Page 63 of Seasonal Fears

“Um,” says Melanie. “Jack says they don’t have to be. The last North American coronation was three hundred years ago, and it was a bloody one, but people can turn the crown aside. They don’t have to take it, and that means they can opt out. Everyone but me. If I opt out, the Winter leaves me, and the shock of the coronation starting kills me.”

“Dead girl walking,” says Dodger, approvingly. “Nice.”

“Do you think you can fight your way to the finish line?” asks Roger. “Are you playing to win?”

Melanie thinks of the frozen place, how much she hates it there in the deep, unbreachable cold. And she thinks of Harry, how much she loves him, how much she’d do to stay with him.

“I don’t have a choice,” she says.

Strawberry Summer

CALENDAR SEASON: FEBRUARY 14TH, 2017: WINTER, WANING WORM MOON.

It’s still summer in the garden.

Harry can feel it as soon as he steps onto the porch, even without going down the stairs. Jack feels it too; she looks distinctly uncomfortable, and when he steps onto the stairs, she doesn’t follow, but hangs back in the shadow of the eaves, where it’s as close as this space gets to the actual season at play in the world outside this ridiculous, topsy-turvy place.

“Sorry,” she says. “If you go down there, I can’t go with you. But you should go down, if it helps you feel better. This is a lot for me, and for Mel, and it’s happening during our half of the year. I can’t imagine trying to swallow all this shit if it had started up during the spring.”

“I’m good here,” says Harry, and sits. The strawberry plant that sprouted between the bricks of the path when he became enraptured by the summer has continued to spread, now obliterating half the walkway. It’s putting out fruit, red and ripe and luscious in the sunlight, and he knows that if he went down there to harvest it, it would be the most delicious thing he’s ever tasted.

He did that. Him. He may not have frozen a man to death in a cruddy motel bathroom, but he changed the world to the tune of calling strawberries out of nothingness and bringing a little more life into being. Because he’s going to wear the Summer crown, or he’s going to die.

The weight of it all is too much for him to carry. He bends forward, putting his hands over his face, and shakes. Not for long; just a few seconds, just long enough to shudder out some of the terror, some of the pressing conviction that the sky is going to fall. He doesn’t cry. He almost wants to, but he’s not quite there yet. He will be, soon enough, he’s sure.

When he sits up again and turns to look at Jack, she’s been joined by the kids from Starbucks, Tim’s mouth tight and pinched and his eyes grave behind his glasses, Kim watching him with concern. Tim walks over and flops himself down next to Harry, waving a hand vaguely at the yard, the street, the horizon.

“This was all going to be ours,” he says. “Only two of the cuckoos from the generation before ours were still around, and they were inherently flawed, they couldn’t stay together for more than a few hours without trying to kill each other, and the Math cuckoo had already tried to kill herself when she didn’t have Language as a target, and we were going to inherit it all. Our father told us so.”

“Your father…?”

“James Reed,” says Kim. “I know that … I know Erin didn’t have good experiences with him, but Roger and Dodger never really knew him as a person, not like we did. He was our dad. He made us, and he took care of us, and he would bring us the most magical things when he traveled. He was good to us.”

“And then the damn flawed cuckoos figured out how to get along,” says Tim. “They started to manifest. They started to yank the Doctrine to themselves, and they didn’t leave any for us. They talk to each other, you know. They’re inside each other’s heads all the time. They don’t always remember to talk out loud when we don’t have company. So you’ll be reaching for the rolls at the dinner table and Roger will suddenly hand them to Dodger, and look confused when you object. Or you’ll all be doing homework, and they’ll both start laughing like they’ve just heard the funniest joke in the world. They never have to be alone. They don’t understand how lucky they are.”

“It was that way for us, before they seized the Doctrine,” says Kim. “We each knew what the other was thinking. It wasn’t creepy, or weird—at least not to us. It was how the world is supposed to be. Your best friend is inside your head, and you never have to be alone.”

