Velveteen vs. The Multiverse

by Seanan McGuire

  Sometimes she wondered what would happen when she finally stepped up and took over for one of her parents. Would her bones turn hollow, filling with ice and mist? Or would her feet leave the ground, gravity falling away from her forever? Privately, Jackie was in no hurry to find out which way her powers would twist. She liked herself exactly as she was. She’d learned how important that was when she took her tour through the Hall of Mirrors, officially becoming her mother’s heir.

  “Mom?” she called again. “I really need to talk to you. I need to go to the Hall. For me. Please, can you come out where I can see you?”

  The room was arctic, cold enough to match the landscape outside the windows. As Jackie watched, frost crept across the glass, lacing and interlacing into a delicate feather pattern. The chill in the air gathered until it somehow turned solid, becoming a white-haired, whiteskinned woman with a white dress patterned in the same feathery swoops that the frost had drawn across the window.

  The Snow Queen frowned at the sight of her daughter’s anxious face. “Jacqueline?” she said, and her voice was the sound of the wind blowing over ageless glaciers. “What’s wrong?”

  Jackie took a deep breath. “I need to use the Hall of Mirrors,” she said. “I need to talk to some alternate versions of a friend of mine, before I can talk to the version of the friend of mine who exists in this mirror.”

  The Snow Queen’s frown deepened. “We’ve discussed your tendency to use your powers for frivolous reasons…”

  “This isn’t frivolous, Mom. I think Vel is going to die if I don’t do something, but I don’t think she’ll listen to me if I don’t have more information. I need to use the Hall of Mirrors to get that information. Please. Help me save my friend.”

  “Ah.” The Snow Queen stood in perfect stillness for a moment, considering her daughter—her strange, hot-blooded daughter, whom she loved so much, and understood so little. There was nothing she could have done differently with Jackie. She knew that. But oh, sometimes she regretted the distance between them. “You realize that you risk your life along with hers if you do this.”

  Jackie squared her shoulders. “I can’t let her die. Winter can’t let her die.”

  “But she is your friend before she is a potential servant of the season.”

  “Yes,” Jackie admitted. “I know it wasn’t supposed to be like that. But yes.”

  “Then yes, you may use the Hall of Mirrors.” The Snow Queen swept her hand through the air and held it out toward Jackie. A glittering key made of ice rested on her palm. “Be careful, my daughter.”

  “I will, Mom.” Jackie took the key. The cold of it bit her skin, but her body was not warm enough to start it melting. “Thank you.”

  “Do not thank me,” said the Snow Queen. “I have done you no favors.” Then she was gone, dissolving back into stillness and the cold, and Jackie was alone.

  It was almost a relief when the floor collapsed underneath her a few seconds later. At least that was normal.

  Jackie Frost materialized on the steps of the Hall of Mirrors in a swirl of snowflakes. They stuck to her blue and silver spangled costume as she walked toward the door, becoming indistinguishable from the crystals and sequins that were already there. There was no keyhole. Instead, she pressed the key her mother had given her against the icy surface of the door itself, and it swung smoothly inward, allowing her to make her way into the endless maze of mirrors.

  It was harder to navigate this way; harder to look for a version of someone else, rather than a version of herself. Possibilities looked out at her from every mirror she passed, Jackie Frosts and Snow Queens and Frostbites, and even the rare, pink-skinned Jacqueline Claus, Santa’s adopted daughter. Jackie knew them all already; she had walked in their skins, if only for a few hours, on her first trips through the looking glass. Some of them she feared becoming. Others she mourned never allowing herself to become. And still she walked, until she found just the right mirror, just the right reflection.

  The Jackie Frost who looked back at her had longer hair, a softer expression, and carried an ice wand in one hand. Snow Princess, delicate protectress of the North Pole, who had never spent a second on the Naughty List. Not one of Jackie’s favorite potential realities, if she was being completely honest—and the Hall of Mirrors was a place for honesty. She touched the mirror’s frame, only wincing a little as the cold of it bit into her fingertips.

