A doorway opens in mid-air. The body of a woman falls to the ground and lies there unmoving as the door slams shut behind her, dissolving like confetti into the wind.

As the grass beneath her slowly dies, Velma Martinez – Velveteen – once architect of the downfall of The Super Patriots, Inc., most recently the servant of the Seasons, has come home.

But ah; we are getting ahead of ourselves. That is the difficulty, once holidays become involved. They want everything to be a fairy tale, and nothing to be true. Perhaps this would not hurt so much, except that they remember the meaning of fairy tales, before we sanded off their edges and called them suitable for children.

The holidays remember how to bleed.

So much as it hurts, we must leave the body in the grass, alone and untended, with no one to confirm whether she will live or whether she has already died. For all things must begin at their beginnings, and the beginning of this tale is far, far behind us…

Join us as award-winning author Seanan McGuire returns to the story of Velveteen, where the choices that a superheroine makes always have consequences.

Dylan Meconis