“I could never hate you.”

  Her head fell against my shoulder, and I let it stay there.

  It was nearly dark now. I watched the last sliver of crimson sun slip behind some mountains beyond the road, the land around us fading to a sad late-evening blue.

  “So what did he say?” I said. “What did you talk about when you called him?”

  “He didn’t say anything, really.” She sighed. “He was angry. He said I shouldn’t have called.”

  “You couldn’t help yourself.”

  She said, so quietly I could hardly hear: “He said I was interrupting dinner. And he hung up.” When she looked up, there were tears in her eyes. “I felt like such an idiot. And then I had to come back to the car where you were waiting and pretend nothing had happened.”

  A little stab of pain shot through me, and then a thought I hadn’t anticipated flitted through my head: Was my grandpa kind of a jerk?

  I put my arm around her and said, “I’m sorry, Em.”

  “Don’t be,” she said. “I needed to hear it. To let him go, finally.”

  Finally. But too late for us.

  “I know we can’t be close like that anymore,” she said. “But we had a friendship, too, and it was real, and worth something.”

  “It still is,” I said. And something unlocked in her, and her shoulders began to tremble.

  I’d meant what I said.

  I still believed that all the wonderful things I had felt about her were true. They just didn’t make me in love with her anymore, not the way they once had.

  “Thank you,” she said, still sniffling. “So, how do we do this?”

  “Like this,” I said, closing my arm into a hug. “And now we should both get some sleep.”

  * * *

  ◆ ◆ ◆

  A tap on my arm. Emma, whispering, “We’ve stopped.”

  I blinked. It was the middle of the night and we’d arrived at some bus station in Iowa.

  “You go first,” Enoch said, nudging me down the aisle toward the door.

  I got out, surveying the ground around the bus parking area for hollow residue. Nothing. They hadn’t stopped here.

  We went into the station, which had a small, all-night food court. Enoch and Hugh got some rubbery hot dogs. Emma had a bean-and-cheese burrito. They were all aging day by day now—teenagers in growing teenage bodies for the first time in almost a century—and they were always hungry. But my stomach was in knots, and the thought of eating made me nauseous. It was odd, I thought, how sometimes my friends seemed ancient, but at other times I felt older than them.

  We got back on the bus and rode on.

  I was drifting in and out of an anxious sleep when, sometime before dawn, Emma shook me awake.

  We were stopped on the highway, the bus snarled in a long traffic jam. Somewhere up ahead, we could see the lights of emergency vehicles flashing.

  I started to get a bad feeling.

  Three lanes of traffic were bottlenecked into one. Slowly the scene came into view: There had been a bad accident. There were police cars, ambulances, a fire truck, flares. Cops directing traffic. A circus of grim activity. My eyes couldn’t help following a swirl of bold black tire marks, past a torchlight parade of flares, to the back of a wrecked bus.

  “Oh my God,” Emma whispered, her face washed over by red and orange flashes.

  “Could that be the same bus?” Hugh said. “The one they were on?”

  “We’d better find out,” I said.

  Enoch said nothing, but he was nodding.

  Traffic had come to a standstill. I led my friends off the bus, pushing through the door over the driver’s grunted objections.

  “There’s no way the police are going to let us snoop around an accident scene,” I said.

  “You’d be surprised where you can go if you act like you belong there,” said Emma.

  There were a few paramedics still circling the wreck, but it seemed the accident was a few hours old already, and the injured had long since been taken away.

  The bus lay on its side like a fallen giant, its bent and gashed frame flickering in the riot of lights. It looked like it had skidded off the road, tipped sideways, and dug a hole in the earth on its way to the edge of some woods. There were no other smashed vehicles that we could see. The bus appeared to have lost control and crashed on its own.

  It didn’t take me long to find the hollow’s residue trail. It was splattered all around the bus, and it led from the wreckage into the woods. There were no police, no EMTs in the woods. Nothing at all but dark trees.

