Page 11 of Seasonal Fears

“It’s February,” he says. “I know it’s warm, but the month still stands, and the moon still shines.”

“And we’re still tidal creatures all.”

“Yes. It will be a Jack Frost that comes for her, if anyone does.”

Of the natural manifestations, the interstitials have always been the hardest to prove. The Congress knows they exist, because the literature is there, and because Monroe is so damned fond of exiling the ones that displease him, but they are so shallowly tied to their living seasons that they might as well be ordinary people with a little extra tolerance for hot or cold. The Congress has taken several of them apart, and learned nothing useful of the art of seeing them coming. Despite their ordinary natures, they are remarkably difficult to contain.

Roland doesn’t know how to contain them, but he knows how to kill them. They’ve been coming for Melanie for the last ten years, one a year, like clockwork. And he’s been doing what any good father would do, and destroying them before they can get to her. Her medication doesn’t just keep her heart in tempo. It keeps her distinct from the season that seeks to steal her from him, the one he connected her to in the first place, and the Winter has been getting desperate. He still hasn’t rebuilt his defenses after the last one to make the attempt.

If a Jack Frost comes for Melanie tonight, he’ll have no way to stop it.

It’s an alarming thought, but he can hear her moving in her bedroom above him; whatever brought her home early, it can’t have been that bad, and there’s no way both she and Harry could be candidates without their noticing something wrong. The crowns haven’t passed in centuries, but there are older accounts, and Roland knows something of the shape of this. Melanie would feel it instinctively if she were under consideration, and she knows so little about what she is, what she has been crafted to be, that she’d come to him if she felt like anything was wrong.

Roland Cosgrove doesn’t consider himself a bad man, just a scientist who has done a few questionable things—even now his mind shies away from the word “unforgivable”—in the pursuit of knowledge. He has always done his best to be a good father to the girl he made. But he doesn’t understand what it is to be a seventeen-year-old girl kept under lock and key and suffering from a medical condition that will kill her before she sees adulthood.

The thought that she might keep things from him has somehow never occurred to him, even though she’s been going in and out of her bedroom window for years to avoid interrogation. He, like all men in positions of power, is intentionally unaware of his own biases, and will not see that he has created a culture of secrecy in which telling him that she suffers will only bring more suffering.

“If they come for her, I’ll know,” he says, with calm and absolute assurance, and only the fact that he has no idea how wrong he is keeps the lie from his voice.

Upstairs, silence falls as Melanie climbs onto her bed and stops moving around for the moment. Roland sighs and turns his attention fully back to the phone call. The crown is passed, but not to her. Never to her.

She was never really in the running.

Secrets and Stories

CALENDAR SEASON: FEBRUARY 11TH, 2017: WINTER, UNDER THE WORM MOON.

Melanie climbs into her bed, a ridiculous canopied confection of pink velvet and billowing lace that she outgrew years ago but hasn’t been allowed to replace. The heavy maple posts conceal and support the hooks and attachment points for her IVs and monitors, which she has required more often than she likes to consider; she sleeps here almost as safely as she does in the hospital. Her father has poured thousands of dollars into having this bed rebuilt and retrofitted, equipped with a mattress that can be raised and lowered without compromising the frame, turned into the perfect place for his precious angel to die. She can’t imagine how much engineering innovation went into her bed. She doesn’t want to.

She hates it almost as much as she hates the pill bottles on her nightstand (safely contained within the circle of the homecoming tiara), waiting for the time when they’ll be needed, whether it be an emergency or the predictable beeping of her phone alarm. She groans and flops backward, head hitting the pillow with the familiar feel of memory foam compressing, everything calibrated for her comfort, her confinement. This bed has been her coffin for years, and she’s been buried alive over and over again.

Her legs ache pleasantly with the memory of motion, reminding her that her flight from the field really happened. It wasn’t a particularly lovely dream. She ran today, really ran, and she isn’t short of breath or light-headed at all. For a little while, she got to feel normal, and while she knows she shouldn’t push herself, there’s nothing she wants to do more.

