Velveteen vs. the Junior Super Patriots (17 page)

The rest of the costume. She reached carefully around the back of her neck, feeling for the clasp. The relief she felt on finding it was almost enough to make her forget about the ears. For a few seconds, anyway. Then, almost without thinking about it, she lowered her hands and felt behind herself again.

This time, she managed not to scream. But it was a close thing.

“Fine,” she said stiffly, as she let go of her tail. “Not a dream, because I’ve experienced pain. Not a parallel dimension, because I’m demonstrating physical changes. So it’s either magic or an alternate reality. Fine.”

She knew how to deal with both of those things. They were both things that she was allowed to hit.

*

It was somewhat gratifying to find Hailey and Scaredy Cat together when she stormed out of the room and down the stairs. It was less gratifying to find them in the middle of a Halloween-themed tea service, complete with little sandwiches cut into the shape of bats and jack-o-lanterns. “You!” she shouted, jabbing a finger in their direction.

Hailey looked up, a bright smile on her face. “Tea?” she offered politely.

“What have you done to me? You fix it! You fix it right now! I want to go home! I’m not—” At that point, words sort of failed her. She wasn’t what? A giant rabbit? Some sort of weird plush toy? In the mood for tea?

“It wasn’t us,” Hailey said. She sounded mildly apologetic, but only mildly, like a cat owner whose beloved pet had just shed on a pair of black trousers. “It’s the holiday. Remember, I said you were here to save Halloween? There aren’t any costumes here. In Halloween, everyone is exactly what they’re supposed to be.”

“I’m supposed to be—”

“You’re supposed to be a hero, and in Halloween, this is what a hero looks like.” Hailey indicated a chair. “Please. You decided to knock yourself out before we could finish explaining things before. This might be easier if you let me finish.”

Velveteen hesitated. Looking toward Scaredy Cat, she asked, “Is she some sort of witch?”

“No,” he said, scowling. “She’s a princess. A witch would be easier to deal with.”

“Please?” Hailey repeated.

Velveteen sat.

*

“The last battle for Halloween was fought in 1903,” said Hailey, once Velveteen was settled. “The guardians then were Jack O’Lantern and the Pumpkin Queen, with their lieutenants, Trick and Treat, standing beside them. The attacks came from the great Corn Maze in the west, when the Wicked Witch sent her Scare Crows against the holiday.”

“It was that idiot Baum’s fault,” added Scaredy Cat, tone sullen and dark.

Velveteen blinked, trying to ignore the alien sensation of her ears perking up. “The Oz guy?”

“Kids all over the country wanted to be Dorothy Gale and her friends for Halloween,” said Hailey. There was something half-nostalgic in her voice. “That was enough to create the idea of a really scary, really powerful Wicked Witch somewhere out there in the world. There’s always been a Witch in Halloween, but this was the first time she’d had access to that sort of power. So she attacked.”

“What happened?”

Hailey hesitated. “I wasn’t here for the whole thing,” she said, slowly. “I didn’t come until later. After the first big battles had already been fought.”

“The Witch baked Jack O’Lantern into a pie,” said Scaredy Cat. Velveteen and Hailey turned to look at him. “Made the Pumpkin Queen eat a big slice. Laughed the whole time, too. That movie they made? Their version of the Witch couldn’t be stopped by anything short of some wide-eyed farm kid who didn’t know what she was doing until she’d already done it.” He glanced at Hailey, shaking his head very slightly. “There wasn’t any other way to stop her. Halloween had to be saved.”

“I know,” said Hailey. Looking back to Velveteen, she said, “I was the only girl they could find who fit the criteria. Strong enough ties to the season; enough of a desire to get away from her life; the willingness to listen to the dreams they sent. Maybe most importantly, I had the potential to learn how to manipulate the holiday. So the Pumpkin Queen sent Scaredy Cat to get me and bring me here, and they put me on a road through the darkest part of the Autumn Lands, and I defeated the Wicked Witch. Halloween was saved.”

Velveteen nodded solemnly, completely unsurprised by the idea that no salvation was forever. Being a superhero had taught her one very important lesson about worlds: they always needed saving again.

“They made me the Halloween Princess, since it was that or make me the new Witch, and that would have been. . . bad,” said Hailey, with a small sigh. “There
is
a new Witch—there’s always a Halloween Witch—but she’s nice enough. A little distracted, but nice.”

