Red Rider's Hood

3 "This isn't exactly the date I had in mind"

My dad always said that belonging to a gang was a way for small-minded people to feel big. He says it works like this: You take a whole bunch of people with more attitude than brain, and maybe if you're lucky all those small brains will add up to one full brain. But I have a different theory. I think it's like multiplication, not addition. Half-a-brain times half-a-brain equals a quarter-brain. You get enough half-brains together, and you end up with cockroach intelligence. That's what I figured I had here in dealing with the Wolves.

"Take him down," Cedric shouted, now that he had the money sack in his clutches. Taking someone down usually meant killing them. Is that what they had done to Grandma? I didn't want to think about it. On Cedric's orders, Marvin Flowers grabbed me by my shirt, lifted me off the ground, and hauled me out of Grandma's room.

"What's the matter, Marvin?" I said, almost choking on my fear. "The fifty I gave you before wasn't enough? You had to take the rest? That's worse than begging for change on street corners."

"I ain't no beggar," he said, annoyed at the suggestion. "Cedric assigned me to case out cars and people at that corner. Easier to do it while I'm washing windows."

"Case them out for what?"

"For anything we decide we need."

"Like my grandmother's money?"

He snarled at that, baring that gold canine tooth of his, holding me even higher off the ground as he moved me through the house. "It's that money that saved you," he said. "Getting that blood money put Cedric in a good mood."

Saved me? I thought. But didn't Cedric tell him to "take me down"?

"So, you're not gonna kill me?"

"Not right now, but don't ask me about later."

I thought of saying something about his sister―about how we were supposed to go out tonight. But then I thought, what if that whole thing was a scam? What if she had been just a decoy so that the Wolves could get to Grandma's house? I'm sure that's what Marvin had intended, but was Marissa in on it, too? I silently cursed myself for allowing the Flowerses to lead me astray long enough for the Wolves to get here first.

"You don't have to listen to everything Cedric says," I told him. "Just because he's a dungworm doesn't mean you have to be."

"Cedric's right―you don't know a thing. And it's best if it stays that way."

Then he pulled open the basement door and hurled me down into darkness. I didn't even connect with the stairs―I flew all the way down until I smashed against the cold, damp concrete. I groaned as the pain in my knees, wrist, and side peaked, then faded, but it didn't go away completely. The door up above had been closed and locked before I had even hit the ground, and there was no light in the basement at all. I lay there listening to my own breathing and the creaks from the floorboards above me as the Wolves moved around, probably ransacking the house. And then across the basement I heard the click-hiss of a match being struck. For an instant I saw a face behind the flaring light before the match went out. I gasped.

"Grandma?"

The sulfur smell of the match overpowered the stench of age-old mildew in the basement. "Caught you, did he? Sorry about that, Red."

It was Grandma. No imitation this time. "Grandma, are you okay?" Just hearing her voice brought a huge wave of relief. The Wolves might have been killers, but at least they weren't killers today. My bones still hurt too much to move, so I just zeroed in on her voice across the room, and a tiny spot of orange light, not bright enough to light up her face. It was the tip of a ciga­rette. I didn't even know Grandma smoked.

"Been better, been worse," Grandma said. "Not my first time in the belly of the beast, if you catch my meaning."

I didn't catch her meaning at all, but that was nothing new. Grandma always lobbed out expressions that no one could catch but her.

"They get my bread?" she asked.

"Huh? Oh―the money. Yeah. I'm sorry."

"Not your fault," she said. "I should have known. That Cedric Soames is no different than his grandfather. Can't change what's in the blood."

I heard her breathe out, and the smell of the spent match was replaced by a perfumy smoke, like burning spice. It was something I'd never smelled before, and I thought I had smelled just about every kind of cigarette.

"What are you smoking, Grandma?"

"Aconitum napellus," she said. "It's a special herb some old friends taught me about a long long time ago. Nothing illegal, mind you, but highly poisonous, if you don't use it just right. I usually drink tiny bits of it as tea, but any port in a storm, if you catch my meaning," which I didn't. She took another puff and blew out the smoke in my direction. I coughed. "Like I said, can't change blood, but you can change its flavor for a time, when you need to."

I had no idea what she was talking about, but this was the third time in five minutes I had heard the word blood. I didn't like it.

"We'll wait down here until they go away," she said calmly. "Those boys won't bother us down here now."

"How do you know?"

"I just do."

Grandma drew in a deep breath and breathed out the smoke. "You come close to me, Red. Let the fumes soak into your clothes."

I didn't know why I'd want to do that, but I sidled up beside Grandma anyway.

"Ahh, Aconitus napellus," she said, flicking ash from the tip of the cigarette. "Of course it's known by a more common name."

"What?" I asked.

Although I couldn't see her smiling in the dark, somehow I knew she was. "Wolfsbane," she said.

Three hours later the noises from upstairs stopped, and we climbed the stairs. I pried open the door with a crowbar to find the house a mess. Cans and bottles were everywhere, garbage was thrown all around. Grandma was fit to be tied.

