I felt its consciousness blink out.

  Dead.

  As we would be soon, no doubt.

  The two wights descended toward us, and their hollow limped to meet them.

  I began to whisper at their hollow, the same one I’d controlled in the blood-sport ring and the battery chamber, but it didn’t respond. I’d have to be closer, and speak louder, to reestablish my connection to it. But how was I going to do that with these vines pinning me to the ground?

  The wights were dressed in unremarkable business casual clothes, designed to help them disappear into modern life. I recognized them from the ymbrynes’ mugshots. One was thick-necked and freckled—Murnau. He had a leather bag strapped across his back. The other wight was thin and wore round glasses on the end of a beaklike nose. There was a third man behind him. His face was a ruin of melted flesh.

  I could hear gunfire continue to ring out from the other side of the hill. Our friends were still fighting. So there was hope yet.

  The wights were standing among us. Arrogant, strutting. The hollow stood behind them, moaning a little and leaking from various wounds. The man with the ruined face was whispering to Fiona, and Murnau was talking to me.

  “A valiant effort, boy. Truly impressive. If only your talents weren’t wasted on the birds, we could do some real damage together. Oh, well.”

  “Maybe we can work something out,” I said.

  “You’ve had plenty of opportunities to join us and always refused. It’s far too late. And you’re too late to stop this, too.” He reached into his bag and pulled out a skull, brown with age, the jaw missing. “Unless you’re here for some other reason. Visiting the Catskills?”

  He put the skull back, muttering something about the master will be so pleased with me, but I wasn’t listening—instead I was trying desperately, under my breath, to gain a little control over Murnau’s hollowgast again.

  There was a loud buzzing sound, and everyone looked to Hugh. His mouth was open, and bees were starting to pour out.

  Murnau shouted something at the man with the ruined face. The man with the ruined face then shouted something at Fiona. Fiona jerked, and a rope of vines clasped around Hugh’s mouth.

  His eyes widened pitifully. “Mmmmf!” Just a few bees had escaped. The skinny wight slapped at the air and killed one.

  The man with the ruined face was the one controlling Fiona’s mind. He wasn’t a wight—he was an ambro addict, most of whom had long ago pledged their allegiance to the wights. Mind control must have been his peculiar ability.

  I was still trying to gain control over the hollow’s mind, but it was resisting me.

  “Let us go now,” Bronwyn said, “and we’ll spare your lives when this is over.”

  Murnau just laughed.

  “And you,” Murnau said, kneeling down in front of Noor. “How’s the search for Mommy going? Think she’s just dying to see you again? Is that why she abandoned you—because she wuves her wittew baby so much?”

  Noor was staring past him, her jaw set.

  “Go die, asshole,” I spat.

  “The boy rushes to her defense. How romantic.” He sighed. “Well, enough of this. I’m getting bored—and we have a plane to catch.”

  He stood up, reached into his jacket, and pulled out a gun. “Who wants to die first?”

  Just then I heard a noise like a sheet flapping in the wind, and something let out a higher-pitch screech and collided with Murnau’s head.

  Miss Peregrine.

  As he was thrown to the ground, the gun fell from his grip, and he swatted at the bird with his bare hands. She flapped her powerful wings, talons tearing at his face.

  “Auuugh!!! Get it offa me!”

  The skinny wight leapt into the fray.

  “Jacob!” It was Noor. She turned her head toward me and opened her mouth a little. Bright light glowed from inside her throat. “I’ve been saving this. One shot. Where do I aim it?”

  Miss Peregrine was on top of Murnau. So I indicated the ambro addict.

  She made a sound like she was choking, then coughing, and then hocked a hot, spinning orb of pure light across the grass just above the ground. It wrapped around the ambro addict’s shins and he began to scream—this one must have been searing hot—and he toppled to the ground.

  Then I heard a screech. Miss Peregrine. The hollowgast had torn her away from Murnau and was swinging her around in the air with its tongue.

