A Map of Days (Miss Peregrine's Peculiar Children #4) - Ransom Riggs Page 0,145
all the things I thought he might say to me, that was not among them.
“One of the seven. Seven what?”
“They will be the emancipators of peculiardom. So says the Apocryphon.”
“What is that? Some kind of prophecy?”
“Writings from long ago. Her birth signals the arrival of a new age. A very dangerous one.” He grimaced in pain and shut his eyes. “That’s why those people are hunting her.”
“The ones with the helicopter and the black cars.”
“The same,” he said.
“They’re one of the clans?”
“No. Much worse. A very old, very secret society of normals. Who want to subvert and”—he winced, sucking air through his teeth—“control us.” He was losing his breath now, gasping between words. “No time for history lessons. Take the girl to V. She’s the last of us. The last of the hunters.”
“V,” I said, my mind starting to reel. “From Abe’s mission log. The one he trained himself.”
“Yes. She lives in the big wind. Doesn’t want to be found, so be careful. Horatio, the map is in the safe . . .”
The hollowgast grunted, loped over to the wall, and moved a picture aside to reveal a small safe. While Horatio spun the number wheel, I focused on H. I could feel him slackening.
I squeezed his hand. “H, I have to know something.” He was slipping away, and the idea that this last, best link to my grandfather’s secrets was about to be severed shook something loose in me. Something I’d been trying to bury since I heard it.
“Why would someone call my grandfather a murderer?”
H looked at me with new intensity. “Who said that to you?”
I leaned in close. He was shaking. I told him, quickly, about the insane things Leo had accused Abe of. Stealing his goddaughter. Killing people. Not just people—kids.
H might have said, The wights made it all up. He might have said, simply, It’s a lie. But he didn’t say either of those things.
He said, “So you know.”
My vision blurred for a moment. And doubt, like a virus, began to spread through me. “What do you mean? What are you talking about?”
I had H by the shoulders. I was shaking him. The hollowgast screamed, whipped a tongue around my waist, and pulled me away from H. I was flung halfway across the room, skidding across the floor into the leg of a table.
A terrible fear had invaded me—that there had been truth to Leo’s accusations. That this was my grandfather’s secret: He had not been trying to protect me from a loss of normalcy, or from the hollows, or from some mysterious band of enemies in black cars. He had been protecting me from himself.
I picked myself up off the floor. The hollow was hissing at me, bent over H, blocking him from view. I commanded it in hollowspeak to move, but it was fighting me. Or maybe H and the hollow were both fighting me now.
I ran toward the hollowgast, yelling, Go, go, let him go—and it did, leaping away from H and up to the ceiling, where it clung to a light fixture with its tongues. I fixed, for a split second, on an odd detail: A forest of tree-shaped air fresheners suspended from the ceiling. To combat the smell, of course. Because the hollow lived here.
I knelt down over H. “I’m sorry.” This time I didn’t touch him. “Please. Tell me what he did.”
“They fooled us. Seven times, they fooled us.”
“Who? What?”
“The Society.”
I was half listening. I only wanted to know one thing. “Did my grandfather kill children?”
“No. No.”
“Did he kidnap them?”
“No.” His face swam with pain—and what seemed like regret. “We thought”—he gasped for breath—“that we were saving them.”
I sank back on my heels, suddenly light-headed. He wasn’t a killer. He wasn’t a bad man. I hadn’t realized how much it had been weighing on me. The very notion.
“We did a lot of good,” he said. “We also made some mistakes. But Abe’s heart was always in the right place. And he loved you very, very much.” His voice had diminished to a whisper.
A rush of tears stung my eyes.
“I’m sorry.”
“Don’t. Don’t be.” With the last of his strength, he touched my arm. “The torch is yours now. I’m just sorry there aren’t more people to help you carry it.”
“Thank you,” I said. “I’ll try to do you both proud.”
“I know you will.” He smiled. “Now, it’s time.” He looked up to the ceiling. “Horatio, come down here.”