Page 26 of Seasonal Fears

“Need for what?” he asks.

“You’re not this stupid,” says Jack. She leans forward, head between the seats, and looks at him. “I know you like to play the fool, class clown, that whole routine, but you’re not stupid. You never have been. Melanie died today. If her father gets his hands on her, it’s game over, and we’re not going to take the season, and you won’t be coronated, and if you don’t get coronated, you die too.”

“How does that work, exactly? I want you to break this down like a football play. Use the simplest words you can. And no, Mel, we’re not going back to my place. There’s stuff there I could use, but if we’re running away from home like assholes, I’m not putting my folks into the position of being the last people who see us alive. That’s the sort of thing that gets you on the evening news, and not in the good way.”

In the backseat, Jack puts her hand over her face and sighs. This would be so much easier if Harry’s Corn Jenny had shown up when she was supposed to. He needs a guide. She’s not equipped to talk to him. Melanie is naturally inclined to listen to her, to trust her as a friend or at least as not an enemy. Jack could no more betray the incarnate Winter than she could cut off her own hand without flinching. She could betray Harry, though. She’s heard stories of ascendants who’ve done just that, decided their incarnate was yoked to the wrong partner and arranged to have someone removed from the competition in order to get them a better one.

But all those stories are from other lands, or from centuries ago, when North America still understood how to conduct a coronation. She’s the latest in a three-hundred-year line of ascendants desperate to see things change, and some of the rules have been muddled or forgotten in the interim.

Jack is the only person in this car who understands what’s happening, and she has no idea what she’s doing.

“You play football, right?” she asks, a little desperately. Harry nods. Keeping tabs on him has never been her job: her last year has been spent learning her own new role in the cosmos and studying one Melanie Cosgrove, in the hopes that maybe a coronation would happen during her lifetime. She never expected it to be this soon. None of them did.

For the last three hundred years, William Monroe has maintained an iron grip on the continent, forcing his counterpart into sleep and ignoring the damage this has done to the world. This was never going to happen. This was never going to be her job. Everyone who understands the system has known Melanie, while an ideal candidate from the outside, wasn’t going to live long enough for a coronation to be called. It simply wasn’t possible.

And now here she is, and here they are, and this is happening. Jack has to deal with it.

“In football, every player has a role to play, right?” Harry nods again, and Jack begins relaxing into the metaphor, just a little. “Imagine if you played football with one big team that you split down the middle to represent the opposing sides, and that was how a normal game happened. That’s you and Melanie now.”

“What?” asks Harry, sounding almost alarmed. “We’re not on different teams. Melanie’s on my team.”

“Yes, it’s one big team that plays against itself sometimes. You and Melanie are trying out for the position of quarterback on the two halves of the same team. The team will do a better job if the two of you get along with each other, but it will work if you don’t. Just not smoothly or as well. You won’t win as much when you do play against other teams. You with me so far?”

“Not really, but sure,” says Harry sullenly. Melanie’s phone buzzes again. She looks at the screen, and makes a face.

Leaning across the car, she puts a hand on his arm. “Maybe drive,” she suggests gently, and Harry turns the engine on, pulls away from the curb, and starts to drive.

“Where are we going?” he asks.

“I don’t know,” she says, somewhat reluctantly. “If we can’t go back to your place and we can’t go to the school without my dad catching us, I don’t know.”

Harry has dreamt of this night since the day they handed him his learner’s permit and his father tossed him the keys to the car that was his birthday present. All he’s wanted to do that whole time, the quiet chanting need behind every action and every hour, has been to put Mel in his passenger seat and drive. Just drive, as far from parents and teachers and doctors and hospitals as he can, take her someplace where they can be happy and she can be healthy and they can have the life they’ve never been quite willing to risk planning together. It’s all he’s wanted, and he’s always known it wasn’t possible, that it wasn’t fair to even want it as much as he does. And now he’s doing it, on the word of a kid he doesn’t know and the evidence of a broken pulse oximeter.

Mel looks better than she has in ages, though, cheeks flushed under her foundation, which seems to stand out more now that there’s some actual color in her face, some sign that she’s actually alive under there. Her eyes are bright and she’s breathing easily, and while this could be one of those instances of someone who’s really unwell having a brief surge of apparent good health before they collapse, he’s been her best friend for most of their lives, and he knows what it looks like when she’s fighting off an episode. He doesn’t think she’s going to crash anytime soon.

It’s almost like he has her all the way, maybe for the first time. It’s almost like they’re normal people.

“To become one of the two quarterbacks, you had to try out though, right? You had to go through some sort of an audition process, to prove you were strong enough and fast enough and whatever else a quarterback needs to be enough to do the job. So you and Melanie, if you want to play those positions, you have to go through the trials. And then if you’re the best, you both get the place. But if either of you fails, since you went in together, neither of you gets to play.” Jack pauses. “I feel like this should be more formalized, somehow.”

“Ya think?” Harry shakes his head. “This is all deeply weird, and if I could find my girlfriend’s pulse, I’d put you out of the car.”

“Thank you,” says Melanie. “For not putting her out of the car. We need to understand what’s going on.” Then she grimaces. “And I need to maybe beat my phone to death with a brick. Do you have a brick in the car?”

“There’s a tire iron in the trunk, but until I know where we’re going, I don’t particularly want to stop driving,” says Harry.

“It might be easier to decide where we were going if we weren’t in the process of actively going there,” says Melanie.

“Yeah, but we’ll lose momentum and pick something that makes sense, and then our parents will find us,” says Harry.

Jack makes a small, amused noise. Melanie twists to look at her.

“Sorry,” she says. “The idea that the biggest thing you have to worry about right now is your parents finding you is just hilarious. It’s also not completely wrong. His parents are pretty harmless. Nice people, and it’s not their fault they got wrapped up in this. Your parents, on the other hand … hoo, boy.”

“My mother died when I was born,” says Melanie. “She had the same heart condition I do. Giving birth to me and my sister killed her.”

“I bet you hate the Star Wars prequel,” says Jack. “Didn’t you ever ask yourself how you can have a condition that hospitalizes you six times a year and requires you to take more drugs than a pharmacy, and have inherited it from your mother? Your heart is basically made of tape and twine. It should have stopped beating years before it did, but you had so much of the Winter stuffed in there that it kept going, because it didn’t know how to stop. How did your mother have the same condition and live long enough to get pregnant, much less carry twins to term?”

Melanie doesn’t answer. Harry knows she’s asked herself the same question, because she’s asked it of him, usually right after he’s said something about the future, when she’s fallen into the pit of blaming herself for her own impending death, and for not being strong enough to break up with him.