She didn’t recall how old she was, only the look on her mother’s face when the woman lifted her eyes from a particularly intricate threading design to see the family cat dead in Millicent’s lap. Millicent was looking up at the woman with the silent, screaming eyes of a confused child.

Her mother had buried that cat quickly, but her parents’ suspicions had begun to grow. They’d hushed her, returning her arm to its sling. Their loving eyes had been etched with fear. Their open hearts had been instilled with guarded spirits.

Now that Millie had learned how to use her left arm, she struggled to obey their simple instruction. She did not want to keep it in its sling any longer.

Her father saw it for what it was the day his beautiful, perfect, joyful child threw both of her arms around her mother’s neck in a hug, clasping the grip of hands firmly against the back of the woman’s neck, talons grazing his wife’s fair, exposed skin. He had ripped Millie from his wife, throwing his daughter to the ground. She had unleashed an unholy wail, a tantrum erupting through her pain and confusion while the man cradled his beloved wife in his arms. The woman was sick for nearly three weeks before her soul left her body to be with the All Mother.

Death was the parasitic spirit leeching on the household, and everyone felt it. Millie, though a child, had understood what she was and what she possessed as she watched her mother lowered into the earth. Death gripped her and her father with a hand just as twisted and gray as the one that belonged to her.