“So why me?” asked Velveteen. “Why can’t you save Halloween again?”

“Because Princesses don’t do the saving anymore.” Hailey’s sigh wasn’t small at all this time. It was deep, and weary, called up from the very center of her being. “I’m not allowed to save myself.”

“Besides, the story’s shifted again,” added Scaredy Cat.

Velveteen frowned. “So what’s the big deal this time?”

“Halloween is being attacked by superheroes,” said Hailey.

It said something about the night Velveteen had been having that she didn’t find this statement confusing in the slightest.

*

The first three superheros. The Big Three, the ones who stayed iconic and unforgettable, even though two of them were dead and the third was missing. Majesty. Supermodel. Jolly Roger. The names that launched a thousand dreams, a million games of let’s-pretend. No matter how much the Marketing machine threw behind their new heroic lines, it was always Majesty, Supermodel, and Jolly Roger whose toy lines sold the best, whose dress-up gear was the first to fly off the shelves. They seemed guaranteed to live forever in the imaginations of children everywhere.

The imaginations of children and, it seemed, the crazy funhouse of Halloween, where anything that inspires a sufficient number of costumes stands a shot at turning real.

“You’ve got the wrong girl!” protested Velveteen, following Hailey out of the house. The yard had changed, going from a semi-generic barnyard setting to something that would have been more appropriate in a Tim Burton film, all twisted, looming topiary and skeletal trees with leering faces in their bark. “I can’t fight
them
. Go back and get somebody with actual
power
. Get The Super Patriots! Or at least . . . at least get Action Dude or Sparkle Bright . . .”

“They don’t have a connection to Halloween like you do,” said Hailey, looking back over her shoulder. “Try to keep up. It’s a ways from here to the Patriotism Palace.” She said the words like they tasted bad. Maybe they did, to her.

“What gives
me
a connection to Halloween? I barely have a connection to the team!”

“You’ll learn,” said Hailey. She didn’t say anything after that. She just kept on walking, and, lacking any better ideas about how to handle things, Velveteen followed her, with Scaredy Cat trailing a bit behind.

For a while, it seemed like Hailey was planning to march them through the entire landscape of Autumn Land. Haunted forests, cemeteries, spooky covered bridges, even fields of corn where the tightly-clustered stalks smelled of secrets, mold, and loam. Velveteen had to trot in order to keep up, but no matter how far they walked, she wasn’t getting tired. If anything, she felt better than she had when she arrived. Her headache was gone, and she felt like she could walk forever.

A hand tugged at hers. She glanced down, and found that Scaredy Cat had taken hold of her fingers, his shorter legs pumping as he struggled to keep up with her. “You don’t want to stay here, do you? Don’t say anything. Just shake your head yes or no.”

Velveteen shook her head in almost violent negation, relieved as she did to find that the holiday wasn’t tempting her. Like Dorothy Gale in the story—unlike the girl they’d tapped to play Dorothy’s role—she just wanted to go home.

“You want to leave, you have to do three things. First, you have to win.” Velveteen opened her mouth to protest, and closed it again when Scaredy Cat glared at her. “You catch her attention, I never said anything to you. You got me?”

Velveteen nodded meekly.

“Good. Now second, when they go down—assuming you can win—you gotta grab the jack-o-lanterns. Don’t give them to
her
,” he shot a poisonous glance at Hailey, “until she’s promised to let you leave. And three . . .” He hesitated, once again looking strangely, terribly old as he said, almost too quietly for her to hear, “You don’t let her call you back. You don’t ever, ever, let her call you back. Got it?”

Velveteen nodded.

“Good.” He let go of her hand.

Glancing quickly forward to confirm that Hailey was still focused on their unseen destination, Velveteen turned back to him and hissed, “Why are you warning me? Why isn’t Hailey telling me this?”

“Because, kid,” he said. “She’s the good guy.”

Then the Patriotism Palace was in front of them, balanced on a high crag that looked far more suited to a crumbling old Victorian manse, and there was no more time for talking.

*

Hailey and Scaredy Cat stood at the base of the trail, watching Velveteen make her way up the winding path to the final fight for Halloween as they knew it. It took a while for the bright patches on her costume to fade into the mist, but they did, and she was gone.

