Of Demons and Fallen Stars

Chapter 1: Camille and the Little Ones

***

It is a pity how getting older can eat up your imagination.

 I wish to stay a child a little while longer.

***

I knew I was different long before the evidences really showed themselves. It was the feeling that there was always something crawling under my skin, something warm and soft and sometimes cold and tickling. Those feelings always made me curious. I knew it was not natural to have temperatures rising and falling, not when your mother makes a fuss of it every single time I grow unnaturally cold or extremely hot. It is weird in a way but you get used to it. Kind of.

Another reason I am certain I was different were my eyes. My eyes were neither the deep browns of my mother nor the jet black of my father. They were amber, like molten gold sometimes but also occasionally the orange of sunset. I learned a long time ago not to show myself to my mom whenever they were that particular orange. I know it would freak her out more than anything else. She always had this look like she would have a panic attack every time my... difference became too prominent. She acted like it everything was normal, probably for my sake, but I would not be surprised if she would go out running and screaming how freakish I was. I know she loved me deeply but I know it was sometimes too much for her and for some reason I always feel guilty of that.

I'm neither adopted nor any of those relatively complicated and mainstream situations you see in television. I am simply different. I mean I know for sure I'm my parent's daughter because I have my mother's features from my hair to the shape of my toenails and also my father's odd ability to infuriate people he does not like with the simplest acts, and of course there is  his terrible addiction to anything that is more sugar than real food. No matter what other people may say I know I am a hundred percent Bloodmoon.

I was nine when the evidences showed up. This kind of evidences were not like something I always had and just appeared in a state where you can sense them, but they really showed up and literally knocked on my door. They were what people would call demons.

My first demon was four inches tall with a bulbous nose and had a greenish tinge to his skin and thick and bristly midnight blue hair growing out of his body at the oddest places, like his earlobes, for instance. I found it odd but I was not quite surprised. I was seven and a demon asking for a strand of hair was not really hard to believe. I mean I have no real grasp of what was normal and what was not then. But I soon regretted meeting it or at least giving it my hair. I got sick and somehow I knew it was because of that encounter. When I told my mother, she gave me one of her odd looks. I learned to keep these encounters to myself soon after that. 

After my first encounter with that first demon, I smartened up. I did not just enthusiastically give them what they asked anymore. At twelve, I have read more books about demons than my sixth grade textbooks. I have decided it was better to know how I handled myself around them since I cannot very well avoid them. Also, as I aged I became more aware that it was not really ordinary to have these little encounters.

I do not quite remember my second nor my third or anything after that first one. There are now too many of them to count after all. There ranged from small demons that caused nothing but mischief, some that actually makes sense to talk to (mostly old tree demons that lived in ancient trees), and also those that loved to draw blood.

I remembered the first time I encountered that last one. He came at dawn. He perched a very long time on my window, just looking into my room and watching me go about my business. It was one of those demons that needed permission to come into a household. It was a pity I did know that fact then. After a long day of just perching on my window, he looked pale. I noticed his leathery wings were looking more and more translucent and his flat face was becoming more gray than blue. I took pity on him and let him in. I left him only a moment to fetch something to feed him but when I came back I found Aurora, the puppy I got for my twelfth birthday lying dead with all her blood sucked dry. I was so angry that the next thing I knew I was tucked on my bed with my mother fussing over me. She had a haunted look on her face that I decided not to ask what happened or what she saw. I knew somehow that the creature met an unfortunate fate. I had little scars on my fingers and quite a few bite marks that also did not quite fade that were constant reminders of that little lapse of judgment.

But the worst has yet to come.