The amorphous gobbet wriggled and squirmed into the jar, a scoop of peach jam canning itself. Hogmanay watched it follow the glow and warmth from the incandescent light built into the old mantelpiece, bored until the mass crossed the lip. Once it was inside, he righted the jar, screwed the steel lid tight and turned off the light.

        The blob, the essence of the new year, would manifest as each new year preceding: bright eyes, curls, a smile; but it needed Hogmanay’s spark to complete the transition of power. Without that infusion, it would rot on the vine. The smile would go first, ten minutes after the top of the hour. The glint of hope in its wide eyes would drown in tears of panic around ten to one. By sunrise—7:20AM—the new year would be a black husk hardening in the bottom of the jar. After seven decades, Hogmanay could set his watch by it. 

        He wasn’t the first year to persist beyond tenure. The ancient years of war, of wrath and upheaval, they had momentum on their side, could slip by unnoticed once or twice. But Hogmanay was easily the most cunning to surpass his time. He’d learned ruthlessness from his charges. They were well-practiced. 

        He walked the long, open room and peered through the window and down twenty stories at the crowd. It was warm for December in New York. The square was crammed full, the corrals set up by New York’s finest overflowing. All those faces, bathed in halogen and neon. He breathed in their energy, their excitement and joy and yearning at the doorway of the year to come. He felt it roll back weeks. Bones straightened, skin tightened. The miseries of age left him with each exhale, descended upon the crowd. It would be several days before Hogmanay returned fully to child-state again, the transformation powered by their mass joy in this one evening. It was almost a vacation, that first week—a chance to catch his breath before the next items on his agenda. 

        Hogmanay heard a scrape, glass on wood. In the rainbow glow of Times Square coming through the window, he saw the jar move. The nascent year, now little more than an unbaked gingerbread man in form, was braced at the top and bottom, trying to overturn its glass prison. It had rocked most of the way to the edge of the mantle. 

        “Aren’t you the fighter!” Hogmanay strode the plank floor, snatched up the jar. He held it, studied it, turning it until he found the slightest hint of facial features. “Fighter, dreamer, coward, laggard—it’s immaterial. You’re going to die in that jar like the ones before you. I still have things to complete. I alone decide when it’s no longer my time. Not a clock, not some arbitrary turn of the calendar page, not you!”

        He fought the urge to throw the jar—why give the baby year what it wanted?—and instead set it in the last open square of the weathered wooden Coca-Cola bottle carrier, beside its dead predecessors. No tipping or breaking there. He still watched it, anger gnawing, the recognition of his own original infancy in the small form like a thorn.

        He’d learned much from the Incarnation of Time from whom he’d taken the reins, the old and tortured thing the city below called 1943. Spit out by the universe, Hogmanay landed in the turmoil of a war the weakling incarnation before him couldn’t turn or tame. Famine, strife, genocide, a host of plagues across the land were his inheritance. But Hogmanay was stronger than such human conceits. Any tide could be turned. It only required tenure. 

        His reign was almost at an end, his business unfinished, his toes at the lip of the abyss when he figured out how to suck vitality from the humans below, regenerate his youth. He destroyed the incarnation that was to follow him, presided over the end of the war and the beginning of the atomic age and beyond. With experience, Hogmanay refined the projection of his miseries, learned how to set his will in motion beyond the streets below his window, to reap the energy of what he wrought: Selma and Seoul, Cambodia and Croatia, the fires of Baptist churches and Baghdad and those two spires south of here, tumbling, smoking.         

        It was his world now. 

        Hand it over to a child and fade into memory? Not while he could still draw breath.  

        The clock over the mantle reached 11PM.

        The short man with the striking blonde curls snapped at everyone: the jostling crowd, the bellman, a young woman with a phone pressed to her ear, and finally the front desk clerk. “I need the parcel I left in the safe.” He glanced at his watch. He should have never left the room. “Quickly! Now! Yesterday!”

        “Name, room number, ID.”

        “Ross. 2218.” He slapped the ID card on the desk. “Unless you’d like a blood sample.”

