Red Rider's Hood by Neal Shusterman

it; you reek of mortality.”
    â€œThat’s not your business,” I told her. “That’s between me and Cedric.”
    â€œFair 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.
    â€œWhere 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?”
    â€œEveryone 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?”
    â€œYou 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.
    â€œRowena?”
    â€œSo 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.
    â€œYou were a sweet kid,” she said.
    I frowned and pushed up my shoulders. “Yeah, well, sweet doesn’t get you much in this town.”
    â€œIt can get you further than you think,” she said.
    â€œWere 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:
    IT IS AGREED.
    SEND HIM AT MIDNIGHT,
    THREE NIGHTS IN A ROW.
    â€œYou can go now,” she said.
    â€œCan I ask what the message means?”
    â€œBetter 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.
    â€œA 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.

12

A Few Million Werewolves
    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