Red Rider's Hood

  “All the next day we sat together, waiting. If that tiny bite from Xavier had passed on the curse, we would know when the moon rose that night. At about four that afternoon, he went into the darkroom. ‘I just want to make a few quick prints,’ he said. ‘To pass the time.’ He was in there for more than an hour, and I began to get worried.” Grandma paused. I suppose she had never told this to anyone. “I found him on the floor of the darkroom, with a small piece of paper in his mouth.”

  Grandma didn’t have to say another word. I knew exactly what had happened.

  “Silver bromide!” I said. Grandma had taught me enough about photography over the years for me know about silver bromide—the stuff on photographic paper that makes it work. “It was a piece of photographic paper in his mouth, wasn’t it, Grandma?”

  Grandma nodded, scrunching her face up to try to hold back the tears. “To someone with the werewolf curse, the stuff’s like cyanide. He left a note. He said this was a better test than waiting to see what happened when the moon rose. Because if he was a werewolf, he didn’t want to live long enough to actually become one.”

  Grandma cried, and I reached out to hold her hand. So in a way, it had been blood poisoning after all.

  “I’m sorry,” I said.

  Grandma quickly mopped up her tears. “It was a long time ago. But if his sacrifice is going to mean anything, we have to finish the job. We have to get rid of Cedric Soames and his new gang, and make sure not a single one of them survives this full moon.” Then she took a good look at me. “Is there anything else you found out about them? Anything that can help us?”

  “Nothing else.”

  “You sure?”

  “Of course I’m sure.”

  “All right, then.”

  I didn’t tell her that Cedric had offered me a city—or that part of me had liked the idea.

  None of the Wolves questioned my loyalty anymore. They didn’t look at me funny, didn’t doubt my motives. Except, of course, for Marvin, who just got more and more bitter with every ounce of acceptance I got. I had respect down there in the Troll Bridge Hollow now, and it made me feel powerful. It was the kind of sneaky, addictive power that kept making you want more. I wasn’t exactly sure why I had so much respect now. Maybe it was because I knew so much about “the Confederation of Werewolf Hunters,” which didn’t even exist. I even made up names for some of them. I got them off the spines of books on my grandma’s shelf and mixed them up. “Herman King.” “Stephen Melville.” Or maybe they respected me because I had ventured into the Canyons and had actually set foot in the Crypts’ lair. Of course, the Wolves wouldn’t admit that they were afraid of the Crypts.

  “They’re just a bunch of girls,” Klutz had said over a game of pool in the Cave one day. Some of the Wolves grunted in agreement.

  “Just a bunch of girls, huh?” Cedric smacked him in the head. “You’re even dumber than you look. Girls can be just as tough as guys when they wanna be. Sometimes even tougher.” He took away Klutz’s cue and made a shot for him, even though Cedric wasn’t in the game. “All I know is I wouldn’t want another war with the Crypts—and I ain’t ashamed to admit that either.” Then he gave Klutz a twisted grin. “Of course, if you want to take them on by yourself, be my guest—and see if you don’t end up like Bobby Tanaka.”

  “Who’s Bobby Tanaka?” I asked.

  “You mean who…was Bobby Tanaka.”

  A/C chuckled nervously. “Yeah,” he explained, “he was a Wolf, but the Crypts kinda put him in past tense.”

  “Got him with silver?” I asked.

  Cedric shook his head. “No.”

  “But I thought ‘silverizing’ was the only way to kill a werewolf.”

  “It is,” Cedric said. “But some things are worse than death.”

  It seemed to me the temperature in the room dropped, and the Wolves let out a collective shiver.

  Klutz began to look a little pale, like all his macho was leaking out through the holes in his Nikes.

  “We don’t talk much about Bobby anymore,” Cedric said. “Or the Crypts. They stay on their side of town; we stay on ours. Everybody’s happy.”

  “So why did I get sent over there?” I dared to ask. “And who did she want you to send for three midnights in a row?”

