Seasonal Fears by Seanan McGuire

Author:Seanan McGuire
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Tom Doherty Associates

Stalking

CALENDAR SEASON: FEBRUARY 13TH, 2017: WINTER, WANING WORM MOON.

The lot outside the motel crawls with police, like maggots swarming over a piece of rotting meat. They’ve cordoned off the whole place with yellow tape, painted orange and green by the flashing lights atop their cars. If there are any guests remaining, they’ve moved their cars elsewhere. Trevor looks at the parking lot and the number of uniformed officers clogging the stairs and balconies and can’t imagine anyone’s still here when they don’t absolutely have to be. This is a lot of authority looking for someone who needs to be punished. They’ll find traffic tickets from twenty years ago, medical marijuana and talking back to your grandmother, and they’ll do it with the ruthless efficiency of men who get paid to be right about everything, even the snap judgments they make on the basis of their own prejudices and preconceptions.

“They were here,” says Aven serenely. She’s comfortable in the front seat of the car, surrounded by candy bar wrappers and empty drink bottles. Their drive so far has been one long process of her starting to figure out what she likes, what she prefers, what makes her happy.

So far, they know she likes chocolate peanut butter cups, Mexican Coke, and taking people apart to see what’s inside them. Her first subject was her father, who came apart under her hands like a jigsaw puzzle that could never be reassembled, no matter how hard the surgeons might have tried. Trevor’s pretty sure the man was still technically alive when they left the house; Aven has a supernatural knack for flensing flesh from bone and nerve from tissue, and she left parts of her father exposed to air that were never meant to be, walking away with him butterflied across the floor.

If she hadn’t found the process pleasant, that might have been enough for her, but she’d enjoyed it sufficiently that she’s tried again several times since they left Portland in Trevor’s battered old Honda, dismantling two gas station attendants and a woman whose only mistake was stopping at the rest stop at the precisely wrong moment. It’s slowed their progress considerably, but Aven isn’t worried, and so neither is Trevor. He literally can’t do this without her, not without finding another potential Summer who still needs an attendant, and so whatever works for her will work for him as well.

Plus, keeping her happy keeps her knives and rage and endless curiosity aimed outward where it belongs, rather than inward, where he’s the only potential study partner she can find. He doesn’t want the things he’s seen her do to others to be aimed at him, thank you very much. He didn’t realize, when he decided he didn’t want to serve the Summer he was meant for, that he’d be swapping Harry March, milquetoast rich boy who had never worked or wanted for anything in his life, for a girl who was half teenager, half toddler, all serial killer in the making.

Aven grew

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