Red Rider's Hood

by Neal Shusterman

  Grandma took a moment to look both of us in the eyes. “I thought it would be a story I would take with me to my grave. I wish I could have, but seeing how the evil’s back just as strong as before, it’s time the story was told.”

  Grandma pulled a loose brick from her fireplace, and from behind it took out a music box. “I’ve always kept this at hand,” she said. “Just in case.” She opened the lid of the music box, and it played “Amazing Grace.” There wasn’t any jewelry in its red velvet lining. Instead there were bullets. Silver ones. They were tarnished to the point of being almost black, but you could still tell they were silver. I found myself backing away at the sight of them, and I almost tripped over the little table behind me.

  “It’s true, then,” I said. “Silver bullets kill werewolves!”

  “It’s simple science,” Grandma said. “Werewolves are allergic to certain metals. They have a violent reaction to silver. Get some silver wedged in their body, and the allergic reaction kills them in less than a minute. The problem for their prey is surviving during that last minute. That’s why bullets work best. You can get them from a distance, and run away safely.” And then she got sad. Thoughtful. “Your grandfather and I—we knew what was going on in town. No one else wanted to admit it. No one else dared to believe it. So we did research. We traveled the world, digging through crumbling books in old libraries to learn all we could. All the details. How fast does a werewolf run? How deep does a bite have to be before they pass the curse on to you?”

  “How deep?” I asked.

  “Not deep at all,” said Marissa, giving me a smug smile. “I’ve been doing research on lycanthropism, too.”

  “Huh?”

  “Lycanthropism,” said Grandma. “That’s just a fancy word for the werewolf curse. But really, it’s nothing more than a supernatural virus. It gets passed on in the saliva, like rabies. If a bite breaks the skin, there’s a pretty good chance you’ve got it.”

  I shivered.

  “After your grandpa and I learned all there was to learn, we came back. We brewed ourselves a wolfsbane cologne and wore it everywhere we went, keeping track of the people who avoided us because of the smell. To be double sure, we went to their homes every full moon, to see if they were there or not. The ones who were never home we knew were werewolves.

  “Then one full moon, we went out on our motorcycles, and went after them one by one. Xavier was the hardest. He always kept himself shielded by the pack. He’d let all the others take the silver bullets meant for him. Selfish to the last.”

  “But in the end, you got him,” I said.

  “Yes, we did, Red.” But she didn’t say any more about it.

  It was all too hard to take. Being deaf, dumb, and blind would be better than knowing the truth. These were dark days, getting darker by the minute, and I didn’t even want to think about the nights. I looked to Marissa, who seemed almost hypnotized by the sight of that little musical jewelry box. On the cover was a mountain lit by a full moon. I opened it to the sound of the innocent music, and the sight of the not-so-innocent silver bullets.

  “I’ve never used a gun, Grandma,” I said. “I don’t ever want to.” Once, when I was little, I saw a man get shot. It happened right in front of me, on the street. Ever since then, you could say guns and me didn’t get along. My dad calls it “ballistiphobia,” but I call it just plain hatred. Either way, I didn’t know if I’d ever be able to touch a gun, much less fire one. I guess Grandma understood, because she took the music box from me and gently closed it.

  “I don’t blame you, Red. I don’t blame you at all. You’ve got a decent heart,” she said, although I wasn’t sure whether or not I really did. She put the box away, and hid it behind the loose bricks again. “Different times call for different weapons.”

  Marissa rolled her eyes. “C’mon,” she said. “You gotta kill werewolves with silver bullets. Everyone knows that.”

  But Grandma shook her head. “If there’s one thing I learned in all of this, it’s that instinct counts for a lot. If Red’s instinct is to stay away from bullets, then maybe he should stay away from them.”

  I turned to Marissa. “What does your instinct tell you?”

  Marissa looked at me, then at Grandma, and closed her eyes, going deep into herself, I guess, to tug at some of those instincts. She took a deep breath, and another, then she opened her eyes.

