Page 80 of Seasonal Fears

The small part of Harry that understands how abnormal all of this is, how out of character it is for him to refuse Melanie’s offer of support, wants nothing more than to seize that hand and let it pull him to safety. But it’s a small part, such a small part. When Melanie fell, she fell hard and fast and traumatized, lost almost before she had the chance to understand what was happening. Harry, on the other hand … Harry knew he was leaving the safe and narrow path he’s walked for his entire life. Harry surrendered to his season with his eyes open and the full knowledge of the choice he was making. That he did it to save the woman he now wishes would go away and leave him alone doesn’t change that he did it, him, Harald March. He made a choice. He called Summer out of the space where it was sleeping in his bones.

He’s not sure when the last time he made a choice for himself was. He didn’t choose to be a vessel for Summer—the season itself chose that, entering him when he was in the process of being made, natural process mirroring the alchemical one Melanie’s parents were undertaking. Roger and Dodger’s reassurances aside, he’s suddenly not sure he chose Melanie, either. She’s the perfect vessel for Winter, built and molded that way, intended for nothing more in this world than the containment of her season. Of course he fell in love with her. He didn’t stand a chance. No Summer vessel would have.

So his destiny and his parallel were chosen for him, and when Mel ran, she chose for both of them. One more thing he didn’t get to decide, one more thing he didn’t get to have a real say in. But he chose to call Summer, and he’s almost drunk now, on the glories of being the one who makes the decision for a change.

He shrugs off Jenny’s hand. “Don’t touch me while I’m driving.”

“So pull over,” says Jenny. His voice is low and soft and very, very close. “This is important, Harry. You need to let the Summer go.”

“I will not renounce my crown.”

“No one’s asking you to concede your claim to the season. You’re going to be the Summer incarnate, if only we can get you to the labyrinth and through to the other side. You have a very strong chance of winning, from what I can see. You’ll be able to burn forever, if that’s really what you want to do. But right now, I need you to let Summer go. You have to trust that it’s going to come back to you if you want to be the one who claims the crown.”

It sounds reasonable. It sounds rational. Harry doesn’t want to listen, doesn’t want to believe a single word applies to him.

Then another hand touches his arm. This one is cool, verging on cold, but still the hand of a living creature and not a corpse, like someone who’s been walking outside too long in December without gloves on. He can feel the outline of every single finger, and in that moment the man and the season currently driving him are united in wanting to take the woman who owns that hand into his arms and hold her tight and never, never let go.

“Harry,” says Mel, her voice gentle. “You promised you’d never leave me, remember? That no matter how bad it got, no matter how sick I got, you’d never, ever leave me. I’ve never taken you for a liar. Come back to me, Harry. Come back to me before you go too far away.”

He blinks, and the road swims in front of his eyes, becoming blurry and uncertain. He’s back on the freeway. Cars zip by at what suddenly feel like unsafe speeds as he puts on his blinker and pulls off to the side of the road, as far onto the shoulder as he can manage without pulling into the ditch. Horns blare as cars rush by, still too fast to follow. Faster, now that they’re not moving. Harry plants his hands on the wheel and pushes himself as far back in his seat as he can manage, staring into nothing.

Mel’s hand seems to get warmer on his arm, and he knows instinctively that she’s not actually warming up; he’s cooling down, the two of them meeting in the middle as they were always meant to do.

He coughs. “Am I still glowing?” he asks, not looking at Mel yet, not sure he’s still allowed to.

She laughs and throws her arms around his neck and holds him close, and it’s okay. They’re still okay. They’re on their way to the labyrinth, and they’re okay.

Really.

Road Trip

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

They pull into Berkeley just shy of midnight, and Trevor knows they’re going the right way as soon as they cross the city limits; they’ve almost caught up to Aven’s wayward sister and her bullheaded beau. This will all be over soon.

He won’t have to share a car with a woman who vacillates between murderous mannequin and stubborn toddler, sometimes in the space between two beats of her non-existent heart. They’ll catch up to Harry and Melanie, and Aven will do what she does best—what she loves most in the world, what he’s beginning to have nightmares about every time he lets his guard down enough to risk sleeping—and she’ll go on to claim the Summer crown, and he’ll be attendant to the Summer incarnate, and he’ll never have to be afraid of anyone again.

He’s not entirely sure how yoking himself permanently to this woman is supposed to free him from her, but he’s an attendant. This is what he was made for. And unlike Harry, he doesn’t have the option to refuse his connection to the crown. The incarnates pay more for what the seasons make of them, but they have more freedom to choose how they pay their bills.

Aven looks sullenly up from her place in the passenger seat, poking at a stain on her sweater that could be ketchup or could be blood (since it’s drying gummy and red, not brown, he’s banking on ketchup; not always a guarantee with her) and frowning. “Why did you stop?”

“Your sister and her boyfriend were here,” he says. “Not very long ago. Can’t you feel them?”

Aven’s frown deepens, as it always does when he asks her to put effort into something other than murder. She likes taking people apart. She doesn’t like looking for them. Then her eyes go wide, frown falling away to be replaced by a look of raw amazement.

“Go that way,” she says, jabbing a finger at a seemingly random spot ahead of the car. When Trevor doesn’t immediately hit the gas, she glares at him and points again, before repeating, “Go that way. I want you to drive.”

Trevor has learned not to argue with Aven when he doesn’t have to. Pushing back is best saved for those moments when failure to do so is likely to get them both killed. Summer incarnate or not, she can still be done in by mortal means, as the previous Summer Queen so generously demonstrated when she threw herself in front of a plane; he doesn’t have a fallback if she fails to claim and keep her crown.

The thought of going after Harry when Trevor has literally committed murder to avoid serving the man is repugnant. Worse, even, than working for a murderess. So he turns the car and he drives, and he keeps driving as she barks command after command, sending him down a series of narrow, twisting streets until she shouts for him to stop in front of the ugliest house he’s ever seen in his entire life.

It looks like it was painted by someone with a vague grasp of Lisa Frank’s aesthetic, but absolutely no idea what made it appealing to literally anyone, even the small children who turned the woman into an artistic empire and motivated the sales of a million Trapper Keepers, a hundred million eye-searing pencil sets. No two swatches of color manage to get along with one another, and when he blinks, he’s fairly sure the afterimages of the house stay imprinted on his eyeballs.

“What the fu—” he begins, and gets no further before Aven is flinging herself out of the car and running for the garden gate. Trevor fumbles to pull all the way over, blocking a driveway in the process. “Dammit, Aven! You can’t just jump out of a moving car!”

He stops the car, yanks the keys out of the engine, and follows her, praying the people here in Berkeley are less tow-happy than the ones back home in Portland, or they might wind up having to steal a new car if they want to keep going. This is all a little more bumbling fools than he likes; he’d prefer a partner he can make plans with, one who has more impulse control than your average cocker spaniel.

But no, he got murder Barbie, fresh from her father’s basement laboratory, and while she’s a nightmare when she wants to be, most of the time she’s happy to eat fast food, ask inane questions he can’t refuse to answer, and point in whatever direction she currently thinks she needs to go. He wonders whether Melanie can feel her the way she can feel Melanie. Is she running from her sister, or just running, not sure how to interpret the feeling at the back of her mind that should tell her where her true partner is and free her from the useless man she’s currently yoked to? Does she know she’s not alone?