Page 62 of Seasonal Fears

Getting what you want is hard and surprisingly horrible, and that means that running when it’s all he wants to do probably wouldn’t work out that well for him.

A hand touches his shoulder. The freezing-slush sensation that accompanies the contact means he’s not all that surprised when he looks around and finds that it’s Jack, her hand on his shoulder, taller than him while he’s sitting down and she’s not. The look on her face is sympathetic enough to be jarring.

“Hey,” she says. “I think this is going to take a while, and I can see that Mel has about a million questions. You want to go outside with me for a few minutes, catch your breath?”

He starts to protest, then catches himself and stands, looking to Erin for the answer to his last question. She meets his eyes unflinchingly.

“I don’t think you could stop her from sinking if you tied her ankles to the clouds,” she says, and that’s surprisingly poetic, and not surprising in the slightest. It just confirms what he already knows. Melanie was built to hold the Winter, and he wasn’t built to do the same for Summer. She’s going to keep sinking. She’s going to go deeper and deeper, until there’s nothing left of the girl he loves but her face.

If her face was all he wanted, he could go and find someone who looks like her. With the kind of money he’ll inherit when his parents die and his trust funds mature, he could pay a woman to look like her.

He’s already lost her.

“Okay,” he says to Jack, and stands, and lets her lead him out of the house, away from the alchemical madness unfolding behind him, back into the sunlight.

Melanie watches Harry leave, hand in hand with her attendant, and wishes she could muster the enthusiasm to go after him. She’s exhausted. She’s overwhelmed. She needs to understand what Erin’s trying to tell her; she suddenly feels, in a very real and concrete way, as if her life depends on it.

“All right,” she says. “Laying this out in a straight line, my parents were alchemists who worked for Dr. James Reed. They wanted to create the perfect vessels for the Summer and Winter, and some things went wrong, resulting in me having a heart condition and my sister being presumed dead. She wasn’t, and my father has been raising her in secret this whole time, letting me think I was an only child with a genetic condition because … why, exactly? And does the fact that my sister isn’t dead have anything to do with Harry’s attendant not showing up?”

“It could,” says Erin. “Your sister, if she’s still alive—and I don’t know one way or the other, at this point, just that she was alive when your father took you home from the hospital and came to make his report to Reed and Leigh—was crafted to be the perfect vessel for the Summer, like you were the perfect vessel for the Winter. With her around, it’s entirely possible that any Corn Jenny close enough to come and attend on him would be attracted to her instead.”

“Jack said Jack Frosts who tried to get to me had been disappearing for years before she managed to get into my room,” says Melanie.

“That makes sense. The last thing an alchemist wants is for their subjects to know too much. Subjects who know things tend to have ideas about them and want them to be handled in the right way, and maybe don’t want to be participants in a human sacrifice, or kill people when they don’t think they have to, or any of the other things that can be required in order to manifest.” Erin shrugs. “Even when there’s no guarantee a coronation is ever going to arrive, you’re supposed to have at least a little understanding of what you are. What you could potentially become. If your father was stopping the Jacks from getting to you, he could also have been stopping the Jennys from getting to her. And that would mean they weren’t around to come to your boyfriend.”

“So Harry winds up dropped in this without even a mouthy sidekick to hold his hand and make sure he understands what’s going on.”

“Yeah,” says Erin. “I know this is a lot, and I’m sure your Jack has been doing her best to help you understand it all, but she does it from within the system, and we’re outside the system. It has to make things easier.”

“I can’t take any more of this,” says Tim, and walks abruptly out of the room. Kim hesitates, looking torn, before she chases after her brother.

Someone still has the strength to follow the people they love, Melanie thinks distantly, although she assumes the relationship between siblings is stronger than the relationship between high school sweethearts. That’s probably what her father’s been banking on. All of his attempts to get her and Harry to open a little space between them are taking on a new light, seeming less like the actions of a protective father trying to keep his only daughter from being hurt, more like the actions of a scientist trying to remove an unexpected complication from his experimental field.

He must have been so horrified when she came home from preschool with the number of another potential Summer written in crayon on her construction paper homework folder. She still has that folder, tucked into the box of keepsakes under her bed. Or she did, before she grabbed what she could carry and ran away from home forever. She supposes she can’t really say she still has any of the things she left behind. Maybe that should feel freeing.

It doesn’t. It feels terrifying, like everything else about this day. Everything else since the motel, when this transformed from a fun if somewhat strange road trip into a journey through hell. There’s blood on her hands, and on Harry’s, and she doesn’t know what she’s becoming anymore, only that when she thought that man was going to kill her, the cold had risen up like a great tide and pulled her under, and she’d watched everything that happened between there and the rest stop where Harry and Jack had pulled her back into herself through a thick, distorting wall of ice, unable to break through, unable to tell them she was still trapped inside.

Is that inevitable now? Is she going to freeze no matter what she does? She doesn’t want to die, but she’s not sure there’s any real difference, if living and taking the Winter crown leaves her in that distant, frozen place, where she can see the people she loves as they suffer, but can’t reach for them, can’t go to them, can’t be there for them.

Melanie looks levelly at Erin. “I have to take the crown or I’m going to die,” she says.

“Yes,” says Erin. “Technically, you died when you were born, but the Winter has been animating you as a sort of backup in case something happened to the Winter King. Well, something happened—from what I hear, ‘something’ was a massive heart attack—and he’s out of the picture now, and Winter needs you. So it’s keeping you going. You’re the best available candidate.”

“Coronations are bloody, right?” asks Roger. “That’s what I’ve been able to gather from the books that actually go into it. There aren’t many of them. If you claim the crown, you’ll be the first alchemical creation to do so. Alchemists aren’t all that interested, by and large, in things they can’t control. Once they figured out that they couldn’t seize the crowns from the Incarnates no matter how hard they tried, they stopped really bothering with you people.”

“That’s a nice way of putting it,” says Melanie hotly. “You always this politic?”

“He’s the living manifestation of Language, and he still manages to stick his foot in it on a surprisingly regular basis,” says Dodger. “Like a puppy that never finished obedience school.”

“I will leave you speaking Mandarin for a month,” threatens Roger genially.

“Do you enjoy having friction?” asks Dodger. “Just checking, since it really sounds like what you’re saying is ‘wah wah, smarter, prettier, all-around better sister, I’m tired of the laws of physics being willing to speak to me.’”

“Children,” says Erin, weary and warning at the same time. To Melanie, she says, “This is my punishment for working with the alchemists as long as I did. I was a trained lab animal, but it still took me a long time to bite the hand that fed me. And my reward is these two, who think they’re funny.” She casts a thin smile at Roger and Dodger. “They’re not funny.”

“Come on, now,” says Roger. “Your reward was us rewinding time over and over again until we managed to orchestrate a situation where you survived the fall of Reed’s lab and you got to be free.”

“Uh-huh,” says Erin, and turns back to Melanie. “You can answer his question.”