  They had her. Which meant now they had everything. I felt suddenly blind with rage, with fear. I had to do something, and soon.

  Murnau was starting to regain his footing.

  And then I heard a gasp—Fiona. Her eyes were rolled forward again, and I felt the vines around us begin to loosen. The addict’s control over her had wavered.

  Murnau bellowed something unintelligible and ran at him, a vial in his hand—and he threw himself atop the man and upended the stuff into the addict’s eyes.

  The vines were slackening—but slowly. It was enough to get an arm free now, and one leg. And for Hugh to loose his bees. They streamed into the air and began to find their targets—the wights, the hollow.

  Twin cones of light shot out of the addict’s eyes. He screamed, flipped over. Murnau ignored the bees stinging him—his face was already running with blood from Miss Peregrine’s talons—and he shoved the man so that he was facing Fiona.

  Fiona went rigid again. The vines began to tighten.

  I yanked my leg hard before their grip was complete, and it came free. Bronwyn and Noor were still caught.

  Murnau hadn’t seen—yet.

  I ran for the hollow. It was holding our thrashing ymbryne above its open, smacking mouth like a bonbon treat, taunting her with death.

  I slammed into the hollow. Bear-hugged it around its neck. I could feel its shock, the surprise at having been physically tackled by such a weak creature—and that bought me a moment to act.

  I gripped it around the sides of its face.

  LISTEN TO ME, I screamed, pressing my head to its head. I stared into its black, weeping eyes. You’re mine, you’re mine, you are mine.

  And then it was.

  Hello, old friend.

  Drop her.

  It dropped Miss Peregrine—and then I felt a sharp pain in my back. The skinny wight had struck me with something.

  I clung to the hollow. I wasn’t letting go.

  Kill.

  The hollow whipped out its only remaining tongue. The wight was dead the next instant.

  I heard Noor scream. Bronwyn, too.

  Turn.

  The hollow turned. The addict was yelling at Fiona, the light from his eyes smoking, the skin around them melting—and everywhere the vines were moving like nests of snakes. The girls and Hugh were struggling against the vines, which were constricting tighter and tighter around them.

  Kill, kill, kill.

  The hollow’s tongue ripped off the addict’s head. The lights from his eyes spun as it tumbled down the hill.

  The vines loosened, unwound, slunk back into the earth. My friends collapsed to the ground, finally able to breathe. Fiona looked at them and moaned in horror at what she’d done.

  Turn.

  Miss Peregrine was alive—thank God—and turning human again, which meant she wasn’t gravely injured.

  I looked for Murnau—and saw him running away. I ordered the hollowgast to chase him down, but the hollow and I hadn’t even gone ten steps when a hail of bullets pockmarked the ground and the headstones around me. Someone was covering Murnau’s escape. The hollow was hit in the leg, and stumbled.

  “Let him go!” Miss Peregrine shouted after me. “Take the others and get to safety!”

  We surrounded Fiona. Hugh scooped her into his arms and she fell limply across him. He would accept no help and carried her by himself, his face rigid but streaming with tears.

  I forced Miss Peregrine to come with us, though I knew her instinct was to chase down Murnau—but that was probably just what he hoped she would do.

  We ran back around the hill, just in time to witness something astounding. My friends were no longer hiding behind the stone angel but charging up the hill toward the other retreating wights. Bringing up the rear was a very eclectic battalion: Miss Wren riding a grimbear; Enoch’s limping dead, a dozen strong; and a surprising number of Americans. A Northern woman barreling headlong uphill with a medium-sized tree under her arm, branches and all. A Californio man, rolling a boulder along before him. A boy with lightning sparking between his hands. And several cowboy types with rifles, in firing positions, laying down a blanket of bullets to clear the way.

  They took the hill, and in no time our forces had killed or caught six wights and several of their ambro-addicted turncoats.

  Murnau was gone.

  Somehow he had slipped away and taken with him a bag of resurrection ingredients. The ymbrynes dispatched a search party, but they didn’t seem hopeful.

