Library of Souls (Miss Peregrine’s Peculiar Children #3)(93)

I made my hollow stand tall so I could get a better view. “Does anyone see Miss Peregrine?” I shouted. Now everyone was looking, checking the sky in case she was still airborne, the ground in case she’d landed but not yet turned human.

Then from behind us, a high, gleeful shout cut through our chatter.

“Look no further, children!” For a moment I couldn’t pinpoint the voice. It came again: “Do as I say and no harm will come to her!”

Then I saw emerge, from beneath the branches of a small, ash-blackened tree just inside the wights’ gate, a familiar figure.

Caul. A twig of a man with no weapons in his hand nor guards by his side. His face pale and contorted into an unnatural grin, his eyes capped by bulging sunglasses, insectine. He was dandied up in a cloak, a cape, loops of gold jewelry, and a bouffant silk tie. He looked flamboyantly insane, like some mad doctor from gothic fiction who’d performed too many experiments on himself. And it was his evident madness, I think—and that we all knew him to be capable of true evil—that stopped us from rushing to tear him apart. A man like Caul was never as defenseless as he seemed.



“Where’s Miss Peregrine?” I shouted, inspiring a chorus of similar demands from the ymbrynes and peculiars behind me.

“Right where she belongs,” Caul said. “With her family.”

The last of the ash cloud gusted out of the compound behind him, revealing Bentham and Miss Peregrine, the latter in human form, held captive in the arms of Bentham’s bear. Though her eyes flashed with rage, she knew better than to struggle against a sharp-clawed, short-tempered grimbear.

It seemed a recurring nightmare we were doomed to dream again and again: Miss Peregrine kidnapped, this time by Bentham. He stood slightly behind the bear with eyes downcast, as if ashamed to meet our looks.

Cries of shock and anger rippled through the peculiars and ymbrynes.

“Bentham!” I shouted. “Let her go!”

“You traitorous bastard!” cried Emma.

Bentham raised his head to look at us. “As recently as ten minutes ago,” he said in a high and imperious tone, “you had my loyalty. I could have betrayed you to my brother days ago, but I didn’t.” He narrowed his eyes at Miss Peregrine. “I chose you, Alma, because I believed—naively, it seems—that if I helped you and your wards, you might see how unfairly you’d judged me, might finally rise above past differences and let bygones be bygones.”

“You’ll be sent to the Pitiless Waste for this!” Miss Peregrine shouted.

“I’m not frightened of your little council anymore!” Bentham said. “You won’t keep me down any longer!” He stamped his cane. “PT, muzzle!”

The bear clamped its paw over Miss Peregrine’s face.

Caul strode toward his brother and sister, his arms and smile spreading. “Benny’s made a choice to stand up for himself, and I, for one, congratulate him! There’s nothing like a family reunion!”

Suddenly, Bentham was pulled backward by an unseen force. A knife flashed at his throat. “Make the bear release Miss Peregrine or else!” a familiar voice shouted.

“Millard!” someone gasped, one of many that rippled through our crowd.

It was Millard, disrobed and invisible. Bentham looked terrified, but Caul seemed merely annoyed. He drew an antique pepperbox pistol from one of the deep pockets in his cloak and pointed it at Bentham’s head. “Let her go and I’ll kill you, brother.”

“We made a pact!” Bentham protested.

“And you caving to the demands of a nude boy with a dull knife would be breaking that pact.” Caul cocked the gun, walked it forward until it was pressed against Bentham’s temple, and addressed Millard. “If you make me kill my only brother, consider your ymbryne dead, too.”

Millard hesitated for a moment, then dropped the knife and ran. Caul made a grab for him but missed, and Millard’s footsteps curved away in a trail of divots.

Bentham composed himself and straightened his mussed shirt. Caul, his good humor gone, turned the gun on Miss Peregrine.

“Now listen to me!” he barked. “You there, across the bridge! Let those guards go!”

They had little choice but to do as he asked. Sharon and his cousins released their collared wights and backed away, and the wight who’d been standing on our side of the bridge lowered his hands and picked his gun up off the ground. Within seconds the balance of power had been reversed completely, and there were four guns aimed at the crowd and one at Miss Peregrine. Caul could do what he wanted.

“Boy!” he said, pointing at me. “Pitch that hollow into the chasm!” His shrill voice a needle in my eardrum.

I walked my hollow to the edge of the chasm.

“Now make him leap!”

It seemed I didn’t have a choice. It was an awful waste, but perhaps just as well: the hollow was suffering badly now, its wounds leaking black blood that flowed around its feet. It wouldn’t have survived.

I unwrapped its tongue from my waist, unsaddled myself, and stepped down. My strength had returned enough for me to stand on my own, but the hollow’s was going fast. As soon as I was off its back it bellowed softly, sucked its tongues back into its mouth, and sank to its knees, a willing sacrifice.

“Thank you, whoever you were,” I said. “I’m sure that if you’d ever become a wight, you wouldn’t have been a completely evil one.”