Page 99 of Seasonal Fears

Aven

CALENDAR SEASON: FEBRUARY 28TH, 2017: ONE MONTH TO SPRING, NEW MOON BETWEEN THE WORM MOON AND THE SPROUTING GRASS MOON.

This girl looks exactly like Melanie herself, save for her hair, which is a brutally stark white, like a sheet of new fallen snow. Mel has time to think that it would have made more sense for her to be the one with the white hair, what with her being tied to Winter and all, before the girl—her sister, it has to be her sister, nothing else makes sense—drops the knife she’s holding, grabs Mel by the shoulders, and slams her forehead into Melanie’s hard enough that Mel sees stars. The girl lets go almost immediately, dancing out of reach before spinning around and delivering a brutal kick to Mel’s midsection.

Mel stumbles backward. The girl goes in for another kick, but before it can land, Mel grabs her foot and yanks, pulling her assailant closer.

“Hi,” she says, in a blithe, almost perky tone. “I guess we haven’t been introduced, huh? I’m your sister. My name’s Melanie. What’s yours?”

“Aven,” snarls the white-haired girl, and launches herself at Melanie again, fingers hooked to grab and claw. She moves like a predator, smooth and elegant, with none of the reservations or awkwardness of someone who’d been socialized according to normal rules; she’s never learned not to bite, not to kick or claw. She fights to kill.

Melanie sidesteps her easily, and slams a knee into the small of Aven’s back as the other girl’s momentum carries her past. “See, here’s the thing,” she says. A bruise is forming on her forehead, stark and purple against the pallor of her skin. “I’m a cheerleader. Do you know what that is?”

Aven turns and looks at her blankly. “No,” she says, finally. “And I also don’t see why it’s relevant.”

Melanie steps on Aven’s knife, foot pinning the blade to the dirt, and smiles placidly at the girl who should have been her best friend, not a distorted and distorting funhouse mirror. She’s going to suffer for this later, she can already tell, not just with the monster headache she feels building in the corners of her skull, but with the kind of hysterical panic that comes from confronting the impossible and truly accepting the fact that every ludicrous story she’s heard has been the truth.

Her father was Dr. Moreau. Her mother, sainted icon of her girlhood, never loved her, never wanted her as a mother wants a child, but as a scientist wants an experiment to succeed. She was not born from love. She was born from obligation and from hubris, and her sister, who she’s always believed was dead, has also survived to grow into this half-feral girl who introduces herself by attacking, who has a stain on her sweater that could be ketchup or raspberry jam or any number of other things. This girl who radiates Summer almost as strongly as Harry does, whose skin is hot under Melanie’s fingers, like brushing against a stove that’s just been turned off. She’s not quite hot enough to burn. She’s far too hot to be entirely human.

“It’s relevant because you don’t become a cheerleader without learning to take a few falls,” says Mel, voice low. “We live on ice baths and arnica.” And you should have been living there with me the whole time, climbing the same pyramids, learning the same tricks. “You may be a badass, but unless you’re willing to kill yourself in the process of taking me out, you’re not going to beat me. And you’re not touching Harry again.”

She looks up, looks around at the circle of candidates surrounding them, most of whom are splitting their attention between her and the gate, expressions resembling the vaguely disinterested focus of people waiting for the mall to open on Black Friday. She sees them, maybe a dozen in all, and in that moment she hates them without reservation. They’re here to take what she’s already thinking of as rightfully hers. They’re here to put her in the ground.

Well, she’s not ready to go.

“That goes for every damn one of you,” she says, voice loud and carrying. “If you touch him, I don’t care if you’re doing it because you’re challenging for the Summer and you want to claim the crown, I don’t care if you’re doing it because he looks like the kid who used to beat you up and take your lunch money, I don’t care what your reasons are. I will end you.”

She has no way of knowing whether the Summer candidates will listen to her, and the Winter candidates are more likely to come gunning for her. She doesn’t care about that, either. She just glares at Aven, silently challenging her sister to come at her again, to come at Harry again, to give her an excuse.

“This isn’t how I thought this would go,” says Aven, sounding almost ashamed. Like she really expected to kill Melanie’s boyfriend and then share a sisterly hug. “I dreamt about you.”

“Yeah, well, I buried you. Before I could even remember that you’d been there.”

“Our father—”

“I know the whole story,” spits Melanie, and Aven has the sheer gall to look disappointed, like the truth about their origins was going to be the thing they could bond over, the thing that united them. Like learning they weren’t real girls was supposed to be the thing that swayed Melanie to her side. Mel learning it from someone else and having time to process that fundamental, foundational betrayal … that wasn’t supposed to happen.

Aven takes a step backward, out of range. “I’m going to kill him,” she says, almost serenely. “In the labyrinth, I’m going to kill him, because you and I, we’re meant to be together. Don’t you feel it? We’d be the most perfect marriage of the seasons the world has ever known. If we took the crowns together, our reign would be endless.”

The worst part is that Melanie does know it, on some level; the Winter in her bones sings in Aven’s presence, even more loudly than it sings in Harry’s. She could pull away from him and run parallel with her sister instead, Roland and Ariadne Cosgrove’s grand experiment finally complete, ready to play out against a stage of millions. Part of her wants to.

Most of her knows that Winter doesn’t get to make her choices, not yet, and if she let go of Harry, it would be for the sake of Winter, to make the season stronger, and not for the sake of Melanie. Fuck that. She’s doing what she does next for the sake of Melanie, because Melanie still matters. Melanie will always matter, even when she allows the Winter in her broken heart to spread through her entire body, even when she gives up on being human to become something else and other.

“Go fuck yourself,” she says pleasantly, and bends to retrieve the knife from under her foot, looking at it for a moment before snapping the blade shut and sliding it into the pocket of her jeans. “I am not your sister. The same man may have manufactured us both, but if you were my sister, you’d know me, and if you knew me, you’d know not to touch my boyfriend.”

Harry is stirring, trying to push himself up onto his elbows. Melanie crouches, sitting on her heels as she offers him her hand, eyes still on Aven.

“Go away, little Summer girl,” she says. “I’ll fight you if I have to, and maybe I’ll win and maybe I’ll lose, but I’m pretty well matched to you, and whether I win or lose, I’ll slow you down enough to take us both out of contention for the crowns. You know what happens to the candidates who don’t claim a crown, don’t you?”

“Of course she does,” says a voice, surprising in its familiarity. Melanie glances toward it and recoils, almost losing her balance. Only Harry’s grip on her wrist keeps her from landing on her behind. He sits up, still holding on to her, and they’re on the same level as they stare at the man now walking toward them, familiar and out of place and …

“Trevor?” squeaks Melanie. “What are you doing here?”

“If you Incarnates cared enough to learn how to spot attendants instead of trusting us to come looking for you every time you needed to do something, you’d have figured me for a Corn Jenny a long, long time ago,” says Trevor stiffly. “But you were always too self-involved to care about what’s happening around you, and too busy focusing on your own lives to notice what was going on with mine.”

“Corn—you’re the one who was supposed to be preparing Harry?” She stands, pulling Harry with her, and takes a menacing step toward Trevor. Aven is all but forgotten, dismissed in the face of an even better target for Mel’s anger. “You were supposed to be his attendant?”

“Surprise,” says Trevor, smugly.