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Nathan closed his eyes and let his hands move across the doorway and the walls, thorough and calm. His mouth moved as he did so, whispering a spell: “Ut revelare speciem adsumendum. Ostende mihi viam. Quod patet iter. Fiat lux. Ut revelare speciem adsumendum. Veritatem revelare.”My Latin had never been great, but I guessed he was trying to figure out the locations of the hexes that held us prisoner.

Sure enough, on the fifth repetition, a ripple thrummed across my bedroom. Sigils just in front of the walls lit up like the Fourth of July, spaced at sporadic intervals. Some glowed amber, pulsing steadily, and some carried a deep red. Others were a stark, bold green that reminded me of Celtic knots, the strands of the hexwork intricately folding in on themselves. Two were a juddering violet, the edges crackling and fizzing with energy, too volatile to hold a defined shape.

“I’ve never seen these hex designs before,” I marveled. “They’re sort of… beautiful.”

Nathan laughed. “That’s dangerous talk, finding imprisonment hexes pretty, though it makes it easier to unravel these things when you can actually see them.”

“Where did you learn this?” I sat on the bed and watched him work. His palms covered each hex and unraveled them on impact, almost like he was plucking them away. His fingers were elegant and fluid, and utterly mesmerizing to behold. Watching him distracted me from the fact that my best friend was out there somewhere, potentially trapped in some insane doorway that I’d accidentally opened. I had no clue what was on the other side of that door, and the not-knowing frightened me more than anything else. More than banshees, more than Leviathan, more than Victoria. I tried to think of this as a recon mission so I could fill Genie in on some Nathan details when I rescued her, because I would be rescuing her. One way or another.

Nathan set to work on the amber hexes, which fell apart at the touch of his fingertips and a further whisper from his lips. “Separabunt necessitudines. Discoperiet nodum. Quod sit potentiam perdidit. Frange est. Frange vincula. Fiat.”They must have been the weaker ones, judging by how rapidly they unraveled. The amber threads un-looped, as though invisible hands were tugging the strands free, the entire thing disappearing in a puff of golden smoke as it finished undoing itself.

“You’re good at this,” I encouraged.

He smiled and moved on to the rusty red designs. “I’ve had a long time to study.”

“You can find out how to do this in books?” I had to keep asking questions to stop myself from toppling into an abyss of fear for Genie. And I really didn’t want Nathan to see me have a panic attack.

“You can, but not these specific spells.” He continued humoring me while he dispensed with the first few reddish hexes, altering the unraveling spell ever so slightly. “You know what a Grimoire is, yes?”

I laughed coolly. “I might not have magic of my own, but I did grow up in a coven.”

“I’ll take that as a yes, then. Apologies if I insulted you—it always pays to understand the knowledge people have before bombarding them with things they may not know.” Beads of sweat trickled down his face as he delicately untwined the last of the red hexwork, deft and precise. “Well, these anti-hex spells came from my father’s Grimoire.”

“He must’ve been very powerful,” I said. “Or did he just have a penchant for hexes?”

Nathan wiped his brow with the back of his sleeve. “I didn’t know him very well, so I couldn’t say. Maybe both, maybe neither.”

“Oh… I’m sorry. Is he… uh… no longer with us?”

Nathan shrugged and began working on the green hexes. “Again, I couldn’t say. He took off when I was three, leaving nothing but a Grimoire to remember him by. My mom gave it to me when I was twelve or so, but before that she hadn’t said much about him, and I didn’t ask.” His Chaos untied the Celtic knots smoothly, but I could see the strain of it on his brow. “I have vague memories of his face from when I was little, but you can’t trust the human brain with such things. It’s more likely that I’ve put together an impression in my mind of what I think he looks like.”

“Did you ever try to find him?” As a daughter of still-married parents, I found it difficult to put myself in his shoes. If it were me, I would’ve wanted to find them. But I knew that wasn’t the case for everyone, depending on the circumstances of a parent’s departure.

Nathan paused and sucked in a heavy breath, his hands still sparking as he worked on the glittering green hexes. “I thought about it, then realized there wasn’t much point. He wouldn’t have left if he wanted to be found. And I had no need for a father figure. My mum had no trouble filling the gap.”

“You said ‘mum.’ I thought you were American?”

“Canadian, actually, but my mum is born and bred Republic of Ireland. Hence the ‘O’Hara’ part. My parents never married, and I guess he didn’t care if I took his name or not.” He closed his eyes, as if he were thinking of her. “We moved to Canada about a year after he walked out. Mum had family there, and I think she wanted to put distance between us and the place where she’d been with him, you know? I don’t think it ended well, but I didn’t understand that until I was much older. And now I’m back here, in the homeland.” He chuckled and got back to work on the last green hex.

