Page 47 of Seasonal Fears

“Mostly, I don’t,” says Jack. “I’m as Winter-bound as she is—not quite as strongly right now, but I’m starting to think that’s a good thing—and the deeper she goes, the deeper she’ll drag me. I’m her attendant, after all.”

She pauses, expression turning wistful in a way that makes Harry think for the first time that there must be something in all of this for Jack, some great and unidentified benefit to being the attendant of whichever candidate takes the crown. He doesn’t know what that could be, and this doesn’t seem like the right time to ask, and so he tucks the question away for later, swaddling it in all his concern for Mel, which is currently vast enough to overwhelm everything it comes into contact with.

“So if she needs an anchor to the world outside the Winter, it’s not going to be me. It can’t be me, even if I want it to be. And I don’t know if I do. I’m scared of what happens if she goes too deep, but I’m sure candidates have gone too deep before. Maybe what the world needs is a Winter who cares more about the snow than how much they can get for selling it.”

“That’s not what I need,” says Harry sharply. “I need Melanie. I need the girl I love to stay human enough to remember that she loves me, too. I need her, not some idea of what the winter looks like in a human body.”

“You won’t be parallel anymore if she goes that much deeper than you,” says Jack. “If you stop holding her in her own skin, she might pull away from you naturally. She might let you go. Then you could renounce without dying on the spot. You could go home.”

That’s tempting. Harry looks at his chapped hands and thinks of his bedroom, of his parents, of college applications and scholarships and football games and all the things his future has always been built upon. Even, despite his own stubborn insistence that they’d find a way to save her, the absence of Melanie. She’s never been a part of those future fantasies, because even as he’s been unable to imagine a life without her, he’s been equally unable to imagine a coherent future with her.

And now he can finally have one, and if it’s the kind of future he would never have imagined on his own, who gives a fuck?

“No,” he says, firmly. “I don’t want to go home. Not without her. So as long as I can ‘hold her in her own skin,’ as you put it, I’m holding on. She’s staying, and so am I.”

“Good for you,” says Jack, and smiles.

She’s still smiling as he turns and walks out of the bathroom, heading back toward the car, into the freezing night. Only when he’s gone does she allow herself to sag, fingers clenching on the edge of the sink. She’s fighting as hard as she can to seem like she knows everything, but she’s only had this job for a year, and there’s so much she doesn’t know, so much she feels like she should know, and so much she can’t possibly have known, so many holes in the brief education she received at the hands of a woman who is either missing or intentionally absent but, either way, isn’t here.

If they lose faith in her, they’re going to lose faith in this whole process, and half of what gets them to the labyrinth is faith. She needs them to reach the labyrinth if she wants them to win, and she wants them to win, very, very badly. She wants the time it gives her if they keep the crowns. She wants a hundred years of adolescence. She wants the rules to be different for her, the way they always have been, one way or another.

Jack slides down from the sink, shoves her hands into her pockets, and follows Harry’s path out of the bathroom, slowly, giving him plenty of time. Giving him a head start.

Harry steps out of the bathroom and turns, immediately, toward the car. It’s still sitting where he parked it, lit from above by the dim glow of the poorly maintained streetlight that’s meant to illuminate the parking lot.

There’s no one in the front seat.

“Mel?” It’s not a shout. It’s just a question, quiet and faintly puzzled, like he can’t understand what he’s seeing. She was in the car when he and Jack went into the bathroom, he’s sure of that. He told her to put her shoes on.

Maybe she’s in the ladies’ room. It would make sense for her to want to clean herself up after what happened at the motel—and at least the cold water won’t bother her. He doesn’t want to go past the social barrier represented by the skirted stick figure outside the bathroom, but he steps past it anyway, trusting the absence of other cars to protect him from any possible consequences.

There’s no one in the bathroom. The doors to both stalls are unlatched and hanging slightly open, at that angle that shows vacancy and not much else, and there are no feet visible under the barriers. She’d have to be standing on one of the slippery metal toilets to go unseen, and she has no reason to do that. If she wanted to go home, he’d take her. Even now, even after everything that’s happened, he’d take her, and she knows him well enough to know that. So she isn’t here, hiding from him.

