Page 129 of Velveteen vs. The Consequences of Her Actions

Polychrome and the others stared at Hailey. Tag, sitting up a little straighter on the couch, squinted at her. “Don’t I know you?” he asked.

“Only when the moon is high and the wind is right, and the air tastes like stale popcorn and apple cider,” said Hailey. A shadow seemed to pass over her face, darkening her eyes, sharpening her cheekbones, so that for a moment she looked like the woman she was never going to become.

Then the moment passed, and she was a smiling teen once more, young enough to have been anyone in the room’s younger sister, bright and arrogant and immortal as all teens were at her age. “Hi, heroes,” she said, cheerfully. “I’m Hailey, and my friend Vel tells me you’re looking for a field trip. I like your costumes.”

“They’re uniforms,” said Polychrome.

“That woman is wearing a ball gown,” said Hailey. “And that one over there looks like a whole-ass steampunk convention died on her corset. They’re costumes. Nothing wrong with costumes.”

“Let’s not argue semantics right now,” said Velveteen. “Hailey can get us into Halloween, and from there we’ll be able to get to Winter. This is how we find Jacqueline.”

“Hailey Ween,” said the Princess, fixing Hailey with a hard eye. “The Halloween Princess. Second only to Scream Queen in the haunter hierarchy. Can I really trust this isn’t a trick?”

“Everything’s a trick to me,” said Hailey, with a shrug. “But one princess to another, I don’t have any reason to be mad at most of you. I’d be mad at Vel here, except if she doesn’t want to stay, she wouldn’t serve my season the way we need her to, and she’s made it so that we can maybe catch another animus in the future. Even if you don’t get to know what she did, we do.”

Velveteen, who had no idea what Hailey was talking about, looked at the Princess and shook her head exaggeratedly, making no attempt to conceal her confusion.

“So I wouldn’t say we owe her, exactly, but we want to stay on her good side, and any opportunity to play a trick on those sanctimonious jerks in Christmas is a treat to me. Everyone’s dressed for Halloween, so let’s get going.”

She turned back to the door, and when she opened it, it was on a wide, moonlit street crowded with trick-or-treaters and dotted with jack-o’-lanterns. She stepped through, Velveteen close behind her. Polychrome caught the door before it could close behind them, holding it open while the others rose and hurried after her.

The door slammed shut on an empty room, only a candy wrapper on the ground left behind to show where they had gone.

* * *

Several hours later, a door opened in the side of a literal snowbank and Velveteen and the others stumbled through, now without Hailey, who had duties in her own domain.

The Princess raked cobwebs out of her hair as she looked around at their surroundings. The snow was warm. The sky danced with the colors of the aurora, a living rainbow that looked like something Polychrome would have painted, under better circumstances.

Tag, as the only one of them never to have traveled to the North Pole before, was the first to speak. “What the fuck?” he demanded.

“You knew we were heading for Christmas,” said Velveteen. “You’ve really never been here before?”

“The air tastes like peppermint,” he said, sounding almost offended. “And no, I’ve never been here. Jackie always said her parents didn’t like it when she had company over, and once she muttered something about not helping Santa Claus get his sticky claws on another animus—I guess she was talking about you, Vel—so we just met up at my place.”

“The air tastes like peppermint, and the hot cocoa is to die for,” said Velveteen. She looked around, frowning. “Normally we’d all wind up in winter gear just from crossing into the season. The fact that we haven’t makes me think Santa’s not happy about us being here.”

“That, or he just doesn’t know we’re here,” drawled the Princess. “We came in through the back door, after all. Let’s go get our girl.”

“It would be better if you were right,” said Velveteen, hesitantly. “But Santa sees you when you’re sleeping, and he knows when you’re awake. You don’t walk into the home of a living surveillance system and just hope he doesn’t know you’re coming.”

“Fair enough,” said the Princess. “I know you’re not on good terms with the man, but she’s his daughter. He should be glad to know her friends are concerned about her.”

“And there’s always the chance my presence will skew his observations,” said Victory Anna cheerfully. “What with my tendency to warp him toward the Snowfather’s domain, whether he prefers it or no.”

“All right,” said Velveteen. “Just be careful, okay? He’s a jolly old elf, but he’s not the only hazard Winter has to throw at us, and a lot of them are substantially less family-friendly.”

“We follow your lead,” said Polychrome firmly. “Promise.”

“Good,” said Velveteen, and began trooping across the snow toward the distant glow of Santa’s Village. The others followed, and the ever-shifting snow wiped their footprints away.

* * *

To call Santa’s Village a storybook cliché was to invite an argument about chickens and eggs: which, after all, had come first, the picturesque village tucked among the evergreens or the endless watercolors ensuring that every English-speaking child would know the place on sight? Elves moved along the streets, accompanied by strangely expressive penguins and oddly canine reindeer. Several paused when Velveteen and company stepped out of the wilds, but as the heroes were doing nothing wrong, they went about their way without raising any alarms.

“This is…this is exactly the way I always thought it was going to be,” said Tag, awed. “How can it be exactly like I thought it was going to be? How does that even work?”

“Santa has a fabulous Public Relations Department,” said Velveteen. “Pretty sure only The Super Patriots had anything better.”