Page 43 of Seasonal Fears

“No, thank you,” she says. The distance is gone from her voice. “Jack got us this far, didn’t she? And Jack was enough for us to take out your candidates. I don’t think we’re in the market for a replacement.”

“Fuck you,” says Jack, more succinctly, as she turns and flips off the pair. She walks backward across the room until she’s just in front of Harry, but stops shy of brushing against him.

“Do we need to worry about them?” asks Harry.

“No,” says Jack dismissively. “They’re just Ascendants. If they don’t find a new Incarnate to attach themselves to, they’re done—and they know better than to hurt me, because you’ve seen them and you wouldn’t accept their service.” Her smile is more of a snarl, a baring of her teeth to the intruders who would dare approach her territory with ill intentions. “They’re out, they’ve failed.”

“What do you get if we win?” asks Harry.

“Oh, I get a healthy serving of what the fuck is wrong with you? The seasons can only keep the rest of this motel from noticing us for so long, and once they do, it’s going to be time for cops and questions. Get your shit, we’re leaving.”

“I paid with a credit card,” says Harry.

“Won’t matter.” Jack waves his concern away. “You’re still a part of the world—you have to be, when you stand for something so big and so integral to the world itself—but you’re a little bit apart from it as long as you’re in contention. No one’s going to think to check the receipts or come looking for you, unless you lose.”

“What happens then?”

“Well, you die, for one thing,” says Jack, ignoring the teens still standing in the doorway as she moves to get her things. “So there’s that. Mel takes the Winter or you both go down.”

“Does that mean I have to take the Summer if she takes the Winter?”

Jack pauses. “You know, that may be the first good question you’ve asked me. No. She’s required, but you’re not; you can refuse, you can step aside, and you can abdicate, all without dropping dead on the spot.”

“What the hell?” asks the boy in the doorway, and Harry is reminded that they have an audience, that this might be a conversation best saved for the car.

“None of your damn business,” snaps Jack. She grabs her backpack, slings it over her shoulder, looks to Melanie as if for permission. When Melanie nods, she strides across the room and vanishes into the bathroom. She doesn’t exclaim or shout, only rummages around for a moment before emerging with Mel’s clothes and toiletries in a roll under her arm and an unfamiliar wallet in her hand.

For a moment, the girl in the doorway looks like she’s going to protest. Then she thinks better of it, and holds her tongue. Jack looks to Harry.

“I really, really don’t want to touch yours,” she says. “Can you search the body? Or at least pick up that knife? Because Mommy and Daddy’s credit cards aren’t going to work forever—or even that much longer if we keep having to drop out of sight to keep from getting caught in the middle of a coronation—and every little bit helps.”

More questions for the car, then. Harry doesn’t think he can express how much he doesn’t want to touch the dead boy on the floor, how much he wants a way to wash the blood from his hands without going into that horror show of a bathroom ever, ever again, but he nods and moves toward the boy he (killed) fought, the boy who might have been the Summer King if he’d been a little bit faster, or stronger, or alone. Harry’s smart enough to admit that. He has a healthy streak of self-preservation; he likes being alive, he likes seeing new things and having new experiences. If someone tried to mug him or beat him up, he’d fight back. But would he be able to kill them? Even under circumstances like this one?

No, probably not. If not for the boy’s friend going after Melanie and making this all very, brutally real, Harry wouldn’t have been able to pick up the knife, much less put it against another person’s throat. Had the boy come alone, had the two decided to split up and face their targets one by one, the outcome could have been a very different one.

Jack casts a sympathetic look in his direction as Mel is gathering her things, and he knows she can guess the direction of his thoughts. She plucks the car keys off the nightstand as he digs through the boy’s clothes, finally coming up with his wallet. There’s nothing else to find or steal, except for a medic alert bracelet around the boy’s left wrist. Harry doesn’t even glance at it. He doesn’t need the boy whose life he ended to be any more of a real person in his memory.

“We’re leaving now,” says Jack to the unnamed attendants—God, they’re not unnamed, Harry thinks, their names are Jack and Jenny. This is going to get confusing. Does every candidate for the crown have to have attendants with the same name?

Based on the way Jack keeps muttering about “his” missing Corn Jenny, he’s going to say probably yes, and much as it sucks, he’s not sure there’s any choice in the matter.

The stranger that Harry knows so completely looks at them with longing as they exit the motel room, leaving the corpses and the sea of broken glass behind. Melanie still doesn’t have her shoes on. They dangle from the fingers of one hand, all but forgotten as she pads down the concrete balcony and onto the stairs, descending toward the waiting parking lot.

Her feet leave no prints, bloody or otherwise. Harry can’t stop himself from staring.

Jack loads their things into the trunk as Harry slides behind the wheel, and this, at least, is normal; this, at least, is the way things are meant to be. He starts the engine, and nothing unexpected happens. He’s just a boy in a car, taking his girl for a drive.

“Why didn’t you put your shoes on?” asks Jack, climbing into the backseat.

“Glass,” says Melanie, voice gone dreamy and distant once again. “I stepped on a bunch of it back in the room. I think it’s still in my heel.”

Harry forces his hands to stay on the wheel, forces himself not to turn and stare at her the way he wants to. Whatever she is, whatever she’s becoming, he can’t stop it without killing her. Maybe if he were an alchemist in his own right, he’d have a chance, but that’s not the world they live in. She’s changing, and all he can do is follow her and try to make sure she doesn’t get lost in the process.

(In Harry’s mind, the word “alchemist” and the word “wizard” are becoming almost indistinguishable, the one bleeding into the other like two shades of paint mixing in a pail. And he’s not as right as he would want to be, and he’s not as wrong as Jack would happily tell him he is, and so he isn’t hurting anything. Not yet, anyway. Melanie isn’t the only one who’s changing: it’s just that the seeds of Harry’s own transformation were not planted by human hands, and so they rest more deeply and rightly in his flesh.)

Harry pulls out of the space he parked in, supposedly for the night, and heads for the highway. In the motel behind them he sees lights start to click on, people start to move, as if the world had only been delaying the inevitable long enough for them to make their escape, slipping away like thieves in the night. He doesn’t like the thought. Liking or disliking something doesn’t do anything to change how true it is or isn’t. If it did, none of this would be happening right now: he’d be home in Portland, having spent Saturday night dancing with Melanie in his arms, not here in the middle of nowhere, following the direction of a preteen’s finger as she points for the highway on-ramp she wants him to take.

He turns onto the highway, his car blending with a river of others, and they’re away; this town has nothing more to offer them.