Which doesn’t stop him from whispering in my head, but still… He didn’t control me. He’d tried that in a dreamworld, and it hadn’t worked. My subconscious might have slipped momentarily, but his influence over me was nowhere near as potent as he would have liked. And I wasn’t going to let anyone else tell me otherwise.
“If I had control over the pixies, do you think they’d still be out there?” I waved a wild hand around me. “They don’t listen to me! They might, if you’d let me try and speak to one of the ones I captured, but you had your hunters take them away. So, that’s out of the question, isn’t it?”
Victoria looked unconvinced by my outburst. “And what if you’re not the one with control over them? What if you’re not even in control of yourself?”
“Leviathan? Tobe has him under lock and key, and even if he could contact me, he still wouldn’t have a say in what I do. My decisions are my own.” I shivered with anger, a chill prickling up the back of my neck. “And he can’t bend monsters to his will, either. If he could, he wouldn’t have been trapped all these years. He’d have just ‘controlled’ the other monsters in the Bestiary and staged a mass breakout. Do you hear sirens? Have you heard about any high alerts from the SDC? No, because there’s nothing going on. Leviathan has no power as long as he’s imprisoned.”
A subtle movement drew my eye toward the door, making my heart jolt—a pixie had snuck in during the conversation, fluttering up to one of the bookshelves. This pixie looked bulkier than the she-pixie I’d first caught—instinct told me I was looking at a male of the species. His coloring was darker, with navy blue wings and emerald green banding across his body. He wore a nutshell hat on his head and was covered in dark red spots that pulsated gently, his dark eyes fixed on me from between two books. I tried to pretend I couldn’t see him, for his sake. Victoria would have had him in a puzzle box faster than he could say “I’m innocent!”
Victoria plucked up a sketchbook and flipped through the pages. My fingertips itched to snatch it back. She might as well have been looking through my diary, peering into my innermost secrets. But I resisted; I was already in trouble.
“I have to do my job, Persie. I don’t like interrogating you, but nothing like this has ever happened before during my entire tenure at the Institute. We have fifteen people missing now, and I have to suspect foul play. And, since we have untold pixies still on the loose, it follows that they’re our top suspect—our only suspect, actually. My people are in grave danger, and I have to see them rescued as soon as possible, which means I have to pursue every avenue.”
Fifteen?! The number had shot up while I’d been hexed into this room. All this time, I could’ve been out there, getting the pixies to help. We might’ve stopped that number from getting out of hand. Victoria and her hunters had prevented that possibility. I could only imagine the authoritarian state out there, right now. Hunters stationed in every hallway, armed with magic. The corridors would be deserted, and those still stuck in their rooms would probably be on the verge of mental breakdowns. With no way to get in touch with the outside world, the Institute had started to feel very isolated and frightening, indeed.
I side-eyed the pixie, and he shook his head solemnly. He pressed a tiny hand to his chest, and the pulsating red spots turned blue, as though he was sad. This gesture confirmed what I’d already deduced—these creatures were sentient and playful, and nowhere close to evil. Maybe Leviathan hadn’t been pulling my leg about this Door to Nowhere business. It meant that we were at the center of a very different, much scarier kind of mess, but it also meant that I was right about the pixies’ innocence. Still, I didn’t want to add that idea to the mix until I had evidence.
“I’m not disagreeing that it’s foul play, but Nathan knows plenty about the pixies. I’m willing to bet he doesn’t think they’re responsible, either.” I moved to the center of the room, so I could see easily both Victoria and the pixie. “You said he did his best, but the truth is that he just didn’t give you the black-and-white guilty verdict that you wanted from him.”
Victoria’s right eyebrow twitched. “He found enough to maintain the theory. Accounts of tricks going awry. Vengeful schemes.”
The pixie shook a clenched fist at the head huntswoman from between the two 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
