Page 86 of Seasonal Fears

Melanie cocks her head and looks at him. That’s all. It’s already warming up inside the cab now that she’s gone, and part of Harry is grateful for the warmth, and the rest of him hates that part for appreciating her absence even for a moment.

She begins walking around the car, heading for the officer’s patrol car.

“Miss, you need to stop right there. You’re interfering with an arrest.”

“You’re not who I’m here to see,” she says. “You want us to think you are, but you’re not. You have a gun and you think that makes you more important than you are. You’re just another attendant.” The scorn in her voice hurts to hear. Harry glances into the backseat at Jack and Jenny. They’re sitting silently, their expressions unreadable.

Catching his eye, Jack offers the smallest of smiles. “It’s okay,” she says. “The Winter’s ideas and Melanie’s ideas aren’t always going to be exactly the same. I know what she thinks of me.”

Melanie is still walking. She’s pretty and she’s young and she’s female, and all these things are clearly combining to make the officer hesitate. He puts his hand on his sidearm as he turns to fully face her, taking a step in her direction.

“Miss, you are in direct defiance of an order from an officer of the law,” he says. “Stop where you are, or I will be forced to charge you with resisting arrest.”

Melanie turns and looks at him, and he backs up a step, following it with several more, until his thighs brush the car and he all but sits on the hood. Jack leans forward and says, out the window, “We’re not meant to argue with them, you know. Not even when we don’t like the things they’re doing. Let her alone.”

Melanie ignores him. Melanie ignores all of them, walking onward toward the officer’s car until she reaches the driver’s side and opens the door, sliding smoothly behind the wheel. The man in the passenger seat recoils from her presence, just barely too far away for Harry to see the look on his face as Mel turns toward him. He imagines, from the slant of her shoulders and the angle of her head, that she’s smiling.

She’s usually smiling when she turns on someone like that.

“They’re all feral, the candidates,” says Jack to the officer, leaning out the window so he can hear her clearly. “At this stage, they’re half human and half incarnate, and they don’t know how to handle the mix, because it’s changing all the time. Not like us.”

The officer glances at her, clearly anxious. Jack shrugs, and continues.

“The seasons speak to us, tell us what we are and what that’s going to mean going forward, and then they basically leave us alone. We age slow, we heal fast, our eyes get a little funky, but that’s it. It doesn’t work that way for the candidates. They’re changing all the time. Frost forming in their bones, droughts growing in their hearts. It’s hard to carry all that and remember how humanity works at the same time, and maybe they forget we’re here too. That we need to keep our jobs, and can’t be seen pulling over random-ass teenagers on I-5.”

The officer glances at her again. “What are you, twelve? What job?”

“Thirteen, and my job is the same as yours: getting my candidate to the labyrinth alive. Which I think I’m going to do, while you’ve just failed.”

The officer whips back around to face his car. The windows have iced over, blocking all view of the interior. It’s not rocking; there’s no fight going on. Whatever happened there has already ended.

The driver’s side door opens again, and Melanie slides out. The air around her fogs and chills, like she’s steaming from nothing more than the cold that radiates off her skin. She’s on the border of calling another private snowstorm. The officer pulls his sidearm, aiming it at her as she walks calmly toward him.

“Lay down,” he barks. “On the ground, right now.”

Melanie ignores him and keeps walking.

“You can kill her if you want to,” says Jack. “She hasn’t reached the labyrinth, and a bullet would take her down. But consider this: you don’t have a candidate anymore. All you’d be doing is shooting an unarmed teenage girl for no good reason. Can you live with that?”

The officer hesitates, and Melanie reaches the car. She ignores him as she walks around it to her door, slides inside, and refastens her seatbelt. The temperature promptly drops.

Her skin has gone even whiter than usual, taking on a bluish cast, like a fresh corpse. Harry can barely look at her.

“Drive,” she says, and her voice is brittle and very far away. It belongs to something else, not to his girl. Not to his Melanie.

Harry starts the engine. The officer doesn’t stop him, and doesn’t move to follow or fire his gun as Harry pulls out and drives away.

They have a long way yet to go.

Road Trip

CALENDAR SEASON: FEBRUARY 18TH, 2017: WINTER, LAST QUARTER OF THE WORM MOON.

Aven is bored.

That’s never a good thing. Trevor is starting to worry about getting to the labyrinth alive, much less getting there in one piece. As Aven has been all too glad to demonstrate over the last several days, “alive” and “intact” are not synonymous. People can lose a surprising number of parts before they stop fighting back.

He’s seen things he never wanted to see. He’d considered himself hardened and ready to do whatever was necessary to achieve his goals, but he’d also considered shooting a woman to be the height of wickedness. He had never considered dismantling people like they were unwanted toys, throwing bits away until they stopped working altogether.