  But Miss Peregrine was safe, and we had Fiona back.

  Fiona.

  God, it was good to see her again. We gathered among the excavations atop Gravehill—a wrecked place of holes and bones and piled-up earth—to take stock.

  Hugh had not let her go for a moment since the vines had released him, but he was finally persuaded to let the ymbrynes examine her.

  We all circled around anxiously to watch. The ymbrynes spoke softly to her. Asked her questions. She seemed dazed, but no longer hypnotized. Her eyes were normal, if red-rimmed and bloodshot, and there were bruises purpling on her arms and face.

  “Are those from the bus accident?” Miss Peregrine asked her.

  She nodded.

  “Did they hurt you in any other way?”

  She blinked several times, then looked away.

  “Love?” said Hugh, grasping her hand. “Did they hurt you?”

  She closed her eyes.

  “Please talk to me,” he begged her. “Tell me what they did to you.”

  She opened her eyes again. Looked at him, and slowly nodded her head.

  Then she opened her mouth. Blood spilled out. It ran down her chin onto her white dress.

  Tongue of the seedsprout. Freshly harvested.

  Murnau had gotten what he needed from her, after all.

  We brought Fiona back to Devil’s Acre and straight to Rafael the bone-mender to begin her recovery. Hugh never left her side. Neither did the rest of us. We crowded her room, talking to her, telling her stories about all she’d missed, and just hanging out in the hope it might make her feel like she was home again, even though the home she’d left behind—Miss Peregrine’s—was gone forever.

  We thought some feigned cheer might buoy her spirits.

  Enoch got the first smile out of her, telling a story about falling into the Ditch and coming out with one of the wrinkled old bridge heads having bitten hold of his trouser leg. And pretty soon our fake cheer began to feel real.

  She was alive.

  Fiona was alive and back among us. Yes, she was hurt. And yes, Murnau was out there somewhere with Fiona’s tongue and the alphaskull and all the other ingredients on Bentham’s infernal resurrection shopping list. But he hadn’t gotten Miss Peregrine—and he never would.

  We told ourselves we had won. We had crushed the wights. Killed or captured all but one of them—and their hollows. I had brought the last one back to the Acre, returning it to the place where I had originally tamed it, the old grimbear enclosure in the blood-sport ring. Only Murnau remained, so far as we knew, and if it really was important that Fiona’s tongue be “freshly harvested,” well—the clock was certainly ticking on that.

  It seemed we had beaten them.

  The wights who’d been captured in the deadrisers’ loop had a glum, defeated air about them that I’d never seen in wights before. Noor and I caught sight of them slouching through the Acre in chains the day after we returned, while they were being transferred out of an interrogation room in Bentham’s house. I had every intention of keeping my distance, but when Noor saw them, she jolted and said, “Oh my God,” and suddenly she was pulling me toward them.

  A home guard soldier stopped us before we could get too close.

  “It’s them,” Noor said, her voice shaking a little, and she raised her arm and pointed at two of the wights: a man and a woman who looked oddly familiar. “Those were the people watching me at school.”

  I stopped breathing for a moment as it clicked into place. They were the vice principals. The ones who’d stalked Noor and who we had seen again just before the attack on her hiding place in the unfinished building.

  The ones H had thought were normal, some secret society bent on controlling us.

  “Holy shit,” I murmured, and took her hand.

  Both of them turned their heads to look at us, and their eyes flashed with hatred. Then they were led through a doorway and were gone.

  Later, Miss Peregrine confirmed it: They had never been in ymbryne custody before. They’d been in America for years, unaccounted for, on the ymbrynes’ most-wanted list.

  They had fooled H. They’d tricked Abe, too—for years—into thinking some other group was responsible for many of the wights’ crimes.

  I swore to myself I’d never let a wight trick me again.

