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“Ineed answers.” Victoria didn’t bother with any niceties. “Now.”

I looked up at her, my mind still fuzzy from the connection to Leviathan. “I’ve told you everything I know, Ms. Jules. What else is there?”

We’d already gone in several circles during this interview-slash-interrogation. And it looked like the record would keep skipping, until I could verify what Leviathan had told me about this weird doorway and show, once and for all, that the pixies had no part in the disappearances. But it wasn’t as if I could just go ahead and tell her that she’d walked in and cut off a mental call from the ancient monster who’d caused all this. That would just add a layer of fault to the trifle of blame already jiggling over my head.

Victoria sucked in a sharp breath. “I need to know everything about these pixies. Nathan has done his best, but there’s not enough lore to go on, and the records from the Cornish coven were destroyed in a fire some years ago.” She paced uneasily, reminding me a little of my mom. I sensed it was taking all of her willpower to stay calm.

“I’ve told you everything!” I insisted, fidgeting with the bedsheets.

Victoria shot me a dark look. “I don’t think that’s true, Persie.”

“Then I’m going to need you to be more precise.” I wasn’t deliberately being sassy, but she was more or less asking me to read her mind.

“Did anyone ask you to do this? Did someone speak to you before you came to the Institute? Did someone put the idea of coming here in your head, or did it happen organically?”

I said nothing, thinking… Did she mean Leviathan?

She paused, her brow furrowing. “Can you remember anything else from the evening you Purged? Were you aware you could Purge extinct monsters, prior to coming here?”

I stared at her. “No! Of course not!”

“I think you ought to be more precise,” she replied coolly.

“Nobody put the idea of coming here in my head.” I shuffled nervously at the edge of the bed, trying to figure out where she was going with all this. “As for the evening I Purged—I got sick, same as every other time. There wasn’t anything different, apart from the fact that I expelled a bunch of monsters instead of one. And no, I have no idea what I’m going to Purge before it happens.”

Victoria went to my desk and absently picked up a few items. “But you understand where your ability comes from, don’t you? You were the one who told me about it.”

So she did think Leviathan had a part in this. Being vague about it didn’t minimize the accusation, that, somehow, the monster had prodded me into this Institute and made me release an army of pixies. But for what purpose? Did she think he wanted to punish the hunters because of the nature of their job? Was I supposed to be the conduit in this scenario?

“Leviathan doesn’t have any say in what I do, if that’s what you’re getting at.” I stood, anger rocketing through me. “He gave me this ability, sure, but that’s where it ends. I’m not his spy or his puppet. He’s frozen in a glass box on the other side of the Atlantic.”

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, butthere 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 wasmy 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.

“Not this one.” Victoria walked to the door, prompting the pixie to disappear in a puff of green smoke. I prayed she hadn’t seen it wafting across my books. “Stop looking for other culprits, Persie, when the truth is staring you in the face. I know it’s hard for you to accept because these pixies are yours, but you need to come to terms with it. The simplest explanation is likely the right one. Pixies have been Purged for the first time in centuries. Fifteen people have gone missing so far.” She paused and hit me with a solemn stare. “And among them is your friend, Genie Vertis.”

After dropping that bombshell, she strode out and closed the door behind her.