"Your grandma is teaching me all the stuff you're not getting to learn," Marissa told me. She took another bite of her dog and spoke with her mouth full. I can respect a girl who talks with her mouth full. "Even if you don't know something, I will, so by the time the moon gets full again, we'll be ready."
"Like what stuff is she teaching you?" I was a bit jealous that she got to spend more time with Grandma than me.
"You know," she said, like it was nothing. "How to track supernatural beasts with an ectoplasmic lens, how to slow their transformations with eye of newt and baking soda. Those kinds of things."
"Oh."
"Tell me everything you've learned!" Marissa said. But I shook my head. "Nothing important. Nothing we'll need." She now knew ancient secrets from mysterious werewolf hunters of the past. So I would have some secrets, too.
"Enough of that," I said. "Let's talk about something else."
"What else is there to talk about?"
"Anything but werewolves," I said. And so we talked about the upcoming year at school, movies we wanted to see, music that made you want to dance, and anything that came to mind.
Spending time with Marissa, even though it was only half an hour or so, made everything feel normal just for a while. The fresh river air seemed to blow away all thoughts of dark and unnatural things. But when we left the pier, she went one way, I went another, and there I was again, in the shadows of buildings, facing the hard concrete reality of Wolves that hid within human flesh.
Tonight would be the new moon, the darkest night of July. Only the stars would peer down from the sky above, so hard to see in the city. It was less than two weeks until the moon would be full again, but I was wasting my time with Marissa, talking about silly things instead of plotting werewolf doom.
I took a shortcut, leaving the relative safety of the busy streets, and turned down an alley full of Dumpsters and deep shadows. It was the kind of place where you find police chalk outlines in the morning. It wasn't too smart of me to walk down that way, but I've always been a little too bold for my own good. My mom would call it foolhardy. Grandma would call it just plain dumb.
Maybe it was just that I felt kind of safe now, being a pledge to the Wolves. Lately, when I got the feeling I was being stalked, I knew it was one of them, tailing me on Cedric's orders. Oddly enough, it gave me a feeling of security, because I was in with them now, and if some thugs ever did actually jump me, I had the distinct feeling that one of my Wolf brothers would be right there to help me fight them off.
Wolf brothers.
It kind of tweaked my spine to think of them as brothers . . . but then, being a brother didn't always mean that you meant one another well. My mom, who was an all-occasion Bible quoter, often told of poor Abel, who was killed by his brother Cain in a field. So if the Wolves were my brothers now, did that make me Cain or Abel? I knew I shouldn't think too much on it, but lately I couldn't help it.
With so much on my mind, I wasn't as observant as I should have been. I was ambushed halfway down the alley. My attacker fell on me, big and broad, cutting across my vision like the moon eclipsing the sun. He smashed into me, and I bounced against a big green Dumpster, my head making the metal ring like I was a bell clapper. I turned and swung, but I was so disoriented, I caught nothing but air. The momentum of my own punch spun me around, I slipped in a puddle of alley scum, and hit the ground. When I looked up, I saw that it was none other than Marvin Flowers.
My brain was still too scrambled to speak, but that was just fine with Marvin.
"There's something you had better get straight," he growled. "You wanna be a Wolf, I got no problem with that. But you stay away from my sister." There was a fury in his eyes, and it was nothing like the fury of a wolf. It was human through and through, but that didn't make it any less dangerous.
I could have fought with him, but it wouldn't have been too wise. I was a head shorter, he was still beefed up from his years of football, and his fury gave him even more of an advantage. No, it was unlikely that I'd win this fight with muscle, but maybe I could put a dent in him with words, before he dented the Dumpster with me.
"What's the matter, Marvin? Wolves aren't good enough for your sister? Maybe I should tell Cedric, and see what he thinks?" That gave him pause for thought. With my back against the Dumpster, I pushed myself back to my feet. "How long have you been waiting to get made, Marvin?" I asked. "How many months? Cedric must not be too happy with you if he's waited this long."
