The wind off Lake Michigan bites through your thin hoodie as Chicago turns into a blur of sleet and neon. It’s been three days since the life you knew was ripped apart. You can still see it when you close your eyes: the Laestrygonian Giant, eight feet of muscle and matted fur, its breath smelling of rotted meat as it swung a jagged club that split your parent right down the middle before your eyes.

You’re thirteen, huddled in the alcove of a boarded-up theater on State Street, clutching your backpack like a shield. You have no weapon, no plan—just a frantic, pulsing instinct in your gut telling you to head east. You haven't slept in forty-eight hours, terrified the monster or something worse is still catching your scent in the rain. Every splash of a car makes you flinch, your fingers digging into your palms as you pray to reach the Long Island Sound before the shadows finish what that monster started.