Page 55 of Seasonal Fears

“Do we have a choice?” asks Melanie.

“Not really,” says Kim. Calm as anything, Dodger starts to walk away.

The rest of them follow. Anything else would be foolishness.

Stalking

CALENDAR SEASON: FEBRUARY 13TH, 2017: WINTER, WANING WORM MOON.

The lot outside the motel crawls with police, like maggots swarming over a piece of rotting meat. They’ve cordoned off the whole place with yellow tape, painted orange and green by the flashing lights atop their cars. If there are any guests remaining, they’ve moved their cars elsewhere. Trevor looks at the parking lot and the number of uniformed officers clogging the stairs and balconies and can’t imagine anyone’s still here when they don’t absolutely have to be. This is a lot of authority looking for someone who needs to be punished. They’ll find traffic tickets from twenty years ago, medical marijuana and talking back to your grandmother, and they’ll do it with the ruthless efficiency of men who get paid to be right about everything, even the snap judgments they make on the basis of their own prejudices and preconceptions.

“They were here,” says Aven serenely. She’s comfortable in the front seat of the car, surrounded by candy bar wrappers and empty drink bottles. Their drive so far has been one long process of her starting to figure out what she likes, what she prefers, what makes her happy.

So far, they know she likes chocolate peanut butter cups, Mexican Coke, and taking people apart to see what’s inside them. Her first subject was her father, who came apart under her hands like a jigsaw puzzle that could never be reassembled, no matter how hard the surgeons might have tried. Trevor’s pretty sure the man was still technically alive when they left the house; Aven has a supernatural knack for flensing flesh from bone and nerve from tissue, and she left parts of her father exposed to air that were never meant to be, walking away with him butterflied across the floor.

If she hadn’t found the process pleasant, that might have been enough for her, but she’d enjoyed it sufficiently that she’s tried again several times since they left Portland in Trevor’s battered old Honda, dismantling two gas station attendants and a woman whose only mistake was stopping at the rest stop at the precisely wrong moment. It’s slowed their progress considerably, but Aven isn’t worried, and so neither is Trevor. He literally can’t do this without her, not without finding another potential Summer who still needs an attendant, and so whatever works for her will work for him as well.

Plus, keeping her happy keeps her knives and rage and endless curiosity aimed outward where it belongs, rather than inward, where he’s the only potential study partner she can find. He doesn’t want the things he’s seen her do to others to be aimed at him, thank you very much. He didn’t realize, when he decided he didn’t want to serve the Summer he was meant for, that he’d be swapping Harry March, milquetoast rich boy who had never worked or wanted for anything in his life, for a girl who was half teenager, half toddler, all serial killer in the making.

Aven grew up in the alchemical equivalent of a sensory deprivation chamber, not quite alive and never allowed to die, learning only the things an alchemist thought were important enough to teach. She’s not evil: she’s amoral, unaware that half the things she does are wrong.

“Can you tell from all the cops?” he asks, frowning. He doesn’t feel another potential Summer anywhere nearby. He’s pretty good at spotting candidates for the season he already considers his own, although he hasn’t been able to lead Aven to any of them yet; the only one he’s picked up on since they hit the road was in a car heading for Canada, too fast and on the wrong side of a concrete divider.

Aven hadn’t noticed the potential challenger, focused as she was on following the trail of her sister and her self-appointed rival; she’d had better things to worry about, and Trevor had chosen not to point out the possibility of a fight. Aven would have demanded he go after them, and he knows how this works, knows the competition will thin itself out, every individual season throwing themselves against the others, until only one is left standing. He intends to let the fighting die down, then present Aven to an exhausted Harry as a fait accompli, still fresh, still ready to do whatever she deems necessary.

And Aven deems a lot of things necessary. She opens the car door, swinging long legs out to touch the parking lot, and when he grabs her arm to stop her, she merely looks at his hand against her skin, slowly raising one bone-white eyebrow to crest high on her forehead, almost verging onto her hairline.

“Why are you touching me?” she asks, voice very mild.

Trevor takes his hand away. “I do not mean to overstep my place…” he begins.

“So don’t.”

“… but it looks as if you’re preparing to go out there and confront the police.”

She lowers her eyebrow and continues to stare at him, eyes flat and cold. At least she isn’t getting out of the car. “They were here,” she says, as if he might have missed that, as if he might not understand the importance of what she’s saying to him. “In this place, they were here. My sister and her Summer boy were here.”

“How are you so sure? Maybe a drug deal went badly and someone got shot. Maybe something else happened.” Something bad, judging by the number of officers.

“She called down the Winter,” she says. “It filled her up with coldness, top to bottom, and she left some of it behind when she walked away. I can feel it. Can’t you feel it? It doesn’t want Summer to be manifest here. It wants me to go away, and I don’t like being told what to do.”

It would be impossible to miss the warning in her tone. He’s telling her what to do right now. That’s not a good way to have her happy with him, and the small part of Trevor that wants to be a good person, that doesn’t want to be killing people and breaking things that would be better left unbroken, recoils from that tone. He leans back into his own seat, hands well away from her.

“I can’t tell you what to do, but I can tell you what you don’t know,” he says. “You don’t know how the police work. If you get out of this car and start walking toward them, you’re going to cross a bunch of invisible lines they’ve drawn with their authority and their presence, and they’re not going to like it. You’re a pretty white woman, so you’ll probably make it to the motel without anyone shooting you, but then they’ll start telling you what to do, and they won’t be nice about it. They won’t let you see the bodies, if there are any. They won’t tell you where your sister went, or anything else you want to know. They won’t help you, Aven. They won’t make this any easier.”

“So what do you want me to do?” she demands … but she pulls her feet back inside the car, and that makes him feel a little better. She’s listening. She doesn’t always. Sometimes she just does, as driven by impulse as any child, and oh, she’s exhausting, and maybe he should have stayed with Harry after all.

Maybe not, though, because she’s going to win. He can see it in the way she moves, in the way she walks through the world, in the way she excites the air. Pamela could never have given her the space to flower into what she’s going to become, a perfect, poisoned posey that will seize the Summer on her own behalf and, by extension, his.

He’s going to live forever.

She closes the door and looks at him, mulish and unhappy. “I want to see where my sister was,” she says. It isn’t a request.

“So we wait until the cops leave, and then we find out what happened here.”

“Fine,” she says, and folds her arms across her chest. “I want lunch if I can’t go inside.”

Toddler. It really is so much like trying to control a violent, potentially powerful toddler. “I saw a McDonald’s a few blocks back. Let’s go get you some fries.”