Persie Merlin and the Door to Nowhere by Bella Forrest Page 0,90
books and received a warning look from me. He sank back into the shadows with a furious expression on his tiny face, squatting down where I couldn’t see him anymore. I had to clear my throat loudly to cover the quiet grumblings from the bookshelf. Victoria definitely wouldn’t have been happy to hear the crude sentiments coming out of the pixie’s sharp-toothed mouth.
“That’s nonsense and you know it!” I shot back. “Fifteen disappearances is more than ‘tricks going awry,’ and far beyond the scope of anything Nathan could have found.”
Victoria turned her back to me, her eyes presumably fixed on the horizon. “For the safety of the Institute, you will continue to stay under lockdown until further notice. We may not know the pixies are guilty, but there is enough evidence to consider the creatures hostile and dangerous.”
Another round of savage grumbling came from the bookshelf, causing me to feign a full-blown coughing attack. Victoria didn’t even turn to check that I was okay.
I lifted an angry finger to my lips and hoped the pixie understood. He stuck out his bright blue tongue but retreated back into the books, sulking. And not a moment too soon. Victoria turned back around, and I made some dumbass attempt to pretend I was rubbing my lips. “It’s not them, Victoria. You’re making a mistake.” I put my hands behind my back to avoid any more awkward charades.
But a question lingered, hot and spiny and horrible inside my head. If what Leviathan had said about my ability was true, then all of this was my fault. It might not have been the pixies, but I’d sure as heck done something to get this doorway open. And that doorway had sucked the missing magicals right into it, somehow. Leviathan had just flipped me out of the frying pan and into the proverbial flames of guilt.
Maybe he’s lying. Maybe it’s a game he’s playing. The strange, Irish-named place had sounded real enough, but the Door to Nowhere had a distinctly made-up, kid’s story vibe to it. And it seemed like the kind of thing that the Institute would know about, or that someone would have read in a book somewhere. They wouldn’t just build something on top of a powerful, mythical gateway… would they? That was just asking for trouble.
But a conflicting notion nagged at the back of my mind. What if he wasn’t lying? What if this doorway existed, and I’d opened it, and that was where the magicals had gone?
I decided to go with it, just in case.
“The Door to Nowhere is responsible for this. The Basanis built this Institute on sacred ground, and now the magical powers that be are pissed. I don’t know why they’ve chosen now to take their revenge, but it’s happening.”
Another slight omission of the truth. Leviathan had told me I was somehow responsible, but I didn’t think it wise to implicate myself when I was already implicated for something else. If I’d somehow opened the Door, maybe I was the only one who could get the missing people back and close it again. If not, people would keep on vanishing and the pixies would keep on getting blamed. If all the pixies were captured and people continued to disappear, Victoria’s theory would grind to a halt. But I didn’t want it to get that far—no one should have to suffer for Victoria’s stubbornness.
Victoria laughed. “That is a fairytale, Persie. An ancient legend that has no basis in reality whatsoever. Do you know how many places in Ireland claim to be the gateway to the land of Tír na nÓg? There are entire Internet pages dedicated to it. If you believe in that, I strongly urge you to avoid toadstool rings. As for the idea that the Institute is built on such a place,” she continued, opening her arms to indicate the facility, “that isn’t even mentioned in the most thorough of Internet chatrooms. I think there’s one nod to it in an old text somewhere, but that manuscript also posits the theory that Finn McCool threw a rock that turned into an island. So, I’ll let you be the judge of how reliable that source is.”
“There’s truth in legends, Ms. Jules.” Someone had told me that, my mom or Uncle Finch, or maybe Melody. Atlantis had been nothing but a legend for thousands of years, but it had been at the bottom of the ocean the whole time, as real as the surface world.