Page 98 of Seasonal Fears

“All candidates die if they renounce,” says Harry. When Carolyn and Clifford exchange a look, shifty-eyed and silent, he shakes his head. “Summer told me. All candidates die, because something inside us got shoved out to make room for our season. It just normally takes a little while for us to … wind down, I suppose is the best way of putting it. Once we say we won’t wear the crown, we’re dead people walking. Mel and I are just in a slightly tighter scrape than most of our peers. You can’t tell me to renounce the crown like it’s a reasonable request.”

“Then what do you want to do?” asks Carolyn. “We can’t stand here forever. You’ll have to enter the labyrinth eventually.”

“You mean this isn’t…?” Harry gestures around himself with both hands, encompassing the walls of towering corn.

“Not at all,” says Clifford. “This is the scarecrow trail. A line. A labyrinth is, by definition, a bunch of lines, all of them squiggling together and into each other, a whole big mess. Like a dungeon in D&D.”

Carolyn gives him a sharp look. “Hush, you.”

“Nope,” he says, looking briefly smug. “Won’t. Anyway, the labyrinth’s ahead. But the house is behind, and you have to either go forward or refute.”

Harry looks to Mel, who looks back, pleading with her eyes. He knows that his refusing the crown would be her ending, and his own. He’d be leaving her, and for once it would be of his own accord. Maybe it’s silly. Maybe it’s childish. But he still can’t do that, either to her or to himself. Even after all this time, he can’t leave her alone.

“I won’t refute,” he says, almost sullenly, and starts walking again. Mel hurries to catch up with him, sliding her hand into his. The rest of them follow.

The corn watches.

The tunnel ends as abruptly as it began, feeding into a wide delta of open space, the ground still sharp with stubble where something has been recently brought to harvest. It doesn’t make much sense, given that the tunnel of corn was very much a springtime phenomenon, but this is a place of deep and profound harvest, of autumn sliding into winter. Harry stops, blinking, and Melanie stops with him.

There is a wall ahead of them, plain gray brick, stretching in both directions for as far as their eyes can see. There are people as well, lounging on the ground or on bales of hay, standing in small conversational clusters. It’s not the murderdome they were threatened with. Half of the people are shivering in the nippy fall air. The others look perfectly comfortable, like this is precisely as air should always be. The Jacks and the Jennies, then, distinguishable by which season sings to them.

This may not be a murderdome, but there are bodies, most of them shoved up against the corn that curves around the whole scene, out of the way. Their necks are broken, their throats slit; their lives ended. They’ve already been removed from contention.

There is only one entrance, closed with gates made of twisted branches tied together and shaped to look like the ornate curlicues of wrought iron. More people cluster around the gates, although “cluster” may not be the right word. They’re all giving each other space, five to ten feet in some cases, and none of them are close enough to grab any of the others. All of them look like they’ve been through the wars, bruised and dirtied, with blood on their cheeks and tears in their clothing.

“The other candidates,” says Jack, confirming Harry’s guess as she steps up on Melanie’s other side. Jenny steps up on his, and they’re a straight line, unified against what’s ahead of them. Harry doesn’t even have to glance back to know that the other two are gone, somehow taking the exit with them. They’ve reached the labyrinth.

Everything that happens from here is as it was always going to be, and there’s nothing left that any of them can do to change it.

Melanie squeezes his hand, her fingers cold as ice against his own, and begins walking forward. Harry matches her step-for-step. Jack and Jenny are slower, falling quickly behind, allowing their Incarnates to take the lead. Harry feels like he’s following a script he’s never seen before, one that tells him where to put his feet and what to say. He feels like everything that’s happened since the football field has been part of the same performance, all of it designated, all of it designed.

It’s not a good feeling. It means nothing he’s ever done has mattered, that he was always going to wind up here, no matter what he said or did, how hard he tried. If this was all going to happen anyway, did he really fall in love with Melanie when they were kids? Or has his single-minded fixation on her been the result of the season in his soul telling him what to do, who to love, who to be? Free will suddenly feels like as much of a fairy tale as this impossible plain, the wall in front of them, the spired city he can barely see rising in the distance on the other side—

We’re standing in the shadow of the Impossible City, he thinks, and that has never been more true, and he has never been more afraid.

Melanie squeezes his hand again. He glances to the side. She’s looking at him, and when he meets her eyes, she smiles, and a knot in his chest loosens, making it easier for him to breathe. Maybe this was all preordained somehow and maybe it wasn’t; maybe it was always going to happen and maybe it’s all happening the way ordinary things happen, one piece at a time, one action feeding into another. It doesn’t really matter in the end. They’re here, now. This is what they have to live with now. This is the moment they have made.

And he would have loved her no matter what. If she’d been an ordinary girl and still Melanie, if he’d been an ordinary boy and still Harry, he would have loved her. They never needed the seasons to bring them together. They only needed the world to line up long enough for them to meet, and there was never a chance they’d do anything but fall in love once they knew it was an option.

She was made for him, and from the way she’s smiling at him, sweet and warm and welcoming all at once, he was made for her.

The crowd around the gate murmurs as they notice the four approaching, eyeing them warily. Harry and Mel are still fresh and they’re all battered to hell, and while the other candidates look tense and unhappy about their presence, they’re already damaged enough not to engage before they have to. Jack and Jenny peel away, going to join another group of attendants around a hay bale, and it’s just Harry and Mel as they approach the gates, hand in hand. None of the other contenders are holding hands, Harry notices; they’re all leaving space between them. He doesn’t see Matthew in the crowd.

Maybe the man didn’t make it this far. Maybe Misty, thwarted and furious but still alive, decided if she couldn’t take Harry apart, her own brother would do, and removed him from contention before he could leave California. Harry’s a little surprised to realize he doesn’t care. The man hurt him and scared Melanie. If he died before he got here, that’s just what he deserved.

There’s a flash of white at the corner of his eye. He doesn’t turn toward it. He’s too busy watching the gate, waiting for the moment when the labyrinth decides they’ve all waited long enough and lets them step inside. It’s a waiting game that could turn into a race at any moment, and you don’t play football as long as he has without developing at least a little bit of a competitive streak. He wants to win this.

He wants to claim his season’s crown and stay with Mel and figure out what normal looks like when he’s dead for three months out of the year. Colleges have summer programs. If he can work things out correctly, he can still get his degree; this doesn’t have to change anything if he doesn’t let it. It’s only going to change everything, because he’ll have Mel forever, and the two of them can be happy. The only thing standing in their way is the rest of the candidates, and now that he knows they’re all dead already, it’s a lot easier to think about hurting them.

If he has to “kill” them to get them out of his way, he thinks he can. After all, the seasons killed them first; he’s just helping them realize what their bodies already partially know. And then, at the end, his own half-life gets to continue.

He’s young enough to believe on some level that he’s immortal, and to know down to the bottom of his bones that the world began when he was born and will end when he dies, and nothing he’s experienced in the past few weeks has been enough to dissuade him, so he holds fast to Mel’s hand and steps up to the gates, and all this is good and right and exactly as it’s meant to be; all this is perfectly fine—

Something hits him, hard, in the back of the head, and he goes down hard, collapsing to the earth. His hand is yanked out of Melanie’s. He hears her shriek, fear and indignation, and then he hears nothing at all, and the darkness is all.

Melanie grabs the person who just hit Harry, yanking them away before they can finish bending down to do … something … to his prone form. “Get away from him!” she snarls. Then she freezes, staring at the woman in front of her.

Her own reflection stares back.