Episode 39

The biting wind whipped Kadja’s hair across her face as she clutched her worn schoolbooks tighter. Saint Stephen’s High School loomed before her, a modern edifice that did little to dispel the ancient dread that clung to her like the damp sea air. It had been the same story at every school, every town, every attempt to escape the unseen hand that seemed to guide her life. The whispers followed her, the sidelong glances, the cruel taunts that echoed in the empty hallways of her mind. "Freak," "witch," "curse" – the words clung to her, each one a tiny shard of ice piercing her already fragile spirit.

Her parents, their faces etched with a weariness that mirrored her own, had tried their best. They’d uprooted their lives, chasing a phantom of normalcy across borders, from the old Tudor in Bar Harbor, Maine, to the vast, windswept land in Saint Andrews by the Sea, New Brunswick, where they’d built a new home, a fresh start. But the land itself seemed to hold its own spectral secrets, whispering tales of long-ago transgressions, of mafia visits in the roaring twenties and the grim seventies, of a woman’s spirit hanging from a chandelier in the grand hall, of doors that opened and shut with the will of unseen forces. Even the neighbors, once eager to extend a welcoming hand, had begun to shy away, their fear a tangible thing that kept them from crossing the threshold of their home.

Katha, her own past a tapestry of similar trials, remembered her own time at Emerson Middle School, the sting of isolation, the phantom tears of her family’s ancestral home at 11 Atlantic Avenue. Her classmates, too, had dared no second visit. Kadja’s life, Katha knew, was a stark echo of her own, a lonely existence punctuated by the unsettling fact that whenever Kadja was treated cruelly, something acted against those who inflicted the pain. It was a dangerous dance, a protective magic born of desperation, but it only served to further alienate her.