“By?” I prompted.
He cleared his throat, his eyes wide. “Pixies.”
Boudicca leapt to the defense of her people, chattering loudly, jabbing and pointing like there was no tomorrow. I got the feeling she disagreed with Nathan, and I wished more than ever that I had a way to understand exactly what my Purge beasts were saying. It would’ve made this so much easier.
“Calm down,” I urged Boudicca. “Explain it slowly, so I can get the gist.”
She turned her pulsating spots to a sad shade of blue and began to act out the message she was trying to get across. First, she pointed at me and pretended to walk across my shoulder, shivering and hunched, her expression scared. Then, she pointed to herself and lifted up off my shoulder, gesturing and beckoning as though she were leading me somewhere. For her next act, she dropped suddenly to the floor, as if she were dead, and turned her spots purple. She rose up with her arms outstretched, like a resurrected mummy, and returned to her second performance of guiding me somewhere. Then, things turned bad again as Boudicca began snickering and tiptoeing through the air, leading me, presumably, down the wrong path.
“The Wisps are spirits of lost souls?” I said. Boudicca nodded vigorously. “Who haven’t been able… to cross to the afterlife?” She nodded again, flashing her purple spots. “But how did they end up like this, causing trouble? They aren’t poltergeists.” Boudicca grumbled something rude in pixie and flashed her purple spots more frantically.
Nathan cleared his throat. “I think she’s trying to say that they were brought into being with some kind of Necromancy. Purple is the color of Necromancy.”
Boudicca took off and hurtled toward Nathan’s face, landing a huge smacker on his nose. She flew back again, smoothing down her hair with sudden bashfulness. In fairness, poor Nathan looked stunned, and maybe a little horrified.
“I guess that means you were right,” I said, chuckling nervously. “Did you bring them into being? I didn’t know you were Necromancers.”
Boudicca gestured, and then swept her hands through the air in a cross.
I arched a confused eyebrow. “You were, but you’re not anymore?”
She grinned and nodded, before motioning in the direction of where the Wisps had disappeared. I tried to remember the rest of the scenes that she’d played out so I could put together a timeline of events in my head.
“So, you brought them into being with Necromancy and gave them the task that you’d been doing of guiding travelers? Only, they… stopped doing what you told them to, and started leading people astray instead?” I was really wading through some wild speculation here. “And that’s when you had your Necromancy abilities taken away from you?”
Boudicca punched the air and nodded effusively. She held up her index finger and added one last scene. Miming to perfection, she signed out a doorway, then pretended to get sucked through, shaking her fists as her spots flashed red with anger.
“They got trapped behind the Door to Nowhere because they were disobeying?” I guessed.
She grinned and gave me a thumbs-up. But she wasn’t quite done. Flying right up to my face, she tapped my forehead. And I had a horrible feeling I understood exactly what she was trying to say this time.
I lowered my voice, so Nathan wouldn’t hear. “I opened the Door to Nowhere by Purging you?”
She tilted her head from side to side and tapped my forehead again.
“I opened it by coming here?” I asked.
No matter which way I swung it, I was responsible for this. The pixies hadn’t stolen anyone directly, and neither had I, but our joint actions had caused a chain reaction that had opened up this mysterious door.
She repeated the head tilt.
I sighed, exasperated. “You don’t know why the Door is open?”
She nodded and pressed her bony finger between my brows.
“You don’t know, but you think it has something to do with me?”
Her black eyes widened in apology as she gave one last, slow nod. I really hadn’t wanted Leviathan to be right… about any of it. The Door to Nowhere was real, and I’d played a part in unlocking it so the Wisps could get out and wreak havoc. He might have had incorrect information about the Wisps, but he’d been on the right track. Maybe, if he wasn’t so arrogant, he would’ve paid attention to beasts who hadn’t warranted his attention, and I’d have been spared this lesson in advanced charades. But I couldn’t change that now. I couldn’t change any of it.
“Is everything all right?” Nathan stepped into my hazy view.
I tried to rally my nerve, for his sake. “I think so. Those Wisps were trapped beyond the Door to Nowhere, and now it’s open. They’re leading people off the path and through the Door, because that’s what they do. It’s real, and it’s here, and I’m guessing it’s down at the bottom of the sphere, since that’s where the Wisps went.”
“But… there has never been any connection between Will-o’-the-Wisps and the Door. Both show up in ancient texts, but never together. And, like I said before, the gateway has only been mentioned once as being anywhere near here.” He scratched his head. “This doesn’t make any sense.”
“It doesn’t have to. Not everything is written down in books, Nathan. Sometimes, there are things in this world so great that they have to be kept secret at all costs.” A lump formed in my throat as the feeling of responsibility built in my chest, the pressure immense. “All I know is, something happened here. Something stirred this place into reacting.”
Nathan’s eyes opened wide. “It’s the construction! If the Door is down there, it must’ve been unearthed when they started building the foundations. They didn’t begin on the sphere too long ago—maybe a week before you arrived—so, if we add a bit of wait time for the gateway to gather energy from… some unknown source, then the timeline would fit!”
Nathan O’Hara. You really
