Red Rider's Hood

by Neal Shusterman

  Marissa shook her head. “If Marvin knew about it, he’d try to show it off—or worse, he’d try to sell it.”

  I wanted to bring up my concern about Marvin—that he really might be one of the Wolves after all—but I knew mentioning my suspicions would just upset Marissa. She had a blind spot when it came to him.

  Marissa hid the skull back beneath the counter as the door opened, setting off the jingle bells above the entrance. Marvin’s confident stride broke when he saw me. He picked it up again pretty quickly, though.

  “Hi, Marissa,” he said, and gave her a brotherly kiss on the cheek. “Hi, Red,” he said, with a coolness in his voice he hadn’t used when he spoke to her. He looked at me for a moment, then put out his hand like he wanted to shake. I lifted my hand, and he shook it in some strange way that must have been the Wolves’ secret handshake.

  “Taking an interest in antiques, Red?”

  “No, just in your sister,” I told him, and winked at her. She threw me back an “oh, please” kind of gaze.

  “A lot of guys take an interest,” Marvin said. “Few live to tell about it.”

  Marissa threw him an “oh, please” gaze, too, and Marvin laughed, showing off his gold canine. “Just kidding, Red. Just kidding.”

  “Ignore him,” Marissa said. “He likes to play head games with any boy that comes within five feet of me.”

  “Hey, that’s a big brother’s job,” I said. “But if he wants to test me, I’ll pass any test he wants.”

  “We’ll see,” said Marvin.

  As it turns out, I wasn’t the one to get tested that day.

  “Oh,” Marissa said, “I just got something in today I want to show you, Red. Something your grandma might like.”

  Marvin squirmed at the mention of my grandma and turned his attention to the bag of chips we had left on the counter. I didn’t quite know what Marissa was up to, only that she was up to something.

  She went to a crowded shelf and pulled off a heavy candelabra, reaching for something behind it. Then she held the candelabra out to her brother. “Marvin, could you hold this for a sec?”

  Marvin hesitated. At first I didn’t realize why he might hesitate. Then it dawned on me. The candelabra was silver.

  “Ask Red,” Marvin said, leaning casually against the counter, eating chips. “He’s closer.”

  “Hey, man, she asked you,” I said.

  Marvin sighed and left the chips, stepping over to his sister. I watched to see what would happen. Grandma had said that just touching silver will set off an allergic reaction in a werewolf, whether they were in wolf form or not. It wouldn’t be fatal, but it would be painful. If he was a wolf, his hand would turn red and swell up like a balloon in less than a minute. Marissa was putting Marvin to the test.

  Marvin gingerly took the candelabra and held it out in front of him like it was a bomb that might detonate at any second.

  “I hate holding antiques,” he said. “I’m always afraid I’ll break them.”

  Marissa fished around on the shelf a moment more, then came back empty-handed. “That’s strange,” she said. “I could have sworn it was back here.”

  Marvin put the candelabra back on the shelf. “Got any dip for those chips?” he said.

  Marissa went into the back room, rummaged around a little refrigerator, and came out with a salsa jar that had only dregs left in it. Still, the salsa dregs kept Marvin busy for more than a minute. Long enough for us to see that his hand showed absolutely no reaction from the silver candelabra.

  “Listen,” he finally said to Marissa. “I came here to drive you home, but if you want to walk in the rain, I got no problem with that.”

  “Go wait in the car, Marvin,” she said. “I’ve got to close out the register and lock up.”

  Marvin threw me a suspicious look, then left, letting in the loud patter of rain before the door closed behind him.

  Marissa crossed her arms triumphantly. “There. Happy now? That proves he’s not a werewolf.”

  “How come you didn’t test me like that?” I asked. “Me, you had to hit over the head and tie up.”

  “Don’t be such a baby,” she said.

  “And anyway, just because he passed the silver test, it still doesn’t explain what he’s doing hanging around with Cedric.”

  “Maybe he’s just a pledge, like you. Maybe he’s pretending, all the while hoping to bring the Wolves down, just like you.”

