Page 2 of Seasonal Fears

“But you will.”

“I will do what I must for Summer’s sake, and endure your company long as our fates demand.” She stands a little straighter, the malice not leaving her eyes. “Your reign will not be long.”

William thinks of the alchemist who came to him at the start of the crowning, the one who offered him victory and a measureless reign if only he would consider the needs of the newly formed American Alchemical Congress in his choices, in his guidance of the season that is his birthright. He turned the man down at the time, but the situation, it seems, has changed.

His reign will be eternal.

Runaway

CALENDAR SEASON: OCTOBER 9TH, 2005: AUTUMN, UNDER THE HUNTER’S MOON.

TWO HUNDRED AND SEVENTY-FIVE YEARS LATER.

Melanie isn’t feeling good again.

Harry’s mom says it’s because Melanie has something wrong with her heart, but Harry doesn’t see how that could be so. His grandma had something wrong with her heart, so she went to see the doctor and they gave her a machine called a pacemaker that fixed the thing that was wrong. Now she’s fine, even if she doesn’t like to run in the park with him when she comes to visit. Most adults don’t much like running, anyway. So if there’s something wrong with Melanie’s heart, she should be able to just go to the hospital and get herself her very own pacemaker, and then she’ll be all right again.

And Melanie goes to the hospital more often than just about anybody else in the whole world. Near as Harry can tell, she’s there almost every week. Sometimes she has to spend the whole weekend at the hospital, and not come home at all, and she can’t talk to him on the phone even. He doesn’t like it when that happens.

She missed two weeks of kindergarten last year, and when he went to her house, she wasn’t there, not ever. Just her dad sometimes, and some of her dad’s weird friends. All adults are at least a little bit weird. Melanie says it’s because they pick up weird like layers of stickers. Harry has a rock he puts cool stickers on when he gets them, and his parents let him because it means he’s not putting stickers on anything else. “It’s practical,” says his mom, and “It’s useful,” says his dad, and they leave his rock alone. It’s about three times as big now as it was when he got it, and that’s all because of stickers. So if weird is like stickers, he guesses it would make sense for adults to be weirder than kids.

Kids have their own kinds of weird. Harry knows that. Everyone’s weird in their own special way, and it’s sort of wonderful, because if everyone wasn’t weird, then he’d be the weird one, because he can’t really think of a world where he’s not weird. His family’s rich, for one thing, and he didn’t have anything to do with that, but it still means sometimes he doesn’t think about things the other kids have to think about all the time, like when he asked why Karen Nelson got free milk in the cafeteria and he had to bring quarters from home if he wanted a little wax carton for his own. His grandparents in Wisconsin live in a castle, for another thing, a real castle that was built on the other side of an ocean and then got moved over to America one piece at a time before the people who moved it put it back together like a house of Lego.

He loves going to visit his grandparents in their Lego house, even though his dad says it’s a monstrosity and a waste of money that would be better served by going into something called a college fund, for if he wants to do more school after all the main school is over. Harry doesn’t think that sounds like a good time, and anyway, the Lego house has a name, and it’s not “monstrosity.” It’s called “Castleview,” and he loves saying that, even though it is the castle, and you can’t view any castles when you’re there, not unless you’re standing in the front yard and looking up so far your neck hurts. It sounds like something out of the Up-and-Under, something out of a fairy story, and in fairy stories no one ever has to miss school because there’s something wrong with their heart.

In fairy stories you might get turned to stone, or fall down a hole and wind up in a whole different world, or have a lady made of smoke reach into your chest and turn your heart into an ember and whisk it away before you can blink, but you don’t have to get a pacemaker, and you don’t have to stay inside all the time, and you don’t scare your friends the way Melanie’s been scaring him.

That’s the other thing that makes Harry weird: he has a best friend, and her name is Melanie, and he doesn’t care if girls have cooties, because if Melanie has cooties, he wants to have them too. He wants her cooties all over him like ants at a picnic. He’s going to marry her someday, when they’re both grown up and old enough. Maybe twelve. Twelve seems like it’s probably old enough to get married.

But not if she never comes outside again.

