Ransom Riggs - Library of Souls

“I hope you understand, Mr. Portman,” said Miss Peregrine.

“I do …”

“Jacob has a soft spot for that hollow,” Emma said.

“Well,” I said, a little embarrassed. “He was my first.”

Miss Peregrine looked at me strangely but promised she’d do what she could.

The bite wound across my stomach was becoming too unbearable to ignore, so Emma and I joined the line to see Mother Dust, which snaked out of her makeshift clinic in the kitchen and down the hall. It was amazing to watch person after person hobble in, battered and bruised, nursing a broken toe or a mild concussion—or in Miss Avocet’s case, a bullet from Caul’s antique pistol lodged in her shoulder—only to stride out a few minutes later looking better than new. In fact, they were looking so good that Miss Peregrine pulled Reynaldo aside and asked him to remind Mother Dust that she was not a renewable resource, and not to waste herself on minor wounds that would heal just fine on their own.

“I tried to tell her myself,” he replied, “but she’s a perfectionist. She won’t listen to me.”

So Miss Peregrine went into the kitchen to have a word with Mother Dust in person. She came out again five minutes later looking sheepish, several cuts on her face having disappeared and her arm, which hadn’t hung straight since Caul had slammed her into that cavern wall, swinging freely at her side. “What a stubborn woman!” she exclaimed.

When it was my turn to go in and see her, I almost refused treatment—she only had a thumb and forefinger left on her good hand. But she took one look at the zagging, blood-encrusted cuts across my belly and practically shoved me onto the cot they’d set up by the sink. The bite was becoming infected, she told me through Reynaldo. Hollow teeth were crawling with nasty bacteria, and left untreated I would get very sick. So I relented. Mother Dust sprinkled her powder across my torso, and in a few minutes I was feeling much improved.

Before I left, I tried to tell her again how much her sacrifice had meant, and how the piece of herself she’d given to me had saved us. “Really, without that finger, I never would’ve been able to—”

But she turned away as soon as I started talking, as if the words thank you burned her ears.

Reynaldo hurried me out. “I’m sorry, Mother Dust has many other patients to see.”

Emma met me in the hall. “You look marvelous!” she said. “Thank the birds, I was really starting to worry about that bite …”

“Be sure and tell her about your ears,” I said.

“What?”

“Your ears ,” I said louder, pointing to them. Emma’s ears hadn’t stopped ringing since the library. Because she’d had to keep her hands aflame to light our way as we escaped, she hadn’t been able to block out the terrific noise—which, I worried, had literally been deafening. “Just don’t mention the finger!”

“The what?”

“The finger!” I said, holding up my finger. “She’s very touchy about it. No pun intended …”

“Why?”

I shrugged. “No idea.”

Emma went in. Three minutes later she came out snapping her fingers by her ears. “Amazing!” she said. “Clear as a bell.”

“Thank goodness,” I said. “Shouting is no fun.”

“Ha. I mentioned the finger, by the way.”

“What! Why?”

“I was curious.”

“And?”

“Her hands started shaking. Then she mumbled something Reynaldo wouldn’t translate, and he practically chased me out.”

We might’ve pursued it further, I think, if we hadn’t been so tired and hungry, and if at that moment the smell of food had not wafted its way past our noses.

“Come and get it!” Miss Wren shouted from down the hall, and the conversation was tabled.

As night fell we gathered to eat in Bentham’s library, the only room big enough to hold all of us comfortably. The fire was stoked and a feast donated by grateful locals brought in, roast chicken and potatoes and wild game and fish (which I avoided, on the off chance they might have been caught in the Ditch). We ate and talked and rehashed the adventures of the past few days. Miss Peregrine had heard only a little about our journey from Cairnholm to London, and then across bombed-out London to reach Miss Wren, and wanted to know every last detail. She was a great listener, always laughing at the funny parts and reacting with satisfying gasps to our dramatic flourishes.

“And then the bomb fell right on the hollow and blew it to smithereens !” Olive cried, leaping out of her chair as she reenacted the moment. “But we had Miss Wren’s peculiar sweaters on, so the shrapnel didn’t kill us!”

“Oh my heavens!” Miss Peregrine said. “That was very lucky!”

When our stories had finished, Miss Peregrine sat quietly for a time, studying us with a mixture of sadness and awe. “I’m so very, very proud of you,” she said, “and so sorry for all that happened. I can’t tell you how much I wish it had been me by your side, and not my deceitful brother.”

We observed a moment of silence for Fiona. She wasn’t dead, Hugh insisted, but merely lost. The trees had cushioned her fall, he said, and she was probably wandering in the forest somewhere near Miss Wren’s menagerie. Or had knocked her head on the way down and forgotten where she came from. Or was hiding …

He looked around hopefully at us, but we avoided his eyes.

“I’m sure she’ll turn up,” Bronwyn assured him.

“Don’t give him false hope,” Enoch said. “It’s cruel.”

“You would know about cruel,” Bronwyn replied scornfully.

“Let’s change the subject,” Horace said. “I want to know how the dog rescued Jacob and Emma in the Underground.”

Addison hopped gamely onto the table and began to narrate the story, but he embellished it with so many asides about his own heroism that Emma was forced to take over. Together, she and I told them how we’d found our way to Devil’s Acre, and how with Bentham’s help we’d mounted our mini-invasion of the wights’ compound. Then everyone had questions for me—they wanted to know about the hollows.

“How did you teach yourself their language?” Millard asked.

“What’s it like to control one?” asked Hugh. “Do you imagine you’re one of them, like I do my bees?”

“Does it tickle?” asked Bronwyn.

“Do you ever wish you could keep one as a pet?” asked Olive.

I answered as best I could but was feeling tongue-tied because it was a hard thing to describe, my connection with the hollows, like piecing together a dream the morning after. I was distracted, too, by the talk Emma and I had been putting off. When I’d finished, I caught Emma’s eye and nodded to the door, and we excused ourselves. As we walked away from the table, I could feel the eyes of the room on our backs.

We ducked into a lantern-lit cloakroom cramped with coats, hats, and umbrellas. It was not a spacious or comfortable place, but it was at least private; somewhere we wouldn’t be walked in on or overheard. I felt suddenly and irrationally terrified. I had a difficult choice to make, one I had not fully grappled with until now.

We were silent for a moment, facing each other, the room so deadened by fabric that I thought I could hear the beating of our hearts.

“So,” Emma said, because of course she would start first. Emma, always direct, never afraid of an awkward moment. “Will you stay?”

I did not know what I would say until the words left my mouth. I was running on autopilot, no filter. “I have to see my parents.”

That was unquestionably true. They were hurting and frightened and didn’t deserve to be, and I had left them dangling too long.