A Map of Days (Miss Peregrine's Peculiar Children, #4)(50)

“Is that a misspelling?” Emma said. “Or a strange joke?”

“Let’s find out.”

I shouldered through plastic curtains caked with frozen meat slime and led us into a smaller, even colder room that flickered under the light of a faulty fluorescent tube. There were cuts of meat everywhere, spilling from torn-open boxes, scattered across the floor, dusted with frost.

“What the hell happened?” I said.

I nudged a rack of lamb with my foot. The still-frozen meat had been bitten clean in half. I got a sudden, sinking feeling.

“I think we should get out of here,” I said. “This might be a—”

The word trap was leaving my lips when three things happened in quick succession:

—I put my foot down on a big X made of tape on the floor.

—The flickering bulb above our heads shattered, and the room went black.

—I felt a roller-coastery lurch in my stomach and a sudden pressure change in my head.



Then the light came back on, only now it was a yellow incandescent bulb in a wire cage. The boxes of meat were gone, replaced by bags of frozen vegetables. And I felt a sharp, unmistakable pain bloom in my gut.

I touched Emma’s hand and raised a finger to my lips. I mouthed the word Hollow.

Emma looked, for an instant, terrified—and then she swallowed hard and reined it in. She put her lips to my ear.

“Can you control it?” she whispered.

It felt like ages since I’d spoken hollowgast or even confronted a hollow in person. I was way out of practice, and even at the top of my game, my control over a hollow had never come instantly.

“I need time to feel it out,” I whispered. “A minute or two.”

Emma nodded. “Then we’ll wait.”

It was in the cold storage locker with us. My inner compass needle was warming up, even as my body was freezing, and it told me the beast was just beyond the plastic curtains. We could hear it chewing on something, grunting and slavering as it ate. We crouched by a wooden crate, trying to make ourselves invisible as the seconds ticked by.

The hollow tossed aside whatever it had been eating and let out a thunderous belch.

Emma shot me a questioning look—Anything?—and I shook my head. Nothing yet. Before I could start to gain control over it, I needed to hear it speak.

It took a step toward us, its shadow falling crooked across the plastic curtains. I listened in vain for anything I could use to get a toehold in its brain—any little utterance would help—but the only sound it made was a ragged intake of breath. It was sniffing the air, gathering our scent. Working up a new appetite.

I tapped Emma and pointed upward. We rose slowly to standing. We were going to have fight.

Emma put out her hands, palms up, and I gritted my teeth, which were chattering either from cold or from fear. More likely the latter. I was surprised at how scared I was.

The hollow’s shadow warped. One of its muscular tongues poked through the curtain flaps and curled experimentally in the air, like a periscope that was spying on us.

Emma took a half step forward and quietly lit her hand-flames. She kept them small, but I could tell from the way she tensed her forearms that she was building up to a burst. Now the hollow’s second tongue pierced the curtains. Emma’s flames climbed a little higher, then higher still. A drop of freezing water hit the back of my neck. The icicles on the ceiling were starting to melt.

It happened suddenly, as violence often does. The hollowgast screamed and punched its last tongue through the curtains, and then all three of them came at us. Emma shouted and released the blast of fire she’d been working up. Just as the tongues reached us, they got burned and reeled suddenly back again—but not before one of them wrapped around my foot, and dragged me along with it.

I slid across the floor on my back, through the curtains, out into the larger cold-storage room. The hollow had flung itself backward against the door to escape the fire, and it was pulling me toward its open mouth. I stuck out my hand as I slid, raking it along the shelves until I managed to hook my fingers into something. But it didn’t stop me—it was just a wooden crate, and it yanked away from the shelf with me as I slid by.

I heard Emma shouting my name. Acting purely on reflex, I grabbed the crate with my other hand and held it out in front of me. When I reached the hollow, I jammed it right between the creature’s jaws.

It let my ankle go for a moment, giving me enough time to scramble away into a corner. I’d heard it utter a few sounds now and I tried them in my own throat, summoning the strange guttural language of hollows from wherever it had been slumbering inside me.

Emma ran to where I was kneeling. “You okay?”

“Yeah,” I said. “But we have to get out of this room. Never fight hollows in a confined space.”

With her eyes she followed the crate in the air to the door. “It’s blocking the exit,” she said.

The hollow gave up trying to dislodge the crate using its tongues and clamped its jaws shut instead, crunching the wood to splinters like it was a mouthful of potato chips.

Move, I said, testing out a word of hollowspeak.

It took a step toward us, but it was still blocking our escape. I tried a slight modification. Move aside.

It took another step forward. Its tongues danced in the air like rattlesnakes ready to strike.

“It’s not working,” Emma said. Her flames were starting to melt everything around us, and drips of water from the ceiling were forming a puddle on the floor.