His family’s rich and he’s seven years old and these two things can occasionally combine in ways no one bothers to think through. “A boy should have a bicycle,” his father said, and bought Harry the nicest bike the shop had, ideal for a boy his age who had an interest in long bike rides and riding off-trail, neither of which Harry has ever shown a strong inclination toward. “His best friend is a sick girl who lives a mile away, he’ll have to ask for a ride if he wants to go see her, and then we can tell him she needs her rest,” thought his mother, and she would have been right if he’d been on foot, but he isn’t on foot.

He has an excellent bicycle.

If anyone takes note of the small boy pedaling his way through the tree-lined streets of suburban Portland, they don’t interfere with him. Small boys ride their bikes, and small boys have friends, and if they don’t recognize this small boy, presumably he’s a friend of one of the local kids. Surely no parents would have misplaced their child so comprehensively as to let him ride his bike alone through the city. Surely he’s someone else’s problem.

Harry rides the wave of being someone else’s problem all the way to Melanie’s house, where her father is parked in the driveway. He stops on the sidewalk almost a whole house down. He doesn’t know if he likes Dr. Cosgrove.

For one thing, he makes everyone call him “doctor” all the time, but he never wears a white coat like the doctors on television or the ones who helped Grandma with her pacemaker. He mostly wears suits and ties, and an expression like he’s thinking about how fun it would be to strangle baby bunnies with his bare hands. It only goes away when he’s looking at Melanie, and Harry doesn’t like the way he does that, either.

Dr. Cosgrove looks at Melanie the way Harry’s father looked at Harry’s bike when they brought it home from the bike shop. Proud and sort of … owner-y, like it was something he’d made, not just something he’d paid for. The first time Harry hears the word “proprietary,” he’ll think of Melanie’s father and not be able to articulate quite why.

He knows Dr. Cosgrove loves his daughter, and Melanie loves her father. But there’s something wrong between them, something Harry can’t name or explain, no matter how hard he tries. It’s not fair, the way things are, and he knows that if he rings the bell, Dr. Cosgrove won’t let him in.

For the most part, Harry is a good kid, unspoiled by his parents’ wealth. Sometimes, though, believing that everything is replaceable can make him careless. Maybe that’s why he props his bike against the hedge and leaves it there as he heads down the sidewalk on foot, reasoning that if Dr. Cosgrove looks out the window and sees him, he’ll assume it’s some other little blond boy out for a walk. He’s smart enough to know he’s not supposed to be this far from home without an adult. He just doesn’t care.

Once he’s past the house, Harry stops strolling nonchalantly and bolts into the yard, heading for the oak tree outside Melanie’s window. It’s perfect for climbing, with its broad, twisting branches, and he’s seen Melanie climb it a dozen times during play dates when her father was inside and couldn’t tell her she was too fragile for something like that.

Harry suspects Melanie isn’t fragile at all. He thinks she’s probably a lot stronger than anyone, especially her father, is ever going to give her credit for being, and he wishes there were a way he could make her understand that. Maybe when they’re grown-up and married. Maybe when they’re twelve.

Harry grabs the highest branch he can reach and pulls himself into the tree, not realizing as he climbs that the window he’s passing belongs to Dr. Cosgrove’s office, or that Melanie’s father is there on his phone until he hears the man’s voice drifting through the barely cracked window. He freezes, held in place by the snake-charmer’s song of an adult voice. He knows he’s not supposed to be here. He can’t move.

“Of course I’m keeping you updated on her progress. You know I’m grateful for everything you’ve done for me. Without access to Asphodel’s research—Yes, sir.” There is a long and terrible pause. “Yes, sir. I know how much faith you’ve put in me by even allowing this attempt, and I feel I’ve paid enough to prove my loyalty. Please, allow me to continue my work. It shouldn’t take too much longer before we know if both are capable of reaching maturity, or if one will have to be culled to rebuild the other.”

The second pause is shorter, broken by the sound of Dr. Cosgrove’s uproarious laughter. It doesn’t sound like he’s heard something funny. It’s more like the kind of laughter that comes from something terribly frightening, the way Harry laughed the time one of his babysitters put on a movie where a man in a mask ran around killing people and there had been so much blood, blood everywhere, and it had been like something out of a terrible dream, something dark and awful and unfair. That’s how Dr. Cosgrove is laughing now.

Harry can’t move. He’s never heard an adult make such a terrible sound, not ever in his life. Not even his dad when the hospital called to say that Grandma was going to need a pacemaker, and he had cried and cried and cried.