Fear Her Wrath II: Crucible of Glass

Chapter 8

"You getting up for lunch, Maggie?"

That was my dad. I felt around in the sheets for my phone and held it close to my face to check the time. 1:31. In the afternoon. Even for a 15-year-old, that was pushing it. Just because Dad knew that I sometimes stayed out to ungodly hours doing who-knows-what didn't mean he needed to be reminded of it by my irresponsible sleeping habits. Still, I was exhausted. For some reason, nine hours of sleep seems like nowhere near enough for a superhero.

"Do I have to?" I mumbled, pressing my face back into my pillow.

"No," he said gently. "But there's something in the kitchen I'd hate for you to miss out on."

Hmph. I knew this trick. He was conjuring me by the power of grilled cheese, and it was working.

"Fine," I groaned. "I'm... I'm getting up. Really."

I counted down from ten, then pushed myself up on my elbows and crawled out of bed. There was always a fleeting moment of panic as I checked my room to make sure I really had remembered to hide my costume and gear the night before, but I was safe. I took a quick shower in our only bathroom and dried my hair as best I could. I was sitting at the small, round table in our living room just as Dad set a steaming grilled cheese sandwich on the plate in front of me. He turned on the radio and sat down across from me, and for a few minutes we both unceremoniously stuffed our faces.

(Dad and I both love grilled cheese.)

My dad is basically the only family I have. I don't think I've mentioned that before. I used to wonder why my cousins always kept their distance when holidays rolled around, but about a year ago, everything became clear. I think Dad figured it was too late to mend all the bridges Mom had burned. He was about 40 the year I started high school, working as an underpaid and overworked doctor at a not-for-profit hospital in Brand Hill. As you can probably tell, he had a bit of a martyr complex, and it rubbed off on me.

His hair was slowly turning gray, but you could still see its original reddish-brown color. He wasn't as thin as when we first moved to Joplin Heights about a year ago, when the stress of the divorce kept him from eating most days, but he was still a little scrawny. We both wore glasses, but his were rectangular and made him look like an English professor who couldn't quite make tenure. You could tell things were busy at the hospital when he started to grow out a scraggly goatee.

It wasn't a bad look, just... a "Dad" look. Mom had always been the more fashion-conscious of the two of them. I don't think you're supposed to have an opinion on whether your dad is handsome, but I would have smacked anyone who said otherwise.

Anyways.

Until I put on a mask and cape and started calling myself "Nightwrath," I think Dad was the person I trusted most in the world. Even now, it hurt whenever I had to lie to him—which was basically every day of my life at this point. Whatever Dad imagined I had been doing when I crept back into the apartment at 4:00 a.m., it couldn't be half as bad as what I was actually up to. It was the classic superhero's dilemma: the person who cares about you the most is also the most likely to get in the way of you risking your life. So, I let him imagine that I was out partying. I figured that was less scary than knowing I was out fighting mafiosi.

"I heard Simon's trial starts next week," said Dad off-handedly.

I scowled. He was about to try and talk me out of going again. The half-eaten sandwich on my plate was starting to look like a bribe, but I wasn't about to stop eating it just because of that.

"Yeah," I said, pretending to be only mildly interested. "He told me that when I saw him a couple days ago."

"Are you still planning on going?"