Page 57 of Seasonal Fears

Melanie pulls her hand out of his just before he steps through the gate. He’s so enthralled by the flowers that he doesn’t notice.

Two more steps and he’s in the middle of the garden, surrounded by planter beds and the smell of sun-warmed greenery on all sides, and he can feel it, he can feel the growth around him, as immediate and manifest as the sunlight baking into his skin, and he’s never felt anything like this. It’s the first time he got behind the wheel of a car and the first time he snuck a beer and the feel of Melanie’s breast in his hand, soft and full and perfect. It’s every good chemical his brain knows how to produce, and a few hundred it doesn’t, that it shouldn’t be able to make without outside aid, and it’s filling him from top to bottom with brilliant burning, he’s on fire, he’s on fire and it doesn’t hurt, because he’s made to burn, just like Melanie was made to freeze.

Winter may be flashier, may be impossible snowfalls and frostbite, but Summer is just as powerful, in its slow way, and for the first time he can feel that power in every inch of his body. He closes his eyes, turning his face up toward the impossibly warm, impossibly welcoming sun. He’s home. This is where he belongs. This is what he’s been fighting for this whole time. He’s never leaving this garden.

“Huh,” says a voice. “Will you look at that?”

“He’s not as far along in his manifestation as she is,” says another voice. “Melanie’s already losing herself to the Winter, for short periods. But the worm moon just passed, and we have until the pink moon before his ascendancy actually begins. So he’s sort of hobbled by the time of year, and she’s encouraged by it.”

“You don’t sound disappointed about that.”

“I’m her attendant, not his. The only thing that would have made me happier about this whole process would be if it had started under the beaver moon. I don’t have the time to get her fully ready for what’s ahead. I don’t have the tools to get him ready.”

“So where’s his attendant?”

“That’s the ten-million-dollar question, isn’t it? There’s supposed to be one attendant for every candidate, and there was a Corn Jenny where they were, but there weren’t any Jack Frosts. I had to be called from across the country when the season found me, and I barely managed to get there on time. If I’d been even a little bit delayed, they would both have gone into this without the proper preparation, and Mel’s father would have been able to—Melanie! No!”

There’s some kind of commotion outside the gate, but anything that happens outside the gate doesn’t really matter, not to Harry. That’s a different world, a winter world, and things that happen in the winter world are none of his concern. Nothing that happens there belongs to him, and nothing about it can—

There is a heavy sound, like a sack of wet concrete hitting the ground, and a sudden pain lances through his chest, there for a moment before it vanishes again, leaving him strong and warm and filled with light. That moment of pain is enough to snap him out of the euphoria of summer, and he regrets its loss even as he lowers his face from the sun and opens his eyes.

Melanie is sprawled face down on the path inside the gate, one arm extended toward him. She isn’t moving. She isn’t breathing.

Harry, who has seen her dead twice in his lifetime, knows immediately what that terrible, impossible stillness means. He rushes back to where she’s lying, dropping to his knees and gathering her into his arms. “Mel? Melanie? Someone call 911!”

“No one call 911,” says Jack, stepping into the garden. As soon as she crosses the boundary, she seems … reduced, somehow, lessened in an impalpable, indefinable way. Part of him hates it. Part of him loves it, has been waiting to see her brought down to normalcy. That part of him is smaller, but growing stronger the longer he’s here in the warmth and sweetness of summer.

Tiny tendrils of green are forcing their way through the cracks between the bricks of the garden path where he kneels, growing with impossible speed, already unfurling minute leaves. He doesn’t notice them, clutching Mel to his chest as he turns wide, disbelieving eyes on the girl who was supposed to help her—help them both to survive this ridiculous coronation and claim their crowns.

“What?” he demands. “Why not?”

“Because human medicine can’t help her,” says Jack. “She’s dead, but she’ll get better when it’s not summer anymore.” She looks past him, meaningfully, toward the stairs.

Harry understands in an instant what he’s being told to do. It’s ridiculous and impossible, but so is everything else that’s happening right now. So he gathers Melanie into his arms and stands, carrying her along with him as he straightens, trying to ignore the sickening cold of her skin where it brushes against his own, the absolute dead weight of her against his chest.

“Are you okay with her?” asks Tim, stepping around his sister, eyes on Harry as he moves into the garden.

“I can always carry Mel,” says Harry. “She’s never too heavy for me.”

He’s been playing football and training for long enough that he’s not lying—not intentionally, anyway—and the summer surging through his veins makes him feel as if he could do anything, like he could walk all the way back to Portland with Melanie in his arms. As he walks toward the steps, she seems to get heavier, and he pauses, adjusting his grip, for long enough to understand that he’s moving out of the center of the impossible artificial summer.

Summer ends completely at the bottom of the stairs. He knows as soon as he’s stepped outside of its sphere and back into the tail end of winter. Weakness washes over him, and he stumbles, nearly dropping her. She’s still not moving or breathing. She wouldn’t notice if she fell. But he would notice. He would know that when she needed him the most, he dropped her.

Straining now, Harry pulls himself onto the first step, and then the second. Above him, the door opens. Feet move on the porch. He can’t lift his head. He can’t look. If he focuses on anything other than continuing to move, his legs will give out, and he’ll drop her.

He can’t. He can’t drop her.

“Well, will you look at that,” says a new voice, with a new accent. Boston. But there’s no reason for someone with a Boston accent to be on the porch above him. Harry keeps moving, keeps hauling himself toward his goal. “Dodge? There a reason a boy with a corpse is heading for the door while you just stand there?”

“That’s Harry,” says the woman named Dodger. She sounds distantly, wryly amused, like this is something that happens every day and never fails to entertain her. “He’s a candidate.”

“Huh. Erin said the coronation had started. Wasn’t sure why I needed to care about that, but I set some snares out anyway, and I guess it’s on our doorstep now. Literally. Hey, Harry?”

The Boston voice turns warm, collegiate, friendly, the voice of a favorite teacher or that one children’s show host who sets up camp in your heart and never goes away, no matter how old you get, no matter how much you know you should have long outgrown them. Harry’s never heard a voice so appealing in his life. If this man did audiobooks, he’d break the bestseller lists.

“I know it’s hard right now, but I also know you can do this. You can carry her as far as you need to. You can make it up the stairs. You’ve got this.”

Harry finds his second wind between one breath and the next, and even though he can’t feel the summer anymore—even though the summer’s over until it gets here the real way, and that’s for the best, really; it’s better if things happen in their own time, at their own speed—and he makes it to the top of the stairs without pausing or slowing down again. Melanie’s still heavy, but he can carry her as far as he needs to. He always could.