A Map of Days (Miss Peregrine's Peculiar Children #4) - Ransom Riggs Page 0,135

was about to pop. “Where’s Enoch?” I said.

“In the Acre,” said Millard.

“Thank God.”

“He escaped that horrible diner,” said Emma, “then called your house and told Miss P everything that had happened, and they tracked us here.”

“We owe him our lives,” said Millard. “That’s something I never thought I’d say.”

“You can catch up on the way back to the Acre,” said someone with a French accent, and I turned to see Miss Cuckoo standing near the exit with another ymbryne. She wore an electric-blue dress with a tall silver collar, and her expression was flat. Neither she nor the other ymbryne betrayed any trace of happiness at seeing us.

“Come, there is a car waiting.”

Leo’s men watched as we walked out, their eyes and guns trained on us. I thought again of Noor, and the fact that we were leaving her here, in some form of captivity. I felt awful about it. Not only had we failed the mission, I had probably consigned her to a worse fate than if I’d left her alone entirely.

The ymbrynes bundled us out of the loading dock and into a big car. It lurched away from the curb before the doors had even closed.

“Miss Peregrine?” I said.

She turned slightly, her face in profile. “It would be better,” she said, “if you didn’t speak.”

We were brought back to Devil’s Acre via a Manhattan loop entrance that connected to the Panloopticon—a route that would have saved my friends and me days of driving and untold trouble if only we’d known about it. I was spared an immediate tongue-lashing because I was injured. Instead, the ymbrynes brought me to a bone-mender named Rafael, who worked out of a tumbledown house on Little Stabbing Street. For the rest of the day and all that night, I lay in a room filled with apothecary bottles while he applied stinging powders and pungent poultices to my wounds. He was no Mother Dust, but I could feel myself beginning to heal.

I was confined to the bed, mostly sleepless, haunted by failures and doubts and guilt. (If only I had listened to H. If only I had aborted the mission when he’d begged me to.) Haunted by the things Leo had said about my grandfather. Not that I thought they could be true—of course he had been framed by wights, it’s the only explanation that made any sense—but the simple fact that anyone would fabricate such lies about him made me deeply uncomfortable. I would have to set that right, if I could ever get H to talk to me again. But I was haunted primarily by guilt about Noor. If she had never met me at all, she’d be safer than she was now. Hunted, yes, but at least she’d be free.

My friends came to see me in the morning. Emma, Millard, Bronwyn. And Enoch, too, who recounted how he had come out of Frankie’s odd trance to find himself dressed in doll’s clothes, which he took off as fast as he could before running away.

“We think he woke up when I tackled Frankie,” said Emma. “She let go of us all, and that must have broken her hold on Enoch, too.”

“She’s quite powerful, to be able to influence people remotely that way,” said Millard. “I’ll have to include her in my new book, Who’s Who in Peculiar America.”

“I can control people remotely, too,” said Enoch. “Provided they’re dead.”

“It’s too bad, you would have made a cute couple,” I said.

Enoch leaned over my bed and flicked a bruise on my arm, and I yelped.

They told me Miss Peregrine hadn’t talked to them yet—not even to reprimand them. She’d hardly said a word to any of us since we’d returned, other than to warn us not to leave the Acre.

“She’s still too angry,” said Emma. “I’ve never seen her like this.”

“Me, neither,” said Bronwyn. “Not even the time my brother sank the Cairnholm ferry with all of us aboard.”

“What if they excommunicate us from peculiardom?” said Emma.

“You can’t be excommunicated from peculiardom,” Enoch said. “Can you?”

“This whole thing was such an awful idea,” Bronwyn said miserably.

“We were doing fine until you got shot with that sleep dart, or whatever it was,” said Enoch.

“So it’s my fault?”

“We never would’ve gotten stuck in Frankie’s loop-trap if we hadn’t had to go looking for a hospital!”

“It’s nobody’s fault,” I said. “We just had some bad luck.”

“If it weren’t that, something else would’ve gotten us,” said Emma. “I’m amazed we made it as far as we did, considering