When the trash had settled, and the Dumpster was banging its way back down to the ground, I ran a system check on my whole body. Once I was sure I wasn't dead, I struggled out from underneath the garbage. The trash truck was almost full. I never thought being in a full trash truck could ever be a good thing. But all that garbage beneath me allowed me to get a good grip on the truck's edge and pull myself up. The truck had already left the alley, and with my arm slung over the edge, I waited, hoping that the driver didn't get the bright idea of turning on the compactor while I was hanging there.
We stopped at a red light, and I leaped out, falling to the road. It must have been quite a sight to the other drivers, but that was the last thing I cared about right then. At a nearby corner I snagged some ice from a street vendor's soda bin and pressed it to the knot on my forehead.
So Marvin wanted a war. That was fine by me, because I was more than ready to fight one.
11
The Canyons
My mom must have known I was into something over my head. I could tell by the way she looked at me, and the way she judged my answers to innocent questions, as if there was hidden meaning in everything I said. I think my parents would have canceled their vacation if it hadn't already been paid for. They were taking a two-week cruise on the Mediterranean. Their second honeymoon. It was fine by me, because I didn't have to go skulking around anymore and make up stories about where I had been. And besides, I was getting more and more restless. I couldn't imagine being confined on something as small as a ship.
Right before they left, Mom did something strange.
"I want to give you something, Red."
I followed her into her room, and she went to a secret compartment in her jewelry chest and pulled out a little coin on a chain. She pointed to the face on the front. "This is Saint Gabriel," she said. "Saint Gabriel of the Sorrowful Mother. He's a patron saint of young people."
The coin was silver and looked very, very old. At first I hesitated, almost afraid to touch it, as if the silver might . . . I shook off the feeling. I had no problem with silver. None at all. I took the coin from her and rubbed it between my fingers, just to prove it to myself.
"Your grandmother gave this to me when I was about your age. It was the day before your grandpa died."
My eyes snapped up to her. I could tell by looking at her that she didn't know the truth about how he died, any more than I did―although I did have my suspicions.
"I want you to have it," my mom said. "Wear it while we're gone, so Saint Gabriel will protect you."
"Sure, Mom," I said. "Sure, I'll wear it." I almost told her everything right then. I wanted to tell her about the Wolves, and how I was supposed to hate them, but when you spend your days with evil, some of it is bound to soak into your clothes, like cigar smoke in a closed room. I wanted to explain to her, but how could I when I couldn't even explain it to myself? In the end, all I said was, "Thanks."
Mom looked at me, studying me for all the layers of meaning beneath my one-word answer, then finally gave up with a sigh.
"Close to your heart," she said, so I slipped the medallion over my neck and tucked it beneath my shirt. It wasn't exactly a werewolf hunter's medallion, but at least it would remind me which side I was supposed to be on.
It turns out Mom wasn't the only one who had something for me. When I arrived at Troll Bridge Hollow later that afternoon, Cedric had a new task for his errand boy. He gave me a sealed envelope with an address scrawled on it.
"I need you to deliver this for me," he said. "Go straight there, now."
"What is it?"
"That's not your business!" he barked. "Your business is just to deliver it. Mess up, and I mess you up."
I left dutifully, as I always did, to run my errand for the Wolves.
The address was clear across town, way out of the Wolves' turf, a place everyone called "the Canyons." It was a bleak corner of the world where I had never been, and had never cared to go. They called it the Canyons because it was full of huge abandoned warehouses looming over narrow streets where not even crabgrass dared to grow in the cracked sidewalks. The streets were canyons of shadow: dark crevasses that rarely let in the sun.
I crossed through Abject End Park, an overgrown no-man's-land that divided our part of town from the Canyons, then crossed over into that awful, dead place. Street after street of dead factories with broken, soulless windows looked out over burned-out cars, which leaned like shipwrecks on the curb.
I rechecked the address on the envelope and counted the building numbers past a forgotten linen factory to a little church on a corner, which seemed completely out of place. The church's paint had peeled down to the warping wood grain, and like everything else in the Canyons, it looked like no one had been here for years. My mama didn't like dead churches. "There's nothing more unholy than abandoned holy ground," she once said.
Sending me here was a joke, of course―it had to be. I could just imagine Cedric laughing his head off about it. I knocked on the door, counted to three, and turned to leave, already plotting the most direct path out of the godforsaken canyons. Then, as I crossed the street, I heard the sound of creaking hinges. I turned to see a figure in black standing just inside the open door. My heart missed a beat.
"Are you a Wolf?" said a girl's voice.
"Uh . . . yeah," I said.
"She says you can come in."
She . . . I thought. She, who?
The girl at the door was about as inviting as the Grim Reaper on Good Friday, so I wasn't in a hurry to hang with her or any of her Goth friends. I took my time crossing back to the church, hoping I could put together enough of the loose pieces of this situation to figure out what this was all about.
Wait . . . I thought. Goth girls in a ruined church? Could Cedric have sent me on an errand to the Wolves' only rival gang in town?
I reached the door, but didn't really feel like crossing the threshold, so I just held out the envelope. "Here."
The girl stood in shadows so dim, I couldn't see much of her face. She didn't reach for the envelope.
"Didn't you hear me? She said you can come in."
"What if I don't feel like it?"
"She doesn't care what you feel like."
There was no doubt in my mind now. I knew who they were. "Are you . . . the Crypts?"
"If you have to ask, then you don't deserve an answer," she said. I wish Cedric had warned me that he was sending me down the throat of a rival gang.
"Her patience grows thin," said the ghoulie-girl in the shadows.
Against my better judgment I went in. Seems this summer was just fulll of things that were against my better judgment. The inside of the church was as bleak as the outside, filled with crumbling pews beneath windows covered in layer after layer of boards. A few stray votive candles cast the only light in the dreary space, and the place was even mustier than Troll Bridge Hollow, if that was possible. The door closed behind me. The creepy girl who had let me in must have slunk away into some dark corner―and in this place every corner was dark.