A Map of Days (Miss Peregrine's Peculiar Children, #4)(86)

“NO!” she shouted, spinning away from me just as a little ball of flame escaped from her clenched fists and sprayed across the ground, catching a few fast-food wrappers and a filthy old sweater on fire.

She turned slowly back to face me. “That isn’t why,” she said, speaking slowly, deliberately. “I came along because this meant a lot to you. Because I wanted to help you. It had nothing whatsoever to do with him.”

“The grass is catching on fire.”

We ran to stomp it out, and when we had—our ankles and shoes covered with kicked dirt—she said, “I should’ve listened to my instincts. They said never to come to Florida. Never go to the place where Abe lived. It would feel too much like I was chasing his ghost.”

“And is that what you’re doing?”

She took a second and really seemed to think it over. “No,” she said finally.

“Sometimes it feels like that’s what I’m doing.”

Her face changed. She looked at me with a new openness, and for the first time in minutes she showed a glimmer of vulnerability. “You’re not chasing his ghost,” she said. “You’re standing on his shoulders.”

I started to smile, then stopped myself. I wanted to reach for her, but kept my hands in my pockets. Something still felt wrong, and I didn’t want to pretend it wasn’t there. A moment of shared understanding couldn’t fix this.

“If you want me to leave, just say it,” she said. “I’ll go back to the Acre. There’s plenty for me to do there.”

I shook my head. “No. I just don’t want us to lie to each other. About what we are, or what we’re doing.”

“Okay.” She crossed her arms tightly across her chest. “Then what are we?”

“We’re friends.”

My body went cold as I said it. But it felt true and right. We were unequal in our feelings for each other, and my only choice was to pull back. We stood there for a long moment, the sound of traffic washing over us in waves, not knowing quite what to do next. And then she put her arms around me and hugged me, and said she was sorry.

I didn’t return the hug.

She let go and started back toward the car without me.



* * *



? ? ?

The others were hungry, so we bought coffee and breakfast sandwiches at a drive-through and then got back on the road. Emma stayed up front next to me, but for a long time we didn’t speak to each other. The others didn’t know what had happened between us, but they knew something had gone down, and even Enoch was smart enough not to mention it again.

Emma and I seemed to agree, without needing to discuss it, that we wouldn’t talk about our personal issues in front of the others. We wouldn’t argue. We would be professional. We would finish the mission. And when it was over, maybe we wouldn’t see each other for a while.

I tried not to think about it. I tried to lose myself in the rhythm of the road. But the hurt was always there, throbbing just above the threshold of ignorability, painful enough to distract me a little at all times.

We began to hit the big cities of the East Coast, Washington, DC, first among them. One of the maps Abe and I had made when I was younger covered this part of the Northeast Corridor and his obscure markings were scribbled all over it. Some roads on the map were crosshatched, others reinforced with parallel lines. Surrounding each city were clusters of symbols: dotted lines in a pyramid, a spiral inside a triangle. It was clear that each corresponded to a location of importance to Abe and H and the other hunters, but whether they indicated something helpful or dangerous, we didn’t know.

As we were driving around the DC Beltway, we came very close to one such oddly marked place, and we debated stopping to check it out.

“Could be a safe house,” said Millard. “Or a murder den. No way of knowing.”

“All these marks could be different loops,” said Bronwyn.

“Or different girlfriends,” said Enoch.

Emma gave him a bloodthirsty stare.

And then my phone rang. It took me a moment to excavate it from beneath a layer of napkins and cold french fries on the center console.

On the screen it said ME, which meant someone was calling from my house’s landline.

“Answer it!” said Bronwyn.

“No, no, no, not a good idea,” I said, thinking it must be Miss Peregrine again, and I tried to hit MUTE but fumbled and accidentally answered the call.

“Crap!”

“Hello? Jacob?”

It was Horace, not Miss Peregrine. I put the call on speaker.

“Horace?”

“We’re all here,” said Millard.

“Oh, thank God,” Horace said. “I was afraid you were all dead!”

“What?” said Emma. “Why?”

“I, uh . . . never mind.”

He’d had a dream, clearly, but didn’t want to freak us out by describing it.

“Is that them?” I heard Olive say. “When are they coming back?”

“Never!” said Enoch, yelling into the phone.

“Don’t listen to him,” said Millard. “We’re driving now. We’ll be back as soon as we can. A few more days, at the most.”

It was a guess, but it would’ve been mine, too. How long could it take to find a peculiar at a high school, take her somewhere else, then drive home? A few days sounded reasonable.