Нил Шустерман: Red Rider's Hood

I shook my head so hard I felt my brain rattle. "After what you did to me yesterday, there ain't nothing you can say that'll get me on that motorcycle."

And then the hunter flipped up the visor that hid his face. "Red, you are one stubborn little cuss."

Whatever I was feeling just a second before was blown so far away, I couldn't even remember it.

"Grandma?!"

"That's right. Now get your butt on my Harley, before any of those Wolves see us."

I was too stunned to do anything but obey. I hopped on behind Grandma, she popped a wheelie, and we burned rub­ber all the way to her house.

I suppose all the signs had been there: She knew all about wolfsbane, and more about Xavier Soames and what happened thirty years ago than anyone else. Still, the concept that my sweet old grandma was a werewolf hunter was just too much to wrap my mind around.

"Not just me," she said, once we got to her house. "Your grandpa was, too."

Grandpa had died long before I was born. Looking at all the photos of the two of them around the house, I couldn't imag­ine him hunting wolves any more than I could picture Grandma doing it.

Grandma went to the bathroom and picked out her helmet hair until it was a full gray Afro once again. She caught my dazed look in the mirror. "Surprised I have a secret side, Red?"

"I guess I always thought of you as the bingo type, not the wolf-hunter type."

She let out a deep, hearty laugh. Then she glanced at the Band-Aids that still covered my knees. "Sorry about yesterday," she said. "I only meant to scare you, not knock you off your bike. Guess my riding skills aren't what they used to be."

I thought of the way she wove in and out of traffic as we rode home today. "You're pretty good, if you ask me." And then I added, "Maybe you could let me take it out next time."

She didn't answer, but she didn't need to. The look on her face told all. I didn't ask again.

A heavy pounding on the front door nearly scared me out of my skin. For a split second I thought the Wolves had followed us here, but it was just Marissa. She had this paleness about her, and wide eyes, like she had been doing some mischief with bones herself.

"Red, I know who the hunter is. You're not gonna believe it."

But when she saw Grandma, still in her leather pants and jacket, Marissa realized I already knew.

"You're both too clever for your own good," Grandma said, shaking her head in both exasperation and admiration. "Run­ning a check on my license plate!"

"If we could do it, Grandma, don't you think the Wolves can, too?"

"It's no secret to them, Red," she told me. "They've always known."

Now that I thought about it, it made sense. Now I under­stood why Cedric was always so nasty to me―and why he seemed to have a grudge against her the day he stole her money. Then something came back to me. "Blood money. The Wolves called the money Cedric stole from you blood money. Why?"

"Because Cedric's a fool. He thinks we killed wolves for reward money. The truth is, people did give us money after we got rid of Xavier and his pack. We didn't ask for it, but they gave it to us anyway. Envelopes were slapped into our palms or slipped under our door. That was the bread I've been hiding all these years, the bread Cedric stole." And then she let loose a sneaky little laugh. "If he had any sense, he would have killed me right there in my basement, instead of letting the smell of wolfsbane keep him away. See, to Cedric I wasn't worth his trouble. He thinks I'm too old and feeble to be a threat to him―and that will be his downfall."

It was all coming together for me now. Marvin had been hanging out at that intersection, casing cars for things to steal―it was bad luck all around that I got caught at that par­ticular traffic light on that particular day. But then again, maybe it wasn't luck at all. Maybe it was fate. The second Marvin told Cedric it was me―the wolf hunter's grandson―taking a big bag of cash to my grandmother, Cedric wasted no time in get­ting to Grandma's house before I did.

Marissa pulled her chair closer to Grandma's. "Will you tell us everything you know?"

Grandma looked at us and sighed. "I suppose I have appren­tices now whether I want them or not." She went to a bureau that held dozens of photo albums. She was a photographer, after all, so photos filled every nook and cranny of her place. As a little kid, I had been through just about all of those albums. They were filled with pictures of her with Grandpa, and of their trips to strange and faraway places. But today, Grandma pulled out a photo album from the bottom of the lowest drawer. This one was full of werewolves, and of her and Grandpa's efforts as werewolf hunters. The pictures of the wolves were all taken with a telephoto lens from a safe distance, some with special film to catch them in the dark. The grainy images of snarling beasts were more disturbing than anything I had seen in my sixteen years. They didn't quite look like natural wolves, but like something almost prehistoric. Like a cross between bear and wolf, but with teeth sharp as a shark's. It was horrifying. It was fascinating. My eyes were drawn to each of those pictures, and I couldn't look away.

"We used these photos to identify them," Grandma said. "There's something about the eyes, the hair color, and the set of the jaw that doesn't change. Once we had a good picture of them in werewolf form, it was easier to figure out their human identities." She pointed to one particularly nasty-looking wolf. "That was Xavier."

I couldn't look at the picture for long. I couldn't get the feeling out of my mind that he was glaring back at me.

"Grandma, why don't you tell us how it happened the first time, and how you beat Xavier and his gang."

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.