By the time Adeline is 13 years old and discovers she's a witch, she's already scared for her life.  

  Growing up on the hate of her parents was something she had learned to live with.  By the time she was 12, more than half of her birthdays had been forgotten in favor of getting drunk or doing something her parents deemed more worthy of their time.  She had never lived in a single town for more than four months, and instead of a house she had a trailer hitched to the back of her fathers dingy old pick up truck.  As soon as she didn't fit in the small crib her mother got from a thrift store anymore, she was immediately moved to the couch at the front of their trailer, completely separated from her parents.  At first, it had unnerved her- the fact that anyone could walk by and see her sleeping, or give one good hit to the door handle and walk into what counted as their living room.  But as she grew older and her powers started to show themselves, she was thankful for it.  

  She had never known her father to not be an angry man.  Harold was a construction worker, or so he said.  One who travelled around the country, happening to find a job wherever his group of  friends did, even though their fields of work were vastly different.  By the time Adeline learned that the chances of hunters getting a job in the same town as a construction worker every month for years are impossible, she's also learned not to ask questions.

  Her mother- Jennifer- somehow always managed to find an odd job in whatever shit hole, run-of-the-mill town they found themselves in.  Whether it was a nanny, a cleaner, a dog walker, or a grocery bagger, each one managed to be worse than the last.  And somehow, every single time, she managed to blow her paychecks on alcohol and clothes she couldn't afford.  

  While her parents had next to nothing in common, the one thing they shared were their views on outcasts.  Scum of the earth, freaks, and monsters, as they were most commonly referred to.  But witches were the worst.  Her father had always been spiteful and full of hate, but she never saw him as angry as she did when he was talking about witches.  Whores, sluts, devil worshippers... anything that went bad in life he somehow managed to blame on witches.  At some point in her life, though she can't remember when, witches became a term that encapsulated any woman he didn't approve of.  Women in politics, women running companies, women speaking up for what they thought was right... somehow they all managed to get hate from her father.  But again, nothing could ever compare to the hate she saw on his face when he talked about real witches.  

  She can still remember the shock of fear that coursed through her when her first power made itself known.  It was a cold winter night, and the trailers heat refused to work, and she had summoned a flame to her hand in an unconscious act of desperation for warmth.  After that, a new phenomenon would occur by her hand- the accidental resurrection of a dead spider, a flower bursting from her palm- like clockwork, almost one every year.  She tried her best to ignore them, aware of her parents hate that spreads over her every day, a painful reminder of the ever-present danger from her own flesh and blood.  

  The one thing relating to her powers that she didn't ignore, though, was the black cat that came scratching at the trailer door after her first experience with her powers.  Her parents only let her keep it to shut up her insistent begging and because it kept the mice in the trailer at bay.  Little did her parents know, sometimes it was the mouse.  Or a raven, or a snake, or whatever other form it could take in order to protect Adeline.  But mostly it was a cat, and she names her Melinoe, after the Greek goddess of ghosts she had learned about from a TV show.  

  She learns she's a witch when her fourth power comes in.  Up until that point, with each new power, she had hoped and prayed that it would be the last.  Being a psychic was better than being a witch, though not by much.  Psychics only ever have one, maybe two powers.  When she reaches two she prayed harder than she ever had that that's it.  But still, her third power appears, and syrup she can still hope.  It's obscenely rare and basically unheard of for a psychic to have three powers, but there were a few cases of it that she could find.  

  The night her fourth power comes in, she cries and sobs in the woods outside the trailer.  Not because that day was her thirteenth birthday and it had once again been completely forgotten, but because now there was no saving her.  There was no way on Earth she would make it out if her parents found out.  If she was just a psychic?  The worst case would probably be disownment, a few bruises, and living on the streets.  But she was way past that and she knew it.  Now... she didn't even want to consider what would happen.  She had enough bad feelings and suspicion towards her Dad's friends, and had heard enough of her father's yelling to know it wouldn't be good.  He believed the only way to deal with a witch was to kill her- something he made blatantly clear on the regular.  His friends and her mother held the same opinion, and thankfully they never cared enough about her to ask for her thoughts on the matter.  Not that she would have told them the truth, if they had.  

  So in consideration of all of that, she didn't want to be a witch.  She wanted the opposite.   But she quickly learned she had no choice in the matter.  Any attempts to squash down her powers and ignore the pulsing urge to use them were met with them backfiring.  Several small fires were started and many plants popped up on their own, all of it thankfully happening during the long hours her parents weren't at the trailer and she was supposed to be homeschooling herself.  Not that she didn't do that.  She was smart, and by the time she was eleven, she was reading at a high school level.  And with all the places they had lived, she discovered she had a knack for learning languages.  The only difference to her schooling after getting her powers was the additional lessons of control on top of her usual classes.  

  Thankfully, as soon as she turned fourteen, she started working- a camping gear shop in Wyoming, a coffee shop in Texas, a restaurant in Minnesota.... all things that got her money, which she then put into a bank account that her parents didn't know about.  And then she used that money to buy things that her parents also didn't know about- the first being a phone other than the one her parents had passed down, which they took and looked through every night.  After that, she started buying more books, mostly about outcasts and witches and history and spells.  

  Fortunately, the other thing that she got on her fourteenth birthday was another power.  It made itself known in the form of a dead woman crossing her path in the woods.  As it turns out, being able to see and communicate with ghosts isn't usually as scary as one would think.  It turned out to be especially helpful when the ghosts of psychics and witches started visiting her.  It was through them she learned spells and potions and how to use her powers.  It was thanks to them that by the time she turned fifteen, she had not only honed and basically mastered her craft, but also accepted her powers while simultaneously learning about more powers she had hidden away inside of her.  

  Unfortunately, by learning how to control her powers, it meant she was more susceptible to using them.  And for all the tricks she had gained on how to hide them from her parents, the one thing she couldn't hide from them was her concern for others.  This singular trait would turn out to be the one that uprooted her life entirely, in the parking lot of a highway-side hotel in Virginia.