Our reunion was joyful but short, and somewhat overshadowed by the horrifying scene of bodies strewn across the street, which I quickly explained. The ymbrynes had spent a long time trying to break through the sealed loop entrance, which was on lockdown after the wights invaded, and only allowed Noor and me inside by some fluke. After an hour, Miss Peregrine and Miss Wren had been about to give up and fly off to fetch some other, more extreme method of breaking and entering, when the door opened on its own. The waiting had left my friends frazzled with worry and frustration, and Hugh shaking with anger. Everyone was furious with the deadrisers—but at the moment there were more important things to deal with.

  Like the wights on the hill. Yes, they were up there. The presence of hollows had confirmed that for me, even before the deadrisers had told us their story. Yes, the wights were here for the skull on Bentham’s list, and given that they’d been searching Gravehill for it since the previous night, they were probably not far from finding it. Each new bit of bad news made my friends’ faces constrict a bit tighter.

  “Did they have a girl with them when they came in?” Hugh asked Lyle, making a concerted effort not to attack the boy, and he described her.

  “I saw a girl like that,” said Eugenia. “They had her in leg irons.”

  Hugh’s face went stony, and Bronwyn had to physically restrain him from running toward the hill that very moment.

  We all wanted to go on the attack. But first we had to make a plan.

  “Do you suppose they know we’re here?” asked Emma, gazing up at the hill in the distance.

  “If they don’t yet, they will soon,” Miss Peregrine said. “They’ll expect this one to report back to them, and when he doesn’t . . .” She glanced at the injured hollow. She couldn’t see him, of course, but he was covered in human blood, which gave him a kind of visible outline. “That means if we want the element of surprise—assuming we still have it—we need to move now.”

  “I’m sorry, miss,” said Millard, his voice coming out of the air. “But you’re not coming with us.”

  “Of course I am!” she said hoarsely. She was starting to look very worn-out.

  “But you’re the final ingredient,” Horace said. “If they manage to get the alphaskull and then you, too . . .”

  Miss Peregrine tried to argue, but thankfully, Miss Cuckoo and Miss Wren intervened.

  Miss Wren patted her arm. “They’re right, Alma. We’re all mothers to our wards, but you’re also Caul’s sister. If that infernal list refers to any of us, it is almost certainly you.”

  “You must keep to the rear,” Miss Cuckoo said, “hard as we know that will be for you.”

  Miss Peregrine reluctantly assented. “I’ll stay back, but I won’t stay out of it.”

  That would have to do.

  We stood in the deadrisers’ grassy yard by a low white fence, beside the massacre, planning what might easily become another one. We would ascend the hill together, staying hidden for as long as we could, and try to be ready for anything. For days, Hugh had quietly been amassing new bees, and his stomach hummed audibly with them. Emma had preheated her hands; when she held them out they rippled the air. Claire had sharpened the teeth in her backmouth, and gnashed them in the air by way of demonstration. Enoch had stuffed a backpack full of pickled hearts and had already begun installing them in the chewed and fallen dead—“I can fix more of ’em,” he said to Josep, “if you’ve got some spare parts handy.”

  “Remember, the wights favor guns,” Miss Cuckoo said. “It’s best not to run directly at them, unless you’re quite close.”

  “And Hugh . . . ,” Miss Peregrine said, delicately, pressing the palms of her hands together. “Should we encounter Fiona, please remember that she may still be under their control. So approach her with caution.”

  He shook his head slowly, looking away. Then said, almost too quietly to hear, “All right.”

  It was time to go.

  Josep told us how to find a hidden path that led up to the top of the hill. After a confusing list of turns and landmarks, he waved his hand and said, “Never mind, I’ll show you the way myself.”

  “Are you sure?” Eugenia said. “It could be dangerous.”

  “These people are ready to risk their lives to liberate our home,” he said. “It’s only fair I risk mine to help them.”

