My mother named me Chamomile, after the taste of my blood.

Even though she’d never tasted the red liquid running through my veins, they had. It was tradition for a creature like me to be named for how my blood bloomed over those monster’s tongues. That’s what I was told, anyway. It must be true since they called my mother Pepper. Pepper Eirian.

I lived in a little cage under a big house filled with screams. Until the day before my twelfth birthday, it was all I’d known.

“Miles, get up.” Mother shook me awake. She’d never called me Chamomile. Always Miles. I guessed because she didn’t like what my full name represented.

My eyes snapped open. “It’s not my day.”

Once a week, they would bite my arms, my neck, and my legs. Tomorrow was my day for the demons to feed. For them to drain the blood from my veins. For me to die of a thousand needles embedded in my flesh.

“Do you trust me?” Mother reached for me and pulled away the green army blanket serving as a comforter.

I nodded. “Yes.”

Her emancipated arms gathered me onto her chest, and I wrapped my spindly legs around her thin waist. The sheer, plain cream dress was my favorite because it had pockets. Pockets carried secrets. Secrets like candy, small toys, and even weapons like little knives.

Mother carried me past the door of my cage, and down the aisle of barred cells. Most the other rooms were empty. We passed by a moaning man, spread across his cot, recovering from the night before.

Fewer people than normal slept or recovered from the night before in their barred stalls. Even down in the cellar, I could hear the screeches over the music. The pleading and laughter. The smell. I didn’t want to find out where it came from.

My mother rushed through the hall and came to an abrupt halt. A door creaked, and Mother’s hands shook. I tried to look, but she pinned my chin to her shoulder so I couldn’t turn around.

“Eli…” she said. “Let me through.”

Eli Florentine. It took me long years of listening to snippets, but Eli was the head recruiter for regular blood slaves known as “drudges.” If one of the enclave members requested a certain blood type, Eli brought in the body. Not a dead one, but the person he brought might as well be. Even though I knew he was bad news, Eli was also the only one who hadn’t sunk his fangs into me.

Eli’s calm voice chilled the room. “Let me take her.”

“No!” Mother gripped me tighter and took a step back. She shuffled me to one arm, but I was too heavy for her to hold. I started sliding down her side.

Behind us, I saw a shadow, the outline of a man. I couldn’t make out much except blond hair, a shushing finger over his mouth, and blue eyes pleading for me to stay quiet.

“Momma—” I said.

“Liebling—” Eli began at the same time as he stretched a hand with clawlike nails toward me.

Soon as my feet hit the ground. Mother jerked her hand and pulled out a silver pen.

“Wait!” Eli threw up his hands, blocking his face. “Pepper! Don’t scare her!”

“How do you know what she’s feeling?” My mother bared her teeth. Her shaking hand holding mine tightened, promising she wouldn’t let me go. Her other hand aimed the pen level with his head.

“You’re spiraling.” He lowered his hands. “The others will know something’s wrong.” His eyes glittered. “I can take her and get her out safely.”

I held my mother’s waist and hid my face in her dress as I willed her to say no. I didn’t want to go with the demon.

“You didn’t answer my question.” Mother seethed. “How dare you touch my child!”

“Pepper, I wouldn’t—ahhh!” Eli threw up his hands as a beam of red light formed a dot over his fingers. Red light, thin as paper, split the darkness. Eli cursed and pushed his face to the wall, covering his left eye.

“Fine then, woman! I’ll do what I can.”

Mother ran with me in tow. We passed stairs, down the hallway. Down to a place I knew all too well.
They called it the medical bay. I called it hell. It held an empty counter, locked cabinets, and a table with straps to hold a “patient” down—for my safety, they said. I think they didn’t want me flailing and scratching their eyes out.

“Mama?”

She whipped us around a corner, knelt to my level, and put a finger to her mouth.

Wide-eyed I nodded.

A gust of wind passed by, and Pepper peeked around the corner. She led us through the dark hall into the one room I hated most of all. The flat metal table, now a bed of nails, stood in the middle of it. Using their sharp canines, demons had ripped into me here until I went unconscious. It was not my favorite room.

Before I could complain, Pepper pulled out folding stairs and set them under the slit of a window. She climbed the steps and pushed the glass pane. It opened, and she took a stuttering breath. “Thank all, he did it.”

An opening! We could escape!

She climbed down and knelt by my side. “Listen, Miles, you need to go now, okay?”

“But you’re coming too?” My hands cupped my mother’s face.

A great roar echoed off the walls, and thunder shook the house.

Mother wasted no time. She hauled me up the ladder and guided my head through the opening. The metal frame squeezed the sides of my face. It felt like getting a wind burn. My ears scraped against the window frame.

A door banged, and my mother’s hands were ripped away.

“Let her leave!” Mother cried.

I couldn’t turn to see even if I wanted to. My head remained pinned between the window frame. If they pulled me back, that might hurt. A lot.

I heard scuffling, and growls.

“Grab the child!” someone screeched. “The child!”

“No!” Eli roared. “It’s too dangerous for her to stay.”

With added effort, my head came free, but the rest of my body teetered inside. Someone shoved me through, the scraping of the window cutting into my chest, then my stomach, and finally my knees until I could claw the rest of the way through.

Long streaks of blood dripped from my head. My knees were scuffed, and the sharp metal in my shoulder ached where I’d squeezed through the window frame. The threadbare gown I wore, stained from grass and blood, felt paper thin against the cold autumn sky. Sunlight. A wash of white obliterated my sight.

“Momma…” I turned around and, in my illogical sense, made to pull my mom out of the hole that I had squeezed through. But I didn’t have time to hurt, to tend my wounds, or to help my mother.

“Miles, run!” Mother cried.

I’d never forget the terror in my mother’s eyes. Monsters swarmed, and as she reached for me, they engulfed her. Pepper was whisked away from sight and replaced by piercing blue eyes that scowled at me through the crack in the window.

“Do as she says, little morsel.” An old dagger and a brown paper bag were tossed my way.

​Fleeing wasn’t hard. Ashamed, I took the package and scrambled away without my mother. I did what she said and ran.