Page 70 of Seasonal Fears

Harry pauses to watch her go, barely aware that he’s staring before Jack prods him in the arm and says, “Hey, loverboy, eyes go inside your head.”

“It’s just nice to see her feeling like she can run,” he says without rancor, turning to take the hose from its resting place and select the grade of gas he wants. A sweep of his credit card verifies it’s still active and approves him to start pumping. He twists off the gas cap and seats the nozzle, getting it locked into position a bare heartbeat before a sudden feeling of sickening heat washes over him.

It’s the heat of sunlight beating down on the pavement during the middle of the summer, of bonfires in July, when they have no business burning, and Harry turns to scan for the source of it right before the baseball bat catches him across the face and everything goes black.

Melanie is at the register with a heart-shaped box in hand, waiting for her chance to pay, when the stand of somewhat-wilted roses catches her eye. She looks at it thoughtfully, weighing the price on the chocolates against the price of the flowers. She’d have to go back to the car and get more money if she wanted to buy both, and somehow that feels grubby in a way swiping the first twenty didn’t. She wants to get Harry a Valentine, and yeah, he’s technically paying for it either way, but the first twenty was impulsive and a reminder that today is Valentine’s Day, even if they didn’t celebrate in any of the traditional ways. A second twenty would show intent.

Regretfully, she decides to leave the roses where they are and steps up to the register, putting her cheap box down and favoring the clerk with a smile. He’s older, a little worn down by a life spent doing all sorts of things she doesn’t know and wouldn’t assume were any of her business if she had the opportunity to ask about them. But his face is kind, and when he returns her smile, showing an assortment of yellowed teeth, the expression is sincere.

“What’s a pretty girl like you doing in a place like this on Valentine’s Day?” he asks. His tone keeps the question from crossing any of the lines into creepiness that it could have merrily gone bounding over; it comes across as genuine curiosity. He really wants to know.

“My boyfriend’s filling the car, and I thought I’d sneak away to get him some chocolates to say thanks for everything he’s done today,” she says. “He’s been amazing, I’m the flake.”

That’s not quite the whole story, but it’s good enough for a stranger in a convenience store. The man’s smile only grows, and he nods toward the wilted roses.

“You should grab him a bundle of those,” he says.

“I can’t. This is all the money I have, and we’re going to be on the road for a while—he’ll appreciate the chocolates a lot more.”

“It’s all right.” His smile turns knowing. “This late on Valentine’s Day? No one’s coming here looking for flowers. They’re on the house.” He passes her change back across the counter—eleven dollars and thirty-seven cents—and she stuffs a five into his tip jar before smiling brightly, tucking the remainder in her pocket, and snagging one of the less-wilted bunches of roses with the hand that doesn’t hold Harry’s chocolates.

“Thank you so, so much,” she chirps, and turns for the door. The man calls a bright farewell, enchanted by his own generosity. She steps back out into the diesel-scented evening, breathing deeply from her gifted bouquet, before she trots toward the car.

The pump is still jammed into the gas tank, the cap dangling from its thin plastic thread, but Harry’s gone.

So is Jack.

And there’s blood on the side mirror, just a few drops, round and red as the roses she has just dropped to the pavement, scattering their petals like confetti for the night wind to take. Her eyes are wide and round as she claps a hand over her mouth.

Not fast enough or tightly enough to stop the scream from getting loose, but enough to muffle it, a little.

Alone, Melanie Cosgrove stands, surrounded by ruined roses, and tries to figure out what happens next.

Abduction

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

It takes almost five minutes for Melanie to get herself back under control, adrenaline flooding her system and triggering the desire to run in some random direction, arms flailing, until she finds safety. It wars with the equal desire to find Harry’s phone, hers having been taken rather catastrophically apart to keep her father from finding her, and calling 911.

She stops screaming and looks, almost desperately, toward the convenience store. The nice man who’d been so concerned about what she was doing all by herself is back to reading his magazine, paying no attention to the little drama in the parking lot. He should have heard her screaming, if nothing else. The fact that he didn’t means …

Means she’s slipped between the edges of the world once again, and whatever happened here was a consequence of the seasons slamming into one another. She doesn’t feel the killing cold that would tell her another Winter candidate was nearby, but whoever took Harry made a mistake.

They also took Jack.

She’s still holding the chocolates, her fingers digging divots into the cardboard of their box. She tosses them through the open window into the front seat, grateful to Harry for thinking to swipe his credit card first as she disengages the hose and returns it to the pump. Driving away with the car still connected to the fueling station might be dramatic and all, but she’s not a very confident driver, and she doesn’t want to have to contend with an explosion at her back. She also doesn’t want to have to push the limits of the situational invisibility that seems to come from interaction with the alchemical world.

Melanie walks around the car to the driver’s side door like she’s in a trance, pulling it open and sliding behind the wheel. Harry, not intending to leave the car, has mercifully left the keys in the ignition, and she turns them after she buckles her belt and adjusts the rearview mirror to her own needs. The engine roars on.

Melanie bows her head for a moment, breathing deeply, trying to center herself on the night, which smells of gasoline, yes, exhaust fumes and the nearby highway, but also of the dying winter, the coming spring. She can smell her future in this night, in the melt of distant snow and the germination of sleeping flowers.

California is further into spring than her beloved Oregon, and she wonders, on some level, what that’s going to do to her: whether there’s a place where the climate ignores the calendar so completely that it’ll be like stepping into that impossible garden once again. She’s spent most of her life knowing what it felt like to die, to fall down and simply … go, disappearing into the great absence on the other side of the heartbeat she still doesn’t have. In Berkeley, she learned a different way to die.

Stepping into the summer wasn’t a fall into the great absence, it was a soft tumble into the forest she visits in her dreams, the bare branches full of icicles and owls. She could spend eternity there if she had to. The thought of spending three months out of every year walking there is less distressing than it could have been, and when that man Roger ordered her back to life, she’d come to with the scent of a blizzard lingering in her nostrils and the sudden, utter conviction that what they’re doing is nothing more or less than the right thing.

She can smell the spring approaching, bearing down on their location like a freight train, and nothing she can do can hold it off. Yet. She has a dim idea that eventually, it will be something she can delay, if not postpone forever. Once they manifest, once they know how they fit into this convoluted system, they’ll be able to push back a lot harder against the world. They can change things. Not completely—the seasons are a million moving pieces, and she doubts even the number of seasonal monarchs the world contains could be enough to understand them all—but a little bit, when necessary.

So she knows what spring smells like, and winter, and summer. She rolls up the car window, breathes deeply, and coughs. The car smells like three people have been crammed inside it for days, eating and breathing and sleeping and farting. It smells like road trip. It’s not the most pleasant thing ever. But she’s looking for something, and so she closes her eyes and tries again.