Discovering the Future

Chapter 29- Chapter 10 (Part 6)

Disclaimer: I don't own Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children.

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I stepped onto the narrow walkway and turned to give Emma a hand up.

"Such a romantic," Hugh said.

We stood with our backs presses against the lamp's warm housing and our fronts to the wind's chill. "The Bird's close," Emma whispered. "I can feel her."

She flicked her wrist and a ball of angry red flame sprang to life. Something about its colour and intensity made it clear that this time she hadn't summoned a light, but a weapon.

"It is rather strange how your fire does that," Millard remarked to Emma. "Has it always done that?"

Emma shrugged. "For as long as I can remember."

"We should split up," I said. "You go around one side and I'll take the other. That way he won't be able to sneak past us."

"I'm scared, Jacob."

"Me, too. But he's hurt, and we have his gun."

She nodded and touched my arm, then turned away.

I circled the lamp slowly, clenching the maybe-loaded gun, and gradually the view around the other side began to peel back.

I found Golan sitting sitting on his haunches with his head down and his back against the railing, the birdcage between his knees. He was bleeding badly from a cut on the bridge of his nose, rivulets of red streaking his face like tears.

"Maybe he's thinking about his bad life choices?" Victor wondered.

All the kids just shook their heads, no longer questioning Victor's mind.

Clipped to the bars of the cage was a small red light. Every few seconds it blinked.

I took another step forward, and he raised his head to look at me. His face was a stubble of caked blood, his one white eye shot through with red, spit flecking the corners of his mouth.

He rose unsteadily, the cage in one hand.

"Put it down."

He bent over as if to comply but faked away from me and tried to run.

Enoch scoffed. "Predictable."

I shouted and gave chase, but as soon as he disappeared around the lamp housing I saw the glow of Emma's fire flare across the concrete. Golan came howling back toward me, his hair smoking and one arm covering his face.

"Stop!" I screamed at him, and he realized he was trapped. He raised the cage, shielding himself, and gave it a vicious shake. The birds screeched and nipped at his hand through the bars.

"Is this what you want?" Golan shouted. "Go ahead, burn me! The birds will burn, too! Shoot me and I'll throw them over the side!"

"Not if I shoot you in the head!"

He laughed. "You couldn't fire a gun if you wanted to. You forget, I'm intimately familiar with your poor, fragile psyche. It'd give you nightmares."

"This is why you don't have psychiatrists," Bronwyn said.

I tried to imagine it: curling my finger around the trigger and squeezing: the recoil and the awful report. What was so hard about that? Why did my hand shake just thinking about it? How many wights had my grandfather killed? Dozens? Hundreds? If he were here instead of me, Golan would be dead already, laid out while he'd been squatting against the rail in a daze. It was an opportunity I'd already wasted; a split-second of gutless indecision that might've cost the ymbrynes their lives.