Harley Merlin 19: Persie Merlin and the Door to Nowhere

by Bella Forrest

  “Not funny!” I barked, but the pixie kept howling with laughter. “Answer the question!”

  He shrugged, making the same circle gesture as before: he had no idea. I’d have to ask the rest of the pixies. I had hoped for a quicker solution so we could get straight to the saving-my-friend-from-a-dangerous-mystical-gateway part of the evening, but if it eventually led to Genie and the others, then I supposed we’d need more input from these funny little pests first.

  I turned to Nathan. “I’m guessing you’ve got an exit strategy? You got in, so you can get us out of here, right?”

  “Getting in was actually the easy part.” He lowered his gaze, his tone apprehensive. “The hexes prevent any non-authorized personnel from leaving, and we’d both be on that list. So would the pixie.”

  I frowned. “But the pixie left once already.”

  The pixie snorted and started running through a rapid charade of what had happened. He flew back up to the bookshelf and puffed out his cheeks like a bullfrog. Snapping out his arms, he ducked behind one of the books, then jumped back into view. He did this again and again until I understood what he was trying to say.

  “You tried to get out, but the hexes stopped you?”

  He nodded furiously.

  I turned to Nathan. “Would a puzzle box work?”

  “For the pixie, yes. For us—we don’t have one big enough.”

  He’d made a joke, and Genie had missed it. I’d have to tell her that Mr. Humorless had some decent dad jokes. When I see her again.

  “Can you deal with that?” I whispered, tilting my head discreetly in the pixie’s direction.

  He nodded. “No problem.”

  Behind his back, he slipped a puzzle box out of his pocket. Charging it with a press of the harp button, he hurled the entire thing at the bookshelf. The puzzle box sped through the air toward the pixie, giving the creature just enough time to screech at Nathan in disgust before he evaporated into a stream of black mist. As the puzzle box clattered to the ground, the black mist went with it, sucked inside the device until there was nothing left. The lid snapped shut and I lunged at the box, twisting the designs to make sure the pixie stayed put. He’d be free again soon, and I knew I’d get another earful for putting him there in the first place, but necessity called for it.

  “He’s going to beat you to a pulp for this.” I brandished the box at Nathan.

  He chuckled nervously. “Not if he gets to you first. Anyway, that’s the least of our worries.”

  “Right, we need to figure out an escape route.” I narrowed my eyes at him. “You were planning on taking me with you, weren’t you?”

  He looked affronted as he pocketed the puzzle box. “I’d have just spoken to you through the door if I wasn’t.” His eyes surveyed said door, his fingertips reaching out to touch the smooth wood. “And we need to hurry, before anyone else goes missing… or something worse happens.”

  I’d said it before myself. But in my short time at the Institute, I’d learned categorically that things could always get worse.

  Twenty-Three

  Persie

  Nathan closed his eyes and let his hands move across the doorway and the walls, thorough and calm. His mouth moved as he did so, whispering a spell: “Ut revelare speciem adsumendum. Ostende mihi viam. Quod patet iter. Fiat lux. Ut revelare speciem adsumendum. Veritatem revelare.” My Latin had never been great, but I guessed he was trying to figure out the locations of the hexes that held us prisoner.

  Sure enough, on the fifth repetition, a ripple thrummed across my bedroom. Sigils just in front of the walls lit up like the Fourth of July, spaced at sporadic intervals. Some glowed amber, pulsing steadily, and some carried a deep red. Others were a stark, bold green that reminded me of Celtic knots, the strands of the hexwork intricately folding in on themselves. Two were a juddering violet, the edges crackling and fizzing with energy, too volatile to hold a defined shape.

  “I’ve never seen these hex designs before,” I marveled. “They’re sort of… beautiful.”

  Nathan laughed. “That’s dangerous talk, finding imprisonment hexes pretty, though it makes it easier to unravel these things when you can actually see them.”

