Page 59 of Seasonal Fears

“Huh,” says Erin. “It’s not summer in here. Shouldn’t she be waking up by now?”

That’s Harry’s question, too. He doesn’t like any part of this, doesn’t like the house, doesn’t like the people, doesn’t like the uncertainty of it all. He wants Mel to open her eyes. He wants to go back to the summer in the garden and stand in the sun and figure out more about what it means, while the season uncurls in his belly like a serpent. He wants to go home.

“This is all sort of new to us, too,” says Jack. “I’m her attendant, and I’ve only been Ascendant for a year. I don’t know how most of this works.”

“Aren’t you both supposed to have attendants?” asks Erin.

“Harry’s attendant didn’t bother to show.”

Harry raises a hand in a brief wave, in case he’s somehow turned invisible, but doesn’t move from his place by Mel’s side. She’ll need him when she wakes up, and she will wake up, she will, this isn’t how their story ends. It’s too anticlimactic, for one thing. They’ve been racing through a fairy tale. It can’t be over just because a woman wrapped in rainbows decided to make the summer happen in her front yard.

“How did you find them, Dodge?” asks Roger.

“I was scraping seconds from the future so I could shop without anyone bothering me, and the Summer boy saw me. He couldn’t possibly have seen me, but he did, and so I thought I should look into things a little deeper. Lo and behold, he’s in the running to manifest the living Summer, and that makes him sort of our problem. The dead girl, too.”

“More yours than mine.”

“I don’t know. People who are also anthropomorphic manifestations of natural phenomenon are more language than they are math or time. I think they’re your problem.”

“Pretty sure you’re bullshitting me because you don’t want the ball,” says Roger.

Dodger shrugs. “So what if I am?”

“As long as there’s a dead girl on our couch, I think they’re our problem,” says Erin sourly.

“Fair enough,” says Roger. He takes a breath, and when he speaks again, it’s with that sweet, mellow, best-teacher-in-the-world voice. The one that says he understands, he cares, and whatever he says he wants is for the absolute, inarguable best. Harry recognizes it better as a compulsion this time, but it isn’t aimed at him; there’s nothing to resist. “Melanie? You’ve had a nice nap, but it’s winter, and winter is when you should be awake. Please wake up now, Melanie.”

“Please wake up as Melanie, and not as the winter,” says Harry hurriedly.

“Please wake up, Melanie,” says Roger, stressing her name harder this time.

“You know, asking dead people to wake up doesn’t usually work unless you’re Dr. Frankenstein,” says Jack.

Melanie sighs.

It’s a small sound. It might go unnoticed if they weren’t so focused on her, but they are, and so it’s the loudest sound in the entire world. Harry feels her chest rise beneath his hand, and for a moment fancies he can actually feel her heart beating, feel the confirmation that she’s back in the world of the living. He understands a bit more about the man they call Roger now: somehow when he tells something to do something, it listens. Even when it shouldn’t be able to listen. Even when he’s telling Harry’s arms to push past exhaustion and not drop his temporarily dead girlfriend, or telling Melanie’s frozen heart to beat. He can talk the world into going along with him.

Harry’s earlier impression was correct, then. He’s dangerous. They both are, this woman who can bend time and this man who can persuade it to stay bent just by sounding as if it would make him really, really happy. Together, they can remake reality to suit them in any way they like, and the thought is terrifying.

Melanie sighs again. Then she opens her eyes, and blinks. “Harry? Where are we?”

“Inside Dodger’s house,” he says. Her chest is still moving, but there’s no heartbeat; that was an illusion, a phantom of his relief, and she’s still dead. She’s just dead and moving again, like she’s been since the football field. It’s good enough for him.

“We were outside, in the garden,” she says. “You were just … standing there, smiling at the sun, and it was like you were glowing, and I tried to go to you, and then everything was cold and dark and I couldn’t wake up.”

“You died,” says Harry.

“Sort of,” says Jack. She finally moves from her place near the door, crossing to the couch. “Remember I told you the price of manifestation would be dying for three months out of the year? It’s not death-death, in the sense that you move on to the afterlife, if there is one. But you’ll be gone for the duration of the season opposing your own, and you’ll wake up when the season that abuts you both begins. So Melanie dies during the summer, and comes back on the first day of fall. If we’d had a Stingy Jack here, they would probably have been able to wake her.”

“And you couldn’t do it because…?”

“Because I stand for Winter, same as she does, but I don’t die during the Summer, I just age like a normal person. So me being here didn’t tell the seasons something was wrong and she needed to come back to us.”

“Huh,” says Harry. “Okay, well, that sucks.”

“Wait,” says Melanie, pushing herself up into a sitting position and narrowing her eyes at Jack. “Are you telling me that you were serious about one of us being dead for six months out of every year? We only get six months together? That’s bullshit.”

“I’m serious about most of the things I say, and you’ll only have three months apart,” says Jack. “Him in the summer, when his season keeps him busy, and you in the winter, when your season does the same. And you get six months together, for as long as you keep your places, instead of spending all your time waiting to die.”