“What would I have to do?” Velveteen’s voice was small.
Persephone smiled. “Just feed yourself. The rest will come naturally.”
Velveteen looked down at her hands and sighed. “Some days I really miss beating the crap out of petty thugs,” she said. Kneeling, she pressed her palms to the ground, between the thorns, and breathed in deep.
Nothing happened.
“You have to actually let it happen,” said Persephone. “Trust yourself not to go too far. You’re allowed to exist. You’re allowed to eat. Let that permission sink in.”
“Lady, you sure do talk a lot for somebody who wants me to find inner peace or whatever,” said Velveteen. She took a deep breath, and pulled—
For most people, eating is a physical thing. It involves the mouth, the teeth, the tongue; the acts of swallowing and digestion. For most people, nutrition comes from the food they ingest, calories entering their bodies and being transformed into potential.
For an anima who can’t access her own life force to sustain herself, things are slightly different.
Velveteen’s hands sunk into the soil and her mind sunk into the thorns, instincts she was barely aware of having seeking out and ripping away the things that sustained their roots and fed their questing tendrils. She was an anima: she was the perfect predator, needing nothing but the barest of contacts to allow her to feed. Her mind raced, moving independent of her intellect, which was slow and steady and burdened with unnecessary morality. The body was hungry. The soul was starving. The power she was host to had the ability to fix both these things, and so fix them it would, regardless of what the mind wanted.
Persephone watched, a strange, sad smile on her face, as the thorn briars withered and withdrew. They dried up from the inside out, collapsing in on themselves, before turning to dust and crumbling where they twined. It was a swift, unnatural process, a denuding of everything, and when it was done—when not a single briar rose from the blackened, blasted ground—they had revealed a wasteland. Tombstones and stone angels dotted the earth. Cobweb-encrusted tombs loomed in the distance.
Velveteen opened her eyes and blanched, the new color running from her face as she beheld what she had unveiled. “Holy crap I conjured a graveyard.”
“It was always here,” said Persephone. “Look.” She raised her hands, and the waste exploded into growth. Green grass blanketed the graves, and wildflowers ran riot. Roses bloomed in glorious abandon, climbing the stone angels and softening the tombs. Trees shot up out of nothing, breaking first into flower, and then into full fruit as they reached their maturity in a matter of seconds.
When Persephone lowered her hand again, the field of briars had become a pastoral graveyard. Still a place of mourning, yes, but one where the beloved dead could rest easily, and where those who missed and mourned them could walk without fear of the thorns. Natural paths had formed amidst the green grass and the riotous wildflowers. Persephone started down the nearest of them. Velveteen, lacking any better idea of what to do, followed her.
“How do you feel?” asked the goddess.
“Good.” It was an understatement, but that didn’t make it any less true. She felt like someone who had recovered in one miraculous moment from a long and debilitating illness, surging back to health and then to some glorious point beyond simple recovery. The small aches and pains that had begun to haunt her were gone, replaced by a feeling of absolute, unquestionable wellness. She could run a marathon. She could lift a mountain. She had never felt so completely, utterly whole in her life, and it terrified her. If she could feel this good by drinking the life of the world around her, what was to stop her from taking it all?
This is how Supermodel felt, she thought, and the idea sickened her, both with its reality and with its accuracy. Supermodel had been obsessed with her own beauty, and with the life she gained from the adoration of those around her. She had wanted to become a goddess. All she had succeeded in doing was destroying herself. She was an icon now, an idol to be worshipped and feared, not a person. “No one ever calls her Heather,” she said softly. “I didn’t even know that was her name.”
“She was a beautiful child,” said Persephone, following the change of topics without missing a beat. “So sweet. So kind. She was always a little self-centered. I blame her parents. They made their love dependent on her accomplishments. ‘Shine bright and we’ll adore you, glow quietly and we’ll ignore you.’ They taught her that the only way to be valued for anything was to be the best at everything, and she did her best to please them, until the day she realized that there were easier hearts to win.”
The path wound gently between the graves, now circling a group of them, now bending away from a copse of trees. Persephone stepped off it, looking down at a headstone. Velveteen moved to stand next to her.
HEATHER YORK, it read. STILL BELOVED.
“She’s buried here?” The words escaped before Velveteen could stop them. She decided that she hadn’t wanted to. Some questions needed to be asked. “How can she be buried here, after what she did?”
“She’s buried here because of what she did, and what she was,” said Persephone. “Don’t you understand yet? Balance.”
“I understand that I am not Anakin Skywalker, and I am not going to bring Balance to the Force.”
Persephone looked at her blankly. Velveteen sighed.
“You know, there is popular culture more recent than that whole thing with the Argonauts,” she said. “Maybe you should check it out sometime.”
“If you say so,” said Persephone politely. A goose waddled past, honking about whatever it was that kept geese occupied when they weren’t biting ankles and stealing bread from small children. “Balance isn’t about bringing something. It’s about taking what you already have and making it self-sustaining. Making it last. Heather threw the balance off when she started killing the people she believed would be her rivals. She was so hungry. She wanted the world to be her banquet. All the strength that should have belonged to them went to you, and they came here. To rest.”
