Red Rider's Hood (11 page)

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 full 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.

When she was done with the letter, she turned her eyes from the paper to me again, studying me as intensely as she had studied the letter. “What's your name?”

“Everyone just calls me Red.”

She grinned. “Are you the Red Rider?”

I have to admit I was impressed. I didn't know I had a reputation. “Yeah, that's me. So how come you know me?”

“You don't remember me, do you?” she said. Again, a statement more than a question. I found it hard to believe that I could forget someone like this, but I drew a total blank. She smiled even wider. It was almost warm. “I used to be your babysitter. In the days before.”

All at once it came to me—not a memory of her face, but a memory of her style. The way her hands would move across a game board. The way she would sing to me when I went to sleep. For an instant I flashed on a memory of her perfume—sort of vanilla and spice. She didn't smell like that now, though. She had the same strange, unnamable smell as the rest of this place.

“Rowena?”

“So you do remember me!”

I nodded. I couldn't imagine my parents trusting me to the hands of a babysitter like this…. But I guess she wasn't always like this.

“You were a sweet kid,” she said.

I frowned and pushed up my shoulders. “Yeah, well, sweet doesn't get you much in this town.”

“It can get you further than you think,” she said.

“Were you always so mysterious? I don't remember that.”

She responded with a silence as mysterious as her words. Pulling a pen out of thin air, it seemed, she flipped over the note and scribbled on the back of it. “Take this back to Cedric,” she said, handing it back to me.

She took no care to conceal the note in an envelope, or even to fold it so that I couldn't read it. Somehow I sensed she wanted me to read it, so I did. The message read:

“You can go now,” she said.

“Can I ask what the message means?”

“Better if you don't.”

Knowing I'd get no more out of her, I turned to go, and as I neared the door, the first girl appeared out of the shadows, opening it for me.

“A word to the wise, Red,” Rowena called out from behind me. “If you can't stay on Cedric's good side, then stay out of his way entirely.”

Then the door slammed closed behind me, and I was alone in the stark shadows of the dead industrial canyons.

B
eing a double agent takes a toll on you. You spend your days lying, pretending to accept friendship like you mean it, knowing you're going to betray those same people who trust you. Cedric had so much power in his gang, but in a way I had even more power than him. Their fate rested entirely on me. I could save them by telling the truth. I could destroy them by lying. No one should have that much power.

When a growing half-moon hung above the city, Cedric took us all back to the roof of his apartment building, to give me the big talk. It was a week until the night of first change.

“You want to know why there are werewolves?” Cedric asked as we sat in rusty chairs on the roof. It wasn't as dark as it had been that first time, and I found myself less terrified than I had been then. The memory of being held out over fifteen stories of thin air isn't something that fades too quickly. Somehow I couldn't help but think this was another test.

“There are werewolves because one of your ancestors got bit by one,” I told him.

“That's not what I mean.” He pushed himself closer, the legs of his chair scraping on the gritty tar paper of the roof. The rest of the Wolves sat in a circle around us, like this was another secret rite of the werewolf order.

“Everything on Earth is here for a reason,” Cedric said. “Trees are here to make oxygen, worms are here to make dirt. There's no such thing as a freak of nature. If it's here, it's naturally meant to be here.”

Unnaturally, in your case.
I didn't dare say it out loud.

“Most other animals got predators to keep their population down—but see, us humans are too smart for predators. Even the stupid humans like Klutz.”

The others razzed Klutz, and he threw a few well-placed punches to shut them up.

“We build walls and fences to keep the predators out,” Cedric said. “We put 'em in zoos, and the ones that get loose, we can put 'em down with a single rifle shot. See, we got brains.”

“So, what's your point?”

“I'm getting to that.” Cedric leaned forward. “It used to be that diseases kept the human population in control. Before we knew how to fight them, things like the plague came and wiped out people like flies—but not anymore. We got vaccines, and antibiotics, and Pepto-Bismol and stuff, so suddenly the bugs ain't so bad anymore.” He looked around to make sure he had everyone's attention, although I got the feeling they'd all heard
this a dozen times before—every time a new Wolf was going to be “made.”