“Aeslinn is hunting people,” the telepath said, rounding on me. “My kind of people—”

“They’re fey?” I asked, glancing back at the group, because they didn’t look it. I could have passed any of them on a street and never blinked, and I doubted that was because they were using a glamourie. They didn’t look like they could afford a glamourie, and if they’d had any magic to spare to craft one of their own, I thought they might have been using it to escape.

“They’re like me,” she said. “Mixed blood, but it hasn’t saved them, any more than it did my grandmother—”

“Your grandmother?”

“The fey one,” the telepath confirmed. “After grandfather died, she moved in with one of my aunts. Grandmother had a club foot and was all but lame; she could sew and do other domestic things, but she couldn’t walk for any distance at all. She hardly left the house except to hobble around the garden. Yet she disappeared one night, while my aunt slept—”

“Disappeared?”

She nodded fiercely. “No one saw anything, and no one ever heard from her again—and none of us understood why. Who would take her? She was merely an old woman! She had no magic; the only thing her fey blood ever did for her was to extend her life—”

“Until someone took it,” I said, thinking of those other fey, the demigod ones, who’d been butchered like meat. But these people didn’t have any talents surely? At least, none worth Aeslinn’s time. So, what was he doing with them? Or with an old woman too weak even to live alone?

And then I realized what I’d said. “Oh, God—I’m sorry—”

But the telepath waved it off. It looked like she was already at maximum rage, and didn’t have room for anything else. “Until someone hunted her,” she hissed, gesturing around. “Do you understand what is happening here? People have been disappearing for years, but nobody knew why. Some thought it was old enemies who had followed them from Faerie; others that dark mages were draining us to steal our magic, although most of us don’t have that much to take—”

“I get it,” I said, trying to calm her down, both because I felt bad for her, and because I didn’t know how much high emotion might affect the stability of the reading.

“Do you? Then you’d be one of the first! Everyone hates us, is suspicious of us, or tries to take advantage—” she suddenly grasped my shoulders. “And now he’s hunting us!”

“Yes, he is.”

“Why?”

“That’s what I need you to help me find out.”

She stared at me blankly for a moment, as if she hadn’t understood the stakes until now. Then I abruptly found myself being dragged back out onto the terrace. Where the frozen tableau wasn’t so frozen anymore.