  I thought Cedric might whack me in the head, too, but he didn’t. He just gave Klutz his cue stick back and took Loogie’s soda, like it was his own. It was an unspoken rule: Whatever was yours was also Cedric’s. Which maybe explained why none of the Wolves ever showed up with their girlfriends.

  “You’re full of questions today, Little Red.”

  But Cedric offered me no answers. Instead, he demanded to know more about the so-called Confederacy of Werewolf Hunters, so I made up stories about John Steel and Danielle Grisham, and how they were, at this very minute, flying in from London.

  As for Grandma, she thought the stories I was feeding the Wolves were a fine thing. “When you’re at war, like we are, it’s not called ‘lies,’ it’s called disinformation,” Grandma said. “Spreading disinformation is a powerful weapon. If they think they’re outmatched and outnumbered, they’ll be scared and start doing stupid things. That’s when we’ll have them!”

  I couldn’t tell her how spinning all those lies to Cedric was making me feel all twisted up inside.

  I had once told Cedric that Grandma had a secret room where she kept all her werewolf stuff. Good thing he never came back to look for himself because there was no such place. There was a darkroom, but that hadn’t been used for years. All that was in there were old photographic supplies. Grandma’s werewolf work was done out in the open; the only thing shielding it from prying eyes were her venetian blinds.

  Four days before the first full moon, she was working a blowtorch, melting down silver jewelry into bullet slugs on the same table where she served Thanksgiving dinner.

  “Silver bullets aren’t exactly an item you get at Wal-Mart,” she told me. “You gotta make them yourself, but you have to be careful.”

  I watched her pour the molten silver into little molds, like she was making a pie. She had bought a whole bunch of .22-caliber shells and had removed the bullets, replacing them with the silver ones once they had cooled in the mold. “Not exactly rocket science,” she said, “but if you do a shoddy job, the bullet may just blow up in the barrel—or in your hand.”

  “I hate guns,” I mumbled to myself, but Grandma heard.

  “Don’t you worry, Red—I got you covered,” she said. She took off her protective glasses and went into the closet, coming out with something you don’t usually find in your grandma’s closet. It was a steel crossbow.

  “Ever use one of these?”

  “No,” I said. I had spent a couple of weeks in summer camp once and did some archery there, but this wasn’t summer-camp archery we were talking about.

  “I’m making you some silver-tipped arrows. They’ll do the job.”

  I took it from her and held it by its smooth ivory handle. It was heavy, but so well balanced, it felt half its weight. A crossbow was different from a gun. Crossbows were always in the hands of good guys. At least in the movies. I found that I could stand to hold it, in a way I could never stand to hold a gun. This was a fine anti-werewolf weapon.

  “A werewolf’s a big target, but it’ll also be moving,” she said. “You’re going to need practice.”

  13

  Abject End Park

  Crossbow practice needs space. Crossbow practice needs solitude. And, most importantly, crossbow practice requires a target—in my case, a very big target—and one that can stop an arrow without splintering it. Like the massively thick oaks that have taken over Abject End Park—the border between our part of town and the ruined buildings of the Canyons.

  I figured the best time to practice would be at dawn. Aside from the occasional cop car or garbage truck, the city would still be asleep—and so would the Wolves, sleeping off whatever mayhem they had gotten into the night before. As lo
ng as I got back home before any of them were up and about, they wouldn’t know what I was doing.

  I set my alarm for 4:30 A.M. and was in the park just as the sun was beginning to rise, turning the eastern sky a grimy yellow. It was barely sunrise, and the day was already beginning to get hot.

  Marissa was already there, waiting for me. “So you made it.” She stifled a yawn as she stepped out from the shadows of the bushes.

  “I told you I’d be here,” I said.

  “I came prepared.” She picked up a heavy thermos, unscrewed the lid, and poured us both a cup of hot chocolate. “I should have brought something cold, but I gotta have my morning cocoa.”

  “Thanks,” I looked at Marissa with a mixture of feelings. She was thoughtful, and smart, and ready to take on anything. Too bad she had to take on something as nasty as werewolves. Thinking about that made me angry—not just at the Wolves, but at Marissa, too, and I didn’t understand why. So instead of thinking about it, I forced all my attention back to target practice.

