Library of Souls (Miss Peregrine’s Peculiar Children #3)(90)

From beyond the wall came the sound of many voices shouting together—a great and rising battle cry—and beneath it a thunder of stampeding boots. Everyone froze and looked at me, dread furrowing their faces.

“What is that?” said Emma.

“Let me see,” I said, and crawled away from my hollow to peer around the edge of the wall.

A horde of wights was charging toward us across the smoking ground. Twenty of them in a cluster, running with rifles and pistols raised, their white eyes and white teeth shining. They were unscathed by the explosion, having escaped, I assumed, into some underground shelter. We’d been lured into a trap, of which the parrot bombs were only the first component. Now that our best weapon had been stripped from us, the wights were making their final assault.

There was a panicked scramble as others looked around the wall to see the charging horde for themselves.

“What do we do?” cried Horace.

“We fight!” said Bronywn. “Give ’em everything we’ve got!”

“No, we must run while we can!” said Miss Avocet, whose bent back and deeply lined face made it hard to imagine her running from anything. “We can’t afford to lose another peculiar life!”

“Excuse me, but I was asking Jacob,” said Horace. “He got us this far, after all …”

Instinctively I looked to Miss Peregrine, whom I considered the final authority on matters of authority. She returned my gaze and nodded. “Yes,” she said, “I think Mr. Portman should decide. Quickly, though, or the wights will make the decision for you.”

I nearly protested. My hollows were all dead but one—but I suppose this was Miss Peregrine’s way of saying she believed in me, hollows or no. Anyway, what we should do seemed obvious. In a hundred years, the peculiars had never been so close to destroying the wight menace, and if we ran away now, I knew that chance may never come again. My friends’ faces were scared but determined—ready, I thought, to risk their lives for a chance to finally eradicate the wight scourge.

“We fight,” I said. “We’ve come too far to give up now.”

If there was someone among us who would rather have fled, they stayed quiet. Even the ymbrynes, who had sworn oaths to keep us safe, didn’t argue. They knew what sort of fate awaited any of us who were recaptured.

“You give the word,” said Emma.

I craned my neck around the wall. The wights were closing fast, no more than a hundred feet away now. But I wanted them closer still—close enough that we might easily knock the guns from their hands.

Shots rang out. A piercing scream came from above.

“Olive!” Emma shouted. “They’re shooting at Olive!”

We’d left the poor girl hanging up there. The wights were taking potshots at her while she squealed and waved her limbs like a starfish. There was no time to reel her in, but we couldn’t just leave her for target practice.

“Let’s give them something better to shoot at,” I said. “Ready?”

Their answer was resounding and affirmative. I shimmied onto the back of my crouched hollow. “LET’S GO!” I shouted.

The hollow leapt to its feet, nearly bucking me off, then launched forward like a racehorse at the starting gun. We burst from behind the wall, the hollow and I leading the charge, my friends and our ymbrynes close behind. I let out a screaming war cry, not so much to scare the wights as to tear down the fear that was clawing at me, and my friends did the same. The wights balked, and for a moment they couldn’t seem to decide whether to keep charging or stop and shoot at us. That bought the hollow and me enough time to clear much of the open ground that separated us.

It didn’t take long for the wights to make up their minds. They stopped, leveled their guns at us like a firing squad, and let loose a volley of bullets. They whizzed around me, pocking the ground, lighting up my pain receptors as they slammed into the hollow. Praying it hadn’t been hit anywhere vital, I sank low to shield myself behind its body and urged it forward, faster, using its tongues like extra legs to speed us on.

The hollow and I closed the remaining gap in just a few seconds, my friends close behind. Then we were among them, fighting hand-to-hand, and the advantage was ours. While I concentrated on knocking the guns out of the wights’ hands, my friends put their peculiar talents to good use. Emma swung her hands like flaming clubs, cutting through a line of wights. Bronwyn hurled the bricks she’d gathered, then punched and pummeled the wights with her bare hands. Hugh’s lone bee had recently made some friends, and as he cheered them on (“Go for the eyes, fellows!”) they swirled around and dive-bombed our enemy wherever they could. So did the ymbrynes, who’d turned themselves into birds after the first gunshots. Miss Peregrine was most fearsome, her huge beak and talons sending wights running, but even small, colorful Miss Bunting made herself useful, ripping one wight’s hair and pecking his head hard enough to make him miss the shot he was taking—which allowed Claire to leap up and bite him on the shoulder with her wide, sharp-toothed backmouth. Enoch did his part, too, revealing from under his shirt three clay men with forks for legs and knives for arms, which he sent hacking after the wights’ ankles. All the while, Olive shouted advice to us from her bird’s-eye view. “Behind you, Emma! He’s going for his gun, Hugh!”

Despite all our peculiar ingenuity, however, we were outnumbered, and the wights were fighting as if their lives depended on it—which likely they did.