“I am. Mom is from Ireland, and my dad is from Senegal. He met my mom while he was in New York City studying to be an architect. She was playing the harp in Central Park; he stopped to watch her and said he fell in love with her right on the spot.” I stopped talking, wondering why on earth I was telling him so much about my family.

“How did you end up here?” he asked, waving a hand around that I took to mean Sweden, rather than the GothFaire itself.

“Dad got a job with Ikea. And, no, I don’t know how to put furniture together. I’m all thumbs when it comes to things like that.”

He held up my hand and pretended to admire it. “Your fingers look perfectly fine to me. So, what would you like to do? We’ve already had our palms read. Have you been to the personal time-travel advisor? I’m told she’s very good.”

I looked at the booth he pointed to. “Not really my thing. I’m perfectly content with the here and now.”

“Ah. A traditionalist? Let’s see… piercings?”

We both looked at the body-piercing booth, then looked at each other.

“No piercings,” Terrin said with a pinched look about his mouth.

I laughed. “Yeah, I’m not into pain or stabbing bits of things through body parts. It was all I could do to get my ears pierced when I was sixteen.”

Terrin stopped in front of a red-and-black-painted booth. “Hmm. There’s to be a demonology demonstration in half an hour. That might be interesting.”

“Eh, demons,” I said, making a little face at the booth and moving forward. “I can take ’em or leave ’em.”

“Really?” He looked mildly surprised. “You have depths, my dear, positively unplumbed depths.”

“Yeah, we Irish-Senegalese Americans living in Sweden are often deep. What’s that?” I pointed to a sign with a camera. We stopped in front of the booth in question so I could read the text. “What’s a soul photograph?”

“I assume it’s a euphemism for an aura photo, but I could be mistaken.”

“Oh, I think I read about those somewhere. A picture together might be fun, don’t you think?” I swung our hands and gave him a winning smile, then suddenly worried that he might think I believed in auras. “Not that they’re real.”

“The photographs?”

“No, auras.”

He handed over some money to the bored teenager who was manning the front of the booth and held up two fingers to indicate we wanted a photo together. “I’m a bit surprised that you want a photo, then.”

“Oh boy, did I just put my foot in my mouth?” I gazed at him in consternation. He didn’t look offended or angry, but then, I wasn’t sure someone with his calm, unemotional personality type got upset about things. “You believe auras are real, don’t you?”

“It’s difficult to dismiss something that you’ve seen, yes.” He held aside a long black curtain so I could enter the tent. Ahead of us stood an old-fashioned camera on a tripod, the kind with huge bellows and large square glass plates, just like something out of a silent movie. A woman was seated on a low bench having her photo taken. The photographer, a bald little man with a fringe of carroty red hair and an elaborately curled mustache, was behind the camera, telling her to think happy thoughts.

We moved to a couple of chairs that had been placed to form a makeshift waiting area.

“You’ve really seen an aura?” I asked Terrin in a low voice.

He nodded. “In photographs, yes. I don’t have the ability to see them with the naked eye, unfortunately.”

“Oh.” I relaxed, feeling much better. I tried to pick out judicious words. “I read an article on a skeptical website that talked about how people make those, you know. Evidently there are some things you can do before the film is developed to make pretty halo effects appear around people’s heads and whatnot, and of course, digital images are super easy to mess with.”

His eyebrows lifted slightly, just enough that told me he was disconcerted by the fact that I was dissing his aura photos. I hurried to try to smooth things over—there was no need to ruin the evening by being a big ole party-pooping skeptic. “Lots of people are taken in by them. Even experts! And I suppose they don’t really do any harm, do they? It’s just a picture, after all.”

“It is that.” He was silent for a moment, still watching me with those eyes that expressed mild interest. “I find it curious that you desired to visit the GothFaire since you don’t particularly believe in things like auras.”

“Are you kidding?” I gave a jaded laugh that I tried to nip in the bud before it got away from me. “We’re not exactly in the hotbed of fascinating life here in northern Sweden. The nearest big city is hours away by train, and there isn’t a whole lot that’s interesting to do or see except rivers and snow and fishing and that sort of thing, and most of the year it’s too freaking cold to do anything but huddle around the fireplace with a stack of books and a bottle of brandy. When Rowan—he’s my brother—told me that a fair was coming this far north, I leaped at the chance to see it. I’ve been here every one of their three days.”

“Ah. I see the attraction of the fair, then.”

The photographer waved us forward, took the slip that Terrin had been given, and told us to arrange ourselves on the bench in whatever manner we liked.

We sat somewhat stiffly side by side while the photographer fussed with extracting a plate and inserting another.

“It’s not that I don’t appreciate other people’s beliefs and such,” I told Terrin. “It takes all kinds to make the world go, and I’m certainly not going to bash someone if they really believe that such things as demons existed, or time travel, or auras. I mean, it’s really kind of a suspension of disbelief, isn’t it? Like when you’re watching a movie, and people suddenly burst into song with a full orchestra that isn’t there. You just go with the flow and believe it in order to have fun.”

The photographer told us to angle ourselves slightly toward each other, then to turn and look at the camera.

“That seems to be a sensible attitude to have,” Terrin agreed.

“Hold that for seven seconds,” the photographer said, and disappeared under the black cape that hung off the camera.