I was intrigued to learn more about the calm and collected researcher. It proved the theory that you couldn’t tell much about a person just from looking at them. “Who was he?”

Nathan’s eyes darkened, as if it was painful to remember. “He wasn’t anyone. He certainly proved that when he left. Just a guy, passing through our lives, who never intended to stay.” His breath caught in his throat, and I knew the QA session had come to an end.

I was looking for a distraction, but I didn’t need to dredge up all of Nathan’s bad memories while I was at it. Still, I was glad his dad had left him that Grimoire, or we wouldn’t have gotten out of here anytime soon.

I focused on Nathan’s spellcasting instead of idle babbling as he turned his attention to the sparking purple hexes. They called for a very different spell, Chaos streaming out of his palms in crackling strands that were tangibly more powerful. As he chanted, a sliver of lavender light flowed out of his skin and pooled in his hands. Finger-like fronds of the light slithered out and sank into the frenetic balls of purple hexwork. With every thrum of his Chaos strands, a piece came undone, like he was trying to undo the knots in a huge ball of wool. And I stared, transfixed by his power and skill. He had hidden talents beneath the stiff upper lip and the tweed.

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 Ostiumspell. 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 again, giving me an idea of what they could and couldn’t do. “If we close the doors and get prepared with puzzle boxes, they can puff as much as they like—they won’t be able to get out. And if we want them to talk, we can’t keep them cooped up like this. They’ve made that blatantly obvious.”

I watched a duo of male pixies in the middle of a brawl, slapping and biting the heck out of each other. They broke apart a few seconds later, putting their arms around each other and laughing as though nothing had happened.

Nathan went quiet for a while. “Okay… let’s do it.”

“Really?”

“It’s the best idea we’ve got, even if it might get me fired.”

Straightening up, he ran to the far side of the Repository and closed the doors. On his way back, he grabbed an armload of puzzle boxes and dumped them on the ground in front of me before zipping off to his study. I had no idea what he needed from there, but all became clear when he ran back, beaming from ear to ear, with a cup, a carton of milk, and a basket of strawberries in his hands.

I laughed, despite my growing anxiety. “You remembered.”

“Milk and sweet fruit. If anything’s going to grab their attention, it’s this.” He set to work, pouring a cupful of milk and putting out the strawberries. I glanced from him to the pixies and back again, wondering if this was the worst plan I’d ever hatched. So much could go wrong. Then again, I didn’t like the sight of the pixies in those glass orbs. I knew it was Institute protocol, and Victoria would flip her lid if she found out they’d all escaped, but if the pixies listened… if they could just give us an indication of where the missing magicals might be, then it would be worth the head huntswoman’s rage. And if the pixies could exonerate themselves in her eyes while they were at it, even better.

“Are you sure you want to do this?” Nathan approached the first orb full of pixies.

I shook my head. “No, but I still think it’s our best shot.”

“Okay, then, brace yourself.” He opened the puzzle box with the pixie inside first, then lifted the lid on the first orb, then the second, then the third, then the fourth. And, finally, the opened the last one, with the solitary she-pixie inside.

In a collective flurry, the pixies erupted from their prisons. They flew up and up with their gossamer wings until I worried they might disappear through the roof, only to hurtle back down the millisecond they spotted the cup of milk. A cascade of brightly colored monsters made an aerial assault on the dairy goodness, one of them diving right into the cup and splashing around in the milk. Four others spied the carton that Nathan had put down and snatched it for themselves. Cheering and chanting, they hauled the milk carton away and went to town, scooping up handfuls and guzzling down every drop.

The strawberry situation quickly turned into a bloodbath. Well, it looked like a bloodbath. Smushed fruit everywhere, smeared on their hungry little faces and all over their tiny frames. Two she-pixies ripped off the green tops and plopped them on their heads, using them as fetching hats. A moment later, they devoured a strawberry between them like piranhas gnawing a whole duck down to the bone.

“Excuse me?” I sank to my knees and tried to get their attention. “Would you be willing to talk now? We need your help with something, and it’s urgent.”

I might as well have been talking to myself.

Over the cup of milk, a fight broke out. A trio of pixies squawking and squabbling, trying to pull the cup toward them in a three-way tug of war. Meanwhile, a fourth pixie still swished and swam about in the milk, happy as a clam. Pixies battled for the prime spot atop the milk carton, shoving each other out of the way to get to it. A she-pixie slapped another so hard across the face that he fell to the ground for a moment before shaking his head and getting back up. He tackled her from the top of the carton, and the two of them wound up in the strawberry basket, where they seemed intent on making jam out of what was left.