  “Or maybe he’s pledging for real.”

  Marissa shook her head. “My brother does not want to be a werewolf. He’s got something else up his sleeve. I’m sure of it.”

  I threw up my hands. “Fine, whatever you say. But until we know what he’s up to, let’s not tell him what we’re up to.”

  I thought she’d put up an argument, but instead she agreed. Across the street, Marvin honked the horn impatiently.

  “You’d better go so I can lock up,” Marissa said.

  “I still need the skull.”

  She pulled it out again and handed it to me. I put it in the empty chip bag, which I tucked under my arm.

  “When will I get it back?” she asked.

  “I don’t know. But if you’re lucky, you’ll end up with a few more for your collection.”

  It turns out that the Wolves had more than one hangout. They kept themselves mobile so no one would know exactly where they were at any given time. The manager of the Cave was of no help. He didn’t know a thing, but I knew someone who would.

  As I had predicted, Cedric’s sister, Tina, was playing yet another game on the sidewalk of their apartment building. The rain had let up by dusk, and she was out there with a big red ball, bouncing it in puddles, getting her white socks spotted with mud.

  “Where’s your brother?” I asked her.

  “Ain’t gonna tell.”

  “But I’m a friend now.”

  “You might be a friend, or you might be a fool. So which is it?”

  “A little bit of both,” I told her.

  She looked at the bag in my hands. “That looks too heavy to be a bag of chips,” she said. She was way too smart for a seven-year-old. If she ever joined a gang, we were all in for trouble. When I didn’t say anything, she bounced her ball up and down, splattering me with puddle water. She bounced it under her leg, then back again, and said in a singsong voice: “Little Red, Little Red, what’s in the chip bag, Little Red?”

  And in the same singsong voice I answered, “Nothing at all, nothing at all, nothing at all but your grandpa’s head.”

  That made her miss the ball, and it went bouncing across the street, almost getting nailed by a passing car.

  “You’re not funny,” she said. “Now go get my ball.”

  “Tell me where Cedric is, and I’ll get your ball,” I told her. “Unless, of course, you want me to tell Cedric you showed disrespect to a Wolf.”

  She looked at me, a little afraid to tell me, and a little bit afraid not to. “He’s in the Troll Bridge Hollow,” she said. “Now go get my ball before I tell my mama you been teasing me.”

  9

  Troll Bridge Hollow

  Nightshade Boulevard ran into Bleakwood, and Bleakwood ran into Troll. Troll Street went over the river. The Troll Street Bridge was an old gray monster: an iron suspension bridge, with two towers rising like twin tombstones, cables spun like spiderwebs between them. It stretched across the mile-wide river, making you think there was a way out of the city. Like maybe if you crossed it you might find life a little bit easier. But, as everyone knew, when you got to the other side off the Troll Street Bridge, all you found was more of the same.

  The bridge itself was the sort of crumbling mess that always seemed minutes away from plunging into the river. Whole chunks of the roadway had fallen away, and you could actually see the river through the potholes. Beneath the roadway, where the bridge touched shore, was a walled-in space at least fifty feet high. In that stone wall beneath the bridge was a single steel door. For as long as I can remember, a
nd before that I’m sure, there were stories about what was behind that door. Some people said there were bodies hidden there, back from the gangster days before even Grandma was born. Others said it was full of gold stolen from Fort Knox. Still others whispered that it held secret stockpiles of nuclear weapons the government had forgotten about.

  But the truth was worse than any of that. Troll Bridge Hollow was a werewolf lair.

  If there was a secret knock, I didn’t know it, so I just pounded on the door until I heard heavy bolts sliding on the other side.

  The door creaked open, and in the dim light I saw a pair of eyes, pupils open all the way, like a cat at night.

  “Who told you to come here?” It was one of the many Wolves I didn’t know.

  “I told myself,” I said. Although this guy was much bigger than me, I wasn’t going to let myself feel threatened. Rule of the jungle: Don’t show fear unless you want to be lunch.

  “Let him in,” I heard Cedric say from somewhere in the darkness of the hollow.