  “Show me Roadkill,” she said. The image blurred, Snow Princess disappearing, only to be replaced by a Mad Max remix of the Velveteen she knew, all leather and rabbit fur and safety pins holding the whole ensemble together. Roadkill was crouching in an alley, stroking something that the mirror’s frame didn’t quite allow Jackie to see.

  “Here goes nothing,” muttered Jackie, and stepped into the mirror.

  * * *

  It had been another shitty night in Seattle. Two of the crows had flown away and not come back, which either meant falcons—possible—or asshole “heroes” trying to clean up the city again. Roadkill’s money was on the heroes. Fuckers never knew when to leave well enough alone. So here she was, in another stupid alley, trying to wake up a tired old dog that had finally staggered off into the dark to die.

  “Get up,” she said, running her hand along the dog’s side. He was a big boy, all corded muscle and strong bone. Age was the only thing that could have taken him down, and age didn’t matter anymore, not once she got involved. The dog’s tail twitched once, thumping against the pavement. Roadkill straightened, the undead crow on her shoulder flapping its wings once as it fought to keep its balance.

  “Come,” she said, and the dog, awake and undead at last, lumbered to its feet and moved to stand beside her. She allowed herself a smile. One dog was worth two crows. With West Nile tearing up the coast, there would always be more crows. She turned, ready to head back to her lair and get ready for another evening of petty crime and annoying The Super Patriots, Inc.—

  —and froze. There was a woman standing behind her, blueskinned and glowing faintly in the dark alleyway. She had white hair and was wearing a costume that looked like something out of an adult production of Disney On Ice.

  “Don’t freak out, okay?” asked the blue woman.

  Roadkill frowned slowly. “Snow Princess?”

  “Not quite. I mean, yes, in this reality, and also no, because I’m not from this reality. I’m here because I need to talk to you. I need your help.”

  Roadkill scoffed. “Okay, now I know you’re from the wrong reality. I’m not the kind of girl who goes around helping people. I’m sort of on the opposite side of that equation, if you get my drift. Fuck off.”

  “No.” The blue woman who wasn’t the Snow Princess shook her head. “I’m sorry, but no. Of all the versions of Roadkill, you’re the one most likely to talk to me. That means you’re going to talk to me.”

  “Are you deaf? I said fuck off.” Roadkill put her hand on the head of her new dog, which was starting to grow, a deep, unpleasant sound. “There’s nothing you could possibly threaten me with that I’m going to give a shit about.”

  “In my world, Yelena is alive.”

  The words were simple. Their effect on Roadkill was not. She froze, all her bravado dropping away, replaced by a longing as cruel as it was sincere. “What?” she whispered.

  “In my world, Yelena is alive,” repeated the blue woman. “She didn’t kill herself. Marketing convinced her she could still be their little darling, if she’d just lie about who she was and what she wanted out of life. They drove my world’s version of you away, because they knew the two of you were too much for them to handle when you were together.”

  Roadkill’s lips thinned into a hard line. “You’re lying.” The memory of Yelena’s body was always there, fresh and cruel and horrible, if not as horrible as the memory that followed immediately afterward. Yelena, getting up again. Yelena, opening her eyes, finding herself trapped in her own dead flesh, and starting to scream.

  “Why would I lie?
Your powers changed when you found your best friend lying in a pool of her own blood. In my world, that never happened. That version of you is still Velveteen. She’s still a hero. And she needs your help.”

  “I told you, I don’t help,” said Roadkill, numbly.

  The blue woman shrugged. “How do you know if you won’t even let me tell you what I need?”

  Yelena, staggering toward her, blood still dripping from her fingertips… “What the fuck do you want?” asked Roadkill, banishing the memory to the depths of her mind, where it belonged. Where it would be waiting for her when she least expected it.

  “My Velveteen has a boyfriend, an animus like her. Tag. He was…” The blue woman hesitated, looking like she wanted almost anything more than she wanted to finish her sentence. Finally, she said, “Killed. He was killed in a fight recently, and Vel sort of…lost it.”

  “She brought him back, didn’t she?” Roadkill shook her head, feeling suddenly tired, suddenly sorry for a version of herself that she would never know or have the chance to become. “She couldn’t leave well enough alone, and she brought him back.”

