Page 40 of Seasonal Fears

“Fuck you,” says Harry. “You break into my motel room in the middle of the night, you break my window—we’re going to need a new room, and I’m not paying for that—and you start making weird-ass threats against me and my girlfriend, and now you want to say you’re not my target? You’re lucky all I did was throw a lamp.”

“Your girlfriend?” says the boy in the sweater. He sounds disgusted. He moves the knife more obviously into a stabbing position, some of his reluctance melting away. “That’s vile, man. Has no one told you what’s going on?”

“Fuck you, too,” says Harry. “No one gets to talk about Mel like that.”

“I’m not calling her vile, I’m calling the idea of the two of you … Do you not understand what’s happening?”

There’s a sudden absence at his back as Melanie pulls away and slides off the bed, moving toward the bathroom door with quick but unconcerned steps. The boy with the knife snarls something incoherent and swings his knife around, now aiming at her.

“We’re willing to let you walk away from this, if you’ll just renounce your crown,” says the man in the tank top. He seems less concerned about the situation than anyone else in the room. Maybe that’s because, based on the way he’s dressed, he shares his season with Melanie. He lives where the winter lives. And right now, he thinks he can’t die.

That would make the boy with him the potentially incarnate Summer, in direct competition with Harry. Not cool. It means he’s vulnerable right now, which explains why he’s so nervous; it’s probably a lot harder to burst in on strangers and start threatening to do them material harm when you know that it could come with actual consequences.

“Neither of us is renouncing anything,” says Melanie calmly, stopping at the bathroom door and turning to face the intruders. “You might want to consider it, if you’re really all that interested in walking away from this.”

The man Harry is assuming wants to claim the Winter laughs at that. Actually laughs, like there’s anything funny about this situation, like there could be anything funny about it. And he starts to walk across the room, heading for the bathroom, and Melanie, who he’s clearly identified as an easy target.

“You could renounce, you know,” says Harry, scrambling to get off the bed, to put himself between the man and Mel. She’s opened the bathroom door and is slipping inside, towel still firmly in place, and he doesn’t want her getting hurt, and he doesn’t want her hurting anyone.

And then the boy with the knife is upon him, putting on a sudden burst of speed and hitting Harry on the shoulder, using his momentum and slightly superior size to drive Harry back and slam him against the wall. He raises the knife like he thinks he’s a character from a slasher movie, something with blood in the title and half a dozen sequels already in development, and he hesitates, clearly unsure as to how he’s actually meant to bring it down on someone alive and staring at him, someone almost his own age.

He hesitates, in fact, long enough for Harry, who has shrugged off more than his fair share of tackles, to twist around and shove him away, and to bring his own knee up into the boy’s crotch for good measure. It’s fighting dirty, sure, but the guy has a knife and broke the window and still there are no alarms. Whatever’s happening here, it doesn’t play by normal rules, and it isn’t going to start.

He’s sure he’ll remember the feeling of the boy’s testicles deforming under the blow for the rest of his life. It makes him want to vomit. It clearly makes the other guy want to vomit even more.

He makes a small, pained sound as Harry pushes him away. He doesn’t drop the knife. Harry really wishes he’d dropped the knife. The man in the tank top has followed Melanie into the bathroom, and Harry hears a loud clatter, followed by Mel shrieking. He can’t tell whether it’s with panic or rage. He really wishes he could. This whole night is suddenly full of things he really wishes for, things he’d happily request from a genie if one were to make itself available, that he never considered worth spending wishes on.

The boy staggers back two steps before raising his knife again, a snarl on his face, and it’s clear from the way he surges toward Harry that he’s no longer uncertain about how he’s supposed to stab somebody. He’s found his inner killer, and he’s ready to let it out.

“Dude, back the fuck off!” shouts Harry, and lowers his torso, getting into position to deliver a proper field tackle. It’ll hurt without proper protective gear (although that sweater’s thick enough to virtually qualify entirely on its own), but it’s hurt or get hurt and it’s been less than thirty seconds and Melanie’s still shrieking and no matter how many times he’s been told not to tackle somebody without making sure they have the proper padding to take the blow safely, he can’t stand here and do nothing while Melanie screams in the next room. So he charges, slamming his shoulder into the boy’s chest just below the solar plexus. The air comes out of him in a great rush as he’s borne backward by Harry’s momentum, stopping only when his back slams into the wall.

He drops the knife. Harry can’t focus on much other than panic and adrenaline right now, but he’s still glad to hear it hit the floor, even as he’s wrestling to get the other teen’s arms pinned in place. “No,” he says, when the boy tries to break free. “No,” he says again, when the boy tries to repeat his own knee-to-the-nuts trick. It’s not hard to block the boy’s knee with his own leg; he must still be sore, and be having trouble moving quickly or thinking clearly. Pain will do that to a person.

“Why are you fighting us?” demands the boy, wheezing a little. “You’re not prepared. You won’t win.”

In that moment, Harry makes the decision he’s been putting off since this wild rush began: he decides to believe this is really happening, and Jack has been telling them the truth since the beginning. There’s a snap somewhere deep inside his mind, the sound of concepts clicking firmly into place, and he remembers conversations he had forgotten before, half-sentences murmured as they drove across Oregon and into California, explanations he’d been clinging too tightly to the world as he knew it to understand.

If these would-be assassins have done nothing else tonight, they’ve caused Harry to admit he’s fighting for his life and, by extension, for Melanie’s life, and it doesn’t matter if he wants to do it, and it doesn’t matter if he thinks it makes any sense at all, if he doesn’t fight, Melanie dies. If he doesn’t fight, he dies. The only way out is through.

“We are winning,” says Harry, and brings up his other hand, shoving the boy’s head back so it knocks against the wall, not hard enough to knock him out, but hard enough to disorient, to leave him momentarily reeling. Harry takes advantage of the boy’s clear disorientation to step back and grab the knife off the floor. “We’re going to win. Whatever the fuck the prize at the end of this whacked-out horror show is, we’re going to win it.”

He has the knife now. Somehow that doesn’t make him feel better. Neither does the fact that Melanie, alone in the bathroom with a strange man, isn’t screaming anymore.

The boy in the sweater looks at him with something close to pity in his eyes. “You have no idea what’s going on,” he says. “You don’t understand a single damn thing.”

“Maybe not,” admits Harry, as he puts his free hand against the boy’s shoulder and holds him to the wall. “But I understand that I don’t want to kill you, and my attendant”—may as well pretend he has one, since this guy clearly does; of the four of them, Harry’s the only one left unprepared—“says if you renounce your crown, you’re out. You’re not a threat anymore. You can’t pick it back up. So renounce.”

The boy doesn’t say anything, just keeps looking at Harry with that same distantly pitying expression. It doesn’t waver even as Harry leans forward and presses the tip of the knife to the skin under the boy’s jaw, in that spot all the medical shows he’s ever seen have told him people can’t survive being cut.

He doesn’t want to kill anyone tonight. He doesn’t think he has the stomach for it.

But the silence from the bathroom is so loud.

“Renounce,” spits Harry.

“You’re parallel because you care about your Winter, aren’t you?” asks the boy. “Me and Paul, we met yesterday morning, when our attendants brought us to the same town and said we should team up. We don’t give a damn about each other. If we won, we’d walk away and keep our courts in isolation, the way you’re supposed to, not get them all mixed together.”

“You knew your attendants before this started?” Harry frowns. Jack explained that Mel’s dad was keeping the Jack Frosts from getting to her—even implied that some of them might have died trying to reach her to do their jobs—but there’s been no one protecting him from the cosmological forces of the universe. His own instructor should have been able to reach him long, long ago.