A Map of Days (Miss Peregrine's Peculiar Children #4) - Ransom Riggs Page 0,57

in the lock and opened the door, and we were embraced by a shroud of frozen air. Hugging ourselves against the chill we walked inside.

Shelves stocked with frozen food lined the walls. Icicles like the spikes of an iron maiden were aimed down at us from the ceiling.

“There’s no one in here,” I said. “I think Norma’s gone senile.”

“Look at the floor,” said Emma. There were arrows made with electrical tape leading to the back of the room, where a curtain of thick plastic flaps hung from ceiling to floor. Stencil-painted across them were the words MEATING ROOM.

“Is that a misspelling?” Emma said. “Or a strange joke?”

“Let’s find out.”

I shouldered through plastic curtains caked with frozen meat slime and led us into a smaller, even colder room that flickered under the light of a faulty fluorescent tube. There were cuts of meat everywhere, spilling from torn-open boxes, scattered across the floor, dusted with frost.

“What the hell happened?” I said.

I nudged a rack of lamb with my foot. The still-frozen meat had been bitten clean in half. I got a sudden, sinking feeling.

“I think we should get out of here,” I said. “This might be a—”

The word trap was leaving my lips when three things happened in quick succession:

—I put my foot down on a big X made of tape on the floor.

—The flickering bulb above our heads shattered, and the room went black.

—I felt a roller-coastery lurch in my stomach and a sudden pressure change in my head.

Then the light came back on, only now it was a yellow incandescent bulb in a wire cage. The boxes of meat were gone, replaced by bags of frozen vegetables. And I felt a sharp, unmistakable pain bloom in my gut.

I touched Emma’s hand and raised a finger to my lips. I mouthed the word Hollow.

Emma looked, for an instant, terrified—and then she swallowed hard and reined it in. She put her lips to my ear.

“Can you control it?” she whispered.

It felt like ages since I’d spoken hollowgast or even confronted a hollow in person. I was way out of practice, and even at the top of my game, my control over a hollow had never come instantly.

“I need time to feel it out,” I whispered. “A minute or two.”

Emma nodded. “Then we’ll wait.”

It was in the cold storage locker with us. My inner compass needle was warming up, even as my body was freezing, and it told me the beast was just beyond the plastic curtains. We could hear it chewing on something, grunting and slavering as it ate. We crouched by a wooden crate, trying to make ourselves invisible as the seconds ticked by.

The hollow tossed aside whatever it had been eating and let out a thunderous belch.

Emma shot me a questioning look—Anything?—and I shook my head. Nothing yet. Before I could start to gain control over it, I needed to hear it speak.

It took a step toward us, its shadow falling crooked across the plastic curtains. I listened in vain for anything I could use to get a toehold in its brain—any little utterance would help—but the only sound it made was a ragged intake of breath. It was sniffing the air, gathering our scent. Working up a new appetite.

I tapped Emma and pointed upward. We rose slowly to standing. We were going to have fight.

Emma put out her hands, palms up, and I gritted my teeth, which were chattering either from cold or from fear. More likely the latter. I was surprised at how scared I was.

The hollow’s shadow warped. One of its muscular tongues poked through the curtain flaps and curled experimentally in the air, like a periscope that was spying on us.

Emma took a half step forward and quietly lit her hand-flames. She kept them small, but I could tell from the way she tensed her forearms that she was building up to a burst. Now the hollow’s second tongue pierced the curtains. Emma’s flames climbed a little higher, then higher still. A drop of freezing water hit the back of my neck. The icicles on the ceiling were starting to melt.

It happened suddenly, as violence often does. The hollowgast screamed and punched its last tongue through the curtains, and then all three of them came at us. Emma shouted and released the blast of fire she’d been working up. Just as the tongues reached us, they got burned and reeled suddenly back again—but not before one of them wrapped around my foot, and dragged me