Page 33 of Seasonal Fears

Too late now. Aven cocks her head to the side, watching him intently, and he knows that if he doesn’t answer now, he won’t be given the opportunity.

“She was born first, and damaged by my own carelessness,” he says. “The doctors already knew she had survived. You were still inside your mother. Your suffocation was guaranteed, and so when she was removed for burial, they allowed me to take you as well.”

So many charms and small revisions had gone into that night, so many exhausting attempts to remove all traces of strangeness from the memories of the medical team attending the birth. One of the nurses had lost the ability to perceive wood due to the workings he’d laid on her mind, amplified by his panic and his grief. Her death had been front-page news, involving as it did a respected member of the community crashing her car into a fallen tree without hesitation or slowing down in the slightest. The clipping is in his file upstairs, a curiosity and a reminder that alchemy should not be used carelessly, but he didn’t grieve. Why should he have? He met her once, and she hadn’t been able to stop the labor and summarily give him the opportunity to save his wife.

Their original plan had been ambitious but workable: make the infants alchemically, using a mixture of techniques provided by Reed’s research and others documented by Shelley and Frazer, whose own attempts at creating life had borne unique and terrible fruit. Allow them to age normally, yoke them to the calendar in all proper truth, and stop the progress of Ariadne’s womb on the solstice. He still has the remaining doses of the tinctures they brewed in his office, locked in a small, secure safe, a keepsake and a condemnation. The infants should have been able to sleep in their suspended animation until the equinox arrived, eight months gestated and ready to draw their first breaths before and after the stroke of midnight, Melanie on the winter side of the equation and Aven in the spring.

The only risk they anticipated at the time was that Aven might, might, be more tightly tied to the spring than to the summer, but there was no way to deliver both girls solidly in the grips of their native season, not without the chance of losing them both. It was a good plan. It worked in tests, wrote out beautifully, and made logical sense.

But when they delivered the first tincture to Ariadne, she gasped and staggered and said she could feel the winter howling in her bones, that the season didn’t want to let go. They had no way of explaining to the universe that they were trying to make things perfect; it saw only that they were trying to take a perfect vessel for the living Winter away, and it reacted accordingly. Ariadne’s body, rather than stopping the process of gestation, had immediately accelerated it, and her labor had begun.

Aven purses her lips.

“I don’t believe you,” she says. “Trevor tells me you’re an alchemist, one of the best, and you should have been able to save us both.”

“I did save you both,” he protests, a little desperately. She’s his daughter. He wants her to love him. He wants her to understand that everything he did, he did out of love for her and for her sister. “The doctors would have taken you away. They might have put you in an incubator, but they wouldn’t have been able to support your connection to the summer. You would have wasted and withered and died before you even had a chance. At least this way, you were able to grow up. And look at you! Just look at you. You’re perfect—”

He’s said the wrong thing. He knows it as soon as her face hardens and her lips thin, and she takes a step backward, away from him. “If I’m so perfect, why didn’t you wake me as soon as summer started? Why didn’t you raise us both?”

“Oh, Aven…” So many reasons. So many good, terrible, uncountable reasons. He could never have explained where the second baby came from, for one thing, and with their hair being so different, he couldn’t have passed them off as the twins they were until they were at least three or four years old; he would have been accused of kidnapping his own child, forced to submit to blood and paternity tests that might have revealed things the world wasn’t ready to confront. Yes, he was their father, absolutely, on a genetic level, and he wasn’t at the same time, just like they were twins and weren’t, were sculptures built to follow the same design, mirror images of the lost Ariadne, but were made of such different base materials that he couldn’t be sure even now, even after all Melanie’s invasive medical interventions, what doctors would find if they compared the two girls under a microscope.

“Your heart never started beating,” he says. “You were pulled from your mother’s body already dead. That part is true. The tincture we had given her before her labor began meant when you died, you stopped changing, and so you hadn’t yet started to decay. I was able to resurrect you, but not repair the damage. I’ve been stimulating your body to grow, keeping it in a state of suspended animation, refusing to let go until a coronation could be called. I never knew if it was going to happen in your lifetime. I didn’t know whether Melanie’s heart would be able to last long enough to give you the chance.”

“And Melanie’s heart mattered more than mine?” Her eyes narrow, snake preparing to strike.

Roland, still laboring under the delusion that he can somehow talk his way through this maze of his own making, quickly shakes his head. “No, not at all. But you were made twins for a reason. We wanted you to embody your specific seasons, and we wanted you to reflect each other, to be a bonded pair. To depend on one another.” To control one another, he adds, silently. If all had gone according to plan, they would have been able to compel the good behavior of either girl by hurting the other. Reflected pain could sometimes be worse than the original.

But Melanie is bonded to the March boy now, if the video is anything to go on. The start of the coronation had knocked her down, as only befits one whose seasonal monarch had died while their season was in even technical ascension, and Harry at virtually the same time, when the approach of the spring should have been enough to keep him standing, at least for the time being. He’d die in truth on the winter solstice, along with any other summer candidates who somehow survived their season, and then only the one bound to the winning Winter would wake up at season’s end.

Kill Harry, and Aven would be able to reclaim Melanie. It was so simple, so obvious. So complicated. People made everything complicated.

“Well, Daddy, I guess I don’t depend on anyone now.” She leans closer again, eyes now fully open, and she smiles. His heart lurches in his chest. She is a monster of his own making, this sweet summer girl who dreamed her life away while her frozen sister danced through her days, through birthday parties and cheer practices and all the complicated dangers of living. “I certainly don’t depend on you.”

“What are you going to do with me?” The question is a mistake, he knows that as soon as he asks it, because once she answers, she’ll be committed to whatever course she’s chosen.

“Nothing bad, Daddy,” she says, and her eyes are wide and round and so innocent that for a moment he can almost make himself believe her; can almost accept that she means it. But she does everything innocently, everything on the basis of wanting it to happen right now and to suit her still unfinished, unformed desires. She was born seventeen years ago. She was born today.

“You killed Mom, after all,” she says, and that’s it, then: there’s no walking away from this. Roland Cosgrove closes his eyes. Whatever comes next, he won’t honor it by watching it happen.

He does, of course, after she cuts his eyelids away. The only lessons she has are the ones he gave her, and he was preparing her to fight and win a war against unknown enemies with unknown training and unknown capabilities. When pressed, she is joyously prepared to prove that she is her mother’s daughter, for all that she’s been asleep for most of her life.

The sun is rising by the time she finally lets him go, and by then, Harry and Melanie are far away, crossing into California, not looking back.

California Coastal

CALENDAR SEASON: FEBRUARY 12TH, 2017: WINTER, UNDER THE WORM MOON.

“Dibs on the shower!” Melanie yells, excitement and delight in her voice as she sprints across the motel room for the narrow rectangle of the bathroom door. Harry steps out of her way, to let her charge through. Jack, who is smaller but in some ways savvier, doesn’t even bother stepping into the room until Melanie is safely through the door.

The door slams behind Melanie, and Jack begins counting on her fingers, holding her hands up to exaggerate the gesture as much as possible. “Ten,” she says. “Nine, eight, seven…”

The door slams open again, Melanie sticking her head out into the room. “The biggest spider I have ever seen has already called dibs on the shower,” she reports.

“Need me to come and get it?” asks Harry.

“Since when have I needed you to deal with a spider? I just wanted you to know, in case the spider comes out and wants a bed.” She withdraws back into the bathroom.

Jack, who has stopped counting, finally pushes into the room and throws herself on the bed nearer to the window. “Mine,” she announces.