  “Where did you learn this?” I sat on the bed and watched him work. His palms covered each hex and unraveled them on impact, almost like he was plucking them away. His fingers were elegant and fluid, and utterly mesmerizing to behold. Watching him distracted me from the fact that my best friend was out there somewhere, potentially trapped in some insane doorway that I’d accidentally opened. I had no clue what was on the other side of that door, and the not-knowing frightened me more than anything else. More than banshees, more than Leviathan, more than Victoria. I tried to think of this as a recon mission so I could fill Genie in on some Nathan details when I rescued her, because I would be rescuing her. One way or another.

  Nathan set to work on the amber hexes, which fell apart at the touch of his fingertips and a further whisper from his lips. “Separabunt necessitudines. Discoperiet nodum. Quod sit potentiam perdidit. Frange est. Frange vincula. Fiat.” They must have been the weaker ones, judging by how rapidly they unraveled. The amber threads un-looped, as though invisible hands were tugging the strands free, the entire thing disappearing in a puff of golden smoke as it finished undoing itself.

  “You’re good at this,” I encouraged.

  He smiled and moved on to the rusty red designs. “I’ve had a long time to study.”

  “You can find out how to do this in books?” I had to keep asking questions to stop myself from toppling into an abyss of fear for Genie. And I really didn’t want Nathan to see me have a panic attack.

  “You can, but not these specific spells.” He continued humoring me while he dispensed with the first few reddish hexes, altering the unraveling spell ever so slightly. “You know what a Grimoire is, yes?”

  I laughed coolly. “I might not have magic of my own, but I did grow up in a coven.”

  “I’ll take that as a yes, then. Apologies if I insulted you—it always pays to understand the knowledge people have before bombarding them with things they may not know.” Beads of sweat trickled down his face as he delicately untwined the last of the red hexwork, deft and precise. “Well, these anti-hex spells came from my father’s Grimoire.”

  “He must’ve been very powerful,” I said. “Or did he just have a penchant for hexes?”

  Nathan wiped his brow with the back of his sleeve. “I didn’t know him very well, so I couldn’t say. Maybe both, maybe neither.”

  “Oh… I’m sorry. Is he… uh… no longer with us?”

  Nathan shrugged and began working on the green hexes. “Again, I couldn’t say. He took off when I was three, leaving nothing but a Grimoire to remember him by. My mom gave it to me when I was twelve or so, but before that she hadn’t said much about him, and I didn’t ask.” His Chaos untied the Celtic knots smoothly, but I could see the strain of it on his brow. “I have vague memories of his face from when I was little, but you can’t trust the human brain with such things. It’s more likely that I’ve put together an impression in my mind of what I think he looks like.”

  “Did you ever try to find him?” As a daughter of still-married parents, I found it difficult to put myself in his shoes. If it were me, I would’ve wanted to find them. But I knew that wasn’t the case for everyone, depending on the circumstances of a parent’s departure.

  Nathan paused and sucked in a heavy breath, his hands still sparking as he worked on the glittering green hexes. “I thought about it, then realized there wasn’t much point. He wouldn’t have left if he wanted to be found. And I had no need for a father figure. My mum had no trouble filling the gap.”

  “You said ‘mum.’ I thought you were American?”

  “Canadian, actually, but my mum is born and bred Republic of Ireland. Hence the ‘O’Hara’ part. My parents never married, and I guess he didn’t care if I took his name or not.” He closed his eyes, as if he were thinking of
her. “We moved to Canada about a year after he walked out. Mum had family there, and I think she wanted to put distance between us and the place where she’d been with him, you know? I don’t think it ended well, but I didn’t understand that until I was much older. And now I’m back here, in the homeland.” He chuckled and got back to work on the last green hex.

  I was intrigued to learn more about the calm and collected researcher. It proved the theory that you couldn’t tell much about a person just from looking at them. “Who was he?”

  Nathan’s eyes darkened, as if it was painful to remember. “He wasn’t anyone. He certainly proved that when he left. Just a guy, passing through our lives, who never intended to stay.” His breath caught in his throat, and I knew the Q&A session had come to an end.

  I was looking for a distraction, but I didn’t need to dredge up all of Nathan’s bad memories while I was at it. Still, I was glad his dad had left him that Grimoire, or we wouldn’t have gotten out of here anytime soon.