  * * *

  ◆ ◆ ◆

  I considered leaving the hollowgast behind, but without me there to babysit, my control over it would gradually fade, and I’d have to tame the thing all over again. I knew it might be useful, having a hollow along as I went to face another one, even one this injured. So we trudged up the hill with the big, limping hollow, and though it was fairly docile now, I made sure to keep it far to one side of us.

  There were houses at the bottom of the hill, but as the ground sloped upward, it became a vast cemetery.

  “Just like in my dream,” Horace said, looking around in wonder.

  There was a paved road that snaked up the middle of the hill, from which the tree-shaded path we walked was more or less hidden. Miss Peregrine stayed to the rear—as she’d promised to, and Miss Wren stayed with her—though I started to worry that if she fell too far behind she’d become easy to pick off from our group. Maybe she shouldn’t have come at all.

  Another bang shook the earth.

  “They’re getting louder,” Bronwyn fretted.

  We could hear the wights, but we still couldn’t see them. I hoped that meant they hadn’t seen us, either. Thankfully, they seemed to have placed total faith in the big, nasty hollowgast to guard their operations atop the hill. Emma had warned everyone to expect a patrol guard or two waiting along the climb, but so far there had been none.

  “Maybe we really will be able to surprise them,” Horace said cheerfully.

  Horace, who was wearing a cravat into battle. Horace, who had stayed up all the previous night repairing the rest of the peculiar sheep’s wool sweaters, which many of us were now wearing as a protective layer under our clothes despite the warm day. When this was over, I was going to tell him just how much I loved him.

  A few of Enoch’s twice-risen dead, looking much the worse for wear, limped and shuffled up the path behind us. I didn’t know what good they would do; you could’ve knocked them over with a flick.

  After a long, gentle climb the graveyard flattened, and I thought we’d reached the top—but then we cleared the trees and saw a second hill, steep and almost perfectly round, rising from the center of the plateau. Every side of it was stippled with headstones and monuments.

  We stopped near the end of the tree line. Past the point where we stood, there was little visual cover. Noor scraped a thin layer of light away from the place where we were kneeling. “Not enough to look strange and draw the eye,” she explained. “Just enough to make someone who was looking for us look somewhere else.”

  We knelt behind the screen she’d made and looked up. Josep told us there was a second plateau at the top of the hill, about a hundred yards across. The oldest part of the cemetery. I could feel the other hollowgast there.

  There was another ground-shaking blast, and then a fine rain of pulverized earth came down.

  “Won’t they destroy the grave they’re trying to dig up?” asked Olive.

  “There was once a peculiar in Devil’s Acre,” said Miss Cuckoo, “who lived in holes, and could burrow deep into the ground like a mole, and would blast the dirt out behind him with great force. I wonder if they haven’t taken him hostage.”

  “I knew that bloke,” said Enoch. “He was an ambro addict. They probably didn’t have to mind control him at all.”

  “There!” Emma hissed. “Look!”

  Two figures were now visible at the edge of the hill.

  “Sentries,” Miss Peregrine said. “Everyone keep still.”

  “And hope we haven’t been seen,” added Bronwyn.

  I peered at them through a thin screen of branches. We were too far to make out their faces, but had we been closer, I suspected we would’ve recognized one or both of them from their mugshots. The figures turned slowly. Nothing in their body language betrayed alarm, or suggested we’d been spotted, and after a long moment the two figures withdrew and disappeared.

  “We need to get to the top of that hill,” said Hugh. He had begun to channel his anger into laserlike focus. “Battle strategy one-oh-one: Never engage the enemy from lower ground. They’ll have all the advantage.”

  We agreed there was no way we could ascend the hill as a group and stay hidden, even with Noor’s light-stealing abilities, so we split into two groups. One would flank to the right while the other went left, and with any luck, we would reach the top undetected and surround them. Maybe then—and when they saw I had their hollowgast—they would give up without firing a shot.

  My brain, as ever, was a hope-making machine.

