VELVETEEN vs. A Disturbing Number of Crows #3
Velveteen looked at the corn. She had the distinct feeling that the corn was looking back, taking her measure even as she was taking its.
Hailey was gone, off to protect the orchards: her parting words had been a muttered warning about being back on the road by midnight, since the corn had “other defenses” once the moon was high enough.
Velveteen had no real idea of what those “other defenses” might be, and more importantly, she had no desire to learn.
Being an animus had taught her that everything had teeth.
Sometimes those teeth were hidden, but that didn’t change their reality.
She had absolute faith that the cornfield was dangerous, and not to be trifled with.
She also hadn’t seen a single crow, standing on the road as she was, which made her suspect that the only way to protect the corn was to go into the corn.
“I hate this holiday,” she announced to no one in particular, and stepped into the green.
The change was immediate. There was no way the road should have dropped behind her so quickly, but it did: with a single step, she was lost in a sea of cornstalks, surrounded on all sides.
They were all tall, stretching two to four feet above her head, but that was where the similarity ended.
Some of the stalks were fresh and green, barely putting forth ears.
Others were golden and dry, already harvested.
Still more were fully mature, heavy with corn, ready for the picking.
“Okay, this is weird,” said Velveteen, turning slowly. Cornhusks crunched underfoot. Everything smelled like chlorophyll. And then, in the middle of her turn, she found her first crow.
She froze. So did the bird. She wasn’t sure what she’d been expecting, exactly, but it wasn’t this…this thing, which bore a resemblance to the glossy black birds she sometimes saw back home in Portland only in the sense that it was large, black, and covered with feathers. Apart from that…
It had a jagged, tooth-filled beak, more like a small dinosaur than a normal bird.
Its talons were abnormally long, almost tiny, scaled hands, and looked perfectly capable of husking an ear of corn without trouble.
And it had a single red eye with a snake-slit pupil in the middle of its skull, which looked at her with an eerie intelligence.
“Um,” said Velveteen.
“Caw,” said the crow, and launched itself into the air, talons angled toward her face.
Velveteen had time to see that it had a long, scaly tail, like some sort of lizard, before self-preservation took over and she hit the ground.
When she lifted her face out of the cornhusks, she saw the crow flying off with an ear of corn clutched in its talons, crowing triumphantly.
Before that moment, she wouldn’t have said that a bird could sound smug.
This one did. Smug, and nasty, and maybe a little bit malicious. Maybe a lot malicious.
Then the sky turned black with beating wings, and the harsh caws of the crows drowned out everything else, and Velveteen realized that this job was considerably larger than she had expected.
“Fuck. Me,” she said, and turned and fled into the corn, looking for a place where she could hunker down and come up with a plan.
Waving her arms and screaming wasn’t going to cut it, she could tell that for damn sure; these were not crows that gave a single fuck about being yelled at.
They were out for blood, or at least for corn, and if she got in their way, they were going to rip her to pieces.
Serving the Season was one thing—she had signed up for that—but dying for it?
Oh, that was something else altogether, and if that was what Halloween wanted from her, Halloween was going to be deeply disappointed.
The direction she was running should have brought her back to the road.
It didn’t. Instead, it brought her more corn, until she ran into a clear patch that had already been harvested.
The stalks here were crushed flat, and the sky overhead was mostly empty, since there was nothing here for the crows to steal.
She stopped, wheezing and trying not to think about how a rag doll that walked like a woman could be short of breath.
Everything here was a metaphor. Pick at it too much and it would come apart at the seams.
“Okay, fuck, crows,” she said, putting her hand against a convenient pole as she wheezed.
Then she stopped, looking up, and met the eyes of the disemboweled scarecrow that dangled there.
It was impossible to tell whether it had originally been an animated doll, like she was; it didn’t matter much, since the thing was clearly not animated now.
It was a dead thing, and looking at it made her shudder.
But it was a dead thing with a face, and while she had never become Roadkill in her timeline, she knew full well that she was capable of animating dead things.