  I focused on Nathan’s spellcasting instead of idle babbling as he turned his attention to the sparking purple hexes. They called for a very different spell, Chaos streaming out of his palms in crackling strands that were tangibly more powerful. As he chanted, a sliver of lavender light flowed out of his skin and pooled in his hands. Finger-like fronds of the light slithered out and sank into the frenetic balls of purple hexwork. With every thrum of his Chaos strands, a piece came undone, like he was trying to undo the knots in a huge ball of wool. And I stared, transfixed by his power and skill. He had hidden talents beneath the stiff upper lip and the tweed.

  Finally, with one exhausting stream of Chaos, he broke apart the entire thing and the rest of the purple hexes collapsed with it, as though they were all connected. Sweating profusely, he looked back at me.

  “Shall we?” He dug a stick of chalk out of his pocket. I knew this wasn’t any ordinary chalk—my mom and dad each carried a similar item.

  I nodded. “Where to first?”

  “The Repository. We need to get more of the pixies to help us before we can make our move.” He sketched a doorway into the wall and whispered the Aperi Si Ostium spell. The lines fizzled like a lit fuse, bringing it into being.

  “One of them has to know where this doorway is,” I muttered.

  He turned. “Doorway?”

  “I… had a thought about where the missing people might have gone. Let’s just say a little birdie told me about it.” I fidgeted, hoping he wouldn’t ask for details. Trying to explain to someone, even a monster enthusiast, that I could speak to Leviathan across oceans would take more time than we had. “They mentioned the Door to Nowhere. That’s what I asked the pixie about. He didn’t seem to know anything, but he said the other pixies might.”

  “The Door to Nowhere…” He pulled open the chalk doorway as he spoke. “I haven’t heard about that in many moons. It’s thought to be a mystical gateway to the land of Tír na nÓg, if memory serves, and there’s lots of speculation about where it might be. But why would you think it’s here?”

  “Like I said, a birdie told me.” My cheeks burned. “And that birdie was very certain about it. They said that the Institute was built on top of it, and that… uh… something must’ve awoken the magic, hence the gateway opening and swallowing up magicals.”

  His eyes widened. “Those trails! The ones I saw through the specterglass! They might be residual spirits of those who were trapped there before. Gateways work both ways—things go in, things come out.” He nodded eagerly. “That would make perfect sense! And do you know what else is useful?”

  “What?” I asked nervously.

  “Monsters are like truffle-sniffing pigs when it comes to dense concentrations of magic. I think the pixies might be able to lead us right to it. With the right persuasion.” He grinned broadly, his eyes hopeful.

  I walked to the chalk-door. “Then we probably shouldn’t put any more of them in puzzle boxes.”

  As it turned out, trying to persuade pixies to do anything at all was like wrangling slippery eels. We’d arrived at the Repository through the chalk-door to find the place empty of hunters, and with our puzzle box pixie in tow, we had the perfect opportunity to make peace offerings to my Purges. Except they weren’t playing ball.

  Twenty of them bounced around in their respective glass boxes—five apiece, aside from one that had four, plus the one where we’d put the first pixie. She had her own private domain, which secretly pleased me. As for the rest, they zoomed from curved wall to curved wall, flat out ignoring Nathan and me. One had fallen asleep at the bottom of an orb, while the other four made every valiant and mischievous attempt to wake her—at least, I thought it was a her. Divebombing her, prodding her, elbowing her in the stomach, and hurling their nutshell helmets at her, yet she somehow managed to sleep through the entire thing, snoring softly.

  “Hey!” I banged on one of the orbs. The five pixies inside whirled around at the same time, black eyes glinting. And then, to my horror, they all turned around and flew backward toward the glass, mooning me through the orb. Once they were satisfied they’d shocked me enough, they somersaulted back through the air, cackling like hyenas. One of them pointed at me, opening his eyes wide in alarm, mimicking my reaction. The other four collapsed into hysterics, and I realized I’d have to work a lot harder to get these pixies to focus.

  I moved to a different orb. “We were just wondering if we could talk to you for a second?”

  A she-pixie approached the glass and lifted her bird skull helmet like it was a visor.

