The aroma of cinnamon and vanilla drifted through the kitchen.
Mere grabbed plates and forks. Fifi stared at her own hands, flexing each finger with slow, deliberate concentration.
"You sure you're okay?" I asked.
She chewed on it for a while, then nodded. "It's just, when I woke up, I thought it wasn't a dream. It was so real. The heat, the voice, the claws. I could feel them, at least for a minute."
"We could get a book on lucid dreaming, see if you can learn to guide your dreams," Mere offered.
Fifi looked up, eyes wide in the kitchen glare. "I'venever had anything like that before. Usually it's just weird sounds, or bad memories, or that one time I dreamed about failing a chemistry test naked."
Mere snickered.
"But this was different. Like maybe I'm possessed by the world's lamest dragon or something." She thumped Huey's head gently. "At least I didn't set the dog on fire."
He inched closer to the table.
We ate French toast silently, three zombies and a canine garbage disposal. The food worked better than the breathing exercises. Everyone seemed steadier after eating.
Fifi's color was returning, but she kept clutching the dog.
When the plates were cleared, I guided the girls into the living room. Fifi refused to go upstairs, but she stretched out on the couch instead, arms wrapped around the world's bravest lapdog. Mere sprawled on the other end, flipping through her phone.
I waited until their breathing evened out before shutting off the lights.
But in the dark, I couldn't stop replaying Fifi's words.
Wake up, little spark.
I tried to file it under "justanother nightmare," but it wouldn't go away. Nothing ever just happened by accident in our lives.
I'd keep watch tonight. Just in case round two decided to show up.
And in the morning, I'd order a new bed frame.
Tash
If there'sone thing worse than waking up early to beat the Knoxville traffic, it's driving all the way there with the hope of a breakthrough only to find yourself right back where you started, hunched over water samples, hoping your nose isn't just buried in data for nothing.
I'd moved my girls halfway across East Tennessee, signed a lease with a view of the southern mountains, and still, some of my days felt like a bad rerun. Punch in, collect coffee-stained printouts, and wait for the lab machines to groan to life while the ductwork rattled overhead. All so I could stare at creek water under fluorescent lights.
Today's haul was lined up in a row on the bench, each vial labeled meticulously with date, time, coordinates,and a code only I understood. The samples from the field site at the edge of the SkyArc construction project had looked suspicious from the start. The water right under the best new lanes always did. My field book still smelled faintly of that slick coal-tar stench and the peppery bitterness of brine. I'd worn gloves, of course, but the smell had a way of sticking.
I had three sets of standards, four control blanks, and enough duplicates to make the techs down the hall whisper that I overdid it. Guilty. I'd even gone back to the creek on Sunday to pull fresh grabs from the same location, just to be sure. Data survived on certainty, not gut feelings.
The screen flashed its results in neat columns, blue font for normal, angry red whenever the readings jumped. Today, they screamed.
First, the chloride. One hundred and seventy milligrams per liter. Almost six times the background in the reference stream. Conductance numbers were just as ugly. Off the charts, with a clear calcium-magnesium dominance in the cation panel. The pH was steady, right where it should be. For a half second, I let myself hope that it meant something, but then I saw the TSS, total suspended solids, clocking in at over 200 mg/L. Not a typo. So much for good news.
Polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons? Up there, everyfraction of a part per billion spelled trouble. Not just a seasonal bump, either, it was the classic fingerprint of coal-tar sealants. Probably brand-new, barely set. The brine run-off was textbook, too. Chloride spikes paired with that weirdly high TSS and all those alkaline metals. Nothing about it happened by accident.
I sat back and exhaled hard through my teeth. I'd seen a lot of "questionable" land management, but somebody here was gunning for the record.
I reran the tests on all the duplicates, not because I expected the machine to lie, but because when it came time to show this data to someone official, backups helped. Every time, the numbers matched. I double-checked the instrument logs, even called up a past file from last year's control site, just to be sure the calibration hadn't wandered.
No luck. The data was ugly and getting uglier.
I was making copious notes, writing out a play-by-play, almost like I was prepping my own crime scene report, when a shadow blocked the light near my shoulder.
