Page 72 of Seasonal Fears

The new light is definitely coming from somewhere overhead, but is otherwise as nondirectional as it was before. The reason for that is finally clear: the walls and ceiling are covered by great sheets of opaque plastic, creating a smaller space within the room and obscuring everything real about it. More plastic covers the floor. Harry shifts on his chair and hears the plastic crinkle, and wonders how he could have missed it before.

But his head is still pounding, and this is an entirely new, entirely terrible situation. He looks at Jack, and realizes she lied at least a little about how she got here: one of her eyes has been blackened, and there’s a bloody scrape down the side of her face that’s going to turn ugly as it scabs and heals. They’ll have to pick her up some concealer, or people will think he and Mel have been beating the kid.

And that assumes they’re getting out of here alive, which is not a safe assumption. That feeling of boiling summer sun is washing over him again, making the room too hot and his skin too tight and everything about his surroundings stuffy and unbearable. Harry breathes in as deeply as he can—his nose is clogged, probably with dried blood, and won’t that be fun to clean up once they get out of this—and strains against the bonds holding him to the chair.

If this were an action movie, he knows, this would be the moment where he snapped the ropes and broke gloriously free to save Jack and beat the living crap out of the guy who kidnapped them both. Instead, nothing happens. He coughs.

Something rustles on the other side of the plastic sheeting. Harry turns toward the sound so quickly, his head spins for a moment afterward. Jack does the same, and he sees her wince.

Some of the plastic sheeting is pushed aside, and a dainty woman in a heavy white sweater and ski pants steps through. She’s bundled up like she thinks she’s about to go snowshoeing in Saskatchewan, not like she’s in a well-heated location on a relatively mild February night in California.

She’s not carrying any weapons, and she’s not the man who hit Harry with the baseball bat. He relaxes a little. “Hey,” he says. “Hey, before you freak out, can you untie us? We don’t know what we’re doing here, and we need to go find my girlfriend—” He’s found that introducing the fact that he has a girlfriend as early in the conversation as possible tends to help girls his own age relax around him, which makes sense, given that he’s over six feet tall and built somewhat like a brick wall that decided to get up and walk around. Football works its wonders on the physique, even as it takes its toll.

The woman stops and looks at him, patently disbelieving. Her lip curls upward in what he recognizes as disgust even before she speaks. “Ew,” she says. “As if I’d help you get back to any girl who’d date an embodiment? That’s gross. You shouldn’t date her. She’s gross.”

“So what, I should be dating you?”

“No, you shouldn’t be dating anyone, because anyone you date is going to be dating an embodiment, and hence gross.” She runs her eyes along first him, and then Jack. “The little one’s a halfsie, right?”

“A what?” demands Jack.

“You know. Half-embodiment, half-normal person like the world is supposed to belong to? Not quite as gross. Also not the girlfriend, unless he likes them really young and has a generous idea of what it means to ‘find’ someone.”

“Not the girlfriend,” says Jack. “And if you know all this, you’re not a ‘normal’ person either. But you’re not a seasonal. I’m going to go out on a limb and say ‘alchemist,’ which means you’re the living worst. Am I close?”

The girl smiles. It’s a thin, sharp expression like a slice along the span of her face, and there’s nothing of kindness in it. Nothing at all. “I like you better than the other one. I’m going to enjoy seeing what I can do with the pieces of you.”

“The other one?” asks Jack.

The girl just keeps smiling, turning it on Harry without seeming to move her head. “You, on the other hand, it doesn’t matter how much I like, I get you for my own. Oh, the rest of my coven is going to be so jealous when they hear that I got to take a candidate apart!”

Jack groans. “Coven? Like this is an episode of Sabrina or something? Come on, lady, witches haven’t been real for hundreds of years. You’re an alchemist. Behave with a little bit of dignity.”

The girl ignores her. Harry can sort of understand the impulse. “I’ll be able to barter bits of you for years, and even if they catch candidates of their own, you’ll further my studies incredibly.” She looks at Jack, smile fading, replaced by a hard, flat look in her eyes. “You, on the other hand, are a lot less valuable than he is. I know three other practitioners who’ve managed to nail halfsies to their tables, and they’ve already pretty well cornered the market on the little pieces of you. I’m still going to harvest, I’m just not going to enjoy it as much.”

Jack spits at her.

That always works in the movies, always leaves the villain shamed and disgusted and wiping mucus from their cheeks. In this case, Jack mostly just spits on the floor, well short of her target. The girl looks at it, expression going hard.

“I should make you mop that up with your face,” she says coldly, looking slowly back up to Jack herself. “I may, when you’re handed over. It would be a nice way to teach you about manners before it doesn’t matter anymore.”

She turns on her heels and stalks to the spot in the plastic where she entered, bellowing, “Matthew! They’re all yours!” before she disappears.

Harry looks at Jack. Jack looks at Harry. The sense of doom in the air is almost overwhelming. Jack still manages to take a breath and say, almost nonchalantly, “I hate the Hot Topic alchemists. They’re even worse than the Congressional kind.”

“What?”

“The American Alchemical Congress is sort of correspondence school for alchemists. There aren’t enough of them for everyone to have a formal education, no apprentices and masters for the majority, but they’ll tell alchemists what to do and how to do it. Formalized alchemy is largely based on sympathetic magic. I’m assuming that’s why Reed’s pet projects had rhyming names, and it’s why all the attendants stop answering to our birth names basically the moment we figure out what we really are. The name I had doesn’t even sound like me anymore. I played along for about a month before I split, because I didn’t really have a choice while I was still in my mother’s house, but it would be like me deciding to start calling you ‘Michelangelo’ all the time. You could learn to respond to it. Doesn’t make it you.”

“Huh,” says Harry. “So you definitely think she’s an alchemist?”

“If she’s talking about taking us apart and using our femurs to curry favor with her coven? Oh, yeah. The difference between an alchemist and a witch is the difference between Whole Foods and the Dollar Store. Witches don’t get proper training, but they can cobble together a lot of the same concepts if they have the time, and they like to share what they know. Hot Topic has a lot to answer for.”

“My head hurts,” grumbles Harry.

“It’d be weird if it didn’t,” says Jack. She’s tense, her attention focused on the flap cut into the plastic even as she answers Harry’s questions. He can’t blame her for that. He’d be tense if his head wasn’t spinning and he wasn’t so god-awful worried about Melanie. As it stands, he can’t quite work up the focus for anything more than pulling gently against the ropes holding him to the chair, trying to find some slack in the knots, some leeway.

There isn’t any.