Fangboy Read Online Free PDF Page A

Malcolm.
    “We’d cut off his head first. Once his head was gone, I can’t imagine the rest of him would cause us that much trouble.”
    “What would we use?”
    “A knife from the kitchen.”
    “We don’t have any that are big enough.”
    Reggie considered that. “You’re right. But we have tape. And two knives taped together would be more than long enough. We’d draw straws for who got to do it, and that person would sneak in while he was sleeping—”
    “Somebody would have to hold him down,” Malcolm said.
    “We’d draw straws for that, too. And so the lucky boys would sneak in there, and they’d saw, saw, saw away until the job was done.”
    “That’s horrible,” said Nathan. He slapped a hand over his mouth. He hadn’t meant to say that out loud.
    “Horrible?” Reggie asked. “ Horrible ? I’ve heard the way you yelp when he goes at you with the paddle. What would you have us do, throw parties in his honor? Make statues? Bake Steamspell-shaped biscuits? I’ll tell you what, if you’re so in love with him, why don’t you take the beatings for all of us?”
    “That’s not what I meant,” said Nathan, pulling his blanket more tightly around him. “I just…does it have to be so messy?”
    “As far as I’m concerned, it’s not messy enough!” Reggie narrowed his eyes (or, at least, spoke in such a tone that Nathan thought he narrowed his eyes in the dark). “Maybe there’s a way that you could be useful, Fangboy.”
    “There isn’t,” said Nathan. “I’m not useful to anybody.”
    “Don’t worry,” said Jeremy, the boy who’d shushed them. “They talk about killing Steamspell all the time. They won’t really do it.”
    “The hell we won’t! Maybe we won’t really tape two knives together, but we have a boy here with the sharpest teeth I’ve ever seen. He wouldn’t even have to press them together very hard to rip out Steamspell’s throat.”
    “Like a vampire!” said Malcolm with great excitement.
    Reggie shook his head. “No, vampires don’t rip anything away after they bite. They just use their teeth to poke. I don’t want Steamspell to have an inconvenient neck wound, I want a large piece of his throat in Fangboy’s mouth!”
    “That’s disgusting,” said Jeremy.
    “Is it? Is it?” Reggie nodded. “Yes, I suppose it is. But disgusting in a fine way. That tyrant must die, and I believe that Fangboy here is the one who can make it happen.”
    “But not tonight, right?” asked Nathan in a pleading voice.
    “No, not tonight. There’s a lot of planning left to do. But soon.”
    * * *
    Thursday was Adoption Day at the orphanage. The orphans would line up outside, using their best posture, and potential parents would file through, hoping to find a child to call their very own. The Bernard Steamspell Home For Unfortunate Orphans was not a quality orphanage and thus did not attract the highest caliber of parents, but each and every one of the children desperately hoped to be chosen.
    “No, no, no,” said an elderly man, shaking his head as he walked down the line. “These are slim pickings indeed. If I drove an hour north, I could adopt a grandson nearly twice as good.” He let out a snort of contempt and left.
    “Haven’t we seen all of these already?” asked a man walking hand-in-hand with his wife. “It seems like every week it’s the same group of kids, only a little thinner and dirtier. Where’s the turnover?”
    “I agree that it’s a sorry lot,” said Steamspell. “You have to understand that I take only the ones that are given to me. If I wished to go out kidnapping, I could offer a selection of the tallest, most charming boys you’d ever seen. But a man must follow his moral compass.”
    “Oh, of course,” said the man’s wife. “If we adopted a child, we’d want one whose parents were dead, not out searching for him.”
    “But though our turnover is indeed low, I’m pleased to say that I’ve made a new acquisition since your last