The Shadow Club Rising
Read The Shadow Club Rising Online
Authors: Neal Shusterman
A WARNING . . .
B
y the time I reached the far side of the pool, Cheryl had been carried off in a current of bumper boats. I floored my accelerator and hit Alec from behind, sending him spinning around and bouncing off the side wall. It got his attention.
He bumped me, and before I knew it we were moving in a circle around the outer edge of the pool, bumping each other.
"So, how do you like our school?" I asked him.
"You came to the bumper boats to ask me about school?" he said, sideswiping me.
I came around, pinning him against the dock. "I came to tell you something you might be too busy to notice."
"I notice everything." He tried to squeeze his way past, but I stayed just in front of him, keeping him pushed up against the dock.
"You might not notice
this."
I leaned forward, getting as close to him as I could, and said as quietly as I could under the circumstances. "You need to watch yourself," I told him. "Because there are some people who aren't too happy with your success. I just felt I should warn you."
Then his face hardened as he looked at me. "Are you threatening me?"
"The author deftly narrates a suspenseful story . . . the plot moves along quickly and sustains the tension until the last page. Hard to imagine it being any better written."—VOYA
For
Erin Dayne
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
The Shadow Club would not have risen had it not been for the following intrepid individuals, whose support and encouragement paved the way for this book: Dr. Steve Layne, whose passion for
The Shadow Club
convinced me that it deserved a sequel; Stephanie Owens-Lurie, whose support and editorial wisdom has been a guiding light throughout my career; Kathleen Doherty, who first rescued the Shadow Club and saw the potential for a sequel; Frank Hodge, whose dedication to children's literature has touched thousands of hearts from coast to coast; Jeff Sampson, David Ruskey, Rachel Morgan-Wall, and all my other on-line fans, whose ideas and enthusiasm continue to inspire me : ); and Dr. Donald Levy, for his friendship and expertise on allergic reactions. And my children, Brendan, Jarrod, Joelle, and Erin, who are a critical audience for all my first drafts and a constant source of joy and inspiration.
Contents
THE
SHADOW CLUB
RISING
Prologue
THE
SEA
AND I have never been friends.
We're more like neighbors who nod politely in passing while keeping a respectful distance. There was a time when the sea and I battled. It was a night lit by the flames of a burning lighthouse, when the surf was charged with an offshore storm. It was the moment of my greatest triumph, and my deepest failure—triumph because I beat the sea, cheated death, and saved a kid's life; failure because I finally had to admit my guilt for every awful thing the Shadow Club had done. It wasn't just admitting it to others, I had to admit it to myself. If you know what happened—and you probably do, since it's no secret in this town—then you already have your own opinion of me. If you don't know about it, well, all the better, because maybe you won't judge me before you get to know me.
There are times now when I'm drawn to thoughts of what happened. When my mind is quiet, I start thinking about that day. I have this shiny seashell, about the size ofmy fist, that I found on the beach when I was little. Sometimes I'll lie on my bed and toss it up and down, fidgeting with it while I think about things I should probably try to forget. They say you can hear the ocean in the spirals of a seashell, and I used to believe it with all my heart. But now, of course, I know it's just echoes of the world around you, caught in the twisting spiral. Which maybe explains why I
do
hear the ocean when I put my ear to the seashell these days. Not just the ocean, but the roar of the flames from that burning lighthouse—two things still caught in the spiral, echoing round and round in my own world.
That's the way it was with the Shadow Club. We thought it was all over, but it had only just begun. The fires, the war against Tyson McGaw, all the dark and dastardly pranks—they were nothing compared to what happened next. In the end we had all confessed to the things we had done—we thought that by purging ourselves of the guilt, it would all just go away. Of course we knew we'd have to pay for the things we did, but even then there was relief in knowing that once we paid our debts to society, we could gather up our lives again and move beyond it. But anger and hatred and resentment—those feelings are as slippery as a greased pig: hard to handle, and even harder to catch when they get loose. Feelings like that don't die easily—they just move on to other people if they can't have their way with you.
Like I said, we'd thought it was over, until February, when everything crept up on us, slamming into us from behind like a traffic accident.
It started, like so many things in my life seemed to have started, with Austin Pace. But this time things were a whole lot different. . . .
The
Iron Maiden
I
HAVE
A
BIKE
,
but I don't ride it much. In our town there are too many hills, and the roads aren't paved as well as they should be. The shoulders are littered with rocks broken loose by the rains and the roots of tall pines. I've always relied on my feet to get me places. In the mornings I run to school, even in the winter, when my nose and ears grow so cold that they feel numb all through first period.
Now that I was officially off the track team, all that running I did to get from place to place meant a whole lot more to me. But on this particular day I didn't run, I walked, because I wasn't in a hurry to get to this destination.
It was the middle of January. Cold to me, but then nowhere near the deep freeze that other parts of the country got. While other places were getting blizzards, we'd just get rain, and when snow did fall it never lasted. The only white Christmas we ever see is from the fog that rolls in from the ocean.
It was getting dark as I walked along the winding, tree- lined road that led to the homes on the hill. My social studies teacher said that in Third World countries the higher up you are on the hill, the poorer you are, because it means that you don't have any water or electricity. But not so in the world I live in. The homes up the hill have pools and big yards and picture windows with million-dollar views. Austin Pace lived about two-thirds up. Not high enough to be in a mansion, but high enough to be able to look down his nose at two-thirds of the rest of us, which he had always done quite well.
Three months ago I had been indirectly responsible for breaking his ankle—and now I was going to his house for dinner. I had to admit I couldn't have come up with a worse punishment myself. I kept reminding myself that I wasn't
actually
the one who spread those sharp rocks on the field— rocks that cut up his bare feet and mangled his right ankle.
That
had been Cheryl Gannett—my life-long friend and now ex-girlfriend. She had done it for me without my knowledge or consent to get Austin back for all the nasty things he had done to me. She did it because I was the second- best runner—all the members of the Shadow Club were second best at something. I had to admit that none of the indignities he had made me suffer came close to the vicious games the Shadow Club had played. Austin had once apologized for treating me the way he had. That was in the nurse's office, after I carried him off the field. He reneged on his apology later, though, when he found out I was partially to blame for his injury. "Pain makes people delirious," he said, and claimed he hadn't meant a word of it.
So
then why was I being invited to dinner?
I asked myself. Had Austin finally accepted my apology? Or was it because my parents paid his uncovered medical expenses with the money they had set aside for buying me a car in a couple of years? Maybe he felt bad because I had resigned from the track team as part of my penance for the Shadow Club's deeds. Or maybe, I thought, he invited me over to dinner just to poison me.