  “It seems to me my instincts are telling me only one thing…that Cedric Soames is going to be harder to defeat than his grandfather.”

  There are werewolf legends, and there are werewolf facts. Grandma knew the difference, and that night, until the sun made a lonely appearance on the horizon, she gave us a crash course in the Lycanthropic sciences, as she called it.

  On the power of the moon, she told us this: “The full moon ain’t an exact sort of thing. The phase of the moon is always changing slightly. For three days, the moon is full enough to boil the blood and make a man turn wolf. The second day the curse is at its strongest, and the higher the moon is in the sky, the more deadly the wolf.”

  On werewolf appetites, she told us this: “In human form, they can eat anything humans eat, although they’re partial to meat. In wolf form, they’re driven to eat their weight in meat each night, and it must be the meat of a fresh kill.”

  On the mind of the werewolf, she told us this: “The mind of a human infected with the werewolf curse doesn’t always start off being evil, but the way I see it, a person turns evil real quick.”

  On werewolf redemption, she told us this: “Ain’t no such thing. No antidote, no remedy, and no turning back. Only way to save a werewolf’s soul is to end its misery, and hope the good Lord truly does have infinite mercy.”

  And of our chances, she told us this: “We all have to die someday. Let’s hope we die as humans.”

  By dawn, my eyelids felt as heavy as the boughs on her tree-lined street, but a plan had already started forming in my mind. Marissa went home, and I closed my eyes to take a quick nap—but when I woke up, it was already late afternoon. Grandma was still sleeping. I didn’t wake her. Instead I slipped out and set a scheme in motion. It would take everything I had inside me to pull it off, and now I was restless as a caged animal, eager to get started. My plan was twisted and nasty and clever and cruel. I left that morning with a grin on my face, feeling as wicked as a wolf.

  7

  The Back Room That Didn’t Exist

  My Mustang was parked near the Cave again. Cedric, in his arrogance, was making no attempt at hiding it, as if he were taunting me. Taking a deep breath, I opened the door to the old pool hall and stepped inside.

  The place was true to its name: dark, dingy, and smelling of stale cigar smoke and spilled beer. The pool hall was empty except for the overweight manager, who stood behind a counter, yakking on the phone. Even though I saw no customers, I heard the crack of billiard balls somewhere deep in the recesses of the place. My heart began to race, and I had to take a few deep breaths to get it under control.

  The manager hung up the phone and plodded out from behind the counter. “We don’t open till five,” he said.

  “Sounds like your back room’s open.”

  “I ain’t got a back room.”

  Again I heard the crack of the balls being hit from the back room that didn’t exist. I grinned at him, and the manager sighed. “Listen, I don’t want any trouble.”

  “You’ve already got trouble back there,” I told him. “A little more won’t make a difference.”

  Still, he didn’t let me pass. He just stood there, wide as a wall, leaving no way for me to squeeze past him. I wasn’t about to give up. The only way he was going to get rid of me would be to pick me up and throw me out bodily, and if he tried, I wouldn’t make it easy.

  Then, from the shadowy threshold of the back room, came a voice.

  “Cedric says it’s okay.”

  I recognized the voice as Loogie Stefano’s, a kid I knew from school—that is, until he dropped out l
ast semester. His real name was Luigi, but an endless stuffy nose had earned him the name Loogie.

  The manager stepped aside. “Welcome to the Cave,” he said. “The management cannot be held responsible for injuries or death.”

  By the time I reached the back room, my eyes had adjusted to the dim light. There were about a dozen of them there—some faces I recognized, some I didn’t. I realized I had no idea how big Cedric’s gang was. Was this most of them, or just a small handful? Were there dozens and dozens of them around town that nobody knew about? I didn’t see Marissa’s brother, Marvin, there, and that was just as well.

  When they saw me, they all looked at one another. Could it be that they were a little bit scared of me? Or maybe they were scared of what Cedric might do to me. Either way, I felt like I had some kind of power in the situation.

  Cedric was at a pool table, ignoring me. He kept shooting until he missed. Then he finally looked at me. “If you got business here, spit it out. Otherwise, get lost.”

