Persie Merlin and the Door to Nowhere by Bella Forrest Page 0,35
for me! I ducked into doorways and hid behind walls to avoid being seen, keeping my eyes well and truly peeled. They couldn’t have gotten far, right? Oh, who was I kidding… of course, they could get far. They had freaking wings and a frightening determination to cause as much mayhem as possible. And I had absolutely no clue what they were. I’d never met them in a dream before, and though they resembled the sprite that Nathan had shown us, they definitely weren’t the same thing. Different bodies, different colors, different wings, and a penchant for bizarre accessories.
“Where the heck are you?” I hissed to the empty hallways as I entered another part of the Institute. Still living quarters, but not a section I’d visited before. Amber light flickered from the sconces on the wall, creating shadows that flitted and darted like the very creatures I was after. It left my head spinning and my stomach churning, until I had whiplash from turning left, right, back, and forward in an endless rhythm. But the tiny critters were nowhere to be seen. It was only the shadows messing with my already screwy head.
Okay, let’s think about this logically. How much harm can they actually do? I pressed on down the hallways, a million worst-case scenarios thudding in my brain. What if they got into Victoria’s room and scrambled her wardrobe, or got into her bathroom and did what they’d done in mine? What if they reached the main assembly hall and started smearing muck, or worse, on all that clean, white marble? What if they snuck into the Repository and let the monsters loose? They might not have looked violent, but they were really freaking mischievous. And there were so many things in this place for them to smash! They seemed to love smashing. And throwing things. And, holy crap, they’d really loved the fire.
“Why did it have to be these beasts?” I muttered, peering around a corner to make sure the coast was clear of people. Meanwhile, my eyes squinted through the gloom for the glint of a monster. “At least one big one would’ve been easier to spot.”
This would all come back to bite me if I couldn’t capture them. Speaking of which, where the heck were all the hunters who’d been stationed to watch over me? The one at the bottom of my corridor hadn’t been loitering there, and I couldn’t see any suspiciously placed personnel on my sprint through the hallways, either. I really hoped Victoria hadn’t called them off because I’d gone five days without a Purge. What if I’d lulled her into a false sense of security at the very moment when I could’ve used some help? Not because I couldn’t handle capturing what I’d created, but because there were so many of them. I’d estimated thirty, maybe more, had exploded from that weird black ball of mist.
Should I go to Victoria? I weighed the options as I pressed on. She’d given me a direct line to her office phone and an emergency beeper for occasions like this. But if I went to her with this incident or sounded the alarm, perhaps she’d worry that this might be a common occurrence in the future—Purging multiple beasts at once. What if that swayed her to reconsider my position? My insides wobbled at the thought of being forced to leave. I mean, I hadn’t even started training yet.
No, I had to fix this myself. There were no two ways about it—I had to catch them, or all those thoughts of independence and self-reliance could take a flying leap out of the window. At the very least, I had to give it my best try, or I’d be back where I was before I came to this place. Always running for help at the first sign of trouble, with everyone looking at me as a dud or a hopeless case, not worthy of the Merlin name. Maybe if I’d Purged a stampede of griffins or Cerberuses, I’d have no choice but to phone her and call in the cavalry, but these weren’t huge, devouring beasts. They were small and hadn’t seemed bloodthirsty. They were a good jumping-off point to start testing my skills as a hunter who deserved her place here—a follow-up to what I’d started, and never got to finish, during my exam.
So far, I hadn’t seen any smashed glass or signs of miscreant behavior, which meant I still had time to remedy the situation. Hadn’t