Birdie looked up from the massive book in her hands, eyebrows rising in mild surprise. “Oh,” she said. “You’re awake. That’s interesting. Hans?”
A massive hand reached down from my right and plucked the gun from my hands. “Done,” growled a deep voice.
“Excellent. Shoot her.” Birdie looked back to the book. “I have no time for failed experiments.”
“Yes, ma’am,” said Hans. He leveled my own gun on me, only to scream and stumble backward as his throat suddenly opened in a wet red gash that sprayed blood everywhere. A shadow clung to his back. Sloane.
Birdie looked around, expression betraying her surprise, even as I grabbed my gun back and aimed it at her again.
“Birdie Hubbard, you are under arrest,” I said, as levelly as I could. “Put the Index down and come with me.”
“No, I don’t think that’s going to happen.” She ran her finger down the column. “Snow White, Snow White … where are you? Oh, yes, here you are. ‘Meek, pliant, nonviolent.’ Put the gun down, Henrietta. Such things are not for you.”
“You can’t—” I began … but I was already bending to set the gun gingerly on the floor, unable to stop my hands from shaking. I had been holding a weapon. Weapons could hurt people. Why, if I’d hurt someone, I would …
I would …
I raised my head and glared at Birdie. “Get the fuck away from my story, you bitch.”
“Uh-uh, language,” she chided gently. “It’s not befitting a princess. Samson, restrain her. She won’t fight you.”
Hans, who only had so much blood in him, finally gave up the fight against gravity and collapsed with a thud. Birdie watched with disinterest.
“I know you’re there, Sloane,” she said. “You’re a villain. You should be on my side.”
“Yeah, but HR would have my head if I touched hers,” said Sloane’s voice, punctuated with giggles, from somewhere at the back of the room.
Birdie’s only remaining goon—the aforementioned Samson—looked nervous. “I don’t want to touch the dead girl,” he said. “What happened to Hans—”
“Henry didn’t do it,” Birdie said. “Take her.”
I tried to force myself to run, but found that my feet were more interested in obeying the story than they were in obeying me. I watched, terrified, as Samson closed in on me.
A shadow detached itself from the wall behind Birdie as Sloane took advantage of the confusion to go after her own prey. It slunk closer and closer—only to stop dead and bleed away, revealing Sloane pinned against the air like a moth pinned to a lepidopterist’s table. Her stripes were gone. Birdie turned and smiled at her.
“You’re a villain, darling, and villains never win when they go up against the forces of good. You really should have chosen your alliances better.”
Samson seized me by the shoulders. I struggled against his grasp, but it was no use: he was stronger than I was, and Birdie’s reminder of my story’s essential nature had sapped my will to fight. I was just a whiteout girl after all, and I was going to die the way the whiteout girls always died: badly.
The smell of snow swirled through the air around us. I froze, inwardly as well as outwardly. There was still something I could do.
It was going to hurt like hell.
“Hey, Mother Goose,” I called, no longer fighting against Samson’s hold. “You forgot one thing.”
“What’s that, princess?” she asked.
“Blood on the snow,” I replied, and whipped my head around, and sunk my teeth deep into Samson’s hand.
He howled, jerking me backward so hard that I felt my shoulder dislocate. It didn’t matter, because the smell of snow was getting stronger, and the blood from his hand was falling to the floor, where the briars grew up to meet it.
Birdie was the reason my story had gone active. Birdie was the one who’d been twisting the narrative away from what was normally true. But what she hadn’t considered was that a thing which is twisted too far can snap back—and Snow White began as its own monomyth, with dead girls in a whiteout wood, and with blood to stain the snow.
She shouted something as, behind her, Sloane peeled herself off the invisible dome of the storyteller’s sphere and began to prowl around the office, looking for a weapon. I didn’t hear exactly what Birdie said. The wind that blew through the wood on the other side of my story was howling, blurring her words and whipping them away.
Samson yanked on my shoulder again. I closed my eyes and fell backward, knocking him to the floor, where the briars wrapped themselves around him and pulled tight. The sound was horrible, crushing and squishing and tearing sounds. Not a single briar touched me. I stood, meeting Birdie’s shocked stare, and smiled.
“You can’t be the good guy and stand against me,” I said, bending to wrest a rope of briar from the floor. The thorns sank deep into the flesh of my hands, and I let them; what I bled on belonged to me. That, too, was a part of my story. “You can’t be a bad guy and stand against Sloane. You screwed up, Birdie. You manipulated us because you thought we’d kill each other, didn’t you? Well, all you did was set up a rock and a hard place for you to catch yourself between.”
Sloane was still pacing. She was even more unnerving without her borrowed stripes to hide her. Blood covered her virtually from head to toe, and her face was distorted in a constant snarl that I was glad was directed at Birdie, not me.
“You can’t do this,” said Birdie. “You can’t. You won’t come out the other side.”
No, I wouldn’t, would I? Henrietta Marchen was a pretty story that I had enjoyed telling to myself, but she didn’t have the narrative weight of Snow White, princess of a kingdom with no name, born in the sacrificial purity of a slit throat and a frozen wasteland. It always takes blood on the snow when you want to bring the summer home, I thought, and it wasn’t my thought, and it wasn’t anyone else’s. “Once upon a time,” I said, tightening my hand around the rope of thorns.
Birdie’s mouth moved. Again, the wind took her words away, while I took a step forward, dimly aware that it was beginning to snow inside the office. Monomyth, eat your heart out, I thought. Another, slightly more coherent part of my mind screamed that Birdie was right and I needed to stop: if I went too far into the story, I wouldn’t come out. Not as Henry, anyway.
