the dust.

The water sloughed off of Indigo and he raced for me.

Lilac pressed a knee into his stomach and pushed her hand against his chest.

“Lightning,” she said, and the world lit up around us.

Lightning arced from Oberon to the water and back again. I watched Lilac, a shining force in the darkness, before Indigo grabbed me. Before I knew it, his face was buried in my shoulder and he was screaming, soundless, against my collarbone. I barely had time to catch him before he executed the move he’d been planning all along.

Oberon’s arm tore from his body. I didn’t hear it at first because of the shock, but once I did hear it, the sound wouldn’t leave my head.

Bone cracked, popped, crunched. Flesh tore. Have you ever heard the sound of flesh tearing? It’s not a pleasant one.

Blood hit the sand. A drop at first, and then a waterfall.

Lilac’s lightning had stopped, but her eyes glowed a pale silver. She took a deep breath as she pulled the life force from Oberon’s chest.

In the silence, Oberon screamed four names.

I won’t tell you what they were. Names have power.

I will tell you this: I have never heard anything like the silence that followed those names.

His face buried in my shoulder, Indigo made a little sound. It was nothing more than a sigh, nothing louder. In my desperation, I clasped his face between my hands and wished my magic would supersede that. I wished I could reverse time. I wished I could tear another one of Oberon’s arms off.

Wishing is not the same as real magic.

Ash floated across my jaw. Indigo raised a hand between us. His index finger crumbled as I watched, then his ring finger.

Oberon said nothing. Idly, I wondered if he was dead. I hoped he wasn’t, so I could kill him myself.

There was Lilac, clambering off of Oberon. She stumbled to Ginger. They collided. Sank to the ground together. Their ashes began to mingle.

There was Adrian. He stood straight-backed, staring, disbelieving. He held a hand up in front of him, disbelieving that it was completely intact. It was his other hand that had begun to go, but it was a couple seconds before he realized it.

I looked down at Indigo again, unable to process what was happening.

“I’m…” he began. “Oh.”

Oberon, who was somehow still not dead, tried to push himself to sit up.

Maybe it was wrong of me to