Page 37 of Seasonal Fears

“Pretty much.” Jack stands, stretching again. “And I need to get some McDonald’s. I’m feeling a distinct lack of processed potato product in my system. If I leave you two alone in here, do you promise to stay put and not go wandering around, trying to get yourselves killed?”

“They’re not really going to be trying to kill us,” says Harry.

“Okay, then, try not to get yourselves challenged to any Pokémon battles before I come back with fries. Stay here and watch television or make out or something. I’ll only be a few minutes.” Jack pauses to take a twenty from Harry’s wallet and then she’s out the door, vanishing into the night.

Melanie and Harry, alone for the first time since the football field, exchange a look that ends when Mel ducks her head and looks away, suddenly shy. “I’m sorry about all this,” she says. “It feels like my fault.”

“Hey.” He grabs her cold hand in his, squeezing her fingers as he pulls it to her chest. In the process, he stops her from pulling any further away from him, and he can’t say he feels bad about that. “This isn’t your fault.”

Her fingers are like ice. But it doesn’t feel wrong, not the way it feels when he touches Jack, whose cold is just as deep and just as immutable but burns, still carries that awful “sticking your hand into slush” feeling. Touching Melanie is crisp and refreshing and right, and she’s supposed to be here, and so is he and this is the way the universe works. This is the way it fits together.

“You heard her, any one of the eight times she tried to talk her way to a straight answer,” he says. “I was born to be tied to the summer. Whatever that actually means, and I guess I’m going to find out the hard way, you had nothing to do with it. If your dad hadn’t messed with you and tied you to the winter the way he did, I’d be someone else’s parallel, and there’s no way of knowing whose. Maybe Chloe’s.”

He knows he’s said the right wrong thing by the way Melanie’s expression darkens. It’s not that she hates Chloe—he’s never known Mel to muster the energy to hate anyone, although that could change now that she’s not spending most of her time trying to will herself not to die—it’s that she’s never appreciated the way their classmate has devoted herself to trying to woo Harry away from his “living dead girl” of a childhood sweetheart.

Invoking Chloe is low, but it’s always worked when he’s needed to snap her out of a funk before this, and he doesn’t want her going down a hole if he can help it.

“So see, summer was always going to come for me. I guess if anyone should be apologizing here, it’s your dad, for messing around with you before you were born. But I’m not going to call him up and ask him to, because wow am I glad that if I have to be part of some ridiculous scavenger hunt for the seasons, I’m doing it with you.”

“You really believe her, then?”

Harry hesitates for a moment, considering, before he nods. “I do. I mean, I probably wouldn’t if you had a heartbeat, but you don’t, and you’re already cold. And I’m so hot all the time that I’m pretty sure I don’t get to eat ice cream anymore, unless what I want is ice cream soup.”

He feels like he has a fever right now, like his skin’s so hot it would sizzle if she touched him. It’s not the nicest feeling. Most of the time, he doesn’t even notice how warm he is, but right now, it’s almost all he can think about. But Melanie is looking at him with the mock-serious expression she always wears when she’s about to say something absolutely terrible, and so he pushes the thought aside, focusing on her instead.

“Milkshakes will still work, as long as you don’t use a metal straw,” says Melanie helpfully.

“That was definitely my first concern,” he says. “Even if Jack’s not telling the truth and we’ve just been tricked into helping some kid run away from home, I was worried about the fact that I now have a permanent fever and can’t drink milkshakes through a metal straw.”

Melanie laughs. It’s one of his favorite sounds in the world, and hearing it reminds him of how rare it’s become over the last year. He’s still enjoying the sound of her laughter when the window crashes inward, showering the small room in shards of glass, and what looks like the engine of a small car slides across the floor.

Melanie’s laughter turns to shrill, startled screaming.

Jack steps out of the room and into the cool air of the February night. She breathes in deeply, cleansing the warm interior air from her lungs. She’s not the Winter Incarnate, to drop dead the day spring starts, but she has a little more than a month before her Ascendency ends and she’s busted back down to ordinary girl for the growing months. Spring and summer will find her powerless, and if the coronation is still happening when they arrive, she won’t be able to help her charges, either the one she’s attendant to or the one she’s picked up on the way.