  I held back an urge to go postal on him for stealing my car—but I knew that would just get me a one-way ticket to the hospital, or worse, the morgue. I had to play this like a game of pool, cleverly banking my intentions off the sides.

  “I know all about you, Cedric Soames,” I told him. “I know all about the ‘Wolves,’ and what you really are.”

  Cedric returned to his game. “So what are you gonna do about it?”

  “Who says I’m going to do anything? There’s a roomful of you, and only one of me.”

  He sank the six ball in a side pocket. “Then why are you here?”

  I didn’t answer. Instead I threw a set of keys onto the table. They hit the cue ball and knocked it to the side. “These are the spare keys to the Mustang,” I said. “I got no use for them, seeing as I don’t have the car anymore.”

  Cedric was not expecting this. He looked at the keys suspiciously, like they might blow up in his face. We both stood there on either side of the pool table, the keys between us.

  “Go on, take them,” I said. “It’s not like they’re made of silver.”

  He scowled at me and slowly came around the table toward me, like a wild animal stalking his prey. Part of me wanted to turn and run, but a bigger part of me wanted to stand my ground.

  When he got to me, he sniffed the air around me, once, twice, three times.

  “I smell fear,” he said with a quiet intensity. “But not nearly enough.”

  I sniffed the air around him. “I won’t tell you what I smell.” It was something like a locker room, and something like a zoo. I’m sure he knew it. I’m sure he was even proud of it.

  “You should be wetting your pants in terror, Little Red, but you’re not.” And then he grinned. “You’re just full of surprises.” He reached out his hand. I thought he was going to hit me, but instead, he leaned over the pool table, scooped up the car keys, and slipped them into his pocket. Then he turned to Loogie. “Bring Red a cue stick, and rack them up for a new game.”

  Loogie sucked up some snot and did what he was told.

  “If you win, I let you live,” said Cedric. “If you lose, I get to kill you any which way I like.”

  “What if I don’t want to play?”

  He smiled, but it looked more like an animal baring its teeth. “Not an option.”

  With Cedric’s whole pack between me and the door, I didn’t have much of a choice. I was a pretty lousy pool player, but I could put on a good show, slamming the balls hard, once in a while sinking them into a pocket I wasn’t aiming for. The others watched our game, grunting their approval each time Cedric sank a ball and sneering each time I missed. For a few minutes I let myself get so absorbed in winning that game, I had forgotten why I had come, and what I intended to do. The plan, the plan, I told myself. Even though my life was on the line, I had to get back to the plan.

  “My grandma’s preparing to hunt you down,” I told him.

  “Tell me something I don’t already know.”

  “You tell me something first,” I said. “Tell me why you let me and my grandma live.”

  Silence from the whole gang. Cedric only shrugged. “We didn’t let you live. Little kids and old women just aren’t worth the time it would take to get rid of.”

  “Yeah, and after we threw youse down there, the basement reeked of wolfsbane,” said Klutz McGinty, who was about as stupid as he was clumsy. “Ain’t no way we was goin’ down there after that!” Cedric threw him a look that could have spoiled milk, and Klutz looked down at his oversize feet, shutting up.

  “I think you’ve got a much better reason for letting us live,” I said. “A reason that you’re not telling anyone.”

  “And what might that be?”

  “Revenge.”

  Cedric kept his expression cold and hard to read. “Keep talking,” he said.

  “You could have just taken the money, but you didn’t—you took my car as well. When you took my car, you knew I’d come looking for you. You wanted me to find you. You even parked it out on the street to make sure I would.”

  By now the others had uncrossed their arms, and had moved a little closer, listening intently.

  “You wanted me to come,” I said, “because you figured you could get me to turn. You could convince me to join the Wolves. And wouldn’t that be the ultimate revenge on my grandma? Taking me in, and turning me into…one of you.”

  Looking at Cedric, I couldn’t tell whether I had gotten it right. Maybe that had been his plan all along, or maybe not. But one thing was certain—now that I had said it, it was his plan.