  “Time to shoot me some tree,” I said, then put down the cup and picked up the crossbow, looking around for a likely target. About fifty yards away, I saw an ancient oak with a dark circle on its bark where a branch once had been, and an even darker spot near the center of the circle. A natural target. “That’s my bull’s-eye.”

  My quiver of arrows was slung over my shoulder, the way all professional merry men carry it. Without looking, I smoothly reached back for an arrow…and jabbed my finger on one of the sharp arrowheads. “Youch!” I put my finger in my mouth to suck the droplet of blood that appeared. Marissa grimaced.

  “Note to self,” I said with a laugh, “arrows go in point down.”

  Marissa chuckled.

  Gingerly, I grasped an arrow by its shaft and pulled it out. Then I placed it in the groove of the crossbow and pulled it back until the bowline was taut and the arrow locked into place.

  I stared down the arrow with one eye closed, aiming at my victim tree until the sharp arrowhead pointed dead center, then I squeezed the trigger.

  With a sharp hiss, the arrow was away. I followed its lightning-fast flight, so smooth, so quick—and so far off the mark. The arrow missed the tree by a good ten feet and landed somewhere in the bushes twenty yards beyond, stirring up a flock of pigeons.

  “Nice shot, Robin Hood,” Marissa said drily. “I think you just killed two birds with one arrow.”

  “I meant to do that,” I said, pulling another arrow out of my quiver.

  “I’ll tell them to put that on your tombstone.”

  I gave her the cold look of a not-so-merry man and lined up my next shot. This time I held my breath as I pulled the trigger.

  Thwack! The arrow hit the tree! Okay, so it wasn’t anywhere near the target, but it was actually stuck in the tree I was aiming for.

  “Nice,” Marissa said, and I could tell by her tone that she really meant it.

  I aimed my next shot high, and actually got the arrow closer to the circle. My next arrow was inside the outer ring of the target.

  “I think maybe I just found my sport,” I said, after firing the last of my arrows. “Too bad it took a battle with supernatural evil to find it.”

  We walked together to the tree to retrieve the arrows.

  “I hope you have found your sport,” Marissa said, suddenly intense. “I hope you can hit that bull’s-eye again and again. Maybe…”

  Her voice trailed off.

  “Maybe what?”

  She spoke so softly I could barely hear her voice. “Maybe that will save him.”

  “Save who?” I asked, knowing full well who she meant, but wanting to hear her say it.

  “Marvin.”

  I nodded in understanding. Now I knew why this battle was so important to her. She saw it as a battle for Marvin’s soul. She wanted to destroy all the Wolves before Marvin got bit and was turned into one.

  “Come on,” I said. We had reached the tree, and I grabbed the shafts sticking out of the bark. “We’ve got time for a few more rounds. You want to try?”

  “No thanks,” she said. “My taste in weapons is a little less…medieval. Your grandma’s been taking me out to the firing range. We’re not using silver bullets, of course, but the principle’s the same.”

  I shot through the quiver of arrows three more times before I began to get paranoid that one of the Wolves might wander into the park and find us. Only about half my shots hit the tree. I knew with a few more weeks of practice I’d be much better. The problem was, I didn’t have a few more weeks. I had only three more days.

  “I don’t know, Red, it’s like your heart isn’t really in it.”

  “Of course it is,” I told her, and to prove it I fired three more shots. All three nailed the tree.

  I went over to Grandma’s house to report on my progress that night. She was proud of me, but I could tell she was worried about me, too—and in more ways than one.

  She listened without saying a word as I told about my early-morning session with the crossbow. When I was done she stared at me for a long time, thinking. Finally, just as the silence was about to turn uncomfortable, she nodded her head.

  “You’re doing good, Red,” she said. “You’re proving yourself every day.”

  There was a mold on the dining-room table, holding about fifteen silver bullets.

