Page 42 of Seasonal Fears

“I didn’t have a choice, Harry. He was going to hurt me. He was going to … He was going to make me leave you. I had to.” Melanie’s head tilts forward, her gaze falling on the floor, and she seems to notice the broken glass for the first time even as she murmurs, “I had to.”

“I know you did. But Mel, I need to know how much trouble we’re in here. I don’t know why the police haven’t shown up yet—” The whole encounter has only taken a few minutes, according to the old-fashioned digital clock on the nightstand, but it wasn’t subtle. The sound of breaking glass alone should have raised a few alarms. He doesn’t know what it means that it didn’t.

He doesn’t think it means anything good. Harry March has always been someone planted firmly in the world as it is, not in the world as he might want it to be. His mother sometimes sighs sadly and says having a dying girl as his best friend has tarnished his innocence, has made it harder for him to believe in the ineffable. Harry just thinks of it as being clear-eyed and level-headed, two traits that are surprisingly useful when trying to convince the entire world that he’s soft and silly and a bit of a fool. No one expects the class clown to be considering a degree in forestry and land management, after all.

But this new world he finds himself in isn’t realistic. This isn’t the world as it is, or the world as he wants it to be: this is the world gone out of control and ridiculous, following rules he doesn’t understand and can’t reject. The window was broken; the motel management should have been called. There was a fight, which he knows will have been audible in the surrounding rooms; the police should be in the parking lot by now, sirens blaring and lights flashing. He can’t quite deal with the fact that none of that is happening, and he can’t deal with the fact that when Mel takes a stuttering step toward the bathroom, her feet aren’t bleeding, and he can’t deal with the blood on his own hands.

There’s a lot he can’t deal with right now. Denying it isn’t making it any less true, and so he forces himself to take a deep breath and walk forward, passing Mel, pushing open the bathroom door to reveal the wreckage on the other side.

He was so wrapped up in fighting for his own life that he didn’t hear the sounds from the bathroom that charted Melanie fighting for hers. The lid from the toilet is on the floor; the mirror is broken, and the crack pattern almost perfectly matches the shape of cuts on her forehead. He finds he doesn’t like the image of her head being slammed into the wall any more than he likes the image of someone punching her in the face, but what he likes and what he doesn’t like don’t matter anymore.

The shower rail has been yanked down, and the man in the tank top is in the bathtub, or at least, his body is. The man himself is gone, as far away as the boy in the heavy sweater, both of them departed down paths that aren’t open to the living. The shower curtain is wrapped halfway around him like a shroud, but that isn’t what killed him. Harry might feel better, if it had been. That’s a weird thought to have, since the idea of Mel wrapping a shower curtain around a man’s neck and strangling him with it isn’t exactly soothing, but it would be more realistic than what he’s seeing.

The man’s skin is covered with a fine tracery of frost, darkened at the fingers, ears, and nose until it turns almost black, like he’s suffering from the worst case of frostbite ever recorded in a motel room near the highway. The skin that isn’t virtually charred is still iced over, and the best phrase Harry’s startled mind can provide him with is “freezer-burned.” Bile rushes up his throat. He claps a hand over his mouth as he staggers back into the motel room, choking back shock and vomit at the same time.

Melanie has pulled a pair of leggings out of her bag. She’s fully dressed now, leggings, sweatshirt, and even a bra she dug out of some mysterious crevasse. He has no idea how she’s managed to fit so much in the one small bag she took from her father’s house. That’s less a “living incarnation of the Winter” thing and more a “cheerleaders have access to some weird storage dimension that the rest of us can’t get to” thing, because he’s seen all the girls from the squad pull similar stunts. Sometimes he’s seen it a bit more clearly than he wanted to, like when Chloe “accidentally” spilled the bag containing all her undergarments in front of him. But that’s not the point. Mel’s sitting on the edge of the bed they were supposed to share tonight, staring at the body against the wall.

“Yours bled more than mine did,” she says, voice distant, and if his response to her first kill (how he hates the word “first”) was nausea and horror, it sounds like hers is total detachment from the situation around them. This isn’t happening, her voice says, even as her body says something different; this is a new situation, but it isn’t a real one, and it isn’t anything I need to worry about at all.

“Mine had a knife,” says Harry. He doesn’t want to go back into the bathroom, but he knows they don’t have forever. Someone will come looking, even if the commotion somehow mysteriously didn’t attract any attention; someone will notice the broken window, which is large enough to be visible from the parking lot, and then they’ll be caught.