        The ice in his tone drove the clerk as if whipped. 

        He felt bad about it. Snappishness wasn’t him. It was this place, the chaos outside, the noise and the lights and the mass of people. He could feel their queasy excitement, their drunken lust and mortal dread. The legitimate feelings of love were distant, circumspect, a thousand swirls of color at some infinite distance, threatening to wink out in the cone of chaos around him.

        He’d gone to the Central Park seeking calm before battle. Ghosted carriage riders. Whispered into ears. Tightened some entwined hands near the skating rink, bolstered courage in racing hearts and fingers clutching ring boxes in the deep pockets of coats, done whatever he could to bring love to bear. It had settled him, reminded him why he existed, even in the face of what he’d been chosen to do. What came next was anathema to him. This was Diana’s wheelhouse. Diana was off stalking other game. 

        The desk clerk returned with the locked case, handed it across the counter. Ross took it with as polite a thank you as he could muster and pushed the button to call the universe’s slowest damned elevator.

        In Times Square, the crowd rumbled as if calling for the individual sacrifice of each precious second. Music to Hogmanay. He breathed with its rhythm, shed the manifestations of age as miseries on the unwitting crowd, ready to be carried to the four corners of the world: intolerance to re-seed places where reason threatened to bloom; ignorance to counter enlightenment; the worms of disease and addiction and anger, burrowers into the soil of a hopeful heart. The passage of time cannot help but corrupt everything. He thought he might pass out in the five minutes to midnight, the crowd below almost intoxicating in its hope for a better year, one in which their lots would improve, in which they’d stop killing each other and their heroes wouldn’t die by the bus-load. One in which they wouldn’t feel quite as helpless.

        Hogmanay heard a creak. Metallic. Outside the building. The fire escape.

        He knew every sound the building made, inside and out. He was its only tenant. When the wind blew, the sun baked, the rain came off the Hudson in needles, he knew it all by ear. 

        The fire escape never spoke.

        Hogmanay smiled. Aside from the replacements he killed, he hadn’t had a visitor in ages.

        Ross couldn’t glide in this form. Limitations of physical manifestation. He had to settle for crossing the chasm high-wire style, cable buried in the facade of the building ahead, secured to his balcony behind. The wind was the worst. Magic could hide him from gazes sent skyward, even slow his fall, but actually stop him from landing amidst revelers and policemen alike if he dropped? What a mess that would be. 

        He finished his trek and dropped onto the fire escape, made more noise than he’d wanted. He unstrapped the bow, unzipped the quiver. He slipped down one flight and paused outside the window. Peered through the grimy glass. Light from all the signs cast strange colors in the room. Nothing moved.

        Ross gripped the window sash, opened it with care. It was halfway up when the pane shattered in front of him. Rough hands pulled him through glass and frame and pitched him across the empty room.

        “You know, I could smell you.” Hogmanay studied Ross in the dark. “After I heard you land, before you descended. It permeates you. A rank smell. Goodness. Pure light. Not one of them.”

        “Not so pure.” Ross dabbed his lip. His thumb came back scarlet. He scanned the room, eyes searching. 

        “You’re a higher creature.”

        “High enough. You’ve lingered too long, old Hogmanay. You know the one they use? Fish and family?”

        “So you propose that I... what exactly? Surrender?”

        Ross drew fast, a blink, and fired an arrow in Hogmanay’s direction, its rosy tip flickering in the dull light. It ricocheted off the Incarnation of Time, cracked into the wall beside him. There was a flash of light, a scent of flowers.  

        Hogmanay beamed. “Eros? The cherub?” 

        Ross nodded, fingers already back in the quiver.

        The old year chuckled. “Janus decided to toss steak to a tiger?”

        Ross kept a keen ear on the proceedings beyond the window. The timing needed to be impeccable. “He’s weary of your abuse of this world.”

        “Not so weary he comes on his own.”

        “We all have our roles. His is dominion over endings and beginnings.”

        “It is? And only now, after decades, he realizes I’ve made him a fool?” Hogmanay swept a hand to the corner of the room. 