  “She did. But there’s a problem.”

  “Zombie boyfriend isn’t enough of a problem? You people don’t fuck around when you complicate things.”

  “She doesn’t know she’s animating him.”

  Roadkill’s eyes widened. “What? How is that even possible?”

  “She’s more powerful than she thinks, and she’s in denial about what happened that day. She’s been animating him constantly for more than two months.”

  “What? No.” Roadkill shook her head. “She has to stop. Animating small things, like crows or cats, that’s easy, I can have an army of those going twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. I never sleep without a guard. But humans? That’s hard. The longest I’ve ever managed a human was three days.” Yelena had begged her to stop, toward the end; begged her to let the animation go, and allow the other heroine to die.

  Sometimes Roadkill wondered whether Yelena had known that she’d be blamed for murdering her best friend, kicked out of her home and branded a supervillain immediately. Sometimes she wondered if knowing would have changed her decision at all.

  She didn’t think so.

  “What’s going to happen if she doesn’t stop?”

  Roadkill looked at the blue woman without flinching. “She’s going to die,” she said. “And there’s not a damn thing anyone else can do about it. It’s her, or it’s no one.”

  “That’s what I was afraid you’d say.” The blue woman who wasn’t the Snow Princess sighed, starting to turn away. “Thank you for your time.”

  “Wait!” It was probably a toss-up between them as to who was more surprised by Roadkill’s exclamation. The blue woman turned back to her, curiosity writ large across her face. Roadkill swallowed hard, and asked, “Except for the whole undead boyfriend thing…is your version of me happy? Are things better for her?”

  The blue woman hesitated. Then she nodded. “She has a home,” she said. “She has friends, good ones, who care a lot about her. She has Yelena to fight by her side. Yeah. She’s happy.”

  “Then you do whatever it takes to save her stupid life,” said Roadkill. “Because my life? Is pretty fucked up. So somewhere, somehow, one of me has to be happy.”

  The blue woman nodded. “That’s what I’m planning to do,” she said, and stepped into the air, leaving a gentle snow falling in her wake.

  Roadkill dropped to her knees, buried her face in her hands, and wept.

  Jacqueline Claus sat at her dining room table, nursing a mug of cocoa and wishing that she dared to spike it with something stronger than marshmallows. Anything else would have interfered with the morphine, and so she restricted herself to sugar, but oh, she yearned. The sound of snow falling behind her was a welcome distraction.

  “You can come out now,” she said, and turned to see a blueskinned, white-haired woman with her face stepping out of the shadows. Jacqueline blinked, raising an eyebrow. “What parallel are you from?”

  “Not this one,” replied the woman. “I need to talk to you.” “First tell me your code name.” Jacqueline wasn’t sure she had it in her to fight a version of herself who’d grown up to be Frostbite; not today, not when the cold was wrapped so tightly through her bones. She could take a Snow Princess, but this girl didn’t look like a Snow Princess. That left…

  “Jackie Frost. I figured there was no point in a code name when everyone would know who I was either way.”

  “It’s a pleasure to meet you, Jackie Frost. I’m Jacqueline Claus.” The understanding of their shared and divergent histories stretched out between them like tinsel draped around a tree. One of them, raised by parents who barely understood the needs of the flesh, but whose love, such as it was, had informed her substance; the other, given to Santa to be raised as his daughter, who loved her just as dearly as her birth parents would have, in a world where they were just a little braver. “What can I do for you?”

  Jackie took a deep breath. “My world’s version of Velma is still Velveteen. But I’m afraid that’s starting to change. Her boyfriend died. She’s animating him right now, and she doesn’t realize that she’s doing it. You know…”

  “I know Marionette very, very well, and you want to know if there’s any way the change can be a good thing,” said Jacqueline. She stood stiffly, the muscles in her back complaining with every move she made. “You’ve been through the Hall of Mirrors.”

  “Yes.”

  “That’s how you know that Marionette is my partner.”