Velveteen stared at her, eyes going wide with horror as she realized what Persephone was saying. “So when you said this place belonged to people like me…”
“I meant that this was where their spirits were laid to rest. All of them. Come with me.” Persephone struck out across the grass, leaving Velveteen no choice but to follow as the living goddess of Spring stalked between the graves, pointing. “Michael Wittenberg. He brought clay figures to life. There was a gas leak when he was three years old, less than a month after he started tapping into his powers. Fawn Clarkson. She was a resurrectionist. Given time to learn her own strength, she could have called anyone back from the verge of death. She brought back her pet goldfish. Her apartment building burned down the next day.”
The litany of names went on and on, each accompanied by a snapshot of their powers: what they had been, what they might have become. It made Velveteen want to cover her ears and scream. She had never asked to be the one to carry the gifts and burdens of an entire generation; she had just wanted to be a good member of her team, to take care of the people she loved, and maybe to be left alone to be happy for a little while. That was all. When had it become so unreasonably much?
They reached the last grave, at the edge of the meadow. The land continued from there, but it seemed somehow hazy, unreal, like it didn’t really count as part of the scene. Velveteen knew without being told that it was because Spring didn’t care enough, as a season, to bring that place into focus. If she kept walking, it would be forced to decide what lay beyond the thin veil of disregard. It might resent her for that. She stayed where she was, joining Persephone in looking at the blank tombstone.
“Let me guess,” she said. “This is where I’m going to be, when I finally die, unless I decide that I want to stay here in the Spring, in which case the grave will go away and I’ll live forever, frolicking in meadows and not worrying about supervillains or grocery bills or turning evil and sucking the
life out of all my friends in the middle of the night.”
“Yes,” said Persephone serenely. “That’s putting it a bit more…viscerally than I would have chosen, but yes. You don’t have to die. You don’t have to change. You can be young and strong and healthy forever, if you stay here with us. And there will be no more anima in the world, and things will be in balance.”
Velveteen didn’t say anything. She couldn’t think of anything to say. She would have been lying if she had claimed she wasn’t tempted. Yes, Spring was strange, and its customs were still difficult for her to understand, but so what? Everything was unfamiliar at first. If she stayed, she could learn whatever she needed to know. She could even learn to be happy, and her friends would finally be freed from the need to worry about her all the time. She could be free. She could be…
“Wait,” she said, frowning as she turned to Persephone. “No more anima. You said no more anima. What do you mean?”
“Supermodel killed all the anima and animus of her generation, and all but two of your generation, and now only you remain,” said Persephone. “If you stay here, there will be none. Absence is an innate balance. The world will adjust.”
Slowly, Velveteen frowned, puzzling her way through all the things that statement could mean. Then—cautiously, more than half afraid of the answer, but needing to hear it all the same—she asked, “What about Tag?”
“He sleeps the sleep of the lost,” said Persephone. “If you stay here, if you don’t go back for him, no one will ever wake him. Don’t mourn for him. He died well, and he lived a long, healthy, fruitful life. His balance has been served.”
“Um, what?” Velveteen turned to stare at Persephone. “He’s my boyfriend. I love him. It’s not his fault that he got hurt, and I’m not going to stop mourning him, or loving him, just because you say his ‘balance’ has been ‘served.’ What does that even mean, anyway? He died. He misjudged a situation, and he died. There’s no balance in that. It was a senseless tragedy.”
“All death is balance, for the life that came before it.” Persephone waved a hand. “This is balance. The only thing that stops it from being perfect is you, little anima, who still walks in the world and doesn’t lie down in fields of flowers. Stay here with us and there will be balance.”
“And if I don’t? If I say ‘golly, this has been a lot of fun, except for the part where it really hasn’t been, I’ll be going now’? Are you going to stop me for the sake of your balance?”
“No,” said Persephone. “I already told you, if you leave here with a better grasp of what you’re capable of, that’s going to be enough for me. I want balance. I want the world to be better than it is. That doesn’t mean forcing people to do things they don’t want to do.”
“Oh.” Velveteen looked back to the blank tombstone for a long moment before she asked, “If I stay here, there won’t be anyone else with my power set? Like, ever?”
“For a generation. Maybe more. Eventually, I’m sure, someone will find their way to Spring, and eat the fruit of these trees.” Persephone reached out her hand. A nearby branch bent, and a pomegranate smacked into the curve of her fingers. The skin had already split, revealing the ruby seeds inside. She turned to offer it to Velveteen. “That person will have children one day. Twins, most likely. And they’ll be born with the ability to animate the inanimate, or to heal flesh, or to summon pictures from the page. They’ll bring it all back with them. Anima and animus will be born again.”
“You know, I think the thing that sucks most about this is that it’s actually sort of tempting,” said Velveteen. She took the pomegranate, turning it over in her hands. “I don’t like it here. I don’t like what you’ve done to me, no matter how necessary you think it is. But I don’t like being—what was it you called me? I don’t like being a ‘weapon that walks like a woman,’ either. I don’t want to be Supermodel.” And it was Spring that had opened that door, wasn’t it? She had never known why anyone would choose to drain the life from the world until Persephone had stopped her ability to feed herself. Sometimes efforts to help could hurt, even when they weren’t trying to.
