Page 41 of Seasonal Fears

Things would be very different right now if he’d been prepared for this process to begin, he’s sure of that.

The look of pity in the boy’s eyes deepens. “I’ve known my attendant since I was eight years old,” he says. “She came and found me on the playground, and she told me she was going to be my new babysitter, and somehow she made it stick. Jacks have tricks we don’t, even when they aren’t yoked to anyone who’s been crowned, because they have to be able to prepare us for the next coronation, when it comes around. And it always comes around, little asshole in love with his own Winter. Which is a terrible idea, just so you know. She’s probably already dead, and the closer you come to crowning, the more tangled up you’ll get with her if you stay parallel. The boost to your manifestation isn’t worth the chance of her taking you down before it’s locked in, and you don’t have to let her drag you out of consideration like this—”

Harry will swear if he’s asked later that he didn’t mean to do it. He wasn’t planning to make things even worse than they already were, even worse than this horrible, brutal scene, which had no reason to happen the way it has, but has insisted on happening anyway. But the boy keeps talking, keeps insinuating that Melanie isn’t worth saving, that he should let her go, and it just happens.

He doesn’t fully understand what he’s done until the blood is running down the boy’s neck and covering his hand, and the boy is raising his own hands to clutch at his throat, trying to stop what both of them know to be unstoppable. Harry takes a step back, horrified by what he’s done, by what he’s witnessing, and the knife slips from his suddenly nerveless fingers to clatter amongst the shards of glass and ceramic on the floor.

He’s killed someone. This stupid boy who smashed in their window (and why aren’t there sirens? Why aren’t people rushing to see what the commotion is all about? This should have attracted attention, this should have brought the whole motel down on their heads, and instead everything is silence, and Jack’s still gone, and he has blood on his hands) is dead now, and it’s because of something Harry did, because of a weapon in Harry’s hand. His chest feels too tight and his heart feels like it’s going to explode in his chest. Is this what it’s like to be Mel? To have your own body constantly on the brink of betrayal?

Mel. Oh, fuck, Melanie. There’s still silence from the bathroom, and Harry turns to reel toward the half-open door like a man drunk. He doesn’t know what he’s going to find there, but he knows Jack said he’d die if Melanie did, and his wildly beating heart is a painful reminder that he’s not dead yet, however much he may almost wish he were. He wants to live, of course he wants to live, even in this wild new world of Ascendants and Incarnates and weird little girls who tell him it’s his job to embody the entire summer in his skin, but he doesn’t want to live in a world where he’s a murderer. The moment is a contradiction. He’s a killer and he’s alive; he’s the living Summer and he’s an ordinary teen, scared and confused and far away from home without a clear way back; he’s walking toward his girlfriend and he’s walking toward a corpse.

“Harry?”

“Mel!” Relief floods through him like rain into an empty canyon, and he nearly sits down right where he is, unable to stay on his feet any longer. He settles for catching himself against the dresser, leaving a bloody smear behind, and holding himself up before he can topple to the floor. His heart seems to be calming down a little, at least; hearing her voice has healed a wound he hadn’t even noticed opening, has made it possible for him to breathe. He can accept this as long as he’s not accepting it alone.

“Are you all right? Did he hurt you?”

“I’m fine,” says Harry, almost giddy now that he can hear her voice, that he hasn’t had the claim that if she dies, he dies too confirmed for a lie. He can’t handle another upset right now. He needs to be able to believe that what their so-called guide has been telling them is true. “Did he hurt you?”

“No.”

“Mel, come out of the bathroom.”

“No.”

Harry pauses, frowns. He can’t think of many reasons she wouldn’t come out, and none of the ones he can think of are good ones, or ones he wants to linger on. “Mel, are you sure he didn’t hurt you?”

“He tried.” Her voice takes on a light, almost singsong quality. “He grabbed for me, pulled my towel off of me. I didn’t like that. He was trying to catch my shoulder. He did catch my hair. I guess I lied a little, because that hurt, when he pulled on my hair. That hurt a lot.”

“I’m sorry,” says Harry. It’s a useless sentiment, especially when he’s standing here with blood on his hands, but maybe it’s a good thing for her to stay in the bathroom for a few seconds longer. If she’s really unhurt, it stretches out the length of time before she sees him as a killer.

Maybe it stretches out the time when she still loves him.

“It’s what I get for leaving it long.” Melanie goes quiet for a long, terrible moment before she says, in a smaller voice, so small it’s almost a whisper, “I don’t know if I want to come out, because you’re going to look at me different after what I did.”

Harry looks at his own bloody hands (how does he have blood on both of them, when he only stabbed the boy with one? How?) and swallows a peal of hysterical laughter. “I don’t think that’s something we need to worry about right now,” he says. “You’re going to look at me differently, too, I’d bet.”

Slowly, the door inches open, and Melanie appears. The towel is gone, but at some point between the end of the commotion and now (and again, how? It’s only been a few seconds…), she’s managed to put her sweatshirt back on. It was originally one of his, and it hangs on her like a dress, covering her from shoulders almost to thighs. She could walk down the street like that and be decent, if not for her bare feet, and the wild look in her eyes, and the cuts on her forehead, and the blue-black bruise forming on her left cheek, almost the exact size and shape of a human fist.

He doesn’t know if Jack ever told her to demand a renunciation. He doesn’t know if she had time to try. But he doesn’t hear anyone else moving around in there, and he doesn’t think she got her assailant to renounce.

“Mel,” he says, and starts to reach for her, only to flinch and freeze when he sees the blood on his own hands.

“Oh, Harry,” she sighs, and slips out of the bathroom like a ghost moving through fog, not taking any care to avoid the glass and ceramic scattering the floor as she walks toward him. He should tell her to go back. He doesn’t. He can’t speak. He can only watch her, and think about how scared he was when she disappeared into the bathroom with a stranger on her tail, another prospective Winter who wanted nothing more than to steal the season she was heir to. He’s been worried about Melanie for most of their lives. He’s always known that one day, he’s going to lose her. But he’s never been scared like this before. Even when she’s been in the hospital, it’s never been this immediate of a threat.

Then she’s in front of him, her pale, unstained fingers tracing his bloodstained hands before she looks past him to the dead boy slumped against the wall, his blood spreading across the floor and sinking into the cheap carpet, cooling and clotting and no longer capable of sustaining life. She sighs again, wordlessly this time, and then she’s throwing her arms around Harry, pulling him close, resting her chin against his shoulder.

“I’m sorry,” she says. “I’m so, so sorry.”

Harry blinks. This isn’t what he expected. “What are you sorry for?” he asks.

“We’re parallel,” she says, like that explains anything.

He wants to ask. He wants to ask what she means more than almost anything, because everything’s so ridiculous right now, he may as well sit down for another incomprehensible tutoring session about things that didn’t matter last week but can apparently mean life or death this week. He doesn’t. Instead, he slides his arms around her and squeezes briefly before asking, “What happened in the bathroom?”

Melanie lets him go and steps back, and something crunches under her foot. She doesn’t seem to notice. Harry does. Harry notices how she doesn’t flinch, not even a little, as she turns on her almost-certainly-wounded heel to look at the bathroom door and says, “He followed me inside. I didn’t want to … didn’t want to…”

“I know. I saw.”