Page 76 of Seasonal Fears

Tommy straightens slowly from his crouch, eyes fixed on Harry’s. “Please,” he says. “Claim me as your attendant. You have more of Summer in you than Matthew does. If you lay claim, I won’t have a choice. I’ll have to go with the stronger incarnate.”

It feels uncomfortably like owning people to Harry, who doesn’t know quite how to articulate how much he dislikes this idea, or why it rubs him so much the wrong way. Still, he can’t mistake the desperation in the other man’s face, or the anxious way his eyes keep darting to the door. His freed hands are still filled with pins and needles. He sets one of them on Tommy’s shoulder, closing his fingers around the other man’s flesh, holding him in place.

“I am Harald March, I am the Summer King, the season incarnate, and I claim you as my Corn Jenny, to serve the season in ascendancy,” he says. “When I take the crown, you will stand by my side, and you will be my herald in the world that is to come.”

Pulling his hand away, he blinks. “I have no idea where any of that came from. I’m sorry. Can you get Jack free, please?”

“In a heartbeat,” says Jenny—says Tommy—says Jenny; thinking of him as Tommy has become suddenly impossibly painful, like trying to think of his mother or Melanie as a slur. It’s not a word that applies to this man, or ever could have. It’s barely even a name.

Jack looks at Harry thoughtfully as Jenny moves to untie her. When Harry meets her eyes, she nods approval. “They came from the part of you that’s just waking up, the part of you that calls sunshine the way Mel calls snow,” she says. “They came from the Summer. This is all new to you, as a flesh creature of fleshy fleshness, but the Summer knows what it’s doing. Sometimes you just have to let it.”

There is a clatter from outside, as of someone rolling an empty garbage can back up against a garage wall. Jack’s head snaps toward it, shoulders tense. There’s been no indication of Melanie’s presence since that first blast of her horn; until the clatter, everything was silent. She fought back in the motel.

She fought back because Harry was there, and she didn’t want him to get hurt. Now she’s alone, and there’s no telling what that other Summer is saying or doing to her. Maybe he’s trying to convince her Harry’s already dead, and she should transfer her partnership.

The part of Harry that knew what to say when claiming Jenny as his own knows Melanie could refuse him as her potential consort and take another Summer in his stead. He also knows it hasn’t happened. Knowing things without being told is not the most comfortable thing he’s ever experienced; it’s sort of like having ants in his brain, busily bringing scraps of psychological sugar to the front of his thoughts.

Jenny has Jack’s hands free. She stretches her arms over her head, then reaches down to help with the knots holding her legs, just as the plastic is shoved aside and Misty flounces into the room, ponytail swaying with each bouncy, angry step. “You people are going to have to wait while my brother flirts with some washed-out Snow White–looking cheerleader,” she says, before she bothers to actually look at them. Her face goes hard, but there’s a feral delight behind those flat, uncaring eyes. “Oooo, Tommy, Matt’s gonna be so mad at you,” she says, with glee that doesn’t match her furious expression.

Harry stands, legs only shaking slightly as he starts using them again. It’s good to know that all that time in training has left him able to walk through numbness. “His name is Jenny,” he says coolly. “He’s my attendant. I don’t care if your brother gets mad at us. I’m pretty pissed at him.”

Misty reaches into the pocket of her cardigan and pulls out a vial full of dark, roiling smoke. It looks like a prop from a bad fantasy movie, and Harry can’t stop himself from staring at it. The world stopped making sense when Mel collapsed on the football field and a kid barely out of elementary school started lecturing him about how magic is real and he’s a part of it. This is happening, whether he wants it to be or not, and he’s come to terms with that, somewhat unwillingly, but still.

Apart from Mel’s private blizzard, this is the first thing he’s seen that he can’t dismiss as a bunch of people playing a really weird LARP that they’ve somehow drafted him into. That smoke is moving with intent, throwing itself from one end of the vial to another like it wants nothing more than to escape.

