Red Rider's Hood by Neal Shusterman Read Free Book Online

maybe they’ll leave motorcycle tread marks on our faces.”
    â€œOne thing’s for sure,” I told her. “If they don’t want us to be part of the problem, then they’d better find a way to make us part of the solution.”
    After all that riding around town looking for my Mustang, it finally turned up just a block from my front door.
    It was the very next day. Marissa was off trying to get her aunt to trace that license plate, and I was walking back from the supermarket with a bag of groceries for my mom, trying to pretend, if only for a few minutes, that this was an ordinary summer.
    Then a glint of red caught my eye, and I saw it, right there at the intersection. My Mustang, with Cedric Soames behind the wheel. Even though I knew he had taken it, and knew he must have been driving it, seeing it with my own eyes made mecrazy. It made my blood boil so hot, my brain stopped working right. The light changed, and he floored it, like he was drag-racing everyone in the city. It wasn’t just him in the car. There were at least five or six other guys with him, squeezed in.
    I dropped the groceries and took after them on foot. I didn’t have a chance of keeping up with them, but the traffic and lights slowed them down just enough for me to keep the car in my sights. I was in pretty good shape, but not for this kind of sprinting. I must have rammed into half a dozen people on the sidewalk. What would I do if I caught up with him? I didn’t know. He had almost killed me before. Closed off my windpipe until I had almost blacked out. All I knew was that I couldn’t stop chasing him as long as I had that car in my sights.
    He made a left turn far up ahead, and when I got to the corner, I thought for sure he’d be long gone. But I was wrong. My red Mustang was parked on the street, just a block ahead. Cedric and the others weren’t in it, but it was no mystery where they had gone. The car was parked in front of the Cave—a sleazy pool hall where my mama told me never to go. Well, she wasn’t here now.
    My heart pounding and my head light from all that running, I stormed toward the car. I’d never hot-wired a car before, but I knew how it was done. Usually people do it when they’re stealing the car. I’d be doing it to get my car back.
    I got close enough to see my reflection in the sideview mirror, when out of nowhere something dark and sleek pulled in front of me. A jet-black Harley. How did the hunter know I was here? Had he been following me? I tried to get around him, but he rolled his bike forward to block me.
    â€œAll I want is my car,” I told him. “Why can’t you just leave me alone?”
    Then came that same hoarse whisper I had heard the day before. Only this time it said, “Get on.”
    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.
    â€œGrandma?!”
    â€œThat’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.
    â€œNot 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