Finally, with one exhausting stream of Chaos, he broke apart the entire thing and the rest of the purple hexes collapsed with it, as though they were all connected. Sweating profusely, he looked back at me.
“Shall we?” He dug a stick of chalk out of his pocket. I knew this wasn’t any ordinary chalk—my mom and dad each carried a similar item.
I nodded. “Where to first?”
“The Repository. We need to get more of the pixies to help us before we can make our move.” He sketched a doorway into the wall and whispered the Aperi Si Ostium spell. The lines fizzled like a lit fuse, bringing it into being.
“One of them has to know where this doorway is,” I muttered.
He turned. “Doorway?”
“I… had a thought about where the missing people might have gone. Let’s just say a little birdie told me about it.” I fidgeted, hoping he wouldn’t ask for details. Trying to explain to someone, even a monster enthusiast, that I could speak to Leviathan across oceans would take more time than we had. “They mentioned the Door to Nowhere. That’s what I asked the pixie about. He didn’t seem to know anything, but he said the other pixies might.”
“The Door to Nowhere…” He pulled open the chalk doorway as he spoke. “I haven’t heard about that in many moons. It’s thought to be a mystical gateway to the land of Tír na nÓg, if memory serves, and there’s lots of speculation about where it might be. But why would you think it’s here?”
“Like I said, a birdie told me.” My cheeks burned. “And that birdie was very certain about it. They said that the Institute was built on top of it, and that… uh… something must’ve awoken the magic, hence the gateway opening and swallowing up magicals.”
His eyes widened. “Those trails! The ones I saw through the specterglass! They might be residual spirits of those who were trapped there before. Gateways work both ways—things go in, things come out.” He nodded eagerly. “That would make perfect sense! And do you know what else is useful?”
“What?” I asked nervously.
“Monsters are like truffle-sniffing pigs when it comes to dense concentrations of magic. I think the pixies might be able to lead us right to it. With the right persuasion.” He grinned broadly, his eyes hopeful.
I walked to the chalk-door. “Then we probably shouldn’t put any more of them in puzzle boxes.”
As it turned out, trying to persuade pixies to do anything at all was like wrangling slippery eels. We’d arrived at the Repository through the chalk-door to find the place empty of hunters, and with our puzzle box pixie in tow, we had the perfect opportunity to make peace offerings to my Purges. Except they weren’t playing ball.
Twenty of them bounced around in their respective glass boxes—five apiece, aside from one that had four, plus the one where we’d put the first pixie. She had her own private domain, which secretly pleased me. As for the rest, they zoomed from curved wall to curved wall, flat out ignoring Nathan and me. One had fallen asleep at the bottom of an orb, while the other four made every valiant and mischievous attempt to wake her—at least, I thought it was a her. Divebombing her, prodding her, elbowing her in the stomach, and hurling their nutshell helmets at her, yet she somehow managed to sleep through the entire thing, snoring softly.
“Hey!” I banged on one of the orbs. The five pixies inside whirled around at the same time, black eyes glinting. And then, to my horror, they all turned around and flew backward toward the glass, mooning me through the orb. Once they were satisfied they’d shocked me enough, they somersaulted back through the air, cackling like hyenas. One of them pointed at me, opening his eyes wide in alarm, mimicking my reaction. The other four collapsed into hysterics, and I realized I’d have to work a lot harder to get these pixies to focus.
I moved to a different orb. “We were just wondering if we could talk to you for a second?”
A she-pixie approached the glass and lifted her bird skull helmet like it was a visor.
“Does this mean you’ll talk?” My hopes rose, only for them to be dashed when she trilled back, mimicking the tone of my voice. Her compadre, another she-pixie, proceeded to fall to the floor and recreate a blow-by-blow of my Purge. She even managed to form some black mist from her own body, which I had to give her credit for.
“Come on! I’m trying to help you here!” I said, but they weren’t paying attention. I’d put them in these orbs, and they were going to mess around and ignore me as payback. Frantically, I tried to remember the song that I’d sung by the dumpsters, but the words wouldn’t come to me. It stayed stubbornly on the tip of my tongue, just out of reach.
Nathan sighed. “I don’t think they want to listen, and who could blame them?”
The only one who didn’t seem to be having a whale of a time was the she-pixie I’d first caught. She sat at the bottom of her orb with her back to the glass, her little shoulders hunched. Her wings lay drooped against her, her body language so sad I wanted to free her right then and there and beg forgiveness.
Then, I had a eureka moment. “What if we were to free them, and earn their trust that way?”
Nathan looked at me as if I’d lost my marbles. “Free them? What if they escape? I just watched one puff back into existence, which means they might try puffing off, if you get what I’m trying to say?”
“But ‘puffing off’ doesn’t mean much. It just turns them invisible, so they can try and make an escape on the sly. It doesn’t mean they can pass through walls.” My sixth monster sense seemed to be tingling