  “Yes,” said Jackie again, looking faintly abashed. “I don’t understand how it works between you, but I know that you’re always together…”

  “Did you ever wonder how Velveteen’s powers worked? How she was able to give life where there wasn’t any?” Jacqueline shook her head. “She gave them her life. She shared her own energy with the things she animated.”

  “But Marionette isn’t alive.” And that was the crux of the matter: in the worlds where she was Marionette, Velma Martinez was already dead.

  “I know. So does she, fortunately; it makes things easier on us. As a dead woman, she has no life to share. As an animus, she understands what the energy of life looks like, feels like, and how to call it to herself. She stays standing because she’s animating her own body, and she’s doing it with the life force of the creatures around her.” Jacqueline offered Jackie a wan smile. “Most versions of Marionette are evil. They have to be, to keep doing what they have to do to survive.”

  “Yours isn’t,” said Jackie.

  “No, I’m not,” said a voice behind her, and she turned to see Velma—almost Velma, but not quite—standing behind her, wearing a black and white version of her original Velveteen costume. She was very pale. “I’m not evil because I don’t have to steal the energy I need. Jacqueline gives it to me freely. It’s killing her, even though she tries to pretend it’s not.”

  “So why don’t you stop?” The words were out before Jackie could call them back. She winced.

  Marionette didn’t seem to mind. She walked past Jackie to Jacqueline, and said, “I became Marionette when The Super Patriots attacked Portland. They killed the Princess. They killed Action Dude. They killed me. Only I got back up and kept fighting. Jacqueline has agreed to keep feeding me energy long enough for us to destroy The Super Patriots for what they did to me. And then I can rest.” The exhaustion in her eyes was unbearable.

  “The way you live now…”

  “I’m not alive. Don’t be fooled by appearances.” Marionette shook her head. “I heard you say that your world’s version of me was animating her dead boyfriend, and didn’t realize it. You have to make her stop. If she kills herself, the power will snap back on her, and you’ll have another Marionette on your hands. I wouldn’t wish this existence on my worst enemies. I can’t wish it on a girl I never got to be. Make her stop.”

  “I’ll try.” Jackie looked to Jacqueline. “
What about you?”

  “I’m fine.” Jacqueline smiled bravely. “I’m Santa’s daughter. I have a lot in me to give.”

  They had nothing left to say to each other, after that. Jackie disappeared in a swirl of snowflakes. Jacqueline turned to Marionette, opening her arms.

  “Come on, dear. You need to eat before you go hunting.”

  Marionette fell on her like a starving wolf, and the morphine helped…for a while.

  * * *

  Jackie Frost materialized on the steps of the Hall of Mirrors in a swirl of snowflakes, fell to her hands and knees, and was messily sick. When she was sure her stomach had nothing left to lose she grabbed a handful of untainted snow, using it to rinse her mouth as she staggered back to her feet. She felt a little bad about leaving the mess for the elves to clean up, but that was what elves were for, and she had places to be. Even if they were places she’d be happier avoiding.

  Two hours, a change of clothes, a magic mirror transport, and a taxi later, she was standing outside Tad’s apartment door, trying to find the strength to knock. She had almost decided to go away and come back later when the issue was resolved for her: the door opened, and a confused-looking Tad blinked at her from inside the living room.

  “Jackie?” His eyes widened. “Oh, crap, Jackie, you can’t be here. I still have a secret identity to worry about.” He grabbed her arm, looking quickly up and down the hall to see if anyone had noticed her. Then he hauled her inside.

  Normally, Jackie would have slapped any man who dared to grab her like that. Under the circumstances, she allowed it to happen. “I need to talk to you,” she said, as soon as the door was closed behind her.

  “Phones work.”

  “This isn’t a phone conversation.” She took a deep breath, studying Tad’s face. Vel was her friend, sure, but she was also a project; woo her to the Winter, one step, one crusade, one girl’s-night-out at a time. Tad was just her friend. They’d known each other for years, and when she introduced him to Velma, she’d been expecting both of them to have a little fun, maybe fuck a little bit of their tension away. She hadn’t been expecting it to get him killed.