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Coincidence was a thing of fools. It was a truth that Martha had seen proven over and over in her nineteen years. She wished she'd been wrong about their collective intuition the night before. The morning news brought another herald of doom upon their coven like a war hammer. The mysterious death of a Hawkins High student occurred that very same night, and Martha knew without a doubt that this was what she'd felt.
The town of Hawkins, Indiana, was in an uproar. Fear spread like a plague amongst its citizens, infecting everything it touched. It was happening again. Ever since Will Byers went missing three years ago, a string of misfortune befell them. There was no such thing as coincidence in a world of witchcraft. This student, whomever they may be, was not killed by natural circumstances. If the coven felt a shift of that magnitude, there was no doubt a supernatural cause.
The trailer park was crawling with uniformed officers, medical examiners, reporters, and curious citizens. The entrance was cordoned off and monitored for anyone looking to sneak a peak at the mysterious dead student. A wall of people and flashing lights pressed flush against the neon police tape as every neck craned to the point of near dislocation. While almost all resources were dispatched to bottleneck the entrance, the woods bordering the park had been left unmanned. There was no one to notice the two young women crouched in the bushes.
Martha and Abigail clutched tight to the disillusionment charms they'd prepared. Their journey began that morning with a set of dowsing rods and a bag of supplies. The practice of dowsing was proven the most effective way to find the cursed gateways that popped up around Hawkins like holes in Swiss cheese. So they entered the woods intending to locate the site of the supernatural event. As Martha expected, the strongest energy just so happened to overlap with the crime scene of a gruesome teen murder.
Martha watched the door to the trailer in question, counting every officer that came and went. The body was wheeled out in a bag not half an hour before, without a hint as to the victim's identity. She had half a mind to follow them to the morgue, but it wasn't the body they were interested in. A dog's shrill bark cut through the muted conversation and a rusted weathervane creaked as the wind twisted it west. It was the kind of wind that lingered long after winter departed. The sort of wind that sent a chill up Martha's spine as it stirred the cracked dead leaves around her feet.