“I don’t think there’s any risk of that,” said Persephone. “You care too much about people to ever go her route. It’s just that without finesse, you can…break things.”
Velveteen—who had once resurrected her boyfriend unintentionally, and was all too aware of her ability to “break things”—nodded. She shook a few seeds out of the pomegranate, popped them into her mouth, and swallowed, before she said, “I’m going back.”
“I thought you might say that,” said Persephone, and smiled. “Well, then, it looks like we need to speed up your lessons, don’t you think?”
“Bring it,” said Velveteen, and oh, the Spring was warm.
Velveteen walked through the green world and the green world moved through Velveteen. She hadn’t quite mastered Persephone’s trick of pulling the ambient life out of mites and chiggers and other small, biting creatures and channeling it into flowers that would burst into bloom under her feet, but she’d managed to figure out how to snack on mosquitoes. When she heard them droning nearby, she reached out with the silent, deadly hands of her power and yanked the life right out of the itchy little fuckers. They fell to fertilize the soil, and she walked on, a little more fed, a little less inclined to accidentally injure people in the search for a good meal.
Sometimes she felt bad about what she did to stay alive. It was hard not to, when she was vampiring her way through the world. But when she really thought about it, she could remember smashing a thousand mosquitoes during her lifetime. None of them had kept her fed, or served any real purpose, since they’d been wiped away with tissues and not dropped to the ground. The way she fed now might be strange and hard to adjust to, but that didn’t make it wrong. And besides, it wasn’t like she was eating squirrels.
Yet. That was the operative word: that was what made this season so terrifying, under its veil of flowers and its promise of balance. The more adept she became at turning her appetite into an arrow and aiming it at the world, the more her hunger grew. It was starting to scare her, all the more because she was a living thing, and eating came so easily to the living. One day, she would think she was reaching for mosquitoes, and she’d find herself with a mouth—or a soul, technically—full of squirrels. Or kittens. Or people.
That was the big fear. People. She could kill people to feed herself, the opposite of what she’d done with Tad, where she’d nearly killed herself in the process of feeding him. Becoming Marionette had never seemed so plausible to her before, especially since what Persephone had done to her by blocking access to her body’s natural reservoirs was exactly what had happened in the timelines where she was Marionette: dead bodies had no life to draw upon. Right now, neither did she.
“Getting good and tired of this bullshit,” she murmured, as she drained the life from a passing wasp and allowed it to fall into the loam at her feet. Back in Winter, the living heart of the season had felt justified in twisting her into a statue of ice and snow and frozen heartlessness, leaving her unable to cope with the reality of her situation, or the fact that her boyfriend—who she loved, she was almost sure of it—was currently technically deceased. When she’d arrived in Spring, with frostbite of the soul and hands that didn’t feel like hers anymore, she’d been transformed again, this time into an open channel with no reservoir of its own. People kept changing her, and they never thought to ask permission first.
“Change never does ask permission, sweetheart,” said a voice like vermouth, filled with sweet bitterness and broken glass glittering in bead-choked gutters. Like most things in Spring, it was a metaphor given flesh and unyielding reality. “Change is like the tide. It does what it wants, and screw you if you don’t feel like going along with it.”
Velveteen stopped and turned. Lady Moon was sitting on a mossy old rock in the middle of the field, filing her nails with a jeweled emery board. Her gown was made of peacock feathers and bright
butterfly wings, matching the mask that covered half her face. It curved upward at an angle, forming the crescent shape of her namesake. As always, her neckline was low enough to make Velveteen feel faintly uncomfortable, like she was supposed to start flinging Mardi Gras beads to pay for the view. It wasn’t prudishness: she’d been a superheroine for most of her life, she’d seen a lot of cleavage. It was the angle, the way everything about Lady Moon seemed to combine to say “look at my tits.”
“Could you maybe not read my mind without permission?” asked Velveteen. “I ask not because I think you’ll actually stop, but because this way I’m justified in hitting you with a brick if you don’t cut it out.”
“You’re always justified,” said Lady Moon. “It’s just that you’ll have to live with the consequences of whatever it is you choose to do.”
Velveteen looked at her flatly. Lady Moon laughed.
“You are a constant delight, and I am going to miss you sorely now that you’re on your way to whatever lies beyond the merry month of May,” said Lady Moon. She stood, her stiletto heels sinking into the ground. “Walk with me.”
“Um,” said Velveteen, who had had no idea that she might be leaving soon, or what the spirit of spring celebration might have to do with it. But if there was one thing she had learnt from her time in the Seasonal Lands, it was that when things made no sense at all, that was when you just had to roll with it. “Sure.”
Lady Moon—who had been a living lightshow, once, a rainbow dancing in the springtime sky, when the fireworks show of her hands had set New Orleans ablaze, a century gone and a hundred quiet bargains past—walked, and Velveteen followed, and the Spring went on.