Page 100 of Seasonal Fears

Melanie glares at him. “What the fuck, Trevor? You decided you didn’t like him because of some stupid fight you had in the sixth grade, and so you went with my dead sister over your own teammate?”

“You said you were my friend,” says Harry. “You said we were cool. I asked you and you said we were cool.”

“Yeah, well, you’re not the only one who can lie,” snaps Trevor. “And it wasn’t sixth grade. It was eighth grade. Before the Spring Fling dance. Remember now?”

“No,” says Melanie flatly. Harry, on the other hand, stares at Trevor in slowly dawning comprehension, followed almost immediately by horrified dismay.

“Really, dude? Really? You left me unprepared for the coronation because I told you I was going to ask Mel to the dance? We’d been going out for years. Everyone knew she was my girl! The teachers knew!”

“Only because you were the first one to ask for her homework when she was out sick,” snaps Trevor. “If you’d given the rest of us half a chance—”

“You would have what? Convinced a Winter girl that someone was better for her than the Summer boy she’d been in love with since she was a kid? Come on, man. You could have gotten me killed. You could have gotten Mel killed. That was bad fucking form.”

“I knew about Aven,” says Trevor, ignoring Harry’s words. “The Corn Jenny who trained me, she knew about the Cosgrove experiment, warned me to stay well clear of their house. ‘There’s nothing we can do until she wakes up, and every Jack Frost who goes there disappears.’ That’s what she said. She told me not to worry, she’d handle the sleeping princess if she ever got the chance to open her eyes, and I could have the golden boy. Said that was how the seasons ‘settled.’ But I didn’t want you.” His smile is slow and cruel. “I didn’t want to stand in your shadow, Mr. Quarterback, perfect little rich boy with the perfect life and the perfect girlfriend and everything. There was never going to be a coronation. I’d just be your weird sidekick for our entire lives.”

Harry spreads his arms, indicating the impossible landscape around them, the endless wall, the shadow of the Impossible City. “Never going to be a coronation, huh? Got any more great predictions about the future, Nostradamus?”

“I hope you like head injuries,” says Trevor, smirking, just before the rock Aven has scrounged up from somewhere hits Harry in the temple and he goes down again, crumpled in the dirt.

Melanie steps forward, the air around her beginning to plummet in temperature, moving fast toward Arctic. Her eyes are icing over, a manifestation of the amount of cold she’s yanking into the world, pulling it from … somewhere else, from wherever it is Winter lives when it isn’t walking in the world. The other candidates, who have been watching this little drama with the disinterested eyes of athletes studying the competition before their first match, fall back, and a boy with snowflake patterns in his irises mutters, “I can’t do that,” in the wounded tone of someone who has just seen the year’s new hot toy whisked away by an uncaring parent.

Melanie keeps moving toward Trevor, and if she even realizes that this leaves Harry unguarded on the ground, she doesn’t pause or acknowledge it. The part of her that cares about other people is very far away right now. She’s focused entirely on the cause of her anger, even if she doesn’t understand what that anger means right now. The Melanie who understands what she’s feeling and why is not currently in control.

Harry groans and rolls over, narrowly avoiding Aven’s foot as it comes crashing down on the spot where his head was just resting. He stares up at her and she smirks down at him, at least until he grabs her leg and jerks her forward, bringing her crashing to ground level with him. She scrabbles in the mud, trying to recover her rock, and he hammers a fist into her solar plexus, knocking the air out of her.

He’s going to have nightmares about this moment forever, maybe longer than he has nightmares about anything else, the still-nameless boy in the motel room, Misty and her cloud of biting, stinging smoke, the sight of Mel surrounded by a delicate snowstorm of her own making, none of them are as terrible as looking into the face of a girl who looks exactly like the woman he loves most in all the world and seeing nothing but wild loathing reflected there. She hates him. She doesn’t even know him, but she hates him, because in her eyes, he’s the one who took Melanie away from her.

Not their father, who somehow kept Aven alive and isolated for all these years, cut off from the people who should have been her foundation and family. Not Trevor, for leading her here and filling her head with who knows what nonsense about her sister and her sister’s Summer boy, who exists to challenge her in a very concrete and personal way. Harry. Somehow, he gets to be the only one she hates. Maybe because in her eyes, he’s already challenged her once and won, when he stole Melanie’s affection.

As if Mel could ever have belonged to a sister she thought was dead before she ever even met him. Before she ever even met herself.

Aven lunges for him again. He brings his knee up, slamming it into her stomach and knocking her away. Feeling around behind his head, he finds the rock she threw at him. Mel, I’m sorry, he thinks, and pegs it at Aven’s forehead with all the strength and accuracy he’s built up over four years of high school football, and seven years of rec league football before that. It hits her squarely between her eyes, which cross, like she’s trying to look at her own nose. Then she goes down in a heap, hard, and Harry scrabbles away from her before picking himself up off the ground.