“Can’t they … I don’t know, can’t they give you a little piece of this Doctrine thing, so it turns back on?” asks Harry. “Like Jack doesn’t hold the Winter, but she has a little piece of Winter inside her, and that’s what makes her Jack Frost.”

“No, because our system isn’t natural the way yours is,” says Kim. “I don’t know if we’d get the Doctrine if something happened to Roger and Dodger. I don’t even know if something can happen to Roger and Dodger. They’re more the sort of people that happen to things than the sort that things happen to.”

“Things are afraid to happen to them,” says Tim. “So we get to be a part of this fucked-up alchemical world, and we’re monsters just like all the people we live with, unnatural and unnecessary, but we don’t even get the cool superpowers to go with it. Not unless we become alchemists.”

“And alchemists tend to make things worse,” says Kim. “I mean, you can’t honestly listen to all that talk about Melanie’s dad and think he didn’t make things worse. But maybe he also loved her. Maybe he took care of her instead of scrapping the project and doing something else because when he met his daughter, he loved her. Like our father loved us.”

Harry, who knows his current opinions about James Reed are based entirely off the word of people he has no more reason to trust than he does Kim and Tim, nods a little. “So you regret it, then?” he asks. “You wanted to be a part of the alchemical world, and talk in each other’s heads, and never be alone again?”

“It’s what we were raised to be,” says Kim. “Of course we regret it. You can’t create someone to be a monster, raise them to be a monster, and then turn around one day and tell them they have to be mortal and expect them to be okay with it. We regret it and we resent it and we should probably hate Roger and Dodger for taking the Doctrine away from us. We were so close to claiming it when they managed to manifest! And they … well, they try not to think about it more than they have to. Sometimes I think Dodger actually forgets where we came from, and thinks we came with the house. ‘Six bedrooms, three baths, two teens.’”

“We know our father wasn’t a good man,” says Tim. “He was willing to use us to manipulate each other, and he put us in the line of fire when he didn’t have to. He could have moved us to a safe house as soon as he knew the manifest Doctrine was coming, and instead, he set things up to transfer it from its current hosts into us, which meant we had to be on location. He wasn’t a good man, and he wasn’t a kind man, and he wasn’t a generous man. But he still loved us. He did things for us that he didn’t have to do. He remembered our birthday, he remembered the name of the woman who’d incubated us, he made sure we were as happy as we could be, in his underground lab where we never saw the sun.”

Harry isn’t sure that sounds like love. It sounds, in some ways, like a more extreme version of the not-quite-love he’d watched Melanie receive from her father, who sometimes seemed to think raising a daughter with a heart condition and raising a rare orchid were the same thing, like he could solve all of their problems if he just built her a big-enough greenhouse. So he doesn’t say anything, just listens.

“The seasons are more generous,” says Jack. “They happen all over the world, and so they spread themselves around. Ascendants like me, we don’t get enough to force our seasons to happen out of turn. You’ll never meet a Corn Jenny who can grow strawberries without seed cuttings, or a Jack Frost who can freeze a car engine solid. But we carry our seasons in our hearts, and they keep us connected to the rest of the web. It’s why we can find our candidates. There’s not a potential Winter or Summer for every one of us, but we don’t fight for them. The candidates are more selfish, because there’s only one crown per continent for each season. So they have to eliminate the competition.”

“It wasn’t always killing, though, right?” asks Kim. “When Dodger came downstairs and announced that a coronation had started, so we might have weirdoes showing up on our doorstep demanding we help them find their missing crowns, she said we shouldn’t let them in if that happened, but shut the door and go find an adult.” Her lip curls at the end, making it clear what she thinks of that particular piece of advice.

“No,” says Jack. “It wasn’t always killing. The last Winter King of North America set that tone during his own coronation, when he started killing his opponents, even after they’d renounced their crowns. He thought he had a right to claim the continent, because he was white and most of them weren’t.”