Or like my body was thinking about a panic attack, despite the fact that Aeslinn wasn’t even here, that I was basically watching him on T.V.!

I didn’t understand myself sometimes. I’d just seen him with Gertie, not two hours ago, but that had been across a good distance of both space and time. It was a little different from a couple dozen yards away.

And that made me furious, because that bastard didn’t get to do this to me. He didn’t get to make my heart pound and my skin crawl and my eyes want to roll up in my head. He didn’t get to do any of that!

After a moment, I sucked in a deep breath, sat up and leaned my head back against the wall. The cold stone felt good; bracing. I just stayed like that for a while.

“Are you—” the telepath began, before I cut her off.

“Tell me about this place,” I said, wanting something else to think about. “How are you making it look like this?”

“Like what?”

“Like I just walked into the middle of a play.”

She didn’t immediately answer, and I could almost feel her impatience; she was practically vibrating with it. She clearly wanted to get on with this, whatever this was—maybe she had another job lined up for later—but I wasn’t there yet. Which she seemed to realize, because after a moment, she answered.

“It isn’t me. As I said: fey imprints are different.”

“Yeah, but this different? It’s 3-D!”

“What?”

“Like a stereoscope,” I said, because the original version of the View Master toys for kids were in practically every parlor, allowing Victorians and their Edwardian cousins to juxtapose two slightly different pictures of the same thing to give a depth effect. They oohed and ahhed over 3-D pictures of lions on the Serengeti and junks riding a Chinese river the same way we laugh at funny YouTube videos.

And I guess she understood that, because she nodded. “Allied fey have a group consciousness that they can tap into, to coordinate movements in battle and share information. In times of stress, this group mind can sometimes create an imprint, combining the knowledge of all those assembled.”

“Like having a bunch of different cameras recording the scene from different angles?”

She nodded. “In a way, although a camera wouldn’t include sound and scent, even touch, as a fey imprint does.”

I felt the cold stone under my fingertips and wondered what Hollywood would pay for tech that could duplicate this. Probably a lot; probably anything. And then what else she’d said registered.

“A group consciousness? You mean, like a vampire clan, in each other’s heads all the time?” Because I’d never heard that.