  “Does this mean you’ll talk?” My hopes rose, only for them to be dashed when she trilled back, mimicking the tone of my voice. Her compadre, another she-pixie, proceeded to fall to the floor and recreate a blow-by-blow of my Purge. She even managed to form some black mist from her own body, which I had to give her credit for.

  “Come on! I’m trying to help you here!” I said, but they weren’t paying attention. I’d put them in these orbs, and they were going to mess around and ignore me as payback. Frantically, I tried to remember the song that I’d sung by the dumpsters, but the words wouldn’t come to me. It stayed stubbornly on the tip of my tongue, just out of reach.

  Nathan sighed. “I don’t think they want to listen, and who could blame them?”

  The only one who didn’t seem to be having a whale of a time was the she-pixie I’d first caught. She sat at the bottom of her orb with her back to the glass, her little shoulders hunched. Her wings lay drooped against her, her body language so sad I wanted to free her right then and there and beg forgiveness.

  Then, I had a eureka moment. “What if we were to free them, and earn their trust that way?”

  Nathan looked at me as if I’d lost my marbles. “Free them? What if they escape? I just watched one puff back into existence, which means they might try puffing off, if you get what I’m trying to say?”

  “But ‘puffing off’ doesn’t mean much. It just turns them invisible, so they can try and make an escape on the sly. It doesn’t mean they can pass through walls.” My sixth monster sense seemed to be tingling again, giving me an idea of what they could and couldn’t do. “If we close the doors and get prepared with puzzle boxes, they can puff as much as they like—they won’t be able to get out. And if we want them to talk, we can’t keep them cooped up like this. They’ve made that blatantly obvious.”

  I watched a duo of male pixies in the middle of a brawl, slapping and biting the heck out of each other. They broke apart a few seconds later, putting their arms around each other and laughing as though nothing had happened.

  Nathan went quiet for a while. “Okay… let’s do it.”

  “Really?”

  “It’s the best idea we’ve got, even if it might get me fired.”

  Straightening up, he ran to the far side of the Repository and closed the doors. On his way back, he grabbed an armload of puzzle boxes and dumped them on the ground in front of me before zipping off to his study. I had no idea what he needed
from there, but all became clear when he ran back, beaming from ear to ear, with a cup, a carton of milk, and a basket of strawberries in his hands.

  I laughed, despite my growing anxiety. “You remembered.”

  “Milk and sweet fruit. If anything’s going to grab their attention, it’s this.” He set to work, pouring a cupful of milk and putting out the strawberries. I glanced from him to the pixies and back again, wondering if this was the worst plan I’d ever hatched. So much could go wrong. Then again, I didn’t like the sight of the pixies in those glass orbs. I knew it was Institute protocol, and Victoria would flip her lid if she found out they’d all escaped, but if the pixies listened… if they could just give us an indication of where the missing magicals might be, then it would be worth the head huntswoman’s rage. And if the pixies could exonerate themselves in her eyes while they were at it, even better.

  “Are you sure you want to do this?” Nathan approached the first orb full of pixies.

  I shook my head. “No, but I still think it’s our best shot.”

  “Okay, then, brace yourself.” He opened the puzzle box with the pixie inside first, then lifted the lid on the first orb, then the second, then the third, then the fourth. And, finally, the opened the last one, with the solitary she-pixie inside.

  In a collective flurry, the pixies erupted from their prisons. They flew up and up with their gossamer wings until I worried they might disappear through the roof, only to hurtle back down the millisecond they spotted the cup of milk. A cascade of brightly colored monsters made an aerial assault on the dairy goodness, one of them diving right into the cup and splashing around in the milk. Four others spied the carton that Nathan had put down and snatched it for themselves. Cheering and chanting, they hauled the milk carton away and went to town, scooping up handfuls and guzzling down every drop.

  The strawberry situation quickly turned into a bloodbath. Well, it looked like a bloodbath. Smushed fruit everywhere, smeared on their hungry little faces and all over their tiny frames. Two she-pixies ripped off the green tops and plopped them on their heads, using them as fetching hats. A moment later, they devoured a strawberry between them like piranhas gnawing a whole duck down to the bone.