Page 88 of Seasonal Fears

There’s no one close enough to hear the screams.

When she’s done, she licks a smear of cheese dust off the side of her hand, tongue coming uncomfortably close to a splash of the deputy’s blood, and all but dances back to the car.

“I think I want tacos,” she says. “They’re not very far ahead of us. The ice hadn’t melted yet. So there’s time to stop for food, and then we’ll catch them, and then I’ll make my sister sorry she left me.”

“Yes,” says Trevor. “I’m sure you will.”

They leave the deputy—or his body, anyway—behind, next to the shell of his slowly thawing car.

Come Back

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

The air in the car is still cold. Not so cold that Harry can see his breath anymore, but cold enough that he’s shivering, wishing he had a thicker jacket, wishing there were a way to turn down the air conditioning when the air conditioning is his girlfriend. He glances at their attendants in the rearview mirror. Jenny is also shivering, huddled against the car door with a miserable expression on his face. Jack, on the other hand, seems to be perfectly fine, even content with the reduced temperature in the cab.

She speaks for the Winter, if not as clearly as Mel does. This is probably ideal for her.

Melanie still isn’t saying anything. She’s staring straight ahead, motionless, radiating cold. Harry’s glad he’s driving. It saves him from the temptation to look at her eyes, which have changed colors almost completely, like they’ve iced over from the inside. It’s not just unsettling, it’s terrifying. She’s not his anymore.

Maybe she was never his in the first place. Her father built her to be the perfect vessel for the Winter; maybe he’s never been anything but a means of delivering her to the inevitable, of seeing her over the boundaries between any candidate and the labyrinth. It’s a heartbreaking thought. It’s not as distant as he wants it to be. So he hits the gas harder and keeps driving, turning miles into memories, turning destination into distance traveled, leaving it all behind. Leaving everything they were and are and ever wanted behind.

The future will be there regardless. All that matters is reaching it.

Melanie sighs a little, the first sound she’s made since fastening her seatbelt. Harry glances at her, torn between frightened and hopeful. “Mel?”

She doesn’t reply.

“Hey, Mel, if you can hear me, can you let me know, maybe? Because you’re freaking me out right now, and I get it if you need more time, honest I do, I just don’t know what to do with it.” If he weren’t driving right now, he’d take her in his arms and hold her until she thawed. He has a feeling he might not survive the experience without making his own ascent into Summer, climbing those sharp and burning steps between him and a season that is not yet completely his, but it would be worth it to bring her back to him. It would be worth it to bring her home.

All he’s ever really wanted was to bring her home.

Melanie doesn’t reply, only keeps staring straight ahead, and the car is so cold, and they have so far yet to go. Harry swallows and keeps driving. He doesn’t know what else to do.

“This has to be your story too, or there’s not any point.”

The woman looks exactly like her, white skin and black hair and a face designed to get her out of trouble, pretty enough to deflect blame without being pretty enough to attract it (and that’s on society, both parts of it: beauty is not virtue, and not an invitation to vice). Only her eyes are different, black slices of star-speckled sky instead of glacial blue, and Melanie knows they’ve never met before, and Melanie knows they’ve been together since before she began.

It’s a lot. Then again, everything is a lot. When she closes her eyes even for a moment, even long enough to blink, she sees the other Winter candidate sitting in the police car, struggling to scream as his skin iced over, as his fingers turned black. Death by frostbite can be swift, but it isn’t the clean transmutation the movies would make it out to be: it isn’t flesh becoming ice, untroubled and clear. It’s painful and it’s brutal and it’s a terrible way to die.

She doesn’t think she can die that way anymore. Not with this much Winter surging inside of her. But there are always other ways, and one of them will find her if she’s not careful.

The forest around them is all black trees against white snow, and the woman who looks like her is the only splash of color she can see, wearing a purple-and-yellow cheerleading uniform that could have been stolen from Melanie’s own locker. Since she’s fairly sure this is all in her head, maybe it was, or at least from the memory of her locker, the idea of it, the place where she keeps all the best parts of her high school experience.

She was never supposed to live long enough to make it here. She was the sick girl, the dying girl, the failed experiment, and the fact that her father spent so much time and effort on keeping her alive proves he loved her, at least enough not to let her go. That could be a comfort, even here in this frozen place. It isn’t, not yet.

The world began fading into forest, into this black-and-white illusion, when she killed the man in the police car. She never knew his name and now she never will, and it hurts her to realize that it doesn’t hurt her more. She could have asked. She could have said something beyond “Are you trying to challenge me for the crown? Will you refuse your claim?”

She could have done something beyond grabbing his arm with her cold, cold hands when he shook his head and answered no. She could have found another path. She could have refused to engage. Harry faced his second Summer candidate without killing the man, even after he’d kidnapped and assaulted Harry and Jack. She failed. She failed to find a safe way through this change of seasons, and they’re all going to pay for it. She’s already paying, because she’s down so deep that she can’t even find the comforting numbness that greeted her on her first descent; all she can do is feel, and fall.

She feels as if she’s falling still, even standing on this snow-covered ground and facing the woman who is and is not her, the woman with the stars in her eyes. This is the forest of her dreams. She isn’t dreaming now.

“You can’t opt out and still claim the crown. If you stay down here with me, you’ll be safe and home, but you’ll never be coronated.”

Melanie blinks, suddenly interested. She has an option other than victory? Jack never presented that to her. Jack made it sound as if she had to win or all was lost. This is something new. She focuses on the woman, who lifts her eyebrows in apparent surprise.

“Oh, that’s what gets your attention? Do you plan to evade the crown somehow? Because it doesn’t really work that way. If you stay here, you’ll be safe, but you won’t be able to keep me. Someone else will do that. And part of why we tolerate the deaths of all the little possibilities who don’t win—why we didn’t step in when you started murdering each other the way you always do these days, it’s quaint, really, although I don’t entirely understand why you need to be like that—is because you’re all dead already. Every single one of you.”

Melanie blinks, frowns, stands up a little straighter. “What do you mean?”