Daughter of Zeus ✔

13

What was that smell? Ada hovered in the in-between of sleep. She could smell and hear, but she wasn't willing to open her eyes to the morning yet. There was the faint aroma of burnt hair, which was confusing. August didn't use a hair straightener, though sometimes she did. Maybe he was cooking breakfast, but he was hardly the one to burn food. Burning food was, again, her territory.

Ugh. To figure out the source of the stench, she needed to open her eyes. But she was too tired. Eleven p.m. had slipped into one a.m. because she had stayed up reading. And one a.m. at her age felt like four a.m. She couldn't help staying up. Her bad habit developed from teaching. Except the classes had become more dependent on student and screen interactions, making observers out of teachers. The students talked to her when their tech was glitching, or when they didn't understand a prompt presented by the interface. Basically, she was babysitting a group of cattle, waiting to remind them to move on to their next class. She wasn't bitter, just disappointed at what her career evolved into.

At least August was thoughtful enough to get up and make her breakfast. Ada stretched. As she reached out, she felt his arm. Oh. He was still asleep. Then what was the smell?

"Wake up," she murmured.

He didn't move. She nudged him.

"Do you smell that?"

He failed to tell her what he did or didn't smell. August had never been a morning person. Most of the time, she had to come back into their bedroom, warning him on multiple occasions when he'd be late for work.

"Get up!" She punctuated her words with a shove, a hard one, which rolled him onto his side.

The charred hair smell clogged her nostrils. She wrinkled her nose then opened her eyes. August's back was rippled with strips of burnt flesh. His skin was scorched black as if he'd been lashed with a fiery whip.

Horror-struck, she gasped. Where had the heat source come from? With trembling hands, she felt around the sheets, the pillows, but they were cool to the touch. A nightmare. August's condition amounted to nothing more than a nightmare. Yes. Any moment, she would wake up, for real this time, and bury the dream under a large cup of coffee.

She pinched her thigh, and when sharp pain followed, she accepted the reality of what was happening.

"August!" her voice cracked.

She couldn't tell if he was moving. It was hard to see through her thick veil of tears.

Sobbing, she shook him, harder and harder, desperate for a response from him. Finally, Ada turned her husband's body over a second time. Scorch marks lined the rim of his mouth. Where his blue eyes should have been were the equivalent of dried up prunes. She screamed.

And screamed. A slap to the face cut her off. Though the slap barely hurt, she planned to retaliate, until she opened her eyes. The first person she saw was Darcy, watching her with revulsion. Phennell stood, eyebrows together. Kressick—ha, Grandpa—waited in front of her. And Moretz... God, he was holding her sweaty hand as if he cared.

Ada ripped away from her father's touch. From the gasp, her action offended Darcy. Meh. Ada was too groggy to pretend consideration. Moretz moved away from her, and Kressick was the only one to stay by her side.

"Are you all right?"

He laid a hand to her sweaty forehead, which she knocked away.

The dream lingered on, and she felt stuck inside of the memory. Ada took a deep breath.

"I'm fine," she said. "Did you slap me?"

Kressick nodded.

Drum beats sounded in her head, and she struggled to stay awake. Kressick's slap stung minimally. She was confused as to why it'd been needed.

"What happened?"

"You fainted."

"I never faint."

He tsked. "You thought you would never plan a murder, and look at how that turned out."

Kressick gestured at Moretz. He limped away from them, and she held in a smile.

She imagined him writhing on the floor as she fried his organs. For an instant, she raised a hand and contemplated doing just that. Oddly, the urge to actually commit those thoughts to action made her nauseous. Ada's hand fell back to her side.

Darcy and Phennell stood together in an opposite corner of the room, whispering to one another. Moretz trudged over to them, covering his injured arm with his hand. Their whispers ceased.

"Don't worry. They didn't hear me," Kressick assured her.

From the way her sister and faux brother ignored her, he was right. His witticism pulled a half-smile, half grimace from Ada.

"What kind of grandfather are you?"

"The kind who occasionally stalks his grandchildren."

"That's not funny," she said, even as she flashed another half-grimace smile.

"Never claimed to be. Now, let's go have dinner."

Ada was too tired to argue how ridiculous that prospect sounded. Kressick helped her up.

She cupped her cheek. "Hurts."

"A scrape from when you fell. Nothing a good meal can't fix."