Red Read Online Free

Just a little cold. She would be better in the morning.

CHAPTER FOUR
A Red Gift
    Granny was not better in the morning. She was worse. She burned with fever and shivered with chills. She coughed and coughed and coughed.
    “You need your Curious Cure-All,” I said.
    “The ingredients are listed on the table,” she said in a raspy voice.
    I went to the table. Granny had all her potion and medicine recipes carved directly into the wood, a jumble of words etched on the top and the legs and even underneath. She said she couldn’t lose them that way.
    I searched the table. There was a recipe for curing baldness (2 scoops of troll droppings and 1 fuzzy caterpillar) and one for rashes and bites (3 sprigs of lavender, 2 drops of frog slime, and 2 spits from a witch, though any spit will suffice).
    Finally I found it.
Curious Cure-All
    5 prickly chestnuts
    1 handful of wild cherries
    1 bunch of gnomeswort
    So far, these ingredients would be easy to find. I read on.
1 drop of pixie venom (wear gloves)
    “Pixie venom!” I shouted. “For medicine?”
    “Powerful stuff,” said Granny.
    Undoubtedly. One bite from a pixie was as painful as a hundred bee stings.
1 pair of tree-nymph wings
    “How am I supposed to tell the nymph wings from leaves?” I asked.
    “You have to pluck them right off the tree nymph,” she said. “Otherwise, they don’t work.”
    “Isn’t that a bit cruel?”
    “They grow back,” she croaked. “They don’t mind.”
    Even if I could find a tree nymph, I’d never be able to catch it. I’d tried many times without success, but that seemed a small concern when I saw the last ingredient:
7 wolf hairs
    “Can I get some wolf fur from your tail?”
    “It’s rabbit. Besides, wolf fur is best when it’s fresh. Just ask nicely.”
    “Ask who?”
    “A wolf, of course. Who else?”
    I sighed. Sometimes Granny could be exasperating. She said crazy things as though they were completely normal and then made you feel crazy for thinking what she said was crazy. Asking questions only made it worse.
    “Is the wolf fur an essential ingredient?” I asked.
    “Of course it’s essential, otherwise it wouldn’t be on the list of ingredients. Now stop asking me silly questions. It’s giving me a headache.” I abandoned the Curious Cure-All recipe and instead made lavender honey tea to soothe Granny’s cough. I placed the cup to her lips, but she barely drank. I tried pressing cold cloths to her burning forehead, but she tossed and turned and talked nonsensically.
    “Snow?” said Granny. “Is that you?” Snow was her sister, who had died long ago.
    “Granny, it’s me. Red.”
    “Red,” said Granny. “I was Red once. Rose Red, they called me. Oh, I was beautiful. Just gorgeous. Everybody said so.”
    “You’re still gorgeous,” I said.
    “Ha.” She began to laugh, but then coughed, and the pain of it seemed to bring her back to awareness. “Oh, Red, it’s you,” Granny whispered, as though seeing me for the first time. “Happy birthday.”
    “It’s not my birthday,” I said.
    “Of course it isn’t. It’s mine.”
    Granny’s birthday? She had never mentioned it before, not once, but of course she had one. Why had I never considered it? She just seemed timeless somehow, like she always stayed the same age.
    “I have a present for you,” said Granny.
    “You have a present for me on
your
birthday?”
    Granny lifted her arm and pointed to the end of her bed. “Open that chest,” she whispered.
    I went to the big wooden chest at the foot of Granny’s bed. I had gone through it many times. It was where she kept her treasures, as she called them, mostly from her childhood—crocheted baby bonnets; a patchwork quilt, worn and faded from many picnics; a white glove; dried roses that had once been red, now black and brittle; a miniature painting of Granny in a red cloak and her sister in a white one.
    “What am I supposed to find?” I asked.
    “Unfold the quilt,” said Granny. “It’s