  I followed the trail and my friends followed me. When we’d gotten twenty or thirty feet past the tree line, Emma sparked a flame in her hand to light our way.

  We passed a pile of trash. A cluster of spiny brush. And then we found her, lying in a pile of leaves.

  The girl. Ellery.

  She was dying. Bleeding from a gash on her head. Her leg twisted unnaturally beneath her.

  We rushed to her.

  “Someone get help!” Emma shouted, and Hugh took off running, back toward the EMTs.

  She was a slight, pale girl. She had only one eye, and the eye patch that normally covered the other one was gone. In its place was a black and puckered hole.

  While we waited for help to arrive, we tried to find out what had happened. But Ellery was disoriented, fading in and out of consciousness.

  “They wanted me to cry,” she was saying. “The men with the blank eyes. They made me cry.”

  As she said it, a tiny white worm crawled out of her eye socket. It tumbled down her face and onto the ground, where I noticed a hundred more just like it, wriggling among the fallen leaves.

  I nearly vomited. Emma and Enoch seemed unfazed.

  “They stole her,” she said, starting to cry. “They took her from me.”

  “Who?” said Emma.

  “Maderwurm,” she whispered, voice shaking. “She’ll die now. She can’t live outside.”

  Emma, Enoch, and I looked up, exchanged a look of dread.

  “Where are the men now?” I said.

  “Gone,” she said. “Will you kill them?”

  “Oh, definitely,” Enoch said.

  “But not the girl. She doesn’t want to do the things she does. They make her.”

  “What girl?” I said.

  “She did it. She stopped the bus.”

  “How?”

  “With her ropes. And she gave me the most beautiful flowers . . .”

  She began to convulse just as the EMTs arrived. Their flashlights lit everything up, and a moment later we were pulled away so they could work on her.

  Ellery was writhing, groaning, and something else was happening, though she was blocked by the EMTs and I couldn’t see what it was. I heard one of them swear as the group of them backed away from her.

  Someone said, “What the hell is going on?”

  And then suddenly I could see her again.

  Ellery was in the grip of a violent convulsion, and there seemed to be a nest of silky threads growing around her.

  “Jesus,” Enoch said. “She’s starting to age forward!”

  It was hair, sprouting from her scalp at an exponential rate, blanching from brown to silver to ivory as it did.

  And then a sudden wind bent the branches and blew the leaves around us, and we looked back to see a helicopter landing just beyond the woods. We crouched, watching, unsure what to do. Several figures jumped out of the helicopter and ran toward us.

  It was the Americans. LaMothe and his bodyguard, running through the woods shouting Ellery’s name. Miss Peregrine, Miss Wren, and Miss Cuckoo were right behind them and couldn’t spare even a glance in our direction. The EMTs were shoved away—horrified, they had been about to run anyway—and as the Americans bent over Ellery, I saw the ymbrynes pouring something from a glass vial into her slack mouth.

  It was clear they were trying to save her somehow, but the girl was aging fast nonetheless. They picked her up and I got a look as she was carried past—in the space of thirty seconds her skin had thinned to near translucence and her eye had clouded to milk.

  The ymbrynes could do nothing more for her. The Americans took Ellery, and Miss Peregrine peeled off from them and came over to where we were huddled against a tree.

  “Miss!” Emma cried, and hugged her. “Where’d you come from?”

  “I told you I’d be watching!” she said, hair whipping in the helicopter’s wind. “Good thing, too . . .”

  “Will she die?” Enoch shouted.

  “We gave her an emergency serum to slow the worst of her aging, but she may still succumb to it. Where is Hugh?”

  “He went to get help,” Emma said. “Hasn’t come back.”

  A look of worry flashed across the ymbryne’s face.

  We ran to find Hugh and spotted him by the wrecked bus, which was crumpled and lying on its side surrounded by flares and police tape. The police who had been standing guard over the accident had left to investigate the helicopter, so for the moment, no one was there to stop us from running right up to the bus’s exposed undercarriage.