The anger didn't leave Marvin's face, but his eyebrows knotted with something between confusion and disgust. "What are your lips flapping about?"
"You might act like a werewolf, but you're not one! I saw you touch that silver candleholder. If you were a real werewolf, just touching it would make you swell up like one of those balloons in the Thanksgiving Day parade. You're just a pledge like me, and you're mad because you think I'll get 'made' before you do."
"You don't know what you're talking about," he grumbled, but I could tell I had my thumb on a nerve now. "You think you know things," Marvin said, "but you know absolutely nothing."
"You forget that my grandma's a werewolf hunter, and taught me all there is to know about it. So you could say I knew exactly what I was getting into when I decided to join the Wolves. Probably more than anyone else who's ever joined."
Marvin was quiet. I knew I was getting to him. "So tell me, how come Marvelous Marvin Flowers hasn't gotten the bite yet?"
Then Marvin's blank expression stretched into a smile, which was never a good thing. "Maybe Cedric wants it that way," he said. "Maybe Cedric needs a human lookout on the nights they go wolfing."
Well, it made sense, but there was something beneath Marvin's gold-toothed grin that was as slimy as a morning snail trail. It made everything he said suspect.
"So, are you gonna stay away from my sister, or not?"
"You were the one who sent me in her direction when you went to steal my grandma's money."
"That was then," he said. "This is now."
A truck turned down the alley. I suppose the sight of other activity in the alley made me feel a little bit bolder. "I make no promises as far as your sister is concerned."
Marvin pursed his lips and nodded. "We could have been friends, Red. But it looks like you just made yourself an enemy." And with that, he grabbed me, lifted me off the ground, and hurled me with his beefy, varsity-trained arms into the Dumpster.
I landed in the trash headfirst, and it was the worst kind of garbage. Rotten vegetables, greasy pasta dregs, and other awful restaurant trash. I righted myself, which was hard in the slippery grunge, and suddenly felt something brush across my leg. A pink tail slithered past, attached to a nasty-looking rat. I scrambled to get away, but it didn't matter. Rats were everywhere.
"Marvin!" This was one of those high Dumpsters, and climbing out wasn't going to be easy. A rat eyed me with dead-eyed suspicion. "Marvin, I'm gonna kill you, you creep!"
The groan of the truck engine grew louder. Hopefully whoever was in that truck had seen Marvin throw me in and would help me out. I tried to work my way to the side of the Dumpster, but it was slow moving, and I kept slipping on the maggoty garbage. There was the sudden clang of metal against metal, followed by another clang, and the whole Dumpster shifted. The rats scrambled up the sides and escaped in a way I could not. That's when I realized what was going on―and what Marvin had intended when he tossed me in here.
The truck that had turned down the alley was a trash truck.
The Dumpster began to rise and the floor to tilt, garbage pouring all over me. My feet slid out from under me on the slippery rot. "Hey," I screamed, "stop!" But who was I kidding? No one could hear me over the drone of the trash truck. As the Dumpster tilted, I saw that the garbage wasn't just food crud. There were planks of wood, broken bricks, and iron rods from some nearby construction. In a few seconds it was all going to be on top of me, and I thought, What a stupid way to die, tossed out with the trash. I
pulled my knees to my chest, gripping my head in crash position, like they do on doomed airplanes, and I said prayers I thought I had forgotten as the whole Dumpster was flipped upside down. I fell into the truck. Iron rods came down on me, missing most of my body, but scraping up my arms real bad. A brick nailed me on the forehead in spite of every attempt to shield my face.
When the trash had settled, and the Dumpster was banging its way back down to the ground, I ran a system check on my whole body. Once I was sure I wasn't dead, I struggled out from underneath the garbage. The trash truck was almost full. I never thought being in a full trash truck could ever be a good thing. But all that garbage beneath me allowed me to get a good grip on the truck's edge and pull myself up. The truck had already left the alley, and with my arm slung over the edge, I waited, hoping that the driver didn't get the bright idea of turning on the compactor while I was hanging there.