But that didn’t matter. If Birdie walked away with the Index, none of us were going to be who we thought we were ever again. We would be rewritten into her perfect little stories, and we’d lose. We’d lose ourselves, we’d lose the fight, and we’d lose each other.
Sloane stopped pacing and closed her eyes, pointing at Birdie. For some reason, I could hear her when she spoke, each word like a stone dropped into still water: “I am a Wicked Stepsister. Whomever I stand with must thus be an Evil Queen. Evil Queens are always defeated.” She opened her eyes, looked at me, and smiled sadly. “I cast my alliance with Mother Goose, who shapes the story. I set myself against you, daughter of the winter wood.”
“If you’re my ally, then help me!” shouted Birdie.
“I am helping you,” said Sloane, and didn’t move. “I’m helping you fulfill your place in the narrative.”
Tears sprang to my eyes, instantly freezing on my eyelashes as I looked at Sloane, and then looked away. The wind was blowing too hard now; I couldn’t hear what Birdie was saying. The snow fell harder as I walked across the room toward her. Birdie backed away. The bubble around her offered me no resistance. Calm now—too calm—I reached out with my rope of briars and wrapped it around her neck, drawing her close. I didn’t want to kill her. The story had other ideas. I fought it, forcing the briars to stay loose enough to let her breathe.
Please, I thought. Please. Not every monomyth could win. Not every princess could become a queen. Not every little girl who bled in the whiteout wood had to die there.
There were so many things I could have said. Any one of them would have ended the scene, and would have determined who I was going to be hereafter. I swallowed them all, seek
ing the one that meant Henry Marchen, the one that meant early mornings and late nights and fights with Human Resources and a brother I never saw and a Shoemaker’s Elf who might eventually be able to kiss me out of a coma. It wasn’t easy. She didn’t have as much of a story behind her.
“Birdie Hubbard,” I finally managed, ripping every word out of the blackness behind my eyes, “you are under arrest.”
Then I lost consciousness again. I didn’t feel myself hit the ground. Given the number of thorn briars growing there, that was probably a mercy.
#
I woke up in the back of the van, parked six blocks from headquarters. Sloane was crouching over me like a particularly vicious gargoyle, her spine bent at one of her favorite improbable angles.
“What the—”
“What’s your name?” she interrupted.
“Henry,” I replied. “How did we get here?”
“I carried you out of the building,” she said, with a shrug. “After I carried Birdie out of the building, that is. She’s handcuffed in the back of the deputy director’s car.”
“Did you also carry him out of the building?” I asked, bemused.
“He wasn’t in the building. I called him at home. He’s pretty pissed off, although not at us, which is a nice change.” Sloane straightened, apparently having decided that I wasn’t the victim of a fairy tale body snatching. I pushed myself into a sitting position as she continued, “Our Sleeping Beauty has been moved to one of the secure cells, and everyone inside has managed to wake up. Well, most everyone. Half of Dispatch is still asleep, but I think they’re just tired.”
“What’s going to happen to—”
“Miss Hubbard is being moved to a secure facility,” said Deputy Director Brewer, coming around the side of the van and looking at me coldly. “Agent Marchen.”
“Deputy Director.” I nodded, but didn’t attempt to stand. I know my limits. “Sorry about the mess, sir.”
“We’re going to need new carpets,” said Sloane.
“Be that as it may … I will expect a full report on my desk by Friday.” Deputy Director Brewer looked from me to Sloane, slowly, before he said, “The Bureau thanks you for what you accomplished today. If Miss Hubbard had been able to leave the building with the Index, there’s no telling what she could have done.”
“Bad shit,” I said. “Is my team okay?” Was my team still mine? I wanted to ask the question, but I wasn’t brave enough. I had summoned snow out of the air. I was in deeper than I had ever been before.
Deputy Director Brewer turned back to me. For a moment—just a moment—I thought I saw a glimmer of amusement in his eye. “Yes. They’ve been waiting for you to wake up.” He turned away. “She’s ready for you now.”
Jeff and Andy rushed around the side of the van, with Demi and Gerry close behind. Gerry was carrying Sloane’s boots. Jeff’s glasses were askew, and he knocked them further askew as he locked his arms around me and kissed me like he thought tomorrow had been cancelled pending further review. I thought about pushing him away—too many fairy tales end with a kiss—and then melted into his embrace. I could worry about everything else later. And there were things we still needed to worry about. And yet …
We were alive, we were ourselves rather than subsumed into our stories, and Birdie was going to prison, where she would never get her hands on a book of fairy tales ever again.
No matter what might be coming down the road ahead of us, this looked a hell of a lot like happily ever after.
About the Author
Seanan McGuire was born and raised in Northern California, where she has lived for the majority of her life. She spends most of her time writing or watching television, but also draws a semi-autobiographical comic strip and has released several albums of filk music (science fiction and fantasy themed folk music). To relax, Seanan enjoys travel, and frequents haunted corn mazes, aquariums with good octopus habitats, and Disney Parks. Seanan is remarkably good at finding reptiles and amphibians wherever she goes, sometimes to the dismay of the people she happens to be traveling with.
This book was originally released in Episodes as a Kindle Serial. Kindle Serials launched in 2012 as a new way to experience serialized books. Kindle Serials allow readers to enjoy the story as the author creates it, purchasing once and receiving all existing Episodes immediately, followed by future Episodes as they are published. To find out more about Kindle Serials and to see the current selection of Serials titles, www.amazon.com/kindleserials.
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