Not pushing herself has swallowed most of her teens, a great and baleful beast whose belly is never full, that takes and takes and takes everything it can wrap its coils around. First it took her freedom of movement, locking her away from the world with more and more regularity. Then it took her art, making it harder and harder for her to sit up long enough to paint, much less carry her supplies anywhere farther away than her desk. It’s tried to take Harry, but Harry fights back, and as long as he has the strength to fight, she supposes he’ll be able to hold on.

That’s good. If not pushing herself took everything, she’s not sure she’d survive.

She wants to run around the room, wants to jump back out of this bed and run laps around the house before her heartbeat returns to drag her down, to jump and somersault and cheer and cheer and cheer. She doesn’t do any of those things. Instead, she closes her eyes and breathes in the memory of running, of Harry waking up when she thought she’d somehow lost him, of living, at least for a little while, the way she wants to live. The way she would live, if her heart allowed it.

She has several hours and two alarms before she needs to get ready for the dance, step into her dress and paint her face to look like she’s actually alive. She has time to think about what happened today, to decide how she wants to feel about it, what, if anything, she wants to do.

She doesn’t notice when sleep looms up and takes her, pulling her down into the darkness behind her own eyelids. She only dreams.

To a normal girl, Melanie’s dreams might seem boring, mundane, limited. She dreams of walking through a frozen wood, stepping so lightly atop the ice-crusted snow that the ice never cracks. Her feet skate along the surface, leaving it unblemished behind her. She walks, and the wood spreads its branches wide to meet her, and the cold doesn’t touch her, and her chest doesn’t hurt. She has never wanted anything more.

She has dreamt this wood over and over again, not every night, but most nights, for most of her life. It is as familiar as any part of her waking world, and as welcome. It isn’t warm, but neither is she, and the cold doesn’t reach her here, not even to the pale degree it does in the waking world. It may seem odd to dream of walking barefoot through the snow and not feeling the cold like it’s the best thing imaginable, but it’s life as she knows it, and some things aren’t worth questioning. Some things never have been.

She’s never been out of the country or seen the ocean, never climbed a mountain or spent more than a week’s worth of nights away from home that weren’t in the hospital. She has the wood in her dreams, and the bed in her waking world, and that’s all.

She walks through the wood, snow underfoot and black trees all around her, and it’s the landscape she was made for, the place where she fits in perfectly, perfectly designed to be part of this world. It’s welcoming and, in its own way, to her, warm. She can smell flowers on the breeze.

So she keeps walking, following the scent of blooming jonquils and sun-warmed grass, until she comes to the end of the wood. Where the trees end, winter ends too. There is no snow past the shade of the branches, no ice past what surrounds her. Instead, there is a wide and sun-bathed clearing, blanketed with grass and tiny, blooming flowers. On the other side is another wood, this one lush and green and ripe with summer fruits.

And there, at the center of the clearing, is Harry. She stops for a moment in her dream, looking at him with an open longing that she rarely allows herself in the waking world.

He’s not the prettiest boy in school, not the one who steals people’s breath away or makes them think he should be on television, but he’s hers, and that makes him better than all the movie stars and all the influencers in the world. He’s naturally tan, a color that only deepens over the summer, when he’s outside more often than in unless he’s sitting with her in the approved safety of her bedroom. She may be the only girl in school whose father insists she stay in her room with a boy, rather than forbidding her to have one up there alone.

Environment and genetics have conspired to keep his hair golden long past the point when most of the boys in their grade have gone brown, and she’s always liked that, the contrast they make when they go out together, the balance of it all. His eyes are as blue as hers, but the shade is altogether different: while her eyes are almost exactly the color of a glacial surface, so bright and pale that her father was concerned about her vision when she was younger, his are the deep and beautiful blue of the summer sky.