We're glad you kept reading

We're glad you kept reading. We're sorry for anyone we've scared away. Mostly. Somewhat.

Original dialogue James Patterson. It was just tweaked a wee bit.

Annoyed that Gazzy interrupted my evil thinking, I punched his back and slammed him in the head with my knife handle. What could I say? When we weren't attempting to beat up Fang, we were beating up each other.

Gazzy looked up at me, his gorgeous blue eyes round and trusting. "May we have Fang for breakfast?"

"All in good time, Gazzy," I said, hoping good time was soon. I've trained him well… perhaps, too well…

"I'll try the Fang voodoo doll again," Gazzy offered, and my heart swelled. He was a sickeningly terrible kid and I loved him. He and six-year-old Angel were both conniving and were skilled with a flail.

Soon Iggy, tall, pale and armless (we'd chopped them off while he was sleeping and sold them on the black market) (desperate times call for desperate measures) walked in. We'd also sold his eyes, and he daringly aimed for the couch, but just missed and fell on the porcupine pelts we'd left out the night before.

"Nice miss, loser," I said, not even trying to hide my obvious glee.

"Bite me," he mumbled through a mouthful of spines, so it sounded more like "bfffba mmm!"

"Fine!" I yelled and bit him hard on the shoulder, the only part not coated with spikes. I don't think he noticed; he was already in too much pain.

So I glanced into Fang's room with naïve hope – maybe the Grim Reaper had come. When I noticed he wasn't there, I was greatly disappointed.

"Try to run from me, will you?" I muttered insanely.

"No, I tried that before," Fang said behind me, pointing at the scar on his leg to prove it. Once again, Gazzy and Angel, I'm so proud of you. With the other hand, he stuck a knife to my throat.

Thankfully, Gazzy attacked his scarred leg, not letting a member of the The Kill Fang Society (TKFS for short) go down so easily. Fang was already four inches taller than me, but that didn't matter much when he was on the ground. Unfortunately, Gazzy's venomous bite wasn't enough to bring him down. I patted Gazzy on the head a little too hard to call it affectionate. "Nice try," I said as he sunk a few inches into the floor with each pat.

We went back into the kitchen; Iggy had found our supply of antiseptic that we practically bathed in and was now attempting to make eggs with his feet. I guess if I were more a fembot it would bother me that an armless, blind guy was making eggs with his feet better than I could; I wasn't jealous, but it seemed like a good enough reason to throw him back into the porcupine room.

"Ow…" he moaned, probably very confused.

I surveyed the kitchen. Breakfast was going a lot better than it normally did. "I'm going to go get Nudge and Angel. Gazzy, Iggy, try to kill Fang while I'm gone." Fang was so used to hearing this he didn't even flinch; just automatically grabbed the butchers' knife I'd been sharpening and prepared himself.

The two girls shared the last small bedroom. It was like a game of Mortal Combat; one day, I wondered if I'd look in there and one would be gone. Or at least parts of them would be scattered about the room like confetti. It was oddly quiet; I found eleven-year-old Nudge laughing as she tightened a knot in the bed sheets. They were conspicuously shaped like six-year-old Angel. Nudge was barely recognizable with her hands coated in blood; she was about to deliver a final blow with a katana, her WOP (weapon of choice). We called her sword Blood Bucket; all blood, no bucket.

"Save it for Fang, Nudge," I said and watched as she reluctantly put it back in its sheath, which was also coated in blood and said 'Nudge's Baby' on it. Nudge blinked, struggling not to kill Angel and was unable to resist tossing her lightly over the edge of the canyon. Well, it was rather tempting.

"Breakfast eventually," I said cheerily and skipped off to see if our youngest TKFS member had survived the fall. She had, of course, and by the time I got there, Angel was enjoying finding shapes in her bruises.

"Hey, you're alive!" I said, feigning happiness and leaning over to stab a bruise shaped like Fang's face. She grabbed my arm and flipped me seconds before I could do so.

"Hey, Max," she said, once we had both recovered, "Did you kill Fang?"

"Patience is a virtue," I reminded her.

"Will you do my braids?" she asked, and I nodded.

Everyone knew how much I hated, hated, hated Fang. We'd already claimed Jeb whats-his-face, so when Fang attacked on his own, we were all furiously angry. Even Iggy, who swore vengeance after we severed his arms, decided to join us for the time being.

"Don't even think about tying my hair in several impossible knots and putting sticky tack in it," Angel said. "Save it for Fang, remember?"

That's another thing about Angel: she can read minds. Something you have to remember when you're trying to stab her with the pointy end of an arrow. You know, just in case you are.