  The ymbrynes, once they had spent a little time settling us back into the Acre, returned to Marrowbone to oversee the end of the negotiations. LaMothe and Parkins had actually come to Hopewell in person with their fighters and, after what they’d witnessed, appeared to be very much on Team Ymbryne. Leo had already been persuaded to make bygones bygones, Miss Peregrine had said, and now there were only a few contractual formalities to work out before a solid peace agreement could be reached and signed.

  * * *

  ◆ ◆ ◆

  We continued to work on finding V, though our quest didn’t carry the same urgency it once had. Our life and safety no longer seemed to depend on it, and I had begun to wonder about H’s motivations; whether sending us to find her was more about his mistrust of ymbrynes than V being the key to something crucial. I couldn’t know. What I did know was that finding V was important to Noor. She was the closest thing Noor had to a mother; a last link to a lost childhood.

  Millard, Noor, and I gave the search most of our time, and the others helped whenever they could. Millard seemed to think we were getting close. Another small memory of childhood came back to Noor one night over dinner, something about a strip-mined mountaintop, and it led Millard to rule out Ohio as a possible location of V’s loop. That left only Pennsylvania to search. It felt like it was only a matter of time.

  Noor and I spent pretty much every waking moment together. Emma, for her part, was mostly ignoring us. She wasn’t mean about it. But she was going through something, and it wasn’t anything I could help her with. So I gave her space and hoped that we really could be friends again soon.

  All seemed well.

  Great, even.

  * * *

  ◆ ◆ ◆

  Noor and I were hunched over rib-eye sandwiches at the Shrunken Head, having just come off a marathon session with Millard in the maps room. We’d been scouring a pile of new atlases the Americans lent us, looking for anything that resembled the topography of H’s map fragment. But after five hours of work, the pile was only a little shorter than when we’d started; even Millard’s usually inexhaustible enthusiasm for cartography was beginning to flag.

  I took a bite of my sandwich, winced, then spat a small metal pellet into my hand.

  “Sorry ’bout that,” a passing waiter said. “Sometimes they don’t get all the buckshot out of the carcass.”

  I pushed the plate away. “How about a coffee instead?”

  He went off to bring me one, and I noticed Noor staring out the clouded window at the bridge head outside. It was barking rude things at passersby.

  “Hey,” I said quietly. “What’s on your mind?”

  “We’re getting so close to finding her now. Like we’re just a step away.”

  “It’s exciting,” I said. Then: “Isn’t it?”

  “Yes,” she said slowly, “but meeting her again means talking to her, means facing all this stuff and digging up all these feelings I buried a long time ago.”

  “You don’t feel ready.”

  “Maybe?” She sighed. “I don’t know.”

  “You know what I think?”

  She looked up.

  “I think maybe you could use a little break.” My coffee arrived with a sudden smack on the wooden table, startling me for a second. “Maybe we could both use some time off. We went through so much, then dove right back into the work again, and you haven’t had time to process any of it. None of us have.”

  But Noor seemed almost afraid to be hopeful. “Maybe just a tiny break? I’d actually been thinking it would be nice to go back to New York to pick up some of my stuff. Clothes, shoes. My backpack . . .” She shrugged.

  “That’s a great idea,” I said.

  “I mean, if I’m really going to, like, live here—”

  “Let’s go,” I said.

  “Really?” She hesitated. “We could be back in a couple of hours or something, right? Use the Panloopticon?”

  “Yep.” I scooted back in my chair. “Easy.”

  * * *

  ◆ ◆ ◆

  We got there in less than an hour. We took the Panloopticon door to New York City—at this point Noor and I had pretty much free rein to roam the Panloopticon at will—and then caught the subway to Brooklyn.

  The train rattled along underground. Noor sat beside me, our hands mingled in a stack on her lap as we talked about plans for the future. She wanted to finish school. She talked about commuting from Devil’s Acre to Bard College in New York, where she’d been accepted into an accelerated student arts program for high school kids. She loved art history and music, but had a knack for engineering and science, too. She was torn. I told her she might have a future in both.