My hands had trembled when I’d forced myself to flush the rest of the uneaten delicacies down the toilet before we’d left. I’d set two aside, in case of emergency. Halfway out the door I’d called my own bluff and gone back to flush those, too. I’d caught a glimpse of myself in the mirror, white-faced with the strain of denying myself what I so badly wanted, the bliss of strength, safety from my countless enemies roaming the streets of Dublin, not to mention being able to hold my own with Barrons. I’d clung to the edge of the toilet, watching the chunks of meat swirl around in the porcelain-cradled whirlpool, until they’d disappeared.

We stood on the outskirts of the Temple Bar District, and I was exhausted.

I’d been with Jayne for seven long hours, and I didn’t like him any better now than before I’d fed him Unseelie, and forced him to see what was going on in his world.

He didn’t like me any better, either. In fact, I was pretty sure he was going to hate me for the rest of his life for what I’d made him confront tonight.

I’d drugged him, he’d insisted, shortly after I’d commenced our little monster-tour. Given him hallucinogens. He was going to have me arrested for trafficking in narcotics. He was going to have me kicked out of Ireland and sent home to prison.

We both knew he wouldn’t.

It had taken hours of steering him around Dublin, showing him what was in the bars, driving the cabs, and running the vendor stands, to get through to him, but I’d finally managed. I’d had to coach him the entire time on how to act, how to sneak looks and not to betray us, unless he wanted to end up as dead as O’Duffy.

Regardless of what I might think of his methods of handling me, Inspector Jayne was a fine cop, with sound instincts—whether he liked what they were telling him or not. Though he’d insisted none of it was real, he’d nonetheless employed the stealth of twenty-two years of investigative procedure. He’d regarded the mouthless, sad, wet-eyed monsters and the leather-winged gargoyles and the hulking masses of deformed limbs and oozing flesh with the perfect impassivity of a nonbeliever.

He’d slipped up only once, a few minutes ago.

I’d quickly nulled and stabbed three Rhino-boys in the dark alley we’d been using as a shortcut.

Jayne stood there, staring down at their gray-limbed bodies, absorbing the lumpy faces with jutting jaws and tusklike teeth, the beady eyes and elephant skin, the open wounds, revealing pinkish gray flesh marbled with pus-filled cysts. “You fed me this?” he said finally.

I shrugged. “It was the only way I knew to show you what you needed to see.”