We stopped at a red light, and I leaped out, falling to the road. It must have been quite a sight to the other drivers, but that was the last thing I cared about right then. At a nearby corner I snagged some ice from a street vendor's soda bin and pressed it to the knot on my forehead.
So Marvin wanted a war. That was fine by me, because I was more than ready to fight one.
11
The Canyons
My mom must have known I was into something over my head. I could tell by the way she looked at me, and the way she judged my answers to innocent questions, as if there was hidden meaning in everything I said. I think my parents would have canceled their vacation if it hadn't already been paid for. They were taking a two-week cruise on the Mediterranean. Their second honeymoon. It was fine by me, because I didn't have to go skulking around anymore and make up stories about where I had been. And besides, I was getting more and more restless. I couldn't imagine being confined on something as small as a ship.
Right before they left, Mom did something strange.
"I want to give you something, Red."
I followed her into her room, and she went to a secret compartment in her jewelry chest and pulled out a little coin on a chain. She pointed to the face on the front. "This is Saint Gabriel," she said. "Saint Gabriel of the Sorrowful Mother. He's a patron saint of young people."
The coin was silver and looked very, very old. At first I hesitated, almost afraid to touch it, as if the silver might . . . I shook off the feeling. I had no problem with silver. None at all. I took the coin from her and rubbed it between my fingers, just to prove it to myself.
"Your grandmother gave this to me when I was about your age. It was the day before your grandpa died."
My eyes snapped up to her. I could tell by looking at her that she didn't know the truth about how he died, any more than I did―although I did have my suspicions.
"I want you to have it," my mom said. "Wear it while we're gone, so Saint Gabriel will protect you."
"Sure, Mom," I said. "Sure, I'll wear it." I almost told her everything right then. I wanted to tell her about the Wolves, and how I was supposed to hate them, but when you spend your days with evil, some of it is bound to soak into your clothes, like cigar smoke in a closed room. I wanted to explain to her, but how could I when I couldn't even explain it to myself? In the end, all I said was, "Thanks."
Mom looked at me, studying me for all the layers of meaning beneath my one-word answer, then finally gave up with a sigh.
"Close to your heart," she said, so I slipped the medallion over my neck and tucked it beneath my shirt. It wasn't exactly a werewolf hunter's medallion, but at least it would remind me which side I was supposed to be on.
It turns out Mom wasn't the only one who had something for me. When I arrived at Troll Bridge Hollow later that afternoon, Cedric had a new task for his errand boy. He gave me a sealed envelope with an address scrawled on it.
"I need you to deliver this for me," he said. "Go straight there, now."
"What is it?"
"That's not your business!" he barked. "Your business is just to deliver it. Mess up, and I mess you up."
I left dutifully, as I always did, to run my errand for the Wolves.
The address was clear across town, way out of the Wolves' turf, a place everyone called "the Canyons." It was a bleak corner of the world where I had never been, and had never cared to go. They called it the Canyons because it was full of huge abandoned warehouses looming over narrow streets where not even crabgrass dared to grow in the cracked sidewalks. The streets were canyons of shadow: dark crevasses that rarely let in the sun.
I crossed through Abject End Park, an overgrown no-man's-land that divided our part of town from the Canyons, then crossed over into that awful, dead place. Street after street of dead factories with broken, soulless windows looked out over burned-out cars, which leaned like shipwrecks on the curb.
I rechecked the address on the envelope and counted the building numbers past a forgotten linen factory to a little church on a corner, which seemed completely out of place. The church's paint had peeled down to the warping wood grain, and like everything else in the Canyons, it looked like no one had been here for years. My mama didn't like dead churches. "There's nothing more unholy than abandoned holy ground," she once said.