He used his credit card to pay for this room. They’re going to be caught. No matter how much he wants to grab their things and get out of here, they’re going to be caught. So someone has to go back into that bathroom and retrieve Melanie’s clothing, and from the way she’s sitting placidly on the bed and staring at the corpse against the wall, it’s not going to be her.

There is a click, a whirr; the sound of an automatic lock disengaging and a door being opened.

“What the fuck?!” demands a familiar voice, less than half a heartbeat later. Harry lifts his head, grateful to see Jack for the first time, less grateful to see the two unfamiliar teens who come pelting up behind her and flank her, staring in unified horror at the wreckage of the room.

Well, not Jack. She’s staring, but she doesn’t look horrified in the least. If anything, she looks relieved, like this is an outcome she hoped for but couldn’t allow herself the luxury of imagining. It’s a feeling that only grows when her eyes flick to Melanie.

“Is our Lady hurt?” she asks, with more deference than he’s ever heard from her before.

Harry startles a little at that tone, but assumes it has something to do with the teens behind her, whose expressions haven’t changed, but who at least aren’t screaming yet—something he really, really wants to avoid as long as possible—and so he answers. “She got her head knocked against the mirror, but she’s mostly okay,” he says.

“No lasting damage done,” says Melanie, and turns to face the three in the doorway, blinking languidly. The bruise on her cheek has finished spreading. It’s an ugly thing, splayed out and uneven as a squashed spider, and part of him loves it anyway, because it’s hers, because its presence means she’s survived. “Hello, Jack. Who are your friends?”

“These fools aren’t my friends,” says Jack, with her familiar disdain. She steps forward, past the threshold, and she’s in the room, and there’s something symbolic about that, and Harry can’t dwell on it, because the teens are still there, still silent, still staring. One of them is holding Jack’s denim jacket, and as he watches, she reaches back and snatches it away, gathering it in her own arms. “Sorry I didn’t bring your fries. Fools again. They interrupted me while I was eating.”

“You … won?” says the taller of the two teens, and Harry knows him instantly, knows him inside and out. He was called by the Summer twenty years ago, and has been aging slowly since then, long enough to grow to resent his lasting youth and dream of a coronation that can let him hit adulthood through some mechanism he doesn’t fully understand and thus can’t transmit to Harry; his name was Jared, once, and has been Jenny since long before his parents took his image off the school milk cartons. He’s a sharp, hostile excuse for a human being, and was even before the season found him; cruelty may not have been the reason he was selected, but it clearly didn’t hurt.

He’s a Corn Jenny. He’s always been a Corn Jenny, but when the Summer was seeking Ascendants in his area, he got the call, and the dead man in the bathroom is the third potential Incarnate he’s trained, or tried to, and he really thought he was going to have a chance at the crown this time. He really thought they were going to win.

His idea of “winning” includes Harry and Melanie both, both of them dead on the floor of this room, while his own candidate walks triumphantly closer to his inevitable victory. Harry’s eyes narrow. He does wonder, briefly, if Mel can see into Jack’s thoughts like this, but assumes she would have told him if she could, and so shunts the thought aside as he walks toward the door.

The strangers quail a little, but they don’t run. That’s good. He doesn’t want to have to chase them.

“You don’t…” says the other teen, the one he assumes must be their Jack Frost, since he can’t feel her at all. “You don’t have to kill us.” A sharp whine comes into her voice. “We’re not in the running. The season touches us but it doesn’t own us, and we’d die if we tried to claim the crown.”

“Did you send those assholes to break our window and murder us in our beds?” Harry asks. Neither of them says a word. He balls his still-bloody hands into fists, and bellows, “Answer me!”

“We didn’t tell them to kill you in your beds,” says the Corn Jenny. It’s almost pathetic, how much this boy, who was willing to see him dead only minutes ago, wants Harry to like him. It bakes off him like heat off a summer sidewalk, practically visible in the air of the destroyed motel room. “We just … We told them…”

“They were supposed to make you renounce, not kill you,” says the girl hurriedly. “They were supposed to remove you from the running. We told them to be careful, because we knew you were parallel. Parallels are dangerous.”

“You knew?”

“Of course we knew. Everyone knows. Everyone you pass can feel you, and the longer you stay paralleled, the more dangerous you’re going to get.” The girl’s voice hardens, turning bleak as winter ice. “You’d know all this if you had proper support. One little girl isn’t going to be enough to see you to the finish.” She shoots a sharply venomous look at Jack. “You could replace her, you know. Take an upgrade to people who have a better idea what they’re doing, and can actually get you to where you need to be.”

Harry hears a rustle from behind him. Melanie has left the bed. Her approach is silent, until she’s right behind him and sets a hand against his shoulder, fingers cold as ever.