I moved away from Miss Wren while talking to the hollow in a constant stream, hoping to draw it away from her and keep its attention on me.
Close your mouth. Sit down. Lie down.
It turned away from Miss Wren as I moved—good, good—and then as I backed away, it came forward.
Yes. Okay. Now what?
My hands went to my pockets. In one I had what remained of Mother Dust’s finger. In the other, a secret—a vial of ambro I’d swiped from the previous room while Emma wasn’t looking. I’d taken it during a momentary lapse of confidence. What if I couldn’t do this on my own? What if I needed a boost?
Sit down, I said. Stop.
The hollow whipped one of its tongues at me. I ducked behind a mannequin and the tongue lassoed that instead, lifted it up and flung it against a wall, where it shattered.
I dove away from a second tongue. Banged my shins on a tipped-over chair. The tongue slapped the empty floor where I’d just been. The hollow was toying with me now, but soon it would go in for the kill. I had to do something, and there were two somethings I could do.
The vial or the finger.
There was no way I’d be able to control this hollow without the boost in my abilities a vial of ambro could give. Mother Dust’s crushed finger, on the other hand, wasn’t something I could launch away from me, and I’d lost my mask. If I tried to use it, I’d only put myself to sleep; it was worse than useless.
As another tongue smashed into the ground beside me, I slid beneath a table and pulled the vial from my pocket. I fumbled to uncork it, my hands shaking. Would it make a hero of me, or a slave? Could one vial really addict me for life? And what would be the worse outcome, being an addict and a slave, or being dead in this hollow’s stomach?
The table was ripped away, leaving me exposed. I leapt to my feet. Stop, stop, I shouted, taking small hops backward as the hollow’s tongues lashed at me, missing by mere inches.
My back hit the wall. There was nowhere left to go.
I took a blow to the stomach, and then the tongue that had hit me uncurled and moved to wrap around my neck. I needed to run but I was stunned, doubled over, breath knocked out of me. Then I heard an angry snarl—one that hadn’t come from the hollow—and a stout, echoing bark.
Addison.
Suddenly the tongue that was reaching for my neck stiffened, as if in pain, and retracted across the room. The dog, that brave little boxer, had bitten it. I heard him growling and yelping as he began to do battle with an invisible creature twenty times his size.
I slid to the floor, back against the wall, breath filling my lungs again. I held up the vial, determined now. Convinced I had no chance without it. I pulled the cork, raised the bottle above my eyes, and tilted back my head.
And then I heard my name. “Jacob,” softly spoken in the dark, a few feet away.
I turned to look, and there on the floor, lying amidst a pile of parts, was Miss Peregrine. Bruised, tied, struggling to speak through a haze of pain or drugs, but there nonetheless and gazing at me with those piercing green eyes.
“Don’t,” she said softly. “Don’t do that.” Her voice barely audible, barely there.
“Miss Peregrine!”
I lowered the vial, corked it, scrambled on my hands to where she lay. This second mother of mine, this peculiar saint. Fallen, hurt. Dying, perhaps.
“Tell me you’re okay,” I said.
“Put that down,” she said. “You don’t need it.”
“Yes, I do. I’m not like he was.”
We both knew who I meant: my grandfather.
“Yes, you are,” she said. “Everything you need is inside you already. Put it down and take that instead.” She nodded at something lying between us: a jagged stake of wood from a broken chair.
“I can’t. It’s not enough.”
“It is,” she assured me. “Just aim for the eyes.”
“I can’t,” I said, but I did. I put down the vial and took the stake.
“Good lad,” she whispered. “Now, go and do something gruesome with it.”
“I will,” I said, and she smiled, her head sinking back to the floor.
I stood up, determined now, the wooden stake gripped in my hand. Across the room, Addison had his teeth clamped deep into one of the hollow’s tongues and was riding it like a rodeo cowboy, clinging valiantly and snarling as the hollow whipped him back and forth. Emma had cut down Miss Wren from the rope where she’d been hanging and was standing guard over her, swinging her flaming hands blindly.
The hollow smacked Addison into a pole, and the dog was flung loose.
I started toward the hollow, running as fast as I could through an obstacle course of scattered limbs. But like a moth to flame, the creature seemed more interested in Emma. It was starting to close in on her, and so I shouted at it, first in English—“Hey! Over here!”—and then in Hollow: Come and get me, you bastard!
I picked up the closest thing at hand—which happened to be a hand—and threw it. It bounced off the hollow’s back, and the thing turned around to face me.
Come and get me come and get me
For a moment the hollow was confused, which was just enough time for me to get close to it without getting caught up in its tongues. I stabbed it with the stake, once, twice in the chest. It reacted as if it’d been stung by a bee—no worse than that—and then knocked me to the ground with a tongue.
Stop, stop, stop, I shouted in Hollow, desperate for something to get through, but the beast seemed bulletproof, totally inoculated against my suggestions. And then I remembered the finger, the little chalk-stub of dust in my pocket. As I reached for it, a tongue wrapped around me and hoisted me into the air. I could hear Emma shouting at it to put me down—and Caul, too. “Don’t you eat him!” he screeched over the PA. “He’s mine!”