Getting the scarecrow down from its post was harder than she had expected, and several times she had to swallow the urge to just wake it up and tell it to get down on its own.
Without knowing how it was suspended, that could easily have ended in the scarecrow ripping itself limb from limb as it tried to follow her orders.
That wouldn’t have been helpful, especially not when she needed it relatively intact to fight for her.
So she climbed and she slid and she struggled and she unhooked, until finally the scarecrow fell to the ground, leaving her hanging from the crossbar that had held its arms in position.
“This was a brilliant plan and I am a genius for having it,” she said, deadpan.
Narrowing her eyes, she focused on the scarecrow.
She hadn’t actually tried to use her powers since arriving in Autumn this time, and after her experiences in Spring and Winter, she was a little worried about what would happen.
Indeed, it felt like the “reach” that always accompanied an animation came easier than it ever had before, accompanied by the tiny sensation of loss that she now recognized as the expenditure of her own energy.
The deep wellspring of power that had always been her own was back now; she didn’t have to be a vampire.
The relief that accompanied that realization was so intense that she nearly lost her grip on the crossbar.
Only nearly. She held on, and the scarecrow staggered to its feet, possessing none of her grace, moving with the uneasy bend of straw and canvas and severely damaged fabric.
It tilted its painted face blindly toward her, its one remaining button eye glinting in the light.
There wasn’t that much of a difference between snowmen and scarecrows, when you got right down to it.
Both of them were inanimate, humanoid, and hers.
“Catch me,” she said, and let go of the crossbar before she could change her mind. If the scarecrow didn’t move fast enough, well. She was made of cloth at the moment. She would probably be fine. Probably.
The scarecrow caught her. Velveteen beamed.
“You are the most useful person I’ve met since I got here,” she said. “Put me down.”
The scarecrow put her down. It took a shambling step back, giving her some space.
Velveteen wasn’t sure whether it had done that on its own or because she wanted room to breathe, and it didn’t really matter.
Her toys had always been better at controlling their own actions than anyone expected them to be.
As long as they still did as she asked, she didn’t mind.
“We’re going to fight the army of crows that tore you open,” she said.
The scarecrow tilted its head, seeming obscurely disappointed.
She swallowed the urge to apologize. “Anyway, we need more of an army if we want to take them out without winding up in a million pieces. Have you ever made a cornhusk doll?”
The scarecrow had not. The scarecrow was, however, willing to learn. Velveteen couldn’t have said how she knew this; she just did. She grinned.
“Great,” she said. “Let’s get cracking.”
* * *
Gathering cornhusks was easy, even with the crows glutting themselves in the field.
The clearing had plenty, and when those started running low, Velveteen ducked into the nearby green and grabbed great fistfuls of leaves and husks from the ground and from the already-denuded cornstalks.
A few crow sentries spotted her and cawed loudly, summoning reinforcements, but Velveteen kept low and moved fast, and none of the flocks managed to descend on her before she could retreat to a safe distance again.
“I would kill for someone with animal-control powers right now,” she said, sitting cross-legged in the middle of the clearing and beginning to twist cornhusks together, forming the shape of a crude doll.
The scarecrow sat beside her, mimicking her motions as well as it could.
Its hands were twigs, skeletal and clumsy, but they bent like fingers, thanks to the power she was pumping through its body, and while it wasn’t fast, it was better by far than nothing.
“I mean, get Cinder or Monstrosity or Jack Daw out here and we could clear this problem up in no time flat. Halloween needs to network better.”
The scarecrow didn’t say anything. The scarecrow just kept making corn dolls. Velveteen gave it a sidelong look.
“You were a scarecrow when you started, right?” she asked.
“I mean, you were always a scarecrow, you’re not somebody who got turned into a scarecrow?
Because I’m not really in the business of animating corpses, when I can help it.
It never ends well.” Her mind helpfully supplied her with an image of Tag, sleeping in his glass coffin back in The Princess’s castle.
Velveteen resisted the urge to punch her own brain in the face.