The Shadow Club Rising by Neal Shusterman Read Free Book Online

what?" asked Abbie.
    "Duh," said Randall, his same old obnoxious self, "figure out which one of us is pranking on Alec Smartz."
    Everyone glanced at one another with the same suspicion that the other kids in school heaped on us.
    "What makes you so sure it was one of us?" I asked him.
    He looked at the others, one by one, and then his thoughts seemed to turn in on himself. "I don't know," he said. "I just figured . . ."
    And that was half the problem right there. If even the members of the Shadow Club believed it was one of our own, how would we ever gain one another's trust again?
    Tyson and I led them up to the old tugboat and through the hole in the hull. When our eyes had adjusted to the light spilling in from the hole below, and the dozens of little separations in the old boat's wooden planks, we found ourselves in a strange and very private world. The empty shell of the tugboat's keel was like an upside-down attic. Although the space was about thirty feet long, and seven feet high, it still felt claustrophobic. I didn't like it. Rats hide in forgotten places like this, I thought. And I'm not a rat. The fact that we had to hide at all made me regret having even called them together. I mean, was Alec Smartz really worth all this trouble? And if my heart really was in the right place, then why was my spirit confined to the moldering shell of an abandoned boat?
    "We didn't do anything to Alec Smartz," I said, once everyone was up inside our new meeting place. I didn't ask them, I told them. If there was one thing in this world thatI knew, it was that all of us—even Randall—had come through the ordeal better than when we started. None of us would pull that sort of mean-spirited prank on anyone ever again. Although it was dim in the shell of the old boat, I could see enough of their faces to know I was right.
    "So, like, we're supposed to prove our innocence before the whole world blames us, right?" said Jason.
    "It's not about proving our innocence," I told him. "It's about stopping the pranks."
    "How are we supposed to stop the pranks if we don't know who's pulling them?" asked Darren.
    "We do some detective work," I said. "We find out."
    "Why should we care a rat's butt about Alec Smartz, anyway?" asked Randall.
    "Because we started it. None of this would be happening if we didn't start the pranks last fall."
    "Statistics show," said O. P, "that the most notorious of criminals often have copycats—and sometimes those copycats are worse than the ones they're copying."
    "Oh, come on," said Abbie, tossing back her hair, "we're not exactly serial killers."
    "No," said Tyson, "but you came pretty close to killing me."
    Tyson had been so quiet, sitting all the way up toward the bow, that we had almost forgotten he was there. It sobered us up a little bit.
    "We set the pattern," I told them. "We were the ones who put the idea in people's heads, and now they're picking up where we left off. I don't know who it is, but I do know that the pranks are going to get worse and worse, just like they did the first time. When we formed the Shadow Club, it's like we let something loose in this town that didn't die when we burned the charter."
    "You mean like a demon or something?" asked Randall.
    "Now you're getting me all spooked," said Jason with a nervous chuckle.
    "Call it what you want," I told them. "A demon—or just a bad idea—but either way it's not going away until we find a way to shoot it with a silver bullet."
    "I thought that was for a werewolf," said Jason.
    "Get a clue," said Abbie.
    I let the thought sit with them for a few long moments. The wind blew across the hole in the hull, like someone breathing across the mouth of a bottle, and the whole tugboat began to resonate with a faint deep moan.
    That's when Darren said, "I'm outta here." He stood up, balancing himself on the slanted floor beneath him. "I've got better things to do than start dreaming up problems that don't exist."
    I was too stunned to say a