Page 52 of Seasonal Fears

The woman in the rainbow veil is standing right beside him, perfectly positioned to have been concealed in his blind spot during her approach, making it seem like she simply snapped her fingers and blinked across the intervening distance. He doesn’t understand how she could have gotten so close.

The person behind him pushes past, between him and the woman in the rainbow veil. He doesn’t seem to see her at all, although he clearly sees Harry, given the way he nudges him aside to get to the counter. “Come over here,” says the woman.

It’s not a request. But she doesn’t feel like summer and she’s not trying to kill him, so Harry steps away from the line, clutching his kettle corn, and follows as she gestures for him to do so, leading him to the lee between the potato stall and a seller peddling homemade jams and jellies. Once there, she narrows her eyes and glares at him.

“Who are you and how the hell can you see me?” she demands.

He blinks. The longer he looks at her, the less jarring the rainbow veil seems, the more she’s just another woman, if one who’s somehow managed to turn on her own private Instagram filter. She’s dressed for the farmers’ market, blue jeans and a flannel shirt over a T-shirt with a complicated math pun he isn’t even going to try to understand printed on the front. There’s a wicker basket over one arm, half-filled with produce, including the fancy potatoes she was selecting when he noticed her.

“Um,” he says. “Harry? Is me. My name, I mean. Is Harald, but everyone calls me Harry, because ‘Harald’ is old-fashioned and doesn’t suit me as well. That’s with an a, not an o. It’s a family name.”

“Okay, when I asked who you were, I didn’t want a complete etymology of your name. Save it for my brother, he’ll care,” says the woman. “Let’s get back to how can you see me? No one else here can see me. I’m not in the market to be seen.”

Harry doesn’t know what to do with that. He’s heard that Berkeley is a hippie town, but he didn’t expect to meet someone who’s so high she thinks she can make herself invisible. He looks around, somewhat frantically, hoping to spot Mel, or Jack, or someone else who can extricate him from this weird-ass situation with this weird-ass woman he doesn’t know and doesn’t think he wants to.

They’re about six stalls away, heads together as they bend over a display of local honeys. The teens from the Starbucks have joined them, holding their own drinks, laughing at something Melanie’s said. Harry manages not to wave and yell, largely because the woman snaps her fingers, dragging his attention back to her, where she clearly feels it belongs.

“Hey, eyes front,” she snaps, voice hard with irritation. “Mr. Harry-is-me, I need to know how you can see me.”

“I don’t … I don’t know?” he says. “You’re all wrapped in rainbow cellophane. I’d never seen anything like that before, so I was looking less at you than I was at the colors. I’m sorry if I wasn’t supposed to look at them. I won’t do it again.”

She blinks, and cocks her head to the side, like a falcon trying to decide whether or not to take its chances on a neighborhood cat. “You can see that?”

“Um, yes?”

“The ‘rainbow cellophane,’ as you put it, is a shield made of seconds stolen from five minutes in the future,” she says. “Pulling them back to me and out of phase with themselves kills them, and when they burn up, they make little auroras. And no one can see them, except for me.” She takes a step toward him. “How can you see the seconds dying?”

“Um.” There’s nothing immediately terrifying about this woman. She’s tall, yes, but he’s taller, and she’s at least like thirty; he’s pretty sure he can take her. And somehow she’s the most frightening thing he’s ever seen. Worse, even, than the sight of Melanie standing in a sparkling haze of snowflakes, and that was pretty frightening. “Lady, I don’t know what you’re talking about, but it doesn’t really make any sense and you’re sort of freaking me out right now, so I’d like it if you’d stop, please.”

People can’t see her, but they can certainly see him, and some of the shoppers are slanting suspicious looks in his direction as he stands there talking to the empty air. The urge to wheel and run is getting stronger. He doesn’t think she’ll chase him. Not if she’s here to buy potatoes and not be seen.

But he’s not sure he can wager Melanie’s life on that, even if he’s willing to wager his own, and so he remains frozen and frightened, watching the redhead sweep her eyes up and down the length of his body like he’s one more thing to buy at the market, one more thing she needs to check for freshness before she puts it in her basket. There’s nothing sexual about it, none of the predatory assessment he’s occasionally encountered since he finished puberty and settled into being tall, broad-shouldered, and unquestionably attractive; she’s taking his measure as an object in her world, nothing more and nothing less.

He still doesn’t like it. “Creepy” is a word that’s taken on distinctly sexual overtones just during his lifetime, and there’s nothing sexual about her, but the way she’s looking at him is nothing short of creepy. He tries to take a step backward, and discovers he can’t.

The woman smiles, thinly. “There was a fifty percent chance you’d try to retreat if I got in your face, so I just made sure we were in the place where the other option won out. You’re not going anywhere.”

“Has anyone ever told you that you’re terrifying?”

That seems to please her, because of course it does. Scary women always like to be told how scary they are. “I learned from the best. Now I need you to explain exactly how it is you can see me despite the seconds, and how you can see the seconds at all.”

“I’m—”

“And quickly. The market closes in two hours, and I need to finish my shopping.”

His throat goes dry and his voice goes dead in his mouth. He can’t speak. He can’t even squeak. All he can do is stare at her, frozen, like a mouse in front of a snake.

“Hey, Sunshine!”

Even Jack’s shout isn’t enough to snap him out of it. She runs up, looking more like the child she is than he’s ever seen her, a bright hothouse daisy in her hair and honey on her lips, and skids to a stop beside him, reaching for his bag of kettle corn. “Share the spoils, man,” she says, and laughs.

The woman switches her cold, reptile’s gaze to Jack, not even seeming to blink. For Jack’s part, she doesn’t acknowledge the woman’s presence, or seem to be in any way aware of it. She ignores her like everyone else who isn’t Harry as she grabs first a handful of kettle corn, then his elbow, tugging to make him come with her.

“Snowflake was asking about you,” she says. “I think she’s feeling a little neglected. I need to teach you two the meaning of the word ‘codependent,’ I think you might find it really useful in the days to come.”

“We already know,” he says, tongue unsticking in the face of something far more normal than invisible, intimidating women wearing rainbows. When the living servant of the Winter became normal is something he doesn’t want to examine too deeply.

“Huh,” says Jack. “So maybe work on it? Just a tip.”