“Mel?” The question is louder this time, growing in strength as the panic starts to settle in. He spins on his heel and runs for the door, moving fast now, faster than his whirling thoughts can keep up with.

He’s an essentially sheltered person, like any teen with a reasonable amount of personal freedom and parents who knew what it meant to be parents, not jailers or vaguely emotionally abusive peers. He’s made his own choices for as long as he can remember, and somehow those choices have almost always aligned with what’s allowed by the rules, or at least the ones that made sense to him. (He has never, for example, been able to understand the rules that said he shouldn’t spend every spare minute with Mel when she’s not feeling well, as if the fact that she might die would make him less eager to be around her, when there’s a limit to how much time they have.) So he’s never actually been at a rest stop in the middle of the night before, only seen them in movies and on the kind of television shows where the credits include listings like “corpse #2” and “kidnapped girl.” He should never have left Melanie alone. Not even for a minute. What was he thinking?

Outside the bathroom, there’s still no sign of her. Harry runs to the car, like he might find her lying down in the seat. That’s happened before, twice, when waves of dizziness and exhaustion suddenly forced her to abandon sitting up as a bad idea. (They told her father about the first incident, and he responded by grounding her for three weeks, saying she was too delicate to go out, or even to go to school. That had been enough to teach them their lesson, and they hadn’t told him about the second incident. Sometimes, disproportionate consequences teach the wrong lessons.) It doesn’t seem likely now, with her heart doing so much better, but if there’s any chance at all—

Melanie isn’t in the car. But her shoes are, abandoned in the footwell. Harry straightens, a chill running across his skin, just in time to see Jack emerge from the bathroom.

“She’s gone!” he yells.

Jack frowns, walking toward him. She doesn’t seem worried yet. He’s sure that will come, with time. “What do you mean, she’s gone?”

“I mean she’s not in the car!” He kicks the tire, a little flash of worried violence, and balls his hands into helpless fists. He regrets both gestures immediately, as kicking the tire hurts his foot and bending his fingers hurts his hands. He unclenches his hands, shoulders sagging. “She’s not in the car, and she’s not in the bathroom. Did someone snatch her?”

“No, she’s still here,” says Jack. “She’s close enough for me to feel her.”

People think of eucalyptus and the beach when they think of California, but so far Harry’s experience of the state has been pretty solidly in line with his experience of his home state; mountains and evergreens as far as the eye can see. They surround this tiny rest stop, their tight-packed canopy of needles shutting out the light of the sky above, stars (so bright this far from any major city; it’s unrealistic how bright they are) and waning February moon alike. A serial killer could easily have dragged Mel into those trees and be taking her methodically apart only a few feet away from here, and he’d never know, or be able to see them before it was too late. Or a bear could have come out of the wood looking for something to eat, and decided that in the absence of any convenient picnic baskets, a bit of succulent girlflesh would do just fine.

“Melanie!” Harry yells. “Mel!”

There’s no answer.

Jack, tethered to Melanie by the invisible but omnipresent chain of the season they share, manages to keep her calm a little better. She turns in a slow circle, looking around at the parking lot, the trees, the scrubby stretch of green that is the rest stop lawn, no doubt maintained for the benefit of families road-tripping with their canine companions. It’s not a very welcoming lawn, made up mostly of weeds and some plants that look, even in the low light, like stickers and thorns, but it’s green, and a dog could get in some good running before doing its business. It extends all the way around the back of the building.

Hands still in her pockets, Jack starts walking across the lawn. She’s following a hunch more than any actual direction; the winter tells her Melanie’s close by and not in any immediate physical danger, but that’s all it can do. Now, anyway. For all her talk about worrying what will happen if Melanie forgets what it is to be human and falls completely into what it is to be the living incarnation of Winter, she doesn’t know what will happen to her, either, if Mel decides to go that route. The most recent Winter hasn’t maintained an Ascendant in well over a hundred years, viewing them as a crutch used to stave up a faltering season; his last Jack Frost died sometime in the nineteenth century, and she’s never been able to find anyone who’d actually met the man.