Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children

“Not if I shoot you in the head!”

He laughed. “You couldn’t fire a gun if you wanted to. You forget, I’m intimately familiar with your poor, fragile psyche. It’d give you nightmares.”

I tried to imagine it: curling my finger around the trigger and squeezing; the recoil and the awful report. What was so hard about that? Why did my hand shake just thinking about it? How many wights had my grandfather killed? Dozens? Hundreds? If he were here instead of me, Golan would be dead already, laid out while he’d been squatting against the rail in a daze. It was an opportunity I’d already wasted; a split-second of gutless indecision that might’ve cost the ymbryes their lives.

The giant lamp spun past, blasting us with light, turning us into glowing white cutouts. Golan, who was facing it, grimaced and looked away. Another wasted opportunity, I thought.

“Just put it down and come with us,” I said. “Nobody else has to get hurt.”

“I don’t know,” Emma said. “If Millard doesn’t make it, I might reconsider that.”

“You want to kill me?” Golan said. “Fine, get it over with. But you’ll only be delaying the inevitable, not to mention making things worse for yourselves. We know how to find you now. More like me are coming, and I can guarantee the collateral damage they do will make what I did to your friend seem downright charitable.”

“Get it over with?” Emma said, her flame sending a little pulse of sparks skyward. “Who said it would be quick?”

“I told you, I’ll kill them,” he said, drawing the cage to his chest.

She took a step toward him. “I’m eighty-eight years old,” she said. “Do I look like I need a pair of babysitters?” Her expression was steely, unreadable. “I can’t tell you how long we’ve been dying to get out from under that woman’s wing. I swear, you’d be doing us a favor.”

Golan swiveled his head back and forth, nervously sizing us up. Is she serious? For a moment he seemed genuinely frightened, but then he said, “You’re full of shit.”

Emma rubbed her palms together and pulled them slowly apart, drawing out a noose of flame. “Let’s find out.”

I wasn’t sure how far Emma would take this, but I had to step in before the birds went up in flames or were sent tumbling over the rail.

“Tell us what you want with those ymbrynes, and maybe she’ll go easy on you,” I said.

“We only want to finish what we started,” Golan said. “That’s all we’ve ever wanted.”

“You mean the experiment,” Emma said. “You tried it once, and look what happened. You turned yourselves into monsters!”

“Yes,” he said, “but what an unchallenging life it would be if we always got things right on the first go.” He smiled. “This time we’ll be harnessing the talents of all the world’s best time manipulators, like these two ladies here. We won’t fail again. We’ve had a hundred years to figure out what went wrong. Turns out all we needed was a bigger reaction!”

“A bigger reaction?” I said. “Last time you blew up half of Siberia!”

“If you must fail,” he said grandly, “fail spectacularly!”

I remembered Horace’s prophetic dream of ash clouds and scorched earth, and I realized what he’d been seeing. If the wights and hollows failed again, this time they’d destroy a lot more than five hundred miles of empty forest. And if they succeeded, and turned themselves into the deathless demigods they’d always dreamed of becoming … I shuddered to imagine it. Living under them would be a hell all its own.

The light came around and blinded Golan again—I tensed, ready to lunge—but the moment sped by too quickly.

“It doesn’t matter,” Emma said. “Kidnap all the ymbrynes you want. They’ll never help you.”

“Yes, they will. They’ll do it or we’ll kill them one by one. And if that doesn’t work, we’ll kill you one by one, and make them watch.”

“You’re insane,” I told him.

The birds began to panic and screech. Golan shouted over them.

“No! What’s really insane is how you peculiars hide from the world when you could rule it—succumb to death when you could dominate it—and let the common genetic trash of the human race drive you underground when you could so easily make them your slaves, as they rightly should be!” He drove home every sentence with another shake of the cage. “That’s insane!”

“Stop it!” Emma shouted.

“So you do care!” He shook the cage even harder. Suddenly, the little red light attached to its bars began to glow twice as bright, and Golan whipped his head around and searched the darkness behind him. Then he looked back at Emma and said, “You want them? Here!” and he pulled back and swung the cage at her face.

She cried out and ducked. Like a discus thrower, Golan continued the swing until the cage sailed over her head, then released. It flew out of his hands and over the rail, tumbling end over end into the night.

I cursed and Emma screamed and threw herself against the rail, clawing at the air as the cage fell toward the sea. In that moment of confusion, Golan leapt and knocked me to the ground. He slammed a fist into my stomach and another into my chin.

I was dizzy and couldn’t breathe. He grabbed for the gun, and it took every bit of my strength to keep him from snatching it. Because he wanted it so badly, I knew it must’ve been loaded. I would’ve thrown it over the rail, but he almost had it and I couldn’t let go. Emma was screaming bastard, you bastard, and then her hands, gloved in flame, came from behind and seized him around the neck.

I heard Golan’s flesh singe like a cold steak on a hot grill. He howled and rolled off me, his thin hair going up in flame, and then his hands were around Emma’s throat, as though he didn’t mind burning as long as he could choke the life out of her. I jumped to my feet, held the gun in both hands, and pointed it.

I had, just for a moment, a clear shot. I tried to empty my mind and focus on steadying my arm, creating an imaginary line that extended from my shoulder through the sight to my target—a man’s head. No, not a man, but a corruption of one. A thing. A force that had arranged the murder of my grandfather and exploded all that I’d humbly called a life, poorly lived though it may have been, and carried me here to this place and this moment, in much the way less corrupt and violent forces had done my living and deciding for me since I was old enough to decide anything. Relax your hands, breathe in, hold it. But now I had a chance to force back, a slim nothing of a chance that I could already feel slipping away.

Now squeeze.

The pistol bucked in my hands and its report sounded like the earth breaking open, so tremendous and sudden that I shut my eyes. When I opened them again, everything seemed strangely frozen. Though Golan stood behind Emma with her arms locked in a hold, wrestling her toward the railing, it was as if they’d been cast in bronze. Had the ymbrynes turned human again and worked their magic on us? But then everything came unstuck and Emma wrenched her arms away and Golan began to totter backward, and he stumbled and sat heavily on the rail.

Gaping at me in surprise, he opened his mouth to speak but found he could not. He clapped his hands over the penny-sized hole I’d made in his throat, blood lacing through his fingers and running down his arms, and then the strength went out of him and he fell back, and he was gone.

The moment Golan disappeared from view, he was forgotten. Emma pointed out to sea and shouted, “There, there!” Following her finger and squinting into the distance I could barely pick out the pulse of a red LED bobbing on the waves. Then we were scrambling to the hatch and sprinting down and down the endless seesawing staircase, hopeless that we could reach the cage before it sank but hysterical to try to anyway.

We tore outside to find Millard wearing a tourniquet and Bronwyn by his side. He shouted something I didn’t quite hear, but it was enough to assure me he was alive. I grabbed Emma’s shoulder and said, “The boat!” pointing to where the stolen canoe had been lashed to a rock, but it was too far away, on the wrong side of the lighthouse, and there was no time. Emma pulled me instead toward the open sea, and, running, we dashed ourselves into it.

I hardly felt the cold. All I could think about was reaching the cage before it disappeared beneath the waves. We tore at the water and sputtered and choked as black swells slapped our faces. It was difficult to tell how far away the beacon was, just a single point of light in a surging ocean of dark. It bobbed and fell and came and went, and twice we lost sight of it and had to stop, searching frantically before spotting it again.