Read Online Baby Teeth: Bite-sized tales of terror by Dan Rabarts - Free Book Online Page B

true. My step-mother didn’t like Timothy. She’d tried to smother him once while he was sleeping, but he woke up.
    My step-sister nuzzles my real mother’s breast, growing at tedious human speed. It will be months before she can even roll over. My step-mother says we aren’t to shave rashers off her, as eating fairy-flesh is taboo. She smells odd anyway, milky and sweet and nectar-laced. It’s a wonder my real parents don’t notice.
    â€˜Why did you swap us?’ I asked my step-mother one night, as we were scraping skin from my father’s arm. We were careful to only harvest a couple of layers of skin, though he was so tired from caring for the changeling we could have taken a finger without waking him.
    â€˜Good girls don’t ask questions,’ my step-mother replied. ‘Bad girls never grow wings.’
    She was always like that.
    â€˜Will I grow wings, Mother? Even though my parents were big people?’ I hoped calling her ‘mother’ would soften her up. It was an obvious ploy but it worked sometimes.
    â€˜If you eat all your dinner, and help me arrange an accident for that oaf of a boy, then maybe. Mind what you’re doing, girl. You’ve got a bit of his arm hair in with the skin shavings.’
    I pretended it was an accident. I reached into the bag and plucked out the hair, then slipped it into my sleeve when mother wasn’t watching.
    The next day I stabbed it into the changeling’s eye.
    She cried, and rubbed at it, but I twisted it and pushed hard, wedging it into the creamy white orb. It wouldn’t blind her, but it would bring my parents running. My step-mother was asleep, hiding from the daylight. I didn’t have long.
    â€˜What are you doing?’
    My brother’s voice. He’d been shifted out of the nursery when the changeling arrived, though he still seemed drawn to the room. I was sure he’d been out in the garden when I came in.
    My step-mother had taught me to make myself unseen, by humans or animals. It was a basic survival skill for the wee folk. But my guard was down, I was too intent on getting the changeling upset.
    Ah well .
    â€˜Timothy, do you know who I am?’ I asked.
    He leaned in close, screwing up his pudgy face and staring at me.
    â€˜You’re not the one who tried to kill me. You’re another one,’ he said.
    â€˜That’s right, I’m your sister. And I need your help.’ I could hear my birth-mother’s footsteps in the hall. ‘Tell them to check her eyes,’ I blurted.
    I had to hide then. My birth-mother would lose her mind if she saw me. She’s been fragile ever since the birth. She probably knows, deep down, that the thing which is drawing life from her isn’t human, isn’t hers. And that knowledge must turn in her like a knife in a gut-wound. What kind of monster must she think she is?
    I know who the real monster is. Before I climbed down from the cot and back behind the walls, I took a chunk of skin from the changeling’s heel.
    I cooked dinner, then climbed into the medicine cabinet above the bathroom sink. I knew my birth-mother would be visiting it for painkillers. The changeling had been crying. My mother looked even more tired than usual when she opened the cabinet.
    â€˜She’s not yours,’ I whispered as she reached for the open box of pills.
    I think she heard. She couldn’t see me but I was learning the trick of casting my voice on the wind.
    â€˜She’s not yours, and she’s not human.’
    My mother’s hand paused over the box. Her left eyelid twitched. I wished I didn’t have to hurt her, but I couldn’t see another way.
    â€˜You’re being eaten alive. And Timothy isn’t safe.’
    My mother burst into tears.
    I went to see my brother. He was playing with his toy cars in his bedroom. My father was lying on Timothy’s bed, his feet dangling over the end, mumbling encouragements and