Page 48 of Seasonal Fears

If Mel loses humanity, maybe Jack loses it too. Maybe then she’ll always know where the other woman is, and they won’t have any secrets from each other. She’s not sure she’s comfortable with that idea. She likes her secrets. She doesn’t have many of them, but the ones she does have are important to her. So she walks slowly around the structure of the rest stop, and when she sees Melanie, she stops, taking a moment to take in the scene in front of her.

She’s still standing in frozen—ironic—silence when Harry comes jogging up behind her and skids to his own stop in the dewy grass, eyes going wide and mouth dropping open in a silent O of confusion and mild shock. He probably shouldn’t be this surprised; wouldn’t be if he’d been better prepared, if she were better equipped to prepare him.

But she isn’t, and he is, and there’s Melanie, standing barefoot on the disk of concrete poured to support the rest stop’s sole picnic table, her hands raised to float at the level of her shoulders, elbows resting lazily by her sides, eyes closed. She looks like a dancer at very sad goth club, one that can’t afford lights, or music, or any other dancers.

That’s not the strange thing. Neither is the way she’s swaying slightly from side to side, unsteady as a reed. That’s still within the realm of normalcy, and something Harry’s seen her do before, after she had exhausted herself, when she was still trying to pretend everything was fine. No, her pose, while odd, is still odd in a reasonable, rational way. Anyone could be odd like that.

What’s not normal is the way the air around her sparkles with tiny points of self-contained light, every one of them glitter-bright and suspended in place. The air a few feet away from her doesn’t shine that way, only the air close enough for her to run her fingers through it. Jack starts moving again, approaching her as slowly as she’d approach a wild deer suddenly appearing in the middle of a grocery store, something strange and feral that she doesn’t want to shock or startle. Harry stands rooted to the spot, unable to lift his feet or bend his legs.

As Jack gets closer to Melanie, she sees that the sparkle in the air isn’t glitter at all. It’s made of countless tiny snowflakes, each of them a perfect crystal in its own right, none of them quite falling, even as Melanie stands and sways.

“Mel,” says Jack.

Three things happen. Melanie opens her eyes. Melanie lowers her hands. And the glitter starts to fall, a brief dusting of tiny snowflakes scattering over the concrete at her feet. She blinks. “What?”

“You scared us, disappearing like this,” says Jack. “You weren’t supposed to go anywhere without us.”

“Harry didn’t say to stay with the car,” says Mel, reasonably enough.

Jack glances back over her shoulder to Harry, who still hasn’t moved. This would be easier if he’d come over here and back her up. She frowns, trying to convey that thought to him with a look, then forces her face to relax as she turns back to Melanie. “No, but he told you to put your shoes on,” she says. “Can I see your feet?”

Startled, Melanie looks down at her bare feet before sitting on the picnic bench. Even the way she sits worries Jack. She sits without care or control, plopping down like a small child whose proprioception is still in flux and needs a certain amount of sharp, swift motion to calibrate it. She was more collected before the motel, more like a girl her own age.

Where Harry vomits and yells, Melanie disassociates. That’s good to know. Jack tucks it away for future reference as she closes the distance to the picnic table and kneels in the remains of Melanie’s brief, impossible snowfall, reaching out with both hands for the foot Melanie amiably deposits in her palm.

Cupping Melanie’s heel, Jack studies the sole of her foot and grimaces. Harry was right to be concerned: there are several slivers of glass wedged there, at least one of them driven in so deep that she can only see the glint of its base between the bloodless edges of the gash in Melanie’s skin. She forces her voice to stay level as she looks up, meeting Mel’s placid, unprotesting gaze, and says, “You have a piece of glass in your foot. I’m going to need to get it out. Can you sit still for that?”

“Sure.”

Jack looks over her shoulder to Harry again. He’s still standing where he stopped, still staring at the two of them like he’s never seen them before. Oh, great. Please don’t let this be the point where they both check out, she thinks. Aloud, she calls, “Harry, is there a first aid kit in the car?”

“In the trunk,” he says. His voice is level and still mostly steady, thank the Wheel. He can do this.

They can do this.

“Can you get it for me, please?” She doesn’t let go of Melanie’s foot. She needs to keep the other woman from wandering away again.

“Sure,” says Harry, with obvious reluctance, before taking two steps backward, then turning to jog around the building toward the car. Jack sighs her relief and turns back to Melanie, who still looks disconnected and disinterested, like nothing that’s happening could possibly be relevant to her as a person, or have any bearing on what she does next.

Jack frowns. This is worse than she thought. “Mel, do you know where you are?”

“I’m sitting on a bench, of course,” says Melanie, bright and chipper as a preschooler being asked to count to ten. “And you’re holding my foot.”

“I didn’t ask what we were doing,” says Jack. “I asked where we are.”

“Oh. California, I think. We’ve been driving for a long, long time.” Melanie’s smile is wide and glassy. “I like California. Last time we were here, Daddy took me and Harry to Disneyland. I got to ride the Haunted Mansion three times. It was fun.”

“Harry’s getting the first aid kit from the car so I can take the glass out of your foot.”

“That’s nice of him. Harry’s always so nice to me. He worries about me a lot, you know. Probably more than he should. He ought to spend more time worrying about himself, and less time worrying about me. I think he’d be happier if he could figure out how to do that.”

“So do I, but Melanie, I need you to come back now, okay?” Jack squeezes her foot, which is cold, so cold. It would be like holding the foot of a corpse, except that it’s so clearly part of something living. It has tension and resistance, and lacks the smooth malleability of dead flesh. It’s just a living thing carved out of ice, rather than a living thing like a human being would be.

“Come back?” Melanie blinks, eyes wide and guileless and still glacier blue. There’s no hint of a snowflake pattern in her irises. Do Winter Queens get the obvious branding that Jack Frosts do? Jack doesn’t know, isn’t sure anyone knows, and she silently damns William Monroe for his selfish refusal to be a part of the Wheel he willingly yoked himself to for so many, many years. They’ve lost so much here in North America, and they need to get so much back, and she doesn’t know how they’re going to do that fast enough for it to make any difference at all.

“Come back,” Jack repeats. “You’re retreating right now, into Winter. It loves you and it’s willing to take you as deep as you want to go, but we need you here and now and helping us run from the people who want to hurt you. We need you to stay. We need Melanie, not the Winter Queen. She comes later, after Melanie gets strong enough to coexist with her.”

“I don’t…” Melanie blinks again, and the innocence in her eyes cracks like ice on a pond, letting a bit of the panic and terror beyond show through. “I don’t want to,” she says, voice much smaller. “I don’t want to run, and I don’t want to be afraid, and I don’t want to have to see what’s coming. I don’t want to come back. Please don’t make me.”