  Five of my balls were still on the pool table, and Cedric had only two more to sink. He took aim, then suddenly took a completely different aim, and made the only move that would end the game in a single shot. He put the eight ball in a corner pocket. It was an automatic loss.

  “You win,” Cedric said. “Guess this wasn’t your day to die.”

  “Dang,” said Klutz, who just didn’t get it. “I thought you’d win for sure, Cedric.”

  Cedric laid his cue down on the table. “Time for you to leave, Red.”

  “What if I don’t want to?”

  “Not an option.”

  I took a step closer to him. “Oh, I think it is.”

  Cedric looked at the others, and then back at me, with a grin. “Are you asking to be a Wolf?”

  “Everyone knows what an honor it is to be in your gang,” I said.

  “Answer the question,” said Cedric. “Are you…asking…to be…a Wolf?”

  I took a deep breath. “I’m asking to live forever. I’m asking to feel what it’s like to be two things at once—man, and animal. I’m asking to be a part of the pack.”

  “What about your grandma?”

  I shrugged. “Her issues aren’t mine.”

  Cedric thought about it and nodded. “Keep it up, Red—you might just get your car back.”

  I smiled. “I was hoping you might say that.” Then I pulled up my sleeve, like I was at the doctor’s office getting a shot. “Do it!” I said. “Give me the bite right here, in front of everyone, so they all know I’m one of you.”

  Cedric put down his cue. “Won’t work now,” he said. “Only works on the full moon.”

  I pulled down my sleeve. “Guess I’ll just have to wait.”

  “Fine,” Cedric said. “Until then, you’ll be a pledge—and if you prove yourself worthy, when the time comes, we’ll offer you full membership.”

  “Fair enough.”

  “And if I ever think you’re not playing straight with me, you’re wolfchow.”

  I nodded. “That’s fair, too.”

  8

  Putting Marvin to the Test

  You did WHAT?”

  If Grandma’s hair wasn’t already gray, it would have gone that way when I told her that I had confronted Cedric.

  “You always said ‘keep your friends close, and your enemies closer,’” I reminded her. “Now I’m on the inside.”

  “I d
on’t know who’s more stupid: you, for going to Cedric Soames, or me, for telling you the truth.” She wagged a finger at me. “You gotta leave werewolf hunting to the professionals.”

  “You weren’t a professional at first,” I reminded her.

  Grandma shook her head so hard, I was afraid her teeth might fly out. “I don’t want my only grandson to risk getting the bite. No. I forbid it.”

  “Don’t worry, Grandma,” I told her. “I know what I’m doing.”

  She wasn’t convinced, and although I wasn’t about to admit it, neither was I. See, my performance in the Cave had been the performance of my life, but even then I knew it was only a half lie. As much as I hated the Wolves, there was that restless, impulsive part of me that wanted to know what it was like to change into something fierce: something out of control. Maybe that’s what made me so convincing.

  “It’s brilliant,” Marissa said as we sat alone, munching on chips in the antique shop one rainy afternoon. “Scary, but brilliant. Do you think Cedric believes you really want to be a Wolf?”

  “I think so.”

  “Thinking isn’t good enough. You have to be sure.”

  But I knew nothing could be sure. Cedric had no real reason to trust me. Then I thought of something.

  “The skull!”

  “What about it?”

  “Give it to me!”

  She looked at me like I was already one of the Wolves. “No.”

  “Trust me,” I said.

  She looked at me, not trusting me in the least, then reluctantly she opened a cabinet under the counter. After she looked to make sure no customers were coming in, she pulled out the skull of Xavier Soames and gently set in on the counter. It was a human skull again, but somehow the eye sockets seemed to be watching me. It was smooth and cold to the touch.

  I reached for the skull, and Marissa gasped, startling me.

  “Marvin’s here.”

  I turned to see him through the shop’s glass door, crossing the street toward us, too cool to cover his head from the rain. “Does he know about the skull?”