If I could persuade one of the Garda to call whenever they received a report of the type of crime that fit my parameters, I’d get an instant lead, without being tied to a radio. I could rush to the crime scene, hoping the Book was still close enough that I could sense it, and use my sidhe-seer senses to track it. Most of the tips would probably prove fruitless, but eventually, I was bound to get lucky, at least once.

Jayne was going to be my informant. One might wonder how I planned to achieve such a monumental twist on the usual police/civilian relationship. That was the brilliant part of my simple plan.

Of course, I had no idea what to do if I managed to actually locate the Sinsar Dubh. I couldn’t even get close to it, and if I managed to somehow, I’d seen what happened to people who touched it. Still, I had to hunt it. It was one of those things programmed into my genes along with my innate fear of Hunters, knee-jerk reactions to Hallows, and constant urge to run around warning people about the Fae, even though I knew I’d never be believed.

Today, I needed to be believed. Jayne wanted to know what was going on.

Today, I would show him.

The voice of my conscience protested thinly. I quashed it. Conscience wasn’t going to keep me alive.

I eyed the tray. My mouth watered. Those were no simple egg, tuna, or chicken salad sandwiches, those scrumptious little confections I’d worked so hard to make, and was now dying to eat. Dreaming of eating. Hungering for in a way I’d never hungered for human food.

Those wriggling little delicacies were Unseelie salad sandwiches.

And Jayne was about to get one great, big, eye-opening look at his city.

_____

It went about as well as train wrecks do.

The inspector ate only two of my tiny sandwiches: the first because he hadn’t expected it to taste so awful; the second, I think, because he’d thought surely the first must have been a mistake.

By the time he’d swallowed the second one, he could see that the sandwiches were moving on his plate, and there’d been no chance of getting a third one into him. I wasn’t sure how long the effects of such a small amount of Unseelie would last, but I figured he had a day or two of it. I hadn’t told him about the superstrength, regenerative powers or skill in the black arts that resulted from eating Unseelie. Only I knew he was currently strong enough to crush me with a single blow.