Persie Merlin and the Door to Nowhere by Bella Forrest Page 0,70
Atlantis, I’d pay homage.
“Why won’t you come out?” I asked my bedroom, though I’d already checked the place twice for any lingering critters. Now, I sat at my desk in the glow of my last lamp, the sun having gone down hours ago. If I’d known yesterday how much things would change in the space of twenty-four hours… Well, what would I have done? Maybe I’d have tried to block the door or opened the window to let the pixies out. Maybe I’d have done the exact same thing. Maybe I’d have just called Victoria from the outset, though her talk of turning the pixies into ‘specimens’ had confirmed that we viewed things differently. It had confirmed why I’d tried to catch them alone in the first place, too. For their sake. If only life were like a painting or a sketch, where I could swipe white paint over the bits I didn’t like or erase the wonky parts and start fresh. But reality didn’t allow for do-overs.
At a loss, I took out my phone and called home. It rang twice, and my mom’s face appeared in fuzzy hologram. Truthfully, I had an ulterior motive for calling her. If she could just give me an iota of intel that I could link to the disappearance of the magicals here, that would be a heck of a start to my alternative abduction theories.
“It must be Christmas, getting two calls in two days!” She grinned, and my heart felt a tiny bit lighter. “How are you feeling, sweetheart? You hung up rather abruptly last night. Everything okay with the… taco incident?”
I nodded. “I managed to sleep it off, though you should see the bathroom. It looks like a colony of bats had a fiesta in there.” I couldn’t bring myself to tell her about the Purge or the missing people, so I bent the story slightly. If you squinted really hard, a pixie could pass for a brightly-colored, really skinny, humanoid bat.
“Lovely.” My mom pulled a funny, disgusted face. “I hope you’re drinking plenty of fluids and sugary things to get your electrolytes back up?”
I chuckled. “Lots of tea. The Irish love their tea.”
“Tell me about it. Your dad used to go crazy whenever he came back from a trip to the motherland—he’d have crates of Barry’s Tea and bottles of red lemonade in his luggage. Weird stuff, but apparently it’s a huge deal over there. Maybe you could get a bottle to help your tummy?” She leaned closer to the camera, as though she could reach me through it.
“I’m already much better,” I promised, which wasn’t a complete lie. The effects of the Purge had worn off after I’d gotten my three hours of sleep this morning, and I only had a few aches here and there to suggest I’d Purged at all. Aside from what came out of me, the recovery time on Purging appeared to be the second biggest surprise of this ability. With the banshee, it took days; with the griffin, the hydra, and the gargoyle, it had been hours; and with the others, I was more or less fine immediately afterward. I guessed it depended on the power of the monster. Sure, I’d Purged lots of pixies, but maybe their cumulative power wasn’t as big as other things I’d created.
I wanted to tell my mom everything, but she’d only have worried. And not the usual motherly worry, either. She’d have been battering down the mirrors and trying to take over Victoria’s investigation before I could even end the call. I did not want to see a stand-off between the head huntswoman and my mom, but I did need to pry some information out of her regarding the missing magical cases. A delicate venture, which would call for stealth and dexterity.
“You still haven’t Purged?” A note of expectation hung in my mom’s voice, like she suspected I had and was giving me the chance to come clean.
I picked up a pencil and doodled nervously on the cover of my sketchbook. “No, still nothing.”
“You can tell me, you know. I won’t go all tiger-mom.” She looked through the camera so earnestly that I hated not telling her everything. But with the pixies at the forefront of this investigation, I couldn’t tell her one thing without revealing the other. And I didn’t want to betray Victoria’s trust, after she’d just let me off the hook… not any more than I already had by hunting the pixies when she’d told me