Page 45 of Seasonal Fears

The toilets are stainless steel, icy to the touch and probably infinitely unpleasant to sit on. He empties his stomach into the nearest one, almost welcoming the smell of bleach and industrial cleaner invading his nostrils. It’s better than the blood and bile he’s been smelling since they left the motel.

Once there’s nothing left inside him to vomit up, Harry straightens, flushes the toilet, and walks to the sinks, which are as brutalist and industrial as everything else in this room, bolted to the concrete wall below a mirror that isn’t made of glass, just a sheet of hard-polished metal that throws back a subtly distorted version of his face. He looks at himself in silence for a long, long moment, trying to figure out why he looks so wrong, before he abandons the attempt and starts the faucet, using the grainy pink soap from the dispenser to wash the blood off of his hands.

He’s never washed his hands this thoroughly in his life. He scrubs until the blood comes off, and then he scrubs them again, and then again, and again, and again, until the world is not and never has been anything but scrubbing, and look, the blood is back, how is the blood back, he washed the blood off. More soap, more water, and it’s so cold, there’s no heat in this place (heat costs money, don’t want to encourage vagrants and wastrels to spend our state’s funds on luxuries like hot water), but the tears running down his face are hot enough to make up for it, and he’s scrubbing, scrubbing, scrubbing—

Somehow he doesn’t see the anxious oval of Jack’s face in the mirror until her hands are wrapping around his arm with that same awful frozen-slush feeling he always gets from touching her. But it’s soothing now, somehow, cooling, like a damp cloth on his forehead in the summer sun. It feels like it’s chasing a fever from his body, and when he breathes again—a deep, shuddering inhale that shakes him from the soles of his feet to the crown of his head—it feels like some terrible toxin flows out of him with that breath, leaving him centered in his body once more.

He looks at the paper towel dispenser, filled with rough brown sheets that will feel like sandpaper on his hands—they had the same towels at his elementary school, where Billy Daniels once swore he got a splinter drying his hands and that was why he couldn’t wash them anymore—and decides he’d rather wipe his chapped, raw fingers on his jacket. The fabric’s absorbent for a reason. It can handle a little water.

He glances at his blurry reflection again, verifying that there’s no blood on his shirt or face, then turns his attention to Jack. “This is the men’s room,” he says, inanely. “What are you doing in here?”

Jack tilts her face up to look at him, and smirks. “It’s the men’s room, but we’re the only ones in here, sunshine, and you aren’t going to call the authorities on me for going through the wrong door. You’re not a narc.”

That’s true enough. Harry has never been one for involving adults in his problems; when he was little, it was out of a combined desire not to upset his mother, who had a genuine gift for looking down her nose and making him feel like he was some nasty thing she’d found crawling in the grass and could put back outside whenever she decided to, and not to draw attention to whatever he’d been doing with Mel, who had no sense of self-preservation whatsoever and seemed to regard gravity as something that happened to other people. She’d never met a tree, or a fence, she didn’t want to scale; the one time he’d been able to arrange to have her come on the family’s summer trip to Castleview, she’d been up the rose trellis so fast that even the gardeners had been impressed, once they stopped panicking about the delicate little girl with the heart condition being twenty feet off the ground and still climbing.

“No, I’m not a narc,” he says, and is almost relieved when he recognizes his own voice, when it still sounds the way it’s always sounded, and not like it belongs to a stranger. He feels like a stranger right now, like he doesn’t fit in his own skin, and his hands are starting to ache. He’s scrubbed half the skin off of his joints, and the scabs are going to hurt like anything when they form.

Scabs … He looks at Jack with sudden alarm. “Seriously, though, what are you doing in here? Where’s Mel?”

“In the car,” says Jack. “Don’t worry. We’re far enough away from anyone else that you’d know if there was another Summer challenger anywhere nearby, and I’d know if there was a Winter challenger, so we’re safe for now. They’re not going to be coming that quickly at this stage.”

“What? Why not?”

“Because there are too many of them.”