Sending me here was a joke, of course―it had to be. I could just imagine Cedric laughing his head off about it. I knocked on the door, counted to three, and turned to leave, already plotting the most direct path out of the godforsaken canyons. Then, as I crossed the street, I heard the sound of creaking hinges. I turned to see a figure in black standing just inside the open door. My heart missed a beat.
"Are you a Wolf?" said a girl's voice.
"Uh . . . yeah," I said.
"She says you can come in."
She . . . I thought. She, who?
The girl at the door was about as inviting as the Grim Reaper on Good Friday, so I wasn't in a hurry to hang with her or any of her Goth friends. I took my time crossing back to the church, hoping I could put together enough of the loose pieces of this situation to figure out what this was all about.
Wait . . . I thought. Goth girls in a ruined church? Could Cedric have sent me on an errand to the Wolves' only rival gang in town?
I reached the door, but didn't really feel like crossing the threshold, so I just held out the envelope. "Here."
The girl stood in shadows so dim, I couldn't see much of her face. She didn't reach for the envelope.
"Didn't you hear me? She said you can come in."
"What if I don't feel like it?"
"She doesn't care what you feel like."
There was no doubt in my mind now. I knew who they were. "Are you . . . the Crypts?"
"If you have to ask, then you don't deserve an answer," she said. I wish Cedric had warned me that he was sending me down the throat of a rival gang.
"Her patience grows thin," said the ghoulie-girl in the shadows.
Against my better judgment I went in. Seems this summer was just fulll of things that were against my better judgment. The inside of the church was as bleak as the outside, filled with crumbling pews beneath windows covered in layer after layer of boards. A few stray votive candles cast the only light in the dreary space, and the place was even mustier than Troll Bridge Hollow, if that was possible. The door closed behind me. The creepy girl who had let me in must have slunk away into some dark corner―and in this place every corner was dark.
There was a smell beyond the waxy scent of the candles―something unpleasant that I couldn't name―but whatever it was, it made my neck hairs stand on end. At the front of the church, where the pulpit once stood, was another girl in black, but her dress was nothing like the wrinkled cotton the girl at the door wore. It was the kind of silky, slinky dress you might wear to a fancy ball, but I don't think she was going anywhere. She stood there in the spot like she owned the place. Not just the place, but the Canyons themselves―and being the leader of the Crypts, I guess she did. I approached her.
"Cedric sent you," she
said, more a statement than a question. "I've been waiting for you." Her voice was both powerful and musical. Commanding, yet soothing. It was the type of voice that could lull you to sleep. Just listening to her made my defenses relax, like some strange reflex deep down inside me.
"Yeah, I got a letter for you," I said. As I got closer I could see the strange accessories of her outfit. Odd white earrings dangled like icicles from her lobes. A black, spiked bracelet was wrapped around each of her wrists. She was African-American, and yet oddly pale at the same time. Her skin didn't have that healthy chocolate tone that my grandfather's had had. Instead, her skin was almost purple: the color of a bruise. I handed the envelope to her. She took it with her long fingers. Her nails were painted the same color as her skin, looking like roaches on the end of her fingers. Rather than opening the envelope, she took a long look at me and said in that deep musical voice. "You're not a true Wolf. I can smell it; you reek of mortality."
"That's not your business," I told her. "That's between me and Cedric."
"Fair enough." Using a fingernail as a letter opener, she sliced the side of the envelope and pulled out a note. I watched her eyes as they darted back and forth across the page. I sensed intelligence there.
"Where are the rest of the Crypts?" I asked. "Or is the whole gang just you and the girl at the door?"
The look on her face darkened. "If you're trying to count how many of us there are, to report back to the Wolves, you won't be able to―but believe me, there are many more of us than there are in your little pack."
I put up my hands apologetically. "Didn't mean to rub you the wrong way. Just curious."
She took a moment to judge me honestly and said, "The Crypts are all here. You're just not looking in the right places."
She finished reading the note. Her dangling earrings rattled with every movement of her head, and only now did I realize what they were. Human finger bones.
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