“This is useless! They don’t care!” I hissed to Nathan. We were running out of time to save my best friend, and these punks were too busy fighting over milk and strawberries. I wanted to grab them and knock their heads together.

Instead, I sat back on my haunches and let the frustration wash over me. Bitter tears welled in my eyes, trickling down my cheeks and onto the floor. One of the little ingrates even dared to dip a finger into the small puddle and taste my tears. I would’ve flicked him away, but it wouldn’t help. We’d let them out, and they didn’t give a crap what we wanted.

Why should they? No one in the Institute cared about what they wanted. They were just returning the favor.

I was so absorbed in my misery that I didn’t notice the she-pixie I’d first caught finally emerge from her orb, as though she’d been observing the situation. For a moment, she was just a flutter in the corner of my eye. Then, she shot upward to meet with the puzzle-box pixie, who was chomping contentedly on a strawberry. He dropped it the moment he saw the she-pixie, and the two of them hovered there for a moment. Their loud chatter and the falling strawberry drew my attention away from my tears. They jabbed bony fingers at me, babbling animatedly, and performed some less-than-flattering charades. Finally, it seemed they’d made some kind of decision. Both creatures nodded to one another and hurtled to the ground.

The she-pixie landed by the milk, while the other one landed by the strawberries. There, in a display of pure rage that I could only have described as jaw-dropping, the two pixies set about terrorizing the others into obedience. Slaps, bites, irate shrieks and yelps, and a lot of angry gesturing and shoving. Every so often, the two additions pointed up toward me, their chatter becoming even more incensed, as if they were reprimanding the others for not listening to me.

Nathan knelt beside me, observing the telling-off of a lifetime. “They have a hierarchy. Fascinating.”

“What do you mean?” I whispered, not wanting to disturb them. The she-pixie and the one from my bedroom were in the middle of corralling the rest into the center of the floor, right in front of Nathan and me. I didn’t dare laugh, but the others looked so put out, their wings drooping and their heads bowed as they shuffled forward, ashamed and humbled. It was made funnier by the fact that most of them were doused in milk or smothered with strawberries.

Nathan gestured to the two he’d freed last. “They operate as a group, socially connected to one another. These two are clearly fond of you, and they’re getting the rest to accept you.”

“They are?” I smiled down at the tiny beasts.

“It looks like it.”

Just then, the fearsome she-pixie tiptoed forward and tugged the bottom of Nathan’s tweed jacket. She sniffed it, then beckoned for the others to do the same. He froze, evidently less confident about the pixies’ intentions than he’d been a moment ago. After all twenty-one had done their smell test, the she-pixie patted her chest frantically. Immediately, the whole flock “oohed,” as if they understood something that Nathan and I didn’t. She then pointed to me and chattered loudly, wrapping her arms around herself and grinning manically. The male pixie who’d come out of the puzzle box nodded and copied her movements, getting them to sniff my knees. I’d never felt less comfortable in my life than I did as a gang of pixies took a whiff of me. The pixies “oohed” again when the male pixie beat his chest, smiling proudly.

“I’m not sure why they’re sniffing us, though.” Nathan chuckled, looking remarkably chipper about this entire thing.

I smiled, my heart softening like a marshmallow. “They recognize our smell. They’re showing the others that they know us, and we’re not going to hurt them.” I pointed to his tweed jacket. “This is the jacket I wrapped her up in, back in your room, and I’m still wearing the clothes that the ‘poofing’ pixie met me in. That’s why they’re sniffing.”

The she-pixie muttered something and made a retching sound. Her wrangling colleague nodded and performed his Victoria impression again, before gesturing at us and shaking his head. The other nineteen pixies eyed us with new intrigue, chirruping excitedly amongst themselves. A few of the she-pixies batted their eyelashes at Nathan, pretending to smooth down imaginary lapels the way he’d just done.

“I think we just made some new friends,” Nathan whispered nervously.

I giggled, laughter bubbling up the back of my throat. “You’re right. I think we did.”

At the sound of my joy, the pixies burst into cackles, nudging each other and hopping gleefully from foot to foot. A few of them even scooped the strawberry goop off their faces and offered it to Nathan and me. After we politely declined, they gobbled it up themselves, clearly relieved we hadn’t accepted. But it felt like a good start to a good relationship.

Now that I had their attention, I stood a chance of getting their help. And that brought me one step closer to finding a way to rescue Genie and the other missing magicals. As terrible ideas went, this might’ve been my best one yet.