  As we approached, I saw that the tires were blown. The axles, broken. Hugh was standing beside one, pulling at what looked like a rope. Ropes had tangled around the axles, clogged up the wheel wells.

  “Ellery said something about ropes,” Emma said as we ran toward Hugh. “She said there was another girl, and she used ropes to stop the bus—”

  “You were right,” I said to Miss Peregrine. “There was a second person. A girl.”

  But when we got closer, we saw that what Hugh was holding wasn’t a rope at all. It was a vine.

  Vines were wrapped around the axles, around the wheels.

  “What on earth . . . ,” Emma said, picking one up. It was green and thorned, and here and there it had delicate purple flowers.

  “Ellery also said something about flowers,” I said. “That the girl gave her flowers.”

  Enoch picked one off the vine. “I recognize this . . . They used to grow all around our house on Cairnholm . . .”

  Hugh still hadn’t said anything. He took the flower from Enoch and held it up in the garish, dancing light of a flare.

  “Miss?” he said, a haunted look stealing over his boyish features. “This is a dog rose.”

  Miss Peregrine turned to him. Locked eyes and nodded seriously. “Yes, Hugh.”

  I said, “I don’t understand.” But the others all seemed to.

  “It was Fiona’s flower,” Emma said quietly. “She could grow them even without meaning to. Sometimes they’d sprout behind her as she walked.”

  I felt the air thin, my head go light. “Are you saying . . . ?”

  Enoch looked at the vines. “Only Fee could have done something like this.”

  “Oh my God,” Hugh cried, tears streaming down his cheeks. “She’s alive.”

  Emma wrapped him in a hug, and he leaned into her. He was overjoyed and devastated all at once. “They have her. They have her. Oh my love. Oh my God.”

  “We’ll get her back, Hugh,” Miss Peregrine said. “Don’t doubt it for a second.”

  We would all be taking off in the Americans’ chopper—it was big enough to fit everyone, and it was the quickest way out of there. We waited while the chopper was readied to leave. We were worn to the bone, our bedraggled bodies parked among the emergency vehicles. Miss Wren kept the police at bay somehow, I suspected with some wild story she had concocted or a few well-timed memory-wipes. LaMothe alone remained upright, pacing anxiously while Miss Cuckoo and Miss Peregrine ministered to Ellery, applying balm to her forehead and what were ostensibly medicinal drops to her remaining eye. The cavity once covered by Ellery’s eye patch was now half obscured by long hair. A pale worm poked its head through the silvery strands; shuddering, I looked away, but the scene change didn’t do much for the queasy feeling in my gut.

  Hugh, I realized, was nearing hysteria. Emma and Enoch were trying to keep him calm, but he still seemed too stunned to be reasoned with. Worse: He was crying again. I stood up and started toward him, but Emma pulled him close, curving their bodies together as she whispered anxiously in his ear. I took another step forward and she stopped me with a single look—narrowing her eyes at me over his shoulder. Let me handle this, she mouthed.

  So I gave them space.

  I found myself briefly alone, feeling useless but simultaneously relieved to be useless. My deferred exhaustion now sank into me, muddling my mind despite my best efforts to remain vigilant. I leaned against a nearby police car, my propped elbow slipping with every passing second, watching Miss Cuckoo stalk down the roadside. Her manner was perfunctory as she memory-wiped any traffic-jammed normals who seemed too interested in what we were doing. I almost laughed. I felt light-headed.

  And then, suddenly, I heard a voice.

  Nice to see you again.

  The fine hairs on the back of my neck stood on end and I stiffened. It was a teasing singsong of a voice, gentle but venomous—and strangely familiar. I turned to look around, but there were no strangers here.

  I heard it again. So. Are you excited?

  The words seemed to rise up from somewhere inside of me, almost a manufacture of my own mind. I was so tired I wondered whether I’d slipped into a waking dream. No, a nightmare.

  Small, revolting little noises—lips smacking, vowels stretching—filled my head. They were sounds of exaggerated satisfaction, like someone snuggling into warm, clean sheets after a long day.

