The protagonist of the tale, Willa, is one such child. 

Willa and her siblings, elder sister Joan and younger brother Luke, live with their mother and step father Eugene. Eugene too has a couple of boys from his previous marriage, Patrick and  Kenneth, but they mostly stay away in schools and come to meet their new family occasionally and these occasions are extremely conspicuous. 

Both these brothers develop an attraction towards their step sisters in their own way. Patrick has a kind of affinity towards Willa, much different than what his brother has for Willa's sister Joan. Kenneth and Joan are much like a common teen couple, although romantic relationships between step siblings might be considered unnatural by some. Every vacation, the duo of boys would come down to the girls' house and while it would spell love and romance for Joan, for Willa it was a different experience.

What Patrick and Willa did is disturbing, not just because there is some semblance of a relation between the two, but because two children should not be doing what they did at that age. And Willa was all of nine when she met Patrick. 

Just as moths are attracted to fire, children are enchanted towards the strange, towards the unnatural. Patrick was the fire to Willa. Patrick was an oddball himself. He eyed Willa oddly, challenged her to do things which were sometimes gruesome, sometimes offensive and sometimes downright painful. Willa could have easily told her mom about it or her step father, but she didn't. Primarily because she was entranced in Patrick's unusual charm and secondly she didn't share a great camaraderie with her mother. Her mother had an effortless grace about her which her opposite sex found very attractive. She almost had the aura of a sexual predator which is why when her second husband was away she ended up getting close to other young boys, not even barring her youngest step son. 

Willa and Patrick, they existed for each other only when they met each other. As if they were tools used for discovery to the other. What started off in their childhood ventured into their adolescence as well. Even when Patrick seemed to be indifferent towards her, Willa wanted his attention, and that opening was all that he needed. Every encounter treaded the line of sexuality and eventually crossed to the other side. Patrick got kicks out of doing some of the most unusual things on Willa, and though Willa felt disgusted after she regained her senses, during the act she was always silent; as if she wanted to see how far Patrick could go and what he could do to her. 

In spite of sharing such an awkward relationship, they did not have any emotional connect. Hardly any normal conversation ever took place between the two. They knew almost nothing about each other. It's as if they used each other just for the sake of their sexual awakening. 

However, it is not only these two who had ridges in their relationship. The two love birds Joan and Kenneth got married in their prime and all was going fine till Joan felt she had started walking in the path her mother had taken in her youth. Joan did not become amorous like her mother, but having an insatiable interest in men wasn't her mother's only vice. She shared a very detached relationship with her children and as the days went by, with her second husband as well. There wasn't any affection in the relations she developed, just a habit of getting used to existed. Finally, it was a gradual deterioration. Joan feared that she couldn't manage children and didn't want to have them either, much against Kenneth's wishes.  All of this was revealed to Willa when she accompanied her sister, brother-in-law and Patrick on a yacht ride. In this yacht ride, though Patrick was the one who started making advances towards Willa, it wasn't only him who did the most shocking things on board. Willa, on her final encounter with Patrick, did what she had never done before, something which was incredibly abhorring to even herself. However, this yacht ride was the last time she ever saw Patrick.

Slowly, each and every one of the characters in this novel is torn up at the end. The family that had once shown signs of coalescing into one, got stripped into small pieces.

There is no denying that this novel is quite disturbing on certain levels, but it's a book that you cannot let go off. It seeps into you and you will find yourself turning the pages with knotted eyebrows. 

Note :I received the review copy of Demi-Gods by Eliza Robertson from Bloomsbury in exchange for an honest review. I thank Bloomsbury for giving me this opportunity.