Hollow City: The Second Novel of Miss Peregrine's Peculiar Children

“What’s taking him so long?” he grumbled.

“If he doesn’t come back soon, I’m going to start tossing eggs,” said Enoch.

“Do that and you’ll get us all killed,” said Emma. “We’re sitting ducks in here. Once the smoke clears, they’ll flay us alive.”

So we sat and waited more, watching the Gypsies, the Gypsies watching back. Every minute that ticked by felt like another nail in Miss Peregrine’s coffin. I found myself staring at her, as if by looking closely enough I might be able to detect the changes happening to her—to see the still-human spark within her slowly winking out. But she looked the same as she always had, only calmer somehow, asleep in the hay next to Bronwyn, her small, feathered chest rising and falling softly. She seemed to have no awareness of the trouble we were in, or of the countdown that was hanging over her head. Maybe the fact that she could sleep at a time like this was evidence enough that she was changing. The old Miss Peregrine would’ve been having nervous fits.

Then my thoughts strayed to my parents, as they always did when I didn’t keep a tight rein on them. I tried to picture their faces as I’d last seen them. Bits and pieces coalesced in my mind: the thin rim of stubble my dad had developed after a few days on the island; the way my mom, without realizing it, would fiddle with her wedding ring when my dad talked too long about something that disinterested her; my dad’s darting eyes, always checking the horizon on his never-ending search for birds.

Now they’d be searching for me.

As evening settled in, the camp came alive around us. The Gypsies talked and laughed, and when a band of children with battered horns and fiddles struck up a song, they danced. Between songs one of the boys from the band snuck around back of our cage with a bottle in his hands. “It’s for the sick one,” he said, checking behind him nervously.

“Who?” I said, and then he nodded at Hugh, who wilted to the floor in spasms of coughing, right on cue.

The boy slipped the bottle through the bars. I twisted off the cap, gave it a sniff, and nearly fell over. It smelled like turpentine mixed with compost. “What is it?” I said.

“Works, that’s all I know.” He looked behind him again. “All right, I done something for you. Now you owes. So tell me—what crime did you do? You’re thieves, aincha?” Then he lowered his voice and said, “Or didja kill someone?”

“What’s he talking about?” said Bronwyn.

We didn’t kill anyone, I came close to saying, but then an image of Golan’s body tumbling through the air toward a battery of rocks flashed in my mind, and I kept quiet.

Emma said it for me instead. “We didn’t kill anyone!”

“Well, you musta done something,” the boy said. “Why else would they have a reward out for you?”

“There’s a reward?” said Enoch.