“You know what this is?” asks Misty, holding the vial up and shaking it like a dance team leader’s baton. Jenny freezes in the act of untying Jack’s feet, and Jack freezes in the process of trying to shake the ropes away. Harry can tell from their reaction that whatever the smoke is, it’s really, really bad, and they don’t want it to get loose.

He folds his arms, looking at Misty the way he’s learned to look at girls who get a little too enthusiastic with their offers to “comfort” him following Melanie’s supposedly inevitable death. Thinking of how disappointed they’ll be when they realize she no longer stays dead is one of the only good things about this situation.

“No, and I’m not sure you know, either,” he says. “You’re waving it around like it’s something scary, but if it were really something scary, you’d be treating it with a little more respect and a little less ‘look at me, I’m the villain from an anime you’ve never heard of, I’m so bad.’”

Her eyes narrow. “You know, my brother doesn’t need any of you. He only brought you here because I said I wanted your body for my birthday.”

“That’s gross,” says Harry.

“If it’s mine, I can do whatever I want with it,” she says, clearly furious, and throws the vial at the floor before running back to the opening in the plastic and flinging herself through. She stops right on the other side of the clear vinyl sheet, a hungry expression on her face.

Not as hungry as the smoke. It boils free when the vial cracks, gathering into a black, horrifying cloud in the middle of the room, much larger than its previous confinement would have indicated. It doesn’t wisp or dissipate like smoke should, only clusters more and more tightly together, a dire warning of disaster to come. It looks like a snake getting ready to strike. The roiling continues, and Harry swears he can see faces in the blackness, eyes gouged-out holes, mouths chattering in ceaseless, furious hunger.

Misty looks almost as hungry as the smoke, eyes alight with obvious excited expectation for what she believes is about to come. Jack is free of her chair; she and Jenny are clinging to each other, terrified.

“You promised your brother you wouldn’t hurt me!” shouts Jenny, like he thinks it’s going to do a scrap of good.

Misty laughs, wildly. “You promised my brother you wouldn’t betray him!” she calls back. “He’s more important than some stupid Seasonal Attendant! There’s dozens and dozens of you, and only one Summer King! He’s going to win the crown, and it won’t matter what happened to you!”

The smoke lunges forward. It surrounds Harry in an instant, swirling and biting, filled with a thousand razored mouths, a million teeth that slash at his skin. He’ll be devoured in seconds if he doesn’t do something about this smoke, if he doesn’t find a way to escape it. His first instinct is to run, but he knows it won’t help; smoke clings. Anyone who’s ever known a smoker knows that. He can’t roll to put it out, because it isn’t burning, only the aftermath of burning, not fire, only the consequences of fire.

He doesn’t move.

The smoke continues to swirl. He hears Jack screaming, the loud, horrified shrieks of a child seeing something terrible unfold. She’s always seemed so much older than her age, and this is almost more frightening than the smoke itself. Magic is real and magic is terrible and being a part of a magical world isn’t enough to protect him from its dangers. Jack’s only an attendant. If he can’t survive this, what’s going to happen to her?

He doesn’t move.

The biting of the smoke is starting to become truly painful, like having sandpaper struck repeatedly over his skin. His eyes are closed, as much to protect them as anything else. He takes a deep breath, coughing as he inhales a few flecks of the roiling smoke, and raises his arms, reaching inward, looking for the place he found in the garden in Berkeley, looking for the feeling of utter peace and belonging that suffused him in the summer sun.

It isn’t summer now, not here, but he’s still the Summer, and for the first time, he fully understands the distinction between the two. The season is temporary and transitory. It dictates his strength, yes, but it’s like the joke his father used to tell when his mother scolded him for having a drink before lunch on the weekend—it’s five o’clock somewhere. Well, it’s summer somewhere, in Australia, maybe, or someplace else on the other side of the world, someplace far away and unfamiliar, where he may never get to go. Becoming a living vessel for the season means limiting some of his adult choices, means not traveling as much as he’s always idly wanted to … but he’d only wanted to travel so he could show the world to Melanie, and she’s never been all that interested. He’ll have her. He’ll have Castleview. And he’ll have the sunlight burning in his veins.

It’s always summer somewhere.