Harry’s confusion must show in his face, because Jack sighs, smiling almost fondly, as she steps away and uses the heels of her hands to boost herself up onto the sink he didn’t fill with soapsuds and blood. The cold metal doesn’t appear to bother her the way it would bother him. He’s not actually sure she can feel cold, and that thought just makes him think about Mel’s feet again, and the way they didn’t bleed when she stepped on the broken glass. He can’t think about that right now. Thinking about that opens a door, and there are monsters on the other side of it. Alice didn’t want to go among the mad people, Avery and Zib didn’t want to go to the Queen of Swords, and he doesn’t want to go where the monsters are.

So he doesn’t. Right here, right now, that’s what he can do, and that’s what he’s doing. He’s not going. He’s not thinking about Melanie’s feet and he’s not thinking about the fact that he just killed a man and he’s going to listen to whatever Jack has to say, and she’s going to tell him what he needs to know. Yes. And maybe this time, what she tells him will make sense, and he’ll finally start to understand what’s happening, and why his life has stopped making any meaningful sense.

Jack starts to speak, then pauses and looks at him carefully, studying his face with the long, slow care of someone who’s about to change the world, or at least make a solid stab in that direction. Then, to his surprise, she smiles.

“You’re getting there,” she says. “Those assholes were the short, sharp shock you needed to snap you out of the world you had and into the world you’re going to have from now on. This is the world where you either live or die, and it was about time you joined us here.”

“What?”

“Look,” she says, with exquisite patience. “You were raised pretty much in the real world. The place where most things happen, where two and two always equal four and never rain, or quiet, or thermonuclear destruction. Alchemy and sorcery and things like the seasonal monarchs, they matter just as much as the things you find in the real world—the fact that they aren’t part of that reality doesn’t make them any less real where they matter. The back of the mirror is always there, even when you’re only seeing the surface.”

Harry makes a noncommittal noise. He wants her to keep talking, he wants her to keep untangling the mess he’s found himself snared in, and if this is the way, then this is the way.

“Melanie was basically half-and-half. She wouldn’t exist if not for alchemy; she’s an artificial vessel, while you’re a natural one. That’s part of why you locked on to her and started running in parallel the way you did. She was supposed to join up with her sister, and it gave her a receptive nature that you keyed to without ever even realizing it. I’m not accusing you of anything, don’t get that defensive look on your face. I’m just telling you how it played out, because you’re finally ready to listen. She never had any trouble slipping through to the back of the mirror, because she was always halfway here. That’s the point of the artificial vessels, you see. They’re primed to fall. Not like you, not like me. We have to find the wall before we climb over it. She was born already standing on the edge.”

“Okay…”

“Those assholes back at the motel, though, they scared you enough to break the glass, and now you’re on the other side of the mirror. You’re starting to see things clearly. You’re starting to retain the things your mind was telling you were nonsense or imaginary before. And that’s good.”

“I’m losing my mind and that’s a good thing?”

“No, you’re losing what you thought was your mind, and that’s a good thing. Harry March, high school football hero who’s going to go to college and study forestry and land management in order to take over his family’s lumber empire, is not the guy we need here. Right now, we need Harry March, Summer King in waiting, the badass motherfucker who’s absolutely going to kick contender ass and claim the Summer crown.”

“Okay,” says Harry. He likes the way that sounds, likes how confident and clean it is, so he squares his shoulders, trying to ignore his aching hands, and repeats, “Okay. So what do you mean, there’s too many of them?”

“There are literally hundreds of Ascendants, in all four flavors, although you’re mostly going to be dealing with the ones associated with the primary seasons, because we’re tied to people like you and Mel. Jacks in the Green and Stingy Jacks, they stand alone for spring and fall, and they either build the labyrinth or keep to themselves when a coronation is going on. I think they’re afraid if they get too involved, the system will realize it’s unbalanced and manifest Incarnates for them, too. We’re everywhere. We’re not as common as people with naturally red hair, but we exist in substantial-enough numbers that you’ve probably met a few of us during your lifetime.”

“Okay…”

“It’s not one-to-one with Ascendants and Incarnates. We’re shallower, we take less energy for the season to sustain, and since we can’t draw on it as directly, we don’t help it assert itself in the same way. All that’s stuff you’ll need to worry about later, much later, so don’t worry if it doesn’t make much sense now. Just focus on the math. There are more Jack Frosts than there are Winters, got me?”

“Got you.”