Page 41 of Velveteen vs. The Consequences of Her Actions

“Me? I think you should listen to these two.” Hailey indicated Trick and Treat with a sweep of her hand. “They’re our final testimonial.”

“You’re the last animus in the world,” said Treat. His voice was low and earnest. “That’s never going to be easy. After what Supermodel did…there are always going to be people who’ll see you as a monster. People who’re just waiting for you to turn rabid and bite. That wouldn’t happen here.”

“You’ve been training or fighting or running away for your entire life,” said Trick. She sounded sorry; she sounded the way Vel had always imagined a mother would sound, genuinely regretful for the pain that hadn’t been avoided. “That’s not going to change. People are always going to want something from you, or think you have to be something that you’re not. They’re never going to leave you alone. They’d leave you alone here.”

Vel snorted. “Oh, because Halloween has been so peaceful and kind to me.”

“It can be,” said Trick. “Time is what we want it to be. For every night we spend patrolling this city and protecting tourists, we get a week with our daughter. We’ve had more time since we came here than we’d had in her entire childhood. She’s growing up slowly because she wants to, because she wants this time as much as we do. If you stayed here, you could have a hundred lazy nights for every one you spent working.”

“What happens when I want to stop?” Vel asked. “Before you said that if you quit, you’d die.”

Trick and Treat exchanged a look. This time, it was Treat who spoke. “We weren’t born in the Calendar Country,” he said. “We started here as children and grew up because we wanted to, and our roles didn’t forbid it. If we stop being Trick and Treat, the holiday guardians, we aren’t anything. We’ll just fade away. You, though. You were born. You have flesh and blood and a family. You might not be able to go back the same as you were, but you wouldn’t necessarily die.”

“If you were me, if you had to make this choice…what would you do?”

Trick smiled wistfully. “I’d be a human girl. I’d live in a complicated, confusing world that doesn’t follow narrative rules, and I would never look back.”

Treat didn’t say anything. Hailey stood.

“There you go,” she said. “You’ve heard from me, the human who chose Halloween, and you’ve heard from the holidays who chose to be human for a while. Now it’s time for you to go and give your answer.”

“Go where?” asked Vel. Hailey pointed to the door.

It was too easy. After everything she’d been through, everything she’d done, it was too easy. It was almost a relief, in a strange way, when she opened the door and the street was gone, replaced by an endless, fog-shrouded forest. She looked back, and the living room was also gone. There was only the forest, and the doorframe in which she stood.

“Here we go,” she said, almost cheerfully, and stepped into the fog.

* * *

She hadn’t gone three feet before a snarl split the darkness. It was something like a roar and something like a growl and something like the sort of thing nobody wants to share a dark, creepy forest with. Vel stopped dead, feeling suddenly small and exposed.

They’d forced her to freeze her way out of Winter and fight her way out of Spring. Why had she expected Autumn to be any kinder?

Then the beast came pacing out of the gray, and she no longer had time for questions. She only had time to turn and run like hell.

It was a mixed-up thing, much like its roar: it was werewolf and bogeyman and bat and rat and most of all, great black Halloween cat. Vel knew what it was even before it opened its mouth and laughed at her, calling mockingly, “Told you you hadn’t seen anything yet. Told you I still had some tricks up my sleeve. Fight me, or die, doll-girl.”

Scaredy Cat’s taunts did have one effect: Vel ran faster, still clutching her husked-off Halloween skin. She had no desire to fight the former Halloween guardian, not here, not ever. He would chew her up and spit her out. He had claws, weapons, natural advantages. All she had was an old costume and a bunch of…dead…leaves…

Velveteen stopped running. The answer to everything had been in front of her the entire time.

All she’d needed to do was acknowledge it.

Scaredy Cat reached the place where she’d stopped less than a minute later. He dug his terrible claws into the ground and bared his terrible teeth, swinging his head in a low arc, nose testing the ground. He could smell her. She hadn’t run. So where was she?

The rock hit him in the top of the head. He looked up, and there she was, crouched in the branches of the nearest tree. He snarled.

“Don’t growl at me,” she said. “Hailey does this shit all the time. She’d make a great superhero. We’re all about the dramatic entrances. Tell Scream Queen I’m done fucking around and being tested. I have a solution that works for us both.”

The great beast dwindled, drawing back into itself, until the little boy in the homemade cat costume was standing in its place, watching her through narrowed eyes. “You were supposed to be a hunt and a chase and a kill,” he said accusingly.

“And now I’m not,” she said. “Sorry. Not my problem. Tell Scream Queen it’s time.”

“Tell me yourself,” said Scream Queen, stepping out of the trees. Her arms were full of dead roses, and her eyes were full of shadows. She looked to Scaredy. “Run along, little boy. This isn’t your place and it isn’t your problem, and if you didn’t get your moment in the sun, well, that’s too damn bad.”

Scaredy Cat glared, but he was smart enough not to argue with the woman who controlled his season. Sullen, he turned and walked away into the wood. Scream Queen looked back to Velveteen.

“Well?” she said. “I warn you, I don’t have much patience for grandstanding. There’s only room for one prom queen in this wood, and it’s me until someone bigger and badder comes along.”