Persie Merlin and the Door to Nowhere by Bella Forrest Page 0,39
he couldn’t quite believe his eyes. “For the love of Chaos, this is… this is incredible! Never in my life did I think I’d see one in the flesh!”
“Would you mind sharing?” I asked.
The tiny monster looked pretty cool, for sure, but she didn’t look special enough to get a grown man jigging around like a little kid. He’d leave boot marks on his super-clean floor if he wasn’t careful.
“Sorry, yes, of course.” He clasped his hands together, grinning so wide the corners of his glasses dug into his cheeks. “Persie, you have no idea how amazing this is. The creature you’re holding in your hands is… goodness, I can’t believe I’m saying this. It’s a pixie!”
I nodded dumbly. “And that’s… good?”
“Good?” He gave the first real guffaw I’d ever heard in my life. “It’s more than good, Persie! This might be the rarest monster I’ve ever laid eyes on. In fact, they’re archived under ‘obsolete’ in just about every monster research library you’re likely to come across. Pixies are… Oh goodness, oh goodness, this is so exciting!”
“They’re what?” My Purge not only made him dance like a marionette with the shakes, it had also made him very distractible.
He clamped a stunned hand across his mouth, then removed it, saying, “They’re supposed to be extinct, Persie! Extinct! Defunct! Nonexistent! Pick your synonym! And you’re holding one in my jacket!” He laughed so hard I worried for his blood pressure. Even the pixie stopped squawking for a second and stared at him with scathing judgment. She turned her face toward me, and I swore she rolled her twinkly black eyes. It took everything I had not to snort and ruin Nathan’s moment of euphoria.
“Well, then, they can’t be extinct,” I said sagely, but Nathan shook his head.
“That’s just it! Even the rarest of creatures will pop up on our radar from time to time, but the last sighting was over a hundred years ago. This… this is an impossible monster.” He held out his hand to touch her, and she snapped her teeth at him. His fingertips recoiled out of harm’s way. “She’s certainly spirited. Now, you have to tell me, did you create her or did you find her? They’re of Celtic origin, though they used to be found primarily in Devon and Cornwall in England. Perhaps they’ve reappeared here of their own accord, or perhaps the land itself has manifested them back into existence? Ireland is famously rich in magic, so it would not be entirely out of the question. Chaos, that would be thrilling! It would change everything we know about monster creation! Oh, think of all the theses I could write.” He went off into a daze, evidently dreaming of sleepless nights at his computer and mountains of research. In fact, I wasn’t even sure he still knew I was there. I felt almost reluctant to burst his academic bubble.
Wait… what do I tell him? My mind forked into two roads. Nathan knew more about monsters than I did, which meant he could be useful in figuring out what these things liked and how to wrangle a whole bunch of them. Although I supposed he could do that without knowing I’d created them. On the flipside, I thought about the implications of what I’d done. I’d expelled a horde of formerly extinct pixies, which was an oxymoron in and of itself; something was either extinct or it wasn’t. What if people worried about the other extinct things I might Purge—creatures with far more dangerous motives than these mischievous things?
The glass box loomed large in my fears.
“Persie?” Nathan prompted, waiting impatiently.
I glanced down at the pixie and she gave me a shrug. “I took an evening stroll, and I happened to see her moving down the hallway. I chased her because I figured she probably shouldn’t be running wild, and I found her rifling through your underwear drawer.” I settled on a compromise—not the whole truth, but not a lie, either. It seemed like the best course of action, though the little she-pixie didn’t appear to agree. She snickered into the tweed, muttering something that sounded a lot like “big fat fibber.”
Nathan laughed, then asked nervously, “But where did she come from in the first place?”
“Right… that.” I couldn’t conjure up a believable excuse out of thin air, and I didn’t know that I wanted to. But the truth… that would mean admitting that things had gone horribly awry.
He offered me a reassuring smile. “Persie, it’s okay. You