A Map of Days (Miss Peregrine's Peculiar Children, #4)(117)

“Miss Peregrine. Miss Peregrine. I’m so sorry.”

She patted my back and kissed me on the forehead.

“Save it for later, Mr. Portman.”

I turned to Leo. “What about my friends?”

“Waiting in the loading dock.”

“And Noor?”

His expression soured instantly. “Don’t push it, kid. And don’t ever come back here. Helping my sister was your get-out-of-jail-free card. But you only get one.”



* * *



? ? ?

Leo’s men escorted us down the hallways, through Leo’s club and the kitchen, and out to the loading dock. In the weak light of dawn I saw Emma and Bronwyn waiting, and beside them the white shirt and gray slacks that I knew belonged to Millard. When I saw them whole and standing and unhurt, the shudder of relief I felt was almost like a chill. I hadn’t realized until that moment how dimmed my hopes had become.

“Oh my bird, thank the birds,” Bronwyn sang, clasping her hands as Miss Peregrine and I approached them.

“I told you he’d be fine,” Millard said. “Jacob can take care of himself.”

“Fine?” Emma said, going pale as she looked me over. “What did they do to you?”

I hadn’t seen a mirror in a while, but between my busted nose and other injuries, I must’ve looked fearful.

Emma hugged me. For a moment it didn’t matter what had happened between us, it just felt good to have her in my arms again. Then she hugged a little too tight, and pain ricocheted across my cracked ribs. I sucked in my breath and pulled away.

I assured her I was okay, though my head felt like a balloon that was about to pop. “Where’s Enoch?” I said.

“In the Acre,” said Millard.

“Thank God.”

“He escaped that horrible diner,” said Emma, “then called your house and told Miss P everything that had happened, and they tracked us here.”

“We owe him our lives,” said Millard. “That’s something I never thought I’d say.”

“You can catch up on the way back to the Acre,” said someone with a French accent, and I turned to see Miss Cuckoo standing near the exit with another ymbryne. She wore an electric-blue dress with a tall silver collar, and her expression was flat. Neither she nor the other ymbryne betrayed any trace of happiness at seeing us.

“Come, there is a car waiting.”

Leo’s men watched as we walked out, their eyes and guns trained on us. I thought again of Noor, and the fact that we were leaving her here, in some form of captivity. I felt awful about it. Not only had we failed the mission, I had probably consigned her to a worse fate than if I’d left her alone entirely.

The ymbrynes bundled us out of the loading dock and into a big car. It lurched away from the curb before the doors had even closed.

“Miss Peregrine?” I said.

She turned slightly, her face in profile. “It would be better,” she said, “if you didn’t speak.”





We were brought back to Devil’s Acre via a Manhattan loop entrance that connected to the Panloopticon—a route that would have saved my friends and me days of driving and untold trouble if only we’d known about it. I was spared an immediate tongue-lashing because I was injured. Instead, the ymbrynes brought me to a bone-mender named Rafael, who worked out of a tumbledown house on Little Stabbing Street. For the rest of the day and all that night, I lay in a room filled with apothecary bottles while he applied stinging powders and pungent poultices to my wounds. He was no Mother Dust, but I could feel myself beginning to heal.

I was confined to the bed, mostly sleepless, haunted by failures and doubts and guilt. (If only I had listened to H. If only I had aborted the mission when he’d begged me to.) Haunted by the things Leo had said about my grandfather. Not that I thought they could be true—of course he had been framed by wights, it’s the only explanation that made any sense—but the simple fact that anyone would fabricate such lies about him made me deeply uncomfortable. I would have to set that right, if I could ever get H to talk to me again. But I was haunted primarily by guilt about Noor. If she had never met me at all, she’d be safer than she was now. Hunted, yes, but at least she’d be free.

My friends came to see me in the morning. Emma, Millard, Bronwyn. And Enoch, too, who recounted how he had come out of Frankie’s odd trance to find himself dressed in doll’s clothes, which he took off as fast as he could before running away.

“We think he woke up when I tackled Frankie,” said Emma. “She let go of us all, and that must have broken her hold on Enoch, too.”

“She’s quite powerful, to be able to influence people remotely that way,” said Millard. “I’ll have to include her in my new book, Who’s Who in Peculiar America.”

“I can control people remotely, too,” said Enoch. “Provided they’re dead.”

“It’s too bad, you would have made a cute couple,” I said.

Enoch leaned over my bed and flicked a bruise on my arm, and I yelped.

They told me Miss Peregrine hadn’t talked to them yet—not even to reprimand them. She’d hardly said a word to any of us since we’d returned, other than to warn us not to leave the Acre.

“She’s still too angry,” said Emma. “I’ve never seen her like this.”