  Bronwyn was going from person to person, giving pats on the back and rubbing shoulders. “Don’t stop until the top,” she said to Horace. “If anyone gets near you, don’t be afraid to draw blood!” she encouraged Claire.

  I reminded them that the wights also had a hollow—and that it could sense our abilities when we used them. “Try not to use your peculiarities until we get close.”

  “Until you see the wights of their eyes,” Enoch said, and looked irritated when no one acknowledged his joke.

  “Remember your sweaters,” Horace said, moving aside his cravat to show his. “If you absolutely must get shot, try to keep it below the neck and above the waist.”

  “While you’re at it, try not to get shot at all,” said Noor. “I just met you guys; no one’s allowed to die, okay?”

  “Okay, Miss Noor,” Olive said, and gave her a hug around the hips (which was as high on tall Noor as little Olive’s arms reached).

  We split up.

  Our group was me, Noor, Hugh, and Bronwyn, and the other was Horace, Millard, Emma, Enoch, and Claire. I instructed my hollow to trail us at a distance, far enough to the rear that if it fell or grunted or crunched leaves too loudly, the noise wouldn’t give away our position. Enoch left his battalion of limping dead behind in the woods. “A second attack wave if we need one,” he called them, and someone had snickered. Millard, who had shed his clothes, would act as a messenger between the two groups, if one was required, and Olive had let Miss Peregrine badger her into staying behind with her and Miss Cuckoo and Josep.

  Miss Peregrine would not be going with us. Before we left, she gathered us for a quick goodbye.

  “There’s no time for speeches, and even if there were I’m not sure I could summon the words needed to express the deep and abiding regard I have for you all. We are about to go forth into extraordinary dangers. One never knows when the end is coming, or if we may all be assembled together as a whole and complete family again. And so I want you to know that I regret every day that my full attention has been called away from you, and if these talks, and the rebuilding of our loops at home, have caused me to shirk my responsibility to you, I am sorry. In the end I am your mistress and your servant. You mean more to me than all the birds in the sky and the heavens above them. If you love me, I hope I have deserved it.” She wiped quickly at her eyes. “Thank you.”

  Miss Peregrine wasn’t the only one tearing up. I felt a flutter in my own chest, too. She raised a hand in a silent goodbye, and with heavy hearts we set off.

  * * *

  ◆ ◆ ◆

  My group flanked to the right, and the other went left. I didn’t get really nervous until we lost sight of one another around the curve of the hill.

  We used the graves as cover, scurrying between stones and monuments large enough to hide all four of us. Luckily, the hill was thickly forested with them, and after working our way to the side for a while, we started to ascend.

  We quickly made it halfway to the top. I began to wonder where the sentries were; we’d been watching for them, but hadn’t seen their heads poke out from the summit since that first time. What were they doing?

  I started to worry that they knew we were here and were just waiting for us to get close enough to make a slaughter easy.

  We dashed across a patch of open ground and ducked behind a mausoleum veined with mildew. “You know, maybe they’re letting us get close,” I said—but I’d hardly finished the sentence when there came a rattle of gunfire.

  We froze. Waited. Another few shots rang out in quick succession.

  They weren’t aiming at us. They were shooting at our friends on the other side of the hill.

  “Wait here!” I hissed, and before the others could stop me I ran back the way we’d come to see what was happening.

  I came to rest behind a stone cross. I could just make out the other group, far across the sloping graveyard. They were huddled behind a massive marble angel. I could see chips flying off its wings, which were being chewed up by bullets.

  I heard footsteps approaching but saw no one. I realized I didn’t have a weapon—and then Millard nearly collided with me.

  “I was coming to tell you not to come!” he wheezed. “Emma says keep going!”

  “But they’re pinned down!” I said.

  “They have good cover, and they’re providing a perfect opportunity for you fellows to take the other side of the hill.”

  “Fine,” I said, “but I’m sending my hollow up there.”