All this time, Melanie has been advancing on Trevor, who at least has the sense to back away, hands raised defensively. When she raises her own hands to strike, they leave trails of freezing vapor in the air, so cold that Harry knows her touch will burn the boy they both went to school with, the boy who is, after all, only a Summer Ascendant and not a Summer Incarnate.

Trevor hates him. More than he ever understood. The fury over “losing” Mel, when she was never his to lose, has grown deep and poisonous, putting roots down well below the surface. And none of that matters, because they’re still teammates, and teammates don’t let each other die of frostbite. Harry jerks to his feet, nearly blacking out as his injured head reels and the world spins around him, then catches his balance and lunges after Mel, arms outstretched to grab her and pull her back.

It hurts when he clamps his hands around her upper arms, cold lancing into his fingers and up his own arms until it hits his shoulders. She snarls and struggles against him, a wild thing restrained. “Mel, Mel, hush,” he says, lips close to her ear, pulling her back against his chest and holding her there. “Mel, it’s me.”

She struggles a little more, eyes on Trevor. Harry kisses the top of her head, lips going briefly numb from the chill, then looks to Trevor, his own eyes narrowing.

“Dude, uncool,” he says. “You could have made this all so much easier, and you went with making it harder because Mel didn’t want to go to a stupid dance with you?” They hadn’t even been real dates back in middle school, much as they’d felt like it, ripe with newly released hormones and bright with the lack of other experiences to compare them to. They’d just been an excuse to put on clothes that were slightly nicer than usual—not much of a treat for a kid—and hang out together in the cafeteria, with all the tables folded up and stacked against the walls like that would somehow be enough to make them disappear. Harry and Melanie had been together in their innocent, childish way before that dance, and if Harry had been a more violent child, he would probably have given Trevor a good reason to hate him long ago. But he’s never been the sort to settle conflicts with his fists, and he doesn’t like that this situation is forcing him to start now.

It’s not fair.

Melanie struggles again, and Trevor takes another step back.

“You had everything,” he accuses. “Money, the football team, even a girl who was always way too good for you. And then the Summer chose me and the other Corn Jenny found me and taught me what that meant. She promised me when I met my Summer I would know, and I’d be able to serve. I’d be able to do something glorious and important, even if there was no coronation. The incarnates serve the seasons even when they never get to manifest, and I was going to support my Summer. But then one day I turned around and it was you.”

His lip twists. He looks so disgusted that Harry nearly recoils, his grip on Melanie slipping momentarily. She doesn’t break away, only squirms and remains against him, apparently giving up on the idea of escape. That’s something, anyway. He’s not going to lose her.

“You and Melanie were out by the swings, and I could see how much you wanted to run, but you weren’t running, because she couldn’t. You were just sitting in the grass, leaning on your hands, looking at her like she was a cake you wanted to eat and a bug you wanted to squash at the same time.” Trevor spits every word with focused fury. This is something he’s been carrying for a long, long time. “You resented her. She was sweet and beautiful and perfect and she cared about you even when you were your stupid self, and you resented her for being sick. You made her feel even worse, because all her illness meant was you not getting to do exactly what you wanted, exactly when you wanted to do it.”

“That’s not how I remember things,” says Harry carefully. Melanie isn’t struggling now, but she’s still leaning against him, her shoulders pressed to his chest, letting him maintain the pretense that he’s holding her against her will. “The only time I remember sitting with her by the swings was right after the first time she had open-heart surgery. They cut her open and they did things to her insides, and her father wouldn’t let me come see her. Said I was too young to see her that way, too young to understand how important it was for me to do exactly what the doctors said and follow all their rules, even if I didn’t like them. If I resented anyone, it was her father, and the doctors, and the people who were keeping us apart.” Mel wasn’t too young to cut open. He shouldn’t have been too young to be with her when she was alone and scared in a strange place, and maybe hurting.

He’d been sitting with her because she was back at school and he was so overwhelmed with being able to be near her again that the thought of getting up and going off on his own had been impossible. Most of the time, he spent his recess racing around like the wild thing he was, and if she was feeling well enough, she did the same. They might have become attached to each other earlier and more intensely than was normal, but they were still kids. Girls still had cooties, boys were still icky, all the little prejudices and gender roles of the playground had still reached the two of them, but the lure of each other’s company had been strong enough to let them come back together every time. He’d been with her because he’d been without her longer than he could stand to be, and if he’d looked resentful, it was aimed at the adults who’d worked so hard to keep them apart, not at Mel, who had done nothing wrong.

“I stayed with her because I loved her,” says Harry, and that’s exactly right, that’s exactly true, that’s exactly why he did the things he did, made the choices he made. “I still love her, and that’s why I’m staying with her now, and why I’m not letting her kill your ass. We’ve both accepted that we have to fight the other candidates—we can’t avoid it, and it wouldn’t matter if we could. Our dice have been rolled, our fates are set. Attendants, though … you can still go and have a normal life. You can walk away from this. She’d blame herself forever if she killed you.”