Page 28 of Seasonal Fears

“All right,” he says, once they’re all out of the car. “Follow me.”

He leads them across the street and down the shallow slope to the edge of the woods. Portland, Oregon, has a famously great climate for growing roses and other flowers, to the point where they host one of the world’s test gardens for new varieties, where the horticulturists who develop new flowers bring them to have their first and most impressive show crops. So it makes sense that the botanical gardens decided to pivot in a different direction, specializing in native plants and thriving scrubby shrubs. It’s not terribly impressive to the eye, but it’s a gorgeous show of conservation and concern for what Oregon was before it became Oregon, when it was part of a continent and not a country.

Harry has always liked the botanical gardens. He likes how real they feel, how unassuming, like they don’t care about how many tourist dollars they can attract as long as they can keep feeding lightning-struck owls and ravens with the bad luck to survive losing fights with trucks. The wildlife-conservation angle of the place is small and mostly for show, a sort of glorified roadside zoo, but the birds are happy, healthy, and unsuited for release, and so he doesn’t feel bad about adoring them the way he does.

They remind him of Mel. Caged but defiant, broken and beautiful and completely prepared to take someone’s eye out if challenged.

Halfway down the slope, the path branches, and he leads them left, toward the stream and the memorial bench someone paid to put there. It seems like a good place to have a life-altering conversation, if that’s something that actually has to happen.

Once there, he boosts himself onto the back of the bench, balancing on the narrow strip of wood, and looks levelly at Jack. “Okay. You’re going to talk now. No more backtracking, no more trying to tell us what you think we need to know, just as linear a story as you can manage. Got it?”

“Got it,” says Jack, and she sounds vaguely amused, but she doesn’t argue as she walks a few feet away and leans up against a tree, folding her arms over her chest.

“All right,” she says. “The first thing you need to understand is that alchemists are how the old magicians and philosopher-wizards reconciled the world as they knew it with the rise of scientific thought. Science didn’t destroy magic. Both have always existed. Combustion and electricity and the lever didn’t all start working the day people stopped chucking fireballs at each other. That’s silly. Magic is what magic is, and it doesn’t give a damn what people think of it. But people give a damn. People learn to think one way and not another, and then they think their way is the only way there is, and all other ways of thinking are wrong, or primitive, or misguided. So there were wizards, and then people figured out science was easier on the mind and body than magic, and they started doing science instead, and the people who still wanted the kind of things you really need magic for started doing alchemy, so they didn’t lose it all.”

“If this is some kind of fucked-up LARP bullshit, I’m out,” says Harry, throwing up his hands. “I am not going to pretend to be an elf just so we can run around in the woods being elves together.”

“It is not some kind of ‘fucked-up LARP bullshit,’” says Jack, sounding amused. “I mean, it is fucked up, and it is bullshit, no question about that, but it’s also real. It’s happening. Magic never went away the way people want to say it did, it just evolved. Everything evolves. Alchemists use science and philosophy and really, really rigid ways of thinking to influence the world. And Melanie’s parents met when they were both apprenticed to Dr. James Reed.”

“Who you said before was Frankenstein’s monster,” says Harry. “Right?”

“Not quite, but good enough for shared concept,” says Jack. “His maker put him together from the things she thought were best about a man, and he was handsome and charming and clever, all the things Shelley said about her own mad scientist’s monster. Shelley was an alchemist too, by the way.”

“Mary Shelley?” asks Mel, who has been quiet since they reached the clearing, listening in wide-eyed silence that Harry supposes makes sense, since it’s her parents they’re talking about.

“A surprising number of alchemists hide as authors,” says Jack. “If they get lucky enough to write a book that sinks into the way people think, they can amass an amazing amount of power in a very short amount of time. I won’t say there’s no effort involved—they have to write a book to start the process—but it’s easier than lassoing storms or bringing corpses to life, so it remains a popular career path. Professors and doctors, also common.”

“Huh,” says Harry. “Okay, keep talking, weird kid.”

“Roland and Ariadne Cosgrove both showed promise in the alchemical arts, and found themselves bound to James Reed, whose goals have always been somewhat … abnormal, even for an alchemist. He was obsessed with the idea that a force called the Doctrine of Ethos could be cajoled into becoming Incarnate if he could just make it an attractive-enough vessel to inhabit.”

“You are officially speaking gibberish,” says Harry.

“I already told Melanie most of this, but here goes: there are certain natural forces and phenomena that have been convinced, by centuries of human belief, to turn themselves into people.”

“People,” says Harry blankly.

“Yes.”

“So that’s what you’ve been doing a piss-poor job of explaining this whole time. You’re trying to say winter somehow turned itself into a person, and Melanie is the winter.”

“No.”

“No?”

“No, Melanie isn’t the winter, and you’re not the summer.” Harry starts to relax, and he shouldn’t, because it means he’s caught just a little bit off-guard when Jack adds, firmly, “Yet.”

His head snaps up, and he looks from the girl to Mel and back again, both of them washed out by the moonlight, both of them shadowed enough to make it difficult to read their expressions. He can’t believe he’s listening to this. He can’t believe Mel, who normally has no patience for fairy stories, is listening to this. She should be laughing her head off and demanding they get out of here, head to the Roxy for pancakes if they’re going to skip the dance.

And her father shouldn’t be going to his house to yell at his parents, or blowing up her phone with calls and texts just because he saw her on the news. Yes, the scene on the football field looked bad, but Mel was fine, and she’s fallen down before, when her blood pressure dropped too abruptly. Nothing about that scene should have frightened her father enough to make him react this way. Nothing, unless the upsetting part was seeing Harry fall down, too.

And Mel doesn’t have a heartbeat. Harry doesn’t want that to be true, but he’s had a lot of experience feeling for the particular, not entirely even, rhythm of her heart. He can say it’s the pulse oximeter as much as he wants to, and if this all went away right now, he might be able to eventually convince himself he believes it, but he knows what’s true and he knows what’s real, and what’s true is that Mel’s skin is cold to the touch, and she doesn’t have a heartbeat, and something is very wrong. Something has changed.

So he’s willing to keep listening, no matter how ridiculous this is, because there’s no other explanation being offered. This is what he can do.

“What do you mean, ‘yet,’ and what does this have to do with Mel’s parents being alchemists?” he asks.

Jack takes a deep breath. “Will you both agree to accept, for the purposes of this conversation, that sometimes, natural forces embody themselves as humans for reasons of their own?”