  “No! You’ll need it yourself!”

  But I had already summoned it close and was grunting further instructions in hollowspeak. I’d gotten my hooks deep enough into its pea brain that I trusted it to function at least partially on autopilot.

  Kill wights, I said. Not peculiars.

  It crouched like a sprinter before the starting gun, then sprung into a one-legged, three-tongued lope across the graveyard, running like some freakish horse.

  “Go!” Millard said, physically pushing me—and before I turned I saw Emma pop out from behind the marble angel and lob a firebomb up the hill toward the wights.

  When I got back to my group, Noor and Bronwyn grabbed me and pulled me to safety. “That wasn’t the plan!” Noor said, livid and terrified. “You can’t just run off like that!”

  I apologized, then told them what I’d seen. The message Millard had passed along. And then I looked around and said, “Where’s Hugh?”

  Noor and Bronwyn spun.

  “He was just here!” Bronwyn said.

  But he wasn’t here anymore.

  “Oh my God,” said Noor, pointing to something on the ground, ten feet away. “Look.”

  It was a trail of purple flowers meandering away among the headstones.

  Oh, Hugh. You idiot.

  We ran, following the trail of flowers, not even bothering to hide behind the graves now.

  The vine wound around a monument to Civil War soldiers, past a tomb decorated with empty flower vases, to a circle of graves.

  There in the middle of it all stood Fiona, in a flowing white gown, ringed by deep beds of purple flowering vines. She was facing away from us, and Hugh was approaching her carefully from behind, repeating her name, his hand outstretched.

  “Hugh!” Bronwyn shouted. “Don’t!”

  Fiona turned around. Her eyes were rolled back in her head. Hugh stopped moving forward for some reason. He looked down and then back at Fiona again, and I heard him say, “Sweetheart, no . . .”

  And then something wrapped around my ankles, and I lost my balance and fell, and Noor and Bronwyn fell beside me. The carpet of vines beneath our feet had come to life, and was quickly swaddling us, mummifying us so that we could hardly move a muscle.

  We struggled to free ourselves, but within a few seconds we were completely immobilized.

  Helpless.

  And then I felt its approach: the second hollowgast.

  I grunted a warning to my friends just as it appeared above us on the hill—and then called out for my hollow, the giant one I had tamed earlier.

  Emma and the others would have to do without its protection for a little while.

  “Fiona!” Hugh shouted. “Please, love, don’t do this!”

  The vines around us tightened.

  The other hollow had been heading right for me, but when it sensed the approach of mine, it stopped in its tracks, confused for a moment, and then seemed to gird itself for a fight.

  Just before they collided, I saw two wights appear atop the hill, to watch.

  The hollows charged across the slanting ground toward one another, leaping over headstones like hurdlers. They collided with a smack, the impact so hard it sent them both up into the air. Then they were on the ground, grappling, tongues whipping so furiously I couldn’t tell which belonged to which. I tried issuing some commands to my giant hollow—Choke! Bite! Gouge!—but they seemed redundant given how hard he was already fighting.

  Now the creature was fighting not just for me, but for its own life.

  It was like watching a battle between two shrieking sea monsters. I saw that my hollow’s hobbled leg wasn’t much of a disadvantage; at such close range, the winner would be decided by their knifelike teeth and strangling tongues. Honestly, I never thought I’d see anything like this; it was mesmerizing to watch.

  Noor fought uselessly against her restraints. “What’s happening?” she said.

  I tried to narrate, but it was happening so quickly I couldn’t keep up.

  The wights’ hollow got mine in a nasty choke-hold, both of its arms and its remaining tongue wrapped around mine’s neck—and I felt the life force of my hollow begin to falter. They were locked together, and neither could move; the wights’ hollow could not afford to let go even for a second or the gnashing jaws of mine would sever its last tongue—and then their hollow reached behind itself, yanked a gravestone from the ground, and bashed my hollow in the head with it.