"Those lousy, stinking sons of such-and-such," Grandma ranted. "Those boys are gonna get theirs, let me tell you. It's gonna come to them in spades, and I'll be shovelin'."

It wasn't until we were done cleaning the house that I thought to look outside. My car―the beautiful red Mustang that I had restored from a hunk of junk, my latest and greatest red set of wheels―it was gone!

"They took it!" I shouted. "They took my Mustang!" I ran outside and down the long stone stairs to the street. There wasn't a trace that I had ever parked it there. The Wolves were now riding around town in my car. I screamed from the pit of my stomach, stomping and punching the air.

Grandma slowly came down the steps until she stood beside me.

"We gotta go to the police!" I shouted. "We gotta report it!"

Grandma just shook her head sadly. "You can't go to the police, Red. Not when the Wolves are involved."

"But... but..

"Trust me," she said. "Some things are simply beyond the police. Cedric Soames's pack is one of those things."

Although I had a mountain of stuff on my mind, I hadn't for­gotten about Marissa. There was only one way to find out whether or not she was in league with her bad-boy brother. I had to show up at the antique shop, just like I had promised, and take her to the movies. I hoped she was being honest about wanting to go, now not so much because I liked her, but because it would burn Marvin's hide to know that he was responsible for his sister going out with me.

It was already late afternoon by the time I left Grandma's house. I had to take two buses to get to the antique shop― something I hated, because it reminded me that I didn't have a car anymore. The buses were late, the traffic was slow, and I didn't get there until a quarter of eight: almost sunset at this time of year. The CLOSED sign was already hanging in the win­dow. I kicked the sidewalk in frustration. She was probably gone by now. I went to the door, but it was locked, so I went around to the back alley.

The alley was a narrow lane, unevenly paved, filled with bits of broken glass and Dumpsters that smelled like bad fish on a hot day. I knocked on the back door of the shop. To my sur­prise, the door opened when my knuckles hit it.

I slipped inside. "Hello?"

The lights were off, and the sun, low in the sky, shone through the front window at a crooked angle, glinting off the crystal and making the dust in the air glow like snow under a streetlight.

"Anybody here? Marissa?" Maybe she was in the bathroom. She wouldn't have left the back door unlocked if she had gone home.

No answer. In the dark corners, antique Mardi Gras masks peered out at me. A ventriloquist's dummy leered at me from a shelf, its lips twisted in a porcelain sneer. I kept thinking its eyes followed me, along with the eyes of all the other masks and little statuettes in the room.

"Marissa?" I said, getting more spooked by the minute. The sun shifted behind a building across the street, leaving the antique shop in an eerie twilight gloom. Everything was in shadows, and every shadow seemed to be moving. A jingling sound behind me rattled my nerves, and I spun. No one was there. Just a wind chime shifting slightly. Something was wrong about that, and it took me a few seconds to figure out what it was. Wind chimes move in a breeze, and there was no breeze.

Suddenly something came down on my head. A pattern of lights flashed in my eyes, kind of like seeing stars in a cartoon. There was a sharp pain in my skull, and I felt my cheek hit the floor before I even realized I had fallen down. I never really fell unconscious―I was just dazed and dizzy. I felt myself get hoisted up, and felt ropes on my hands, but my eyes were still rolling into my head from the blow, and I didn't catch sight of my attacker until the spinning world began to slow down. When it did, I found myself hog-tied to a red leather armchair that smelled of old cigar smoke, somewhere in the back of the antique shop.

Sitting in an identical chair across from me was Marissa.

"What did you do that for?"

"I think you know," she said.

I didn't know much of anything right then. That blow left me barely remembering my own name. "What did you hit me with?"

She reached over and pulled a nasty-looking rifle onto her lap. "I hit you with this rifle butt. As for the business end, you'll be meeting that in just a few minutes, I suspect."

I wanted to think she was joking, but she was serious. Deadly serious.

"This is about your brother, isn't it?"

"No. It's about you. It's about the things you do. It's about what you are."

"I don't know what you're talking about."

"Well, if that's true, we'll know soon enough." She looked up at a skylight above us. The sky was painted with purple-and-orange clouds. Dusk was kicking up colors and would soon be settling into night.

Marissa stood up, went off, and came back with something in her hands. There was a little table between us―cherrywood with fancy frills and clawed feet. She slammed the thing down on the table.

It was a skull. A human skull. Its empty eye sockets stared out at me. Its yellowed teeth were fixed in a snarling grin.

"What the. . ."

She sat down across from me, took the rifle, and laid it across her lap. "Now we wait."

"Do you have to leave that skull on the table staring at me? It's bad enough I have to sit here at all, why did you have to put that there?"

She didn't answer.

"This isn't exactly the date I had in mind," I told her.

She sighed. "Do I have to gag you?"

After that I kept quiet.

Slowly the clouds beyond the skylight bruised deeper, until the sky was dark. Still Marissa stared at me. Then, through a back window, a thin shaft of moonlight shone in, hitting the table. The dome of the skull glowed a faint blue in the darkness.

And what I saw then I will never forget for as long as I live.

The skull began to change.