Dresden Files Reread - Summer Knight Chapter 22

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We pick back up at Billy's apartment, just as Harry and Murphy finish filling the Alphas in on the events
of the previous few chapters. This is where we get the explanation of where they got the gasoline for the super soaker and the chainsaw. We get an update on the Alphas as a group, which mostly aligns with what we were already told about Billy, although it's new information that a lot of the girls are in knit pullover dresses. This is interesting, because while knit pullover dresses aren't precisely formal, they are acceptable clothing that won't stand out in a considerably wider range of circumstances than the sweats most of the boys are wearing, meaning that the girls among the alphas may be better equipped to respond to supernatural problems that arise, say, while going to the bank, or in a business casual work setting. I have no idea how often this realistically comes up - most things that go bump in the night tend to do it, y'know, at night, not at the church's ice cream social. They've got massive amounts of pizza and soft-drinks, which is appropriate for twelve werewolves in what I think is at this point still their early 20s. Georgia's working on Murphy's injured leg, cutting away her jeans and cleaning the scratches. It's reasonably realistic that the baby psychologist would also be the team medic, not because the skill sets overlap (they do, but not much), but because the interests tend to. People who like fixing people tend to...like fixing people. Nonetheless I'd be interested to know if at this stage, Butcher already planned for her to eventually get her Masters in Psychology, or if she was originally on a track to be the doctor when a plot called for one, until Butters demonstrated that he needed to be more than a one-off. I don't remember if Georgia's being a psych major is maybe referenced later in this book, but it's not in Fool Moon. 

Billy asks why, if mind fogs are a thing, he hasn't heard about them before now. Most of the discussion focuses on how people don't believe, or don't want to believe, in the supernatural, and we'll get to that in a minute, but the first thing Harry says is that they're rare. This is pretty reasonable, inasmuch as they're illegal, and also it does, as they say, have to be real mist. I would imagine that the overlap between people with the fine manipulation and, do they actually call it "psychomancy" in this series, am I remembering that right? Whatever they call it, the skill with mind magic, to do this, and people with the raw power to conjure up something, even a relatively insubstantial something, big enough to fill a Walmart and part of the parking lot, is not large. Among human practitioners, the ones I'm entirely confident could do it are the Merlin, Ebenezer (who would probably have to try pretty hard), Molly Carpenter