  “That’s the last of them,” Grandma said. “I’ve melted down every bit of silver in the house, and a whole bunch I got from the neighbors.” She glanced up at me. “Will you be seeing Marissa tomorrow?” she asked. “She couldn’t come by tonight.”

  I nodded. “She’s meeting me at practice again in the morning.”

  Grandma went over to the cabinet next to the dining-room table and pulled out a drawer.

  “Here.” She reached in and lifted out a paper bag, handing it to me. It was heavy, and I could hear something rattling around inside.

  “There are thirty silver bullets in there.”

  All at once I felt queasy, but if I got pale, Grandma didn’t notice.

  “Give them to Marissa when you see her,” she said.

  “All thirty?”

  “She’ll need as many bullets as she can get, come the night of the hunt.”

  The night of the hunt. It was getting real. This last week had flown by way too fast, and I don’t know about Grandma and Marissa, but I didn’t feel prepared.

  I was back in the park for more crossbow practice the next morning—a drizzly dawn where it was hard to spot the tree through the mist. Marissa met me there, and I held up the paper bag Grandma had given me.

  She looked at the pile of silver bullets inside the bag and shivered.

  “That’s a lot of silver,” she said. “But it’s not just about the ammo. I’m hoping I have what it takes to use them.”

  I nodded, trying not to show her how scared I was, too.

  I set the bag on the grass, on top of my jacket, and picked up the crossbow.

  I went through the quiver quickly. I was getting better. More arrows were hitting the tree, more were closer to the target. I even hit the bull’s-eye once.

  Marissa’s curiosity got the better of her, and she finally tried the crossbow herself. She was just as bad as I had been when I first started.

  I practiced long past when I should have stopped, but I was making real progress, and what were the chances that one of the Wolves would stumble upon us? The park was so overgrown, you could barely see us from the street.

  It was midmorning when the arrow slipped.

  It was careless. I had just locked the last arrow into the crossbow and hadn’t aimed it yet when my finger accidentally hit the trigger. Marissa and I watched in shock as the arrow went flying out of the park. We heard a crash of glass, then the blaring car alarm.

  Marissa bounded through the bushes, retrieved the arrow from the car’s interior, and came running back. She laughed when she saw my stricken face.

  “Don’t worry,” she said. “You didn’t
kill anybody. But you have to be more careful.”

  “Well, I’m done for today anyway,” I said, walking with her to the tree to retrieve the rest of the arrows.

  Then we heard the voices.

  “Over here.” It was A/C. “It’s this one.”

  “Hey, the window’s broken, but the stereo’s still inside.” It was Warhead.

  “Grab it.”

  Marissa and I glanced at each other. My hand was already closing on the arrows in the tree.

  “Hey—someone’s coming!” I heard Loogie shout.

  “So what? We didn’t do it,” said Marvin.

  “Yeah, but they don’t know that!”

  And then I heard the worst sound I could possibly hear: The four of them were rustling through the bushes, coming into the park to hide, and headed straight for us.

  14

  Adviser to the Godfather

  I quickly yanked the arrows out of the bark and handed them to Marissa, along with the crossbow. I slipped the quiver off my shoulder and handed that to her as well.

  “Get in the bushes!” I said softly. “Deep.”

  She nodded and ducked as far as she could under the shrubs, just as A/C, Warhead, Marvin, and Loogie came into view.

  “Well, well, he’s here after all!” said Marvin, almost snarling at me.

  “I see him,” said A/C. “Took long enough to track you down.”

  Track me down?

  “What’s the matter?” I said. “Can’t a guy take a walk?”

  We were all standing next to the tree I was using for target practice. A/C crossed his arms and leaned against it. “That’s it?” he asked me. “Just taking a walk? Nothing else going on?”

  A/C’s shoulder was just a few inches from the bark that was riddled with holes from the arrows. He hadn’t noticed them yet. How could he not notice them, they looked like giant black holes to me!

  I moved away from the tree, but kept eye contact with him. “What else would be going on? It’s getting closer to the full moon, and I’m kind of antsy, like I can’t sit still, so I figured I’d take a walk.”