“What?!” exclaimed Winter. “Erik, what are you talking about?”     “The cops called me after I got to work,” he explained. “They said one of the neighbours had called about our house. I went back home to see for myself and—Winter, it...it was like a car went through the house!”     Erik paced as he continued his story.

“I don't want to be here, Erik...!”     Winter Banos pouted as she leaned on the passenger-side window frame of her brother's pick-up truck. The last thing she wanted to do was sit inside a high school classroom in July. She was about to repeat American History so she could graduate with the rest of her senior classmates.   

Beneath an ancient Victorian home, in a small, dimly lit stone room known as the Key Chamber, there sits a solitary figure. A woman, cloaked and hooded in robes of royal blue. She rests unmoving upon an old ornate wooden chair.     The woman once had a proper name, yet for more than two hundred years, she has borne a different mantle