Where the hell is Pamela? She was supposed to have the summer side of the story. She was supposed to tell the March boy exactly what he needed to know to win, and put it all in terms he could understand. And she knew her charge was a natural occurrence, that he wouldn’t be as easy to convince as Melanie, wouldn’t have the physical signs to go by.

This would all have been easier if it had happened in the summer side of the year. He’d be sprouting grass and toadstools everywhere he went, and he’d have to come to terms a lot faster. He’d definitely stop asking her to repeat herself. That would be so nice, and she wants that for herself, and she’s not going to get it. She also wants Pamela to suddenly make an appearance, late and apologetic but present and ready to do her damn job.

Jack sighs. The golden arches of McDonald’s are only about a block away, easy walking distance, especially for someone like her who doesn’t mind the cold. She shoves her hands (one still clutching the pilfered twenty) into her pockets and heads down the motel steps, glad they’ve stopped for the night at the crest of California, far from the bustling, poisonous prosperity of the Bay Area, where two teens traveling with an obviously unrelated child might have attracted unwanted attention.

They’ll wind up there eventually, she knows; she can feel it in the pit of her stomach, a ball of nausea and knowledge swirled together in equal measure, almost choking her. That’s not where the coronation will be held, of course. That understanding will come later, after they’ve faced and survived their first few challenges. Assuming that they do.

She believes both of them have some steel in their souls, some potential to win this thing. Parallels always start out at an advantage, as far as she understands; they have something to fight for. Each other.

She can’t imagine what coronations must have been like a hundred years ago, before the internet, when none of the attendants would have had any way to reach each other or to compare notes. This is North America’s first coronation in three hundred years. They’d all be completely lost if they couldn’t email their counterparts.

Not that any of them are giving away their locations. Not intentionally, anyway.

Cars litter the parking lot. These little tourist motels are the same no matter where you’re starting out in the country; they’re a miracle of North American architecture, balconies cupping the body of the parking lot, tiny rooms stacked like cells in a honeycomb. She’s seen more than her share of them since closing the door to her childhood home in Evanston, Chicago. Running away from home became a lot easier once she didn’t have to be afraid of freezing to death, always her father’s favorite threat. (“Be good, girl, or I’ll let you sleep outside in the snow, see how you like it when your hair freezes into icicles and your skin goes blue.”) Well, she’s slept outside in the snow plenty of times since then, and her hair’s never frozen into icicles, and she’s never even cracked the ice she stretches out atop.

Being tied to the winter has its benefits. Summer’s a monster, but she never liked the summer anyway. Hot and nasty and full of midges. She has to be more careful in the summer, when she’s as vulnerable as any ordinary girl, when she sweats and ages and risks heat stroke every time she goes out in the sun. But in the winter, she’s as close as she can be to invulnerable.

Until they take their crowns, Harry and Mel are a little sturdier than the ordinary people they’ve always believed themselves to be. He won’t feel hot, she won’t feel cold, and the weapons of their seasons will be reluctant to do them harm. That may seem like a small thing, but she’s heard stories of potential Winters shoved into fireplaces and potential Summers locked in freezers, and it wouldn’t work in the reverse. Their connection makes them stronger than they might otherwise be at this stage in the coronation, but their lack of preparation makes them weaker, and she’s not sure which aspect will dominate.

The night air is sweet with diesel fuel and mountain air. Jack breathes easy as she walks onward to the McDonald’s, where the smell of grease and fried potatoes greets her before she steps into the parking lot. The lights glow steady and even, the same way they do everywhere she’s ever been, all across the continent. It’s one of life’s little certainties. The seasons change, the moon beams, and McDonald’s will sell you hot, fresh, calorically dense food at a price that’s unsustainable unless you control supply chains and buy everything you need in bulk.

She’s a semi-mortal manifestation of the spirit of winter, she only ages when she wants to or the summer is in ascendancy, meaning she’ll get three months older every year for the rest of her life, and that life is likely to be very, very long, but she’s also a thirteen-year-old girl in the body of a twelve-year-old, and she’s about to get McDonald’s. She’s practically skipping by the time she reaches the door and pulls it open, releasing that smell unique to fast food lobbies and somehow universal across them all. Pizza, hamburgers, chicken or fish and chips, it doesn’t matter, because the air inside will smell exactly the same regardless.