Page 27 of Seasonal Fears

“The story he’s been telling you for your whole life hasn’t been true,” says Jack darkly. There’s a bitter viciousness in her tone that Harry appreciates, even shares. There have been times when he hated the man.

“Are you trying to say my mother’s alive?” asks Melanie.

“No. I’m sorry. Except for the part where even if she were alive, she’d still be the kind of person who married your father and agreed to his wild experimentation, and that means you’re better off without her in your life. But no, she’s not alive. She died when you were born.”

“So what was the point of—”

“She died because your father killed her. Between your birth and your sister’s, he drove a stake through her heart.”

Melanie doesn’t say anything. The silence grows, deepens, becomes so profound it fills the entire car, and Harry, who has made a life out of shattering uncomfortable silences, can’t take it anymore. “Mel’s mom was a vampire?” he asks.

“No,” scoffs Jack. “She was an alchemist. Which means she might as well have been a vampire—vampires are more honest. They at least tell people they’ve come to suck their blood and drain them dry. Alchemists pretend they’re doing the things they do because they want to make humanity better, but they mostly just make things better for alchemists and mess up the universe for everybody else. Sometimes they break it in ways we can’t even comprehend until they’re over. Like creating a thirty-year time loop that keeps rewinding and replaying the entire planet for centuries.”

Harry stares at her in the rearview mirror, mouth hanging open. “You’re serious.”

“Yes.”

“Mel’s mother was an … alchemist? Those aren’t real.”

“Neither are people so tied to the seasons that they stop qualifying as entirely human, and yet here we are, in a whole car full of them.” Jack shrugs. “We have to deal with what the world hands us, and not argue too much about whether or not it’s logical, or reasonable, or real. ‘Real’ is just a word people use to dismiss things they don’t want to work to understand.”

Harry resists the urge to take his hand off the wheel and rub his temples. He recognizes the road around them now, at least, and knows roughly where they’re heading: if he doesn’t turn the car around, they’re going to wind up at the botanical gardens. The gardens are technically closed at night, but really that just means they won’t have to pay to get inside: the visitor’s center and gift shop lock up, and any staffers still in the area to check on the center’s rehabbed birds will yell if they see people there when they aren’t supposed to be, but Harry grew up in this area. He knows how to avoid being seen. More, his parents are huge donors to the gardens, and if he identifies himself, he’ll be forgiven as being overly excited to spend a little private time with his girlfriend.

He’s not sure how anyone who sees them will justify Jack to themselves. Maybe they’ll assume Melanie’s babysitting and had to bring her charge along with her, and that will explain why he’s in a tuxedo and she’s in a sweatshirt. Or maybe he’s worrying too much. They’re kids. Adults never pay as much attention to what’s actually happening as they do to the fact that kids are doing things, kids are where they aren’t supposed to be, kids are disobeying. They could probably have a literal Frankenstein monster chasing them and the adults wouldn’t notice, if they were on the wrong side of a gate.

Yes, the botanical gardens will do nicely, he decides, and if the world shifts a little around them once a clear destination has been settled upon, well, he doesn’t know how to notice that yet. Eventually it will come as easy as breathing, but right here, right now, he can be forgiven for not paying full attention, for not understanding the consequences of his choices. He’s always been insulated from consequences by the reality of who his parents are—he isn’t as spoiled as he could have been, thanks to his utter devotion to a girl who money could never have been enough to save, but he’s still used to being able to buy his way out of almost anything—and this will be a learning experience for him.

He doesn’t particularly want a learning experience, but then, who ever does?

“So you’re saying Mel’s dad murdered her mother,” says Harry.

“I mean, yes, but that word isn’t sufficient for what he did,” says Jack. “He sacrificed her, and she was a willing sacrifice. They both worked for a man named James Reed, who was maybe the oldest alchemist in North America, and was made in a lab by a woman named Asphodel Baker.”

“This is ridiculous,” says Melanie.

“She wanted someone who could be her hands while she did something really big and really stupid for a while, and so she made herself a proxy. He was her son and her student and her lover, and as far as the American Alchemical Congress was concerned—as far as he was concerned—he was her killer. Now, that’s a long story and we don’t have time for it right now.”

Harry, who is pretty sure you know when you kill someone, frowns and doesn’t say anything. Melanie is not so sanguine.

“If we don’t have a lot of time, you’re wasting it,” she snaps. “I need you to explain what’s happening.”

“I’m trying,” says Jack. “I’m trying. This isn’t easy, it’s complicated and it’s contradictory and sometimes it’s all piled up, one thing on top of another like a game of pick-up-sticks, only half the sticks are venomous snakes, and they haven’t been fed in a while. I can’t tell you everything in a single, linear order, because everything is connected to everything else. What I can say is that I won’t lie to either one of you. Melanie, I can’t lie to you, even if I wanted to, and Harry, I could lie to you, because I’m not your servant, but I won’t, because it would hurt my lady, and hurting her is anathema to who and what I am. The idea of being dismissed from my role is the worst one in the world, and I sort of wish I hadn’t been tapped to be a guide, because if you lose, I’m fucked. If you go directly up against whoever eventually wins and they hold it against me, I can be stripped and sent down to humanity, and that’s the worst thing I can think of.”

“You said we don’t qualify as entirely human anymore,” says Harry. “And that Mel’s mom was a vampire.”

“Alchemist,” says Jack.

“Neither of those things exists, so I’m going to say same difference,” says Harry. He pulls into the gravel lot set aside for the botanical gardens and gets out of the car, slamming the door behind himself as he shoves his keys into his pocket.

Melanie gets out more decorously. She seems more dazed than angry, which he supposes makes sense, since most of the ridiculous claims Jack is slinging are aimed at her; she’s overwhelmed in a way that he isn’t, and probably will be for a while. He’ll just have to work harder to keep her safe, until whatever-this-is is over.

She glances at her phone, and sighs in obvious relief. “No service out here,” she says, shoving it into the back pocket of her jeans. “I don’t have to keep ignoring his messages if I can’t see them.”

“And they won’t be able to track your phones if you’re not on the grid,” says Jack approvingly, as she climbs out of the car. She glances at Harry. “Smart,” she says, in a snidely judgmental tone that makes him bristle, because he’s heard it before.

He gets it from teachers who’ve decided his goofy affability is a shield for a lack of intellectual acuity, even though his grades have always been excellent, and from classmates who don’t have access to his scores and schoolwork, but who assume any progress he makes is a consequence of his parents’ money and not any work he’s actually done for himself. The only person who’s never written him off as stupid, even for a moment, is Mel, and that’s just because he’s never been able to play the fool hard enough to fool her.

If he’s being honest, he’s never really tried.