“Bentham!” I shouted. “Let her go!”
“You traitorous bastard!” cried Emma.
Bentham raised his head to look at us. “As recently as ten minutes ago,” he said in a high and imperious tone, “you had my loyalty. I could have betrayed you to my brother days ago, but I didn’t.” He narrowed his eyes at Miss Peregrine. “I chose you, Alma, because I believed—naively, it seems—that if I helped you and your wards, you might see how unfairly you’d judged me, might finally rise above past differences and let bygones be bygones.”
“You’ll be sent to the Pitiless Waste for this!” Miss Peregrine shouted.
“I’m not frightened of your little council anymore!” Bentham said. “You won’t keep me down any longer!” He stamped his cane. “PT, muzzle!”
The bear clamped its paw over Miss Peregrine’s face.
Caul strode toward his brother and sister, his arms and smile spreading. “Benny’s made a choice to stand up for himself, and I, for one, congratulate him! There’s nothing like a family reunion!”
Suddenly, Bentham was pulled backward by an unseen force. A knife flashed at his throat. “Make the bear release Miss Peregrine or else!” a familiar voice shouted.
“Millard!” someone gasped, one of many that rippled through our crowd.
It was Millard, disrobed and invisible. Bentham looked terrified, but Caul seemed merely annoyed. He drew an antique pepperbox pistol from one of the deep pockets in his cloak and pointed it at Bentham’s head. “Let her go and I’ll kill you, brother.”
“We made a pact!” Bentham protested.
“And you caving to the demands of a nude boy with a dull knife would be breaking that pact.” Caul cocked the gun, walked it forward until it was pressed against Bentham’s temple, and addressed Millard. “If you make me kill my only brother, consider your ymbryne dead, too.”
Millard hesitated for a moment, then dropped the knife and ran. Caul made a grab for him but missed, and Millard’s footsteps curved away in a trail of divots.
Bentham composed himself and straightened his mussed shirt. Caul, his good humor gone, turned the gun on Miss Peregrine.
“Now listen to me!” he barked. “You there, across the bridge! Let those guards go!”
They had little choice but to do as he asked. Sharon and his cousins released their collared wights and backed away, and the wight who’d been standing on our side of the bridge lowered his hands and picked his gun up off the ground. Within seconds the balance of power had been reversed completely, and there were four guns aimed at the crowd and one at Miss Peregrine. Caul could do what he wanted.
“Boy!” he said, pointing at me. “Pitch that hollow into the chasm!” His shrill voice a needle in my eardrum.
I walked my hollow to the edge of the chasm.
“Now make him leap!”
It seemed I didn’t have a choice. It was an awful waste, but perhaps just as well: the hollow was suffering badly now, its wounds leaking black blood that flowed around its feet. It wouldn’t have survived.
I unwrapped its tongue from my waist, unsaddled myself, and stepped down. My strength had returned enough for me to stand on my own, but the hollow’s was going fast. As soon as I was off its back it bellowed softly, sucked its tongues back into its mouth, and sank to its knees, a willing sacrifice.
“Thank you, whoever you were,” I said. “I’m sure that if you’d ever become a wight, you wouldn’t have been a completely evil one.”
I put my foot on its back and pushed. The hollow tumbled forward and dropped silently into the misty void. After a few seconds, I felt its consciousness disappear from my mind.
The wights across the bridge rode over to our side on the hollow’s tongues, Miss Peregrine’s life threatened again if I interfered. Olive was yanked out of the sky. The guards set about herding us into a tight and easily controllable cluster. Then Caul shouted for me, and one of the guards reached into the crowd and dragged me out.
“He’s the only one we really need alive,” Caul said to his guards. “If you must shoot him, shoot him in the knees. As for the rest of them …” Caul swung his gun toward the tightly packed crowd and fired. There were screams as the crowd surged. “Shoot them anywhere you please!”
He laughed and twirled with his arms poised like a squat ballerina. I was about to run at him, ready to dig out his eyes with my bare hands and damn the consequences, when a long-barreled revolver appeared front and center in my field of view.
“Don’t,” grunted my monosyllabic guard, a wight with broad shoulders and a shiny bald head.
Caul fired his own gun into the air and shouted for quiet, and every voice fell away but the whimpers of whomever he’d shot.
“Don’t cry, I have a treat for you people!” he said, addressing the crowd. “This is a historic day. My brother and I are about to culminate a lifetime’s worth of innovation and struggle by crowning ourselves the twin kings of peculiardom. And what would a coronation be without witnesses? So we’re bringing you along. Provided you behave yourselves, you’ll see something no one has witnessed for a thousand years: the domination and expropriation of the Library of Souls!”
“You have to promise one thing, or I won’t help you,” I said to Caul. I didn’t have much negotiating power, but he believed he needed me, and that was something. “Once you get what you want, let Miss Peregrine go.”
“I’m afraid that won’t do,” Caul said, “but I’ll let her live. Peculiardom will be more fun to rule with my sister in it. Once I clip your wings I’ll keep you as my personal slave, Alma, how would you like that?”