“Not since Abe,” Hugh said, and at the mention of his name a reverent hush fell over the children.

“I heard he once killed one with his bare hands,” said Bronwyn.

“I heard he killed one with a knitting needle and a length of twine,” said Horace. “In fact, I dreamed it, so I’m certain he did.”

“Half of those stories are just tall tales, and they get taller with every year that passes,” said Enoch. “The Abraham Portman I knew never did a single thing to help us.”

“He was a great peculiar!” said Bronwyn. “He fought bravely and killed scores of hollows for our cause!”

“And then he ran off and left us to hide in that house like refugees while he galavanted around America, playing hero!”

“You don’t know what you’re talking about,” Emma said, flushing with anger. “There was a lot more to it than that.”

Enoch shrugged. “Anyway, that’s all beside the point,” he said. “Whatever you thought of Abe, this boy isn’t him.”

In that moment I hated Enoch, and yet I couldn’t blame him for his doubts about me. How could the others, so sure and seasoned in their abilities, put so much faith in mine—in something I was only beginning to understand and had known I was capable of for only a few days? Whose grandson I was seemed irrelevant. I simply didn’t know what I was doing.

“You’re right, I’m not my grandfather,” I said. “I’m just a kid from Florida. I probably got lucky when I killed that hollow.”

“Nonsense,” said Emma. “You’ll be every bit the hollow-slayer Abe was, one day.”

“One day soon, let’s hope,” said Hugh.

“It’s your destiny,” said Horace, and the way he said it made me think he knew something I didn’t.

“And even if it ain’t,” said Hugh, clapping his hand on my back, “you’re all we’ve got, mate.”

“If that’s true, bird help us all,” said Enoch.

My head was spinning. The weight of their expectations threatened to crush me. I stood, unsteady, and moved toward the cave exit. “I need some air,” I said, pushing past Enoch.

“Jacob, wait!” cried Emma. “The balloons!”

But they were long gone.

“Let him go,” Enoch grumbled. “If we’re lucky, he’ll swim back to America.”

*   *   *

Walking down to the water’s edge, I tried to picture myself the way my new friends saw me, or wanted to: not as Jacob, the kid who once broke his ankle running after an ice cream truck, or who reluctantly and at the behest of his dad tried and failed three times to get onto his school’s noncompetitive track team, but as Jacob, inspector of shadows, miraculous interpreter of squirmy gut feelings, seer and slayer of real and actual monsters—and all that might stand between life and death for our merry band of peculiars.

How could I ever live up to my grandfather’s legacy?

I climbed a stack of rocks at the water’s edge and stood there, hoping the steady breeze would dry my damp clothes, and in the dying light I watched the sea, a canvas of shifting grays, melded and darkening. In the distance a light glinted every so often. It was Cairnholm’s lighthouse, flashing its hello and last goodbye.

My mind drifted. I lapsed into a waking dream.

I see a man. He is of middle age, cloaked in excremental mud, crabbing slowly along the knife tip of a cliff, his thin hair uncombed and hanging wet across his face. Wind whips his thin jacket like a sail. He stops, drops to his elbows. Slips them into divots he’d made weeks before, when he was scouting these coves for mating terns and shearwaters’ nests. He raises a pair of binoculars to his eyes but aims them low, below the nests, at a thin crescent of beach where the swelling tide collects things and heaves them up: driftwood and seaweed, shards of smashed boats—and sometimes, the locals say, bodies.

The man is my father. He is looking for something that he desperately does not want to find.

He is looking for the body of his son.

I felt a touch on my shoe and opened my eyes, startled out of my half-dream. It was nearly dark, and I was sitting on the rocks with my knees drawn into my chest, and suddenly there was Emma, breeze tossing her hair, standing on the sand below me.

“How are you?” she asked.

It was a question that would’ve required some college-level math and about an hour of discussion to answer. I felt a hundred conflicting things, the great bulk of which canceled out to equal cold and tired and not particularly interested in talking. So I said, “I’m fine, just trying to dry off,” and flapped the front of my soggy sweater to demonstrate.

“I can help you with that.” She clambered up the stack of rocks and sat next to me. “Gimme an arm.”

I offered one up and Emma laid it across her knees. Cupping her hands over her mouth, she bent her head toward my wrist. Then, taking a deep breath, she exhaled slowly through her palms and an incredible, soothing heat bloomed along my forearm, just on the edge of painful.

“Is it too much?” she said.

I tensed, a shudder going through me, and shook my head.

“Good.” She moved farther up my arm to exhale again. Another pulse of sweet warmth. Between breaths, she said, “I hope you’re not letting what Enoch said bother you. The rest of us believe in you, Jacob. Enoch can be a wrinkle-hearted old titmouse, especially when he’s feeling jealous.”

“I think he’s right,” I said.

“You don’t really. Do you?”

It all came pouring out. “I have no idea what I’m doing,” I said. “How can any of you depend on me? If I’m really peculiar then it’s just a little bit, I think. Like I’m a quarter peculiar and the rest of you guys are full-blooded.”

“It doesn’t work that way,” she said, laughing.

“But my grandfather was more peculiar than me. He had to be. He was so strong …”

“No, Jacob,” she said, narrowing her eyes at me. “It’s astounding. In so many ways, you’re just like him. You’re different, too, of course—you’re gentler and sweeter—but everything you’re saying … you sound like Abe, when he first came to stay with us.”

“I do?”

“Yes. He was confused, too. He’d never met another peculiar. He didn’t understand his power or how it worked or what he was capable of. Neither did we, to tell the truth. It’s very rare, what you can do. Very rare. But your grandfather learned.”

“How?” I asked. “Where?”

“In the war. He was part of a secret all-peculiar cell of the British army. Fought hollowgast and Germans at the same time. The sorts of things they did you don’t win medals for—but they were heroes to us, and none more than your grandfather. The sacrifices they made set the corrupted back decades and saved the lives of countless peculiars.”

And yet, I thought, he couldn’t save his own parents. How strangely tragic.

“And I can tell you this,” Emma went on. “You’re every bit as peculiar as he was—and as brave, too.”

“Ha. Now you’re just trying to make me feel better.”

“No,” she said, looking me in the eye. “I’m not. You’ll learn, Jacob. One day you’ll be an even greater hollow-slayer than he was.”

“Yeah, that’s what everyone keeps saying. How can you be so sure?”

“It’s something I feel very deeply,” she said. “You’re supposed to, I think. Just like you were supposed to come to Cairnholm.”

“I don’t believe in stuff like that. Fate. The stars. Destiny.”

“I didn’t say destiny.”

“Supposed to is the same thing,” I said. “Destiny is for people in books about magical swords. It’s a lot of crap. I’m here because my grandfather mumbled something about your island in the ten seconds before he died—and that’s it. It was an accident. I’m glad he did, but he was delirious. He could just as easily have rattled off a grocery list.”

“But he didn’t,” she said.

I sighed, exasperated. “And if we go off in search of loops, and you depend on me to save you from monsters and instead I get you all killed, is that destiny, too?”