“You told her?” asked Hailey, not turning.

“Yeah,” confirmed Scaredy Cat. “I’m not sorry.”

“I didn’t think you would be. We could use her, you know.”

“Keep her now, lose her forever. Give her some time . . .”

Hailey laughed darkly. “Aren’t you supposed to be the monster here?”

“Oh, I am. I’m willing to let her find more things she can lose.”

They stood in silence for a while after that, before Hailey asked, “Do you think she can win?”

“Honestly?”

“Yes.”

“No.”

After that, there was nothing else to say.

*

The doors of the Patriotism Palace swung open as Velveteen approached. They were supposed to open automatically for any licensed member of The Super Patriots, or their Junior Branches, but that was in the real world. Not . . . here. She found the self-opening doors creepy beyond all reason. She walked through them anyway.

The Hall of Victories had been subtly shifted, just like the rest of the hall, the Rogues’ Gallery of Villains and Honored Heroes taking on a spooky, Halloween-esque theme. Not a friendly, cartoon Halloween like the one she’d seen with Hailey. This was a darker side of Halloween, the kind that sent little kids scurrying for their parents and made the older ones laugh uncomfortably. This was the Halloween that wanted to kill you, not just chill you.

“I can do this,” said Velveteen, softly. “I’m going to go home.” Then, because it seemed like the right thing to do, she started chanting under her breath, “There’s no place like home. There’s no place like home. There’s . . .”

The heavy doors to the conference chamber swung open ahead of her. Unlike the front doors, that
wasn’t
supposed to happen. Velveteen stopped dead in her tracks, swallowing hard in an effort to force down the lump that had suddenly formed in her throat.

“. . . place like home,” she whispered, and started forward into the darkness. Almost as an afterthought, she raised one hand, and beckoned. She didn’t even look around as the immortalized heroes and villains stepped down from their pedestals and followed her.

The door slammed shut behind the last of them. There was a long moment of silence, all of Halloween seeming to hold its breath.

Then the screaming started.

*

Velveteen walked down the winding pathway alone, three glowing jack-o-lanterns cradled in her arms. The Patriotism Palace was already starting to dissolve behind her, fading back into the raw stuff of Halloween like it had never existed at all. The next day, the men and women from Marketing would be baffled by the sudden, unpredicted down-tick in the sales figures for the Big Three. They’d never quite recover their market share after that unexplained Halloween loss, and Marketing would eventually come to blame it on the unprecedented star power of two of their newest heroes, Action Dude and Sparkle Bright.

None of that mattered on that misty Halloween night that had already stayed long past its welcome. All that mattered then was one exhausted child heroine, trying hard not to think about the stuffing that leaked from one of the tears in her costume as she walked down, down, down to the end of the path.

Scaredy Cat and Hailey were standing exactly where she’d left them. That was no surprise. Neither was the sudden brightness in the air around Hailey, the suggestion of her own private lighting crew, while Scaredy was surrounded by an equally subtle darkness. Things were returning to normal. Halloween normal. Whatever that might mean.

She focused first on Hailey. “Your last name is Ween, isn’t it?” she asked. “That’s how they caught you.”

“Hailey Ween, and I was born on October thirty-first,” said Hailey, nodding as she held out her hands. “Give them to me. They’re supposed to be mine.”

“Promise that you’ll send me home,” Velveteen responded, hugging the jack-o-lanterns tighter. “Then you can have them.”

“What’s to stop me from breaking my word?”

“He said you were the good guy.”

The look Hailey gave Scaredy Cat was weary, but it was also amused. “He never gets tired of using that against me. Velveteen. . .” She looked back toward the battered junior hero, and said, “We could use you. We’ve been short-handed since Trick and Treat ran out. The heroes would never have been able to get that much of a hold if we hadn’t been abandoned that way. You belong here. You have to feel it. I know I did.”

“I just want to go home,” Velveteen said. “Please. I want to see my friends, and do my homework, and be able to take my costume off.” She was embarrassed to realize that tears were welling up in her eyes. She couldn’t wipe them away with her arms full of pumpkins. “I want to be more than just a mask. I want to go home.”

“All right,” said Hailey, and held out her arms. “I promise you can go home. Now please, give them to me.”