        Ross saw the piles of jars overflowing the shelves. He didn’t need to ask. Some of the black smudges cast faint echoes of the despair in which they died. “You’ve been cunning, for certain. You’re also exploiting these people by feeding them misery and sorrow.”

        “They’re quite capable of making their own lot. I merely sow and harvest. Their hope is like royal jelly to the bee. You, cherub, should know better than anyone how powerful a thing hope is.”

        Ross tried to match stares with his opponent. Failed. Didn’t like how it felt. “I do. I’m here to give it back to them.”

        “With your little love-tipped sticks?” He laughed again, a carrion cry. “Was the plan to tickle me to death? Because it might be working.” 

        Below, the crowd counted down from thirty now. Empires have fallen in less time. “Perhaps. Perhaps not.” Ross drew and aimed another arrow. Hogmanay set himself in anticipation. 

        “Fool. Love can’t stop me. Love only feeds—”

        Ross pivoted and released. Hogmanay watched the diamond tip on the shaft shatter the top of the glass jar holding the nascent year. Small pink hands gripped the broken rim with care, pulled. The figure climbed from the wrecked jar and dropped to the floor. It breathed deeply, in time to the count beyond the window. Ten! Nine!

        Hogmanay laughed again. “It doesn’t matter. It can’t overpower me. You needed to be here an hour ago. You shouldn’t have come here at all, cherub. You die before it does.”

        Ross’ watch chimed as the crowd shouted. Two! 

        Fluid, he drew the special arrow, the one the color of soot. One! 

        “I’m right where I need to be.” He let it fly.

        The arrowhead buried itself in Hogmanay’s forearm. Blood spread from the wound. He gaped at Ross, confused. “What deviltry is this?”

        “One with two horns. First, the people in this place strive to keep the most accurate time. The planet’s wobble in the great scheme of things confuses their clocks, so every so often, they must add a second to keep time honest—a moment that they will into being, one beyond your control, one in which you’re fully vulnerable.”

        Rage and spit on his lips, Hogmanay pulled on the arrow’s shaft. He couldn’t dislodge it. Blackness spread from the entry site like a pond ripple.

        “The second? An arrow kissed by Libitina, and cursed thus.” Ross shuddered at the thought of the funerary goddess, the nothingness he felt when she handed him the arrow for his quiver. Wordless. Joyless. He stared at Hogmanay. “You love death and destruction. Embrace your love.”

        Libitina’s kiss proved formidable. Hogmanay’s skin flaked in layers. The flakes flared, golden embers like firefly tails. The youthful energy stolen from the crowd below flowed out the window and returned to them, unseen. Hogmanay’s flesh and muscle and bone reduced to black soot and snowed on the old floorboards. As it did, Hogmanay’s last spark of old life flickered through the air, a bolt of miniature lightning that found the nascent year and set it working. 

        Ross lifted the form in his arms. Twenty seconds past the stroke of midnight, it was already the size of a newborn, making up ground. By the end of the crowd’s second round of Auld Lang Syne, the New Year had a head of red curls and was walking on its own. Its smile took a little longer to bloom. It observed the lights, the sounds of joy outside. It giggled as it looked over the mass of humanity gathered to welcome it, eyes wide with wonder. 

        According to Janus, each incarnation had innate knowledge of what it was, how it was to preside over the billions of threads in the skein of the world. Still, all Ross could see in that moment was a child, with all the promise of any child ahead of it.

        Ross read from notes he’d jotted on index cards, the old year’s surrogate. Instincts or not, the kid still needed initial guidance. “Do them no harm. They’re going to do what they do, live and die as they do. But their hope, their optimism, their love all belong to them, and should be nurtured, never blindly taken.” It took a couple of hours to hit all the points Janus had outlined. Ross lingered until he was given his leave with a grin and a hug. 

        “Good luck, kid.”

        The New Incarnation of Time, the first in decades, held up a reassuring hand. “Tell them all better days are coming.” 

        Ross didn’t need to. The heart of every person he passed sang to him in a slightly different pitch. They could tell somehow they’d crossed a threshold into a year truly new.