  Mm-mmm, the voice whispered. That’s better. I could get used to this again . . .

  “Who’s there?” I said, whipping around.

  “Jacob, are you all right?” Emma was staring at me.

  I blinked at her, startled, forgetting for a moment where I was. “Yeah,” I said. “Sorry, I’m fine. I think I just . . . fell asleep.” I frowned at the lie. “Maybe I should take a walk. Get some air. Clear my head.”

  Emma nodded distractedly, she and Enoch both too focused on their own task—calming Hugh—to question my strange behavior. So I walked. Not too far to be irresponsible, but just far enough to clear the voice from my head, and to convince myself of my own lies: that this was nothing. That I’d heard nothing.

  I took long, determined steps toward nothing, wending my way through the maze of emergency vehicles. The night air pushed at my body, the once-welcome breeze growing aggressive. A sudden gust of wind wrapped around my legs so abruptly that I stumbled sideways, catching myself against the back doors of an ambulance.

  I heard the voice again.

  There’s a new world coming, it whispered, and it’s going to be so beautiful—

  “Who are you?” I said, hissing into the darkness.

  Just an old friend.

  “And what does that mean?” I said, my head whipping back and forth and my heart racing.

  The voice laughed. It was a dark sound, rough and throaty. And then, familiar words:

  Ev’ry land on earth will sink, and reek and wallow in stench and stink, of rotted trunks of beast and man, and vegetation crisped on land . . .

  A lock rattled.

  The back doors of the ambulance swung open, nearly knocking me off my feet. By now I was thoroughly freaked out and yet—somehow, I found myself drawing nearer the darkened interior. I didn’t know why. I didn’t even know I was searching for something until I saw it, until it seemed obvious what I might find here.

  A body. Unmoving beneath a sheet.

  My every instinct was screaming at me to run, to call for help, to catch a flight back to my boring, predictable life in Florida.

  I shut it out. Told it to die.

  And then I steeled myself and clambered into the ambulance. My heart beating out of my chest, I lifted a corner of the sheet. I saw the face of a young man, dead, half his head caved in.

  Jesus.

  “Just an old friend,” the voice said, and now it was coming from the body, from the dead young man’s bloodied mouth. “But I’ll be back soon . . .”

  I let the sheet fall, my body now shaking uncontrollably.

  A song began to play from the radio in the cab, and play loud. It was “With a Little Help from My Friends.”

  Chills ricocheted down my spine. I felt wild, out of control. I ran out of the ambulance—and into Enoch. He grabbed me, eyes wide.

  “Where’d you go?” He shouted over a noise I hadn’t noticed before: the chopper’s engine. “Come on,” he said, “we’re leaving!”

  And he pulled me away toward the waiting helicopter.

  * * *

  ◆ ◆ ◆

  Two minutes later we were in the air, strapped into seats, headsets muffling the roar of the blades. Ellery was laid across the laps of LaMothe and his bodyguard in the front row, and the rest of us were squeezed into the back. Miss Wren and Miss Cuckoo had had to assume bird form so we’d all fit, and they were perched near the pilot, scanning the dawning skies ahead. The ymbrynes had done all they could to stabilize Ellery, but getting her back into a loop was her only real chance of avoiding death—so we were headed for the nearest one, some backwater town called Locust Gap.

  I was still shaken by what had happened on the ground a moment ago. Was it a vision? A hallucination?

  It was Caul’s voice I’d heard.

  Caul’s voice quoting the most apocalyptic parts of the prophecy to me. Which meant—what?

  Which meant I was losing my mind, probably. Either that, or Caul was just finding new and creative ways to torment me.

  Hugh was having a meltdown. Despite Emma’s and Enoch’s best efforts, he was doing worse.

  “They’ve got Fiona right now,” he was saying through his headset mic for all to hear, “and the longer we take, the harder it will be to get her back. We need to search every loop within two—no, three hundred miles of here. And we’ve got to do it now—”