Persie Merlin and the Door to Nowhere by Bella Forrest Page 0,107

hypnotize people in order to lead them astray. Usually, it is to lead them from safe paths into bogs and marshland, to claim more spirits for themselves. However, it seems they have diversified.

“Will you not listen to us?” whispered a soft voice, ethereal and sad. Almost as if they were pleading with me. “Please, hear our song. We sing it for you.”

I nodded slowly. “I’m listening.” The moment I spoke, the connection severed and Leviathan vamoosed out of my head, just as I’d wanted. Now, I could give all of my focus to the hypnotic wisps, just as they wanted. I’d come all this way; the least I could do was listen.

“Will you follow us, sweet lady?” the voice whispered again, gentle and warm. “Will you come to us? We can sing to you there. We sing for you.”

I smiled shyly. “For me?”

“For me?” Nathan parroted.

“Only for you. Will you follow us?” The lights floated toward the dense black of the new Repository sphere, and my feet did the talking. I stepped forward automatically, eager to go wherever the Wisps were going. Beside me, Nathan did the same.

“I’ll follow,” I replied dreamily, desperate not to lose sight of them.

I’d walked a few paces when Boudicca put her fingers to her lips and gave the loudest whistle my eardrums had ever heard. En masse, the pixies surged toward the Wisps. The pixies’ pulsating lights burned with blinding brightness for a few seconds, the sudden ferocity chasing the Wisps away down the central walkway of the sphere and into the darkness below. The moment they disappeared, taking their heartbreaking song with them, I snapped out of whatever trance they’d put me in. It was like waking up after a long, strange dream, and finding that you’d sleepwalked into the kitchen for no reason.

I blinked. “Nathan? Are you okay?”

“I was just about to ask you the same thing,” he replied, concerned. “Did they just… hypnotize us?”

I nodded. “And the pixies saved our behinds.” The pieces were slowly making sense. “I’ve got a feeling that, if we’d followed them, we’d have ended up in the same situation as the missing magicals. That’s why there were no signs of a struggle: no one did struggle. They came here of their own accord, because of the Will-o’-the-Wisps.”

Nathan’s face was marginally visible in the light of the glowing pixies who’d come back to roost. “Pardon?”

“They’re Will-o’-the-Wisps,” I said, fixing him with a stern gaze. Weren’t we almost trapped like everyone else, and wasn’t he supposed to be a genius in this subject? “Do you know anything about them?”

“Yes. They are thought to be controlled by…” He trailed off, looking at the pixies on his shoulder.

“By?” I prompted.

He cleared his throat, his eyes wide. “Pixies.”

Boudicca leapt to the defense of her people, chattering loudly, jabbing and pointing like there was no tomorrow. I got the feeling she disagreed with Nathan, and I wished more than ever that I had a way to understand exactly what my Purge beasts were saying. It would’ve made this so much easier.

“Calm down,” I urged Boudicca. “Explain it slowly, so I can get the gist.”

She turned her pulsating spots to a sad shade of blue and began to act out the message she was trying to get across. First, she pointed at me and pretended to walk across my shoulder, shivering and hunched, her expression scared. Then, she pointed to herself and lifted up off my shoulder, gesturing and beckoning as though she were leading me somewhere. For her next act, she dropped suddenly to the floor, as if she were dead, and turned her spots purple. She rose up with her arms outstretched, like a resurrected mummy, and returned to her second performance of guiding me somewhere. Then, things turned bad again as Boudicca began snickering and tiptoeing through the air, leading me, presumably, down the wrong path.

“The Wisps are spirits of lost souls?” I said. Boudicca nodded vigorously. “Who haven’t been able… to cross to the afterlife?” She nodded again, flashing her purple spots. “But how did they end up like this, causing trouble? They aren’t poltergeists.” Boudicca grumbled something rude in pixie and flashed her purple spots more frantically.

Nathan cleared his throat. “I think she’s trying to say that they were brought into being with some kind of Necromancy. Purple is the color of Necromancy.”

Boudicca took off and hurtled toward Nathan’s face, landing a huge smacker on his nose. She flew back again, smoothing down her hair with sudden bashfulness.