  The guy looked at me with a menacing glare.

  “You heard him, let me in.”

  He grunted and stepped aside. I went in and he closed the door behind me. The metallic boom of the closing door echoed in the vast hollow chamber beneath the bridge.

  The place had a gamy, damp smell, like wet dog and mildew. It took my eyes a while to adjust, and when they did, I could see that the chamber was full of high brick arches that disappeared into hazy darkness above. I could hear the buzz of traffic on the bridge overhead. The only light came from a TV in the corner, and around it the Wolves stretched out on old couches, watching some bloody action film.

  “Our new pledge wants to hang with us,” Cedric’s voice boomed. He didn’t bother to get up from his comfortable couch. “Should we let him?”

  “Only if he lets me use him as a footstool,” said a kid called A/C, who I guessed was Cedric’s second in command. I don’t know what his real name was—everyone called him A/C because he always claimed to be “too cool for the room.”

  Cedric laughed. “You heard him, Red. Go be a footstool.”

  “Nobody uses me as a footstool.”

  Cedric’s eyes turned from the TV and looked at me, meaner than I thought they could get. “You’re a pledge. That means you gotta do whatever we tell you until you’re a full-fledged Wolf.” Then he grinned a nasty grin. “Or would you rather run crying to your grandma?”

  “He knows our hangout,” said another voice in the darkness. “If he tells her…”

  “He won’t,” said Cedric. “See, we keep a watch on that old witch. If she starts sniffing around here, we’ll know Red told her, and that will be the end of Red’s story.”

  I tried not to think about what end Cedric had in mind.

  “Do you want to see what I brought you, or not?” I said impatiently.

  Finally he got up and stalked toward me. He glanced down at the bag in my hands. “For me? And it ain’t even Christmas.” A few of the other guys laughed. Not because it was funny, but because Cedric thought it was. Cedric was the kind of guy who had to have his own private laugh track cackling behind his jokes.

  “So, what is it?” he asked. “And it better be more than just chips.”

  I held the bag up to him. “See for yourself.”

  He took the bag, threw me a suspicious glance, then tried to look inside, but it was too dark. So he reached in, felt around a bit, and his hand came out holding a human skull. He yelped in surprise and dropped it to the musty ground.

  “You think that’s funny?” Cedric barked.

  “Nothing funny about it,” I told him. “Take a good look at it. Tell me if it looks familiar, because it should.”

  By now all the rest of the Wolves had crowded around. Cedric picked up the skull.

  “Is it someone I should know?”

  “It’s your grandpa.”

  I watched as a whole busload of emotions drove by on Cedric’s face. By the time the bus had passed, I could tell he believed me.

  “Where did you get this?” he asked through gritted teeth.

  Well, I couldn’t tell him the truth—but I had a better story anyway, and I knew I could sell it, because lately I’d become a real good liar.

  “Where do you think I got it?” I said. “I stole it from my grandma. She had it hanging on the wall like a trophy, in that secret room where she keeps all her werewolf-hunting stuff.”

  The Wolves all murmured, cursing in awe and anger. Cedric screwed his lips into a scowl. “That old woman is going down! I won’t even wait until the full moon.”

  “Bad idea,” I said. “If you do that, you’ll never get all the others.”

  Cedric looked at me with suspicion written all over his face. “What others?”

  “You know…The C.W.H.”

  He gave me a blank look.

  “The Confederacy of Werewolf Hunters,” I explained. “They’re coming into town during the next full moon. They mean to get rid of all of you.” And then I corrected myself. “All of us, I mean.”

  The Wolves all looked at one another, whispering worry. Cedric snapped his fingers to shut them up.

  “It ain’t gonna happen,” Cedric said. “Because Red here is going to feed us information and let us know their every move, so we can attack first. Isn’t that right, Red?”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “I thought you wanted me to be a footstool.”

  “You do this right,” Cedric said, “and I’ll make A/C into your footstool.”

  “Hey!” said A/C.

  “Shut up!” said Cedric.

  I paused for effect. “Okay, I’ll do it,” I told him. “On one condition.”

  “What’s the condition?”

  “That my grandma doesn’t end up in a werewolf’s belly.”

  Cedric looked at me, then broke out laughing. At first I wasn’t sure what his laughter meant. The rest of the Wolves didn’t know, either, but they laughed along with him anyway.

  “We got ourselves a master negotiator here!” he said.

  “Yeah—maybe we oughta send him to negotiate with the Crypts,” snorted Loogie. That brought another round of laughter. The Crypts were the all-girl gang whose turf was way across town. Scary bunch, from what I’d heard.

  “So,” said Cedric, “Little Red’s willing to sell out his grandma’s life’s work in exchange for her life.”

  “She’s a crazy old woman,” I told him, “but she’s still my grandma, and I want her to live. If you get rid of all her werewolf-hunting friends, you won’t have to get rid of her, because she’ll be powerless.”

  Cedric began to pace the big space of the Troll Bridge Hollow, weaving in and out of his pack of Wolves. “Sure,” he said. “I’ll make her watch all her friends get eaten, and then make her watch as you turn into a werewolf right before her eyes. You’re right, Red—letting her live will be a much better revenge. It’ll be sweet.”

  He grinned at A/C, and although A/C grinned back, he looked a little worried—like maybe he really would end up being my footstool.

  Cedric pointed at me. “You go back to your grandma, but keep your eyes and ears open. Then report back to me.”

  “I’ll be your man on the inside.” I turned to go, but Cedric called to me.

  “Hey, Red!”

  When I turned back to him, something was flying through the air toward me. I snapped my hand up to catch it, and the second it hit my hand, jingling slightly, I knew what it was. My car keys.

  “It’s parked near the corner of Moat Street and Troll,” said Cedric.

  I clasped the keys in my hand and felt my heart speed to near breaking. I had my Mustang back! I could have just walked right out of there, gone to my car, and driven off into the sunset, but instead, I threw the keys back to Cedric. “If Grandma sees me with the Mustang, she’ll be suspicious. She’ll wonder how I got it back. Best if you keep it, and we play enemies for a while.”

  Cedric smiled. “Red,” he said, “I think you mi
ght just be too smart for your own good!”

  10

  “The Way of the Wild Is Our Way, Too”

  I got to know all of the Wolves by name—or at least by the nicknames Cedric had given them. There was Warhead, who was always ready for a fight. There was the kid with a head shaped kind of like an alien’s, called Roswell. There was El Toro, Moxie, and the kid named Sherman, who everyone called “the Tank”—twenty-two in all. By the end of my first week, I knew where most of them lived, and they knew where I spent my time, too, because there was always someone tailing me. Cedric wasn’t about to trust me entirely—not considering my family tree—so lessons with Grandma on the craft of wolf hunting had to be in short sessions so as to not arouse suspicion.

  “Twenty-two Wolves are gonna be hard to put down for a boy, a girl, and an old woman,” Grandma said one afternoon. “Especially if we got no master plan.”

  Grandma was big on “master plans.” Me, my plans kind of came to me in spurts. I liked it that way. It kept me on my feet, able to move with the flow of things. But lately that flow was taking some strange new directions.

  “It’s a dangerous game you’re playing, Red,” she was always telling me. But at the same time I could see a glimmer of admiration in her eyes. Like tricking Cedric made me worthy of being her grandson.

  By the end of the second week, I was the Wolves’ official errand boy. They laughed and called me “the Wolverine,” like I was a werewolf Cub Scout. I guess they didn’t know that a wolverine could be fiercer than a wolf.

  All that time I was learning things I couldn’t have learned any other way. Like which famous citizens from history had been werewolves (like Frank Sinatra), and how that crazy old woman with the golf-ball eyes managed to get a lock of his hair (you don’t want to know).

  On the night when the moon had slimmed to a dying crescent in the sky, Cedric took the gang up to the roof of his apartment building, to get away from the heat and humidity that fell on the city like a hot, sopping rag. There was something the others didn’t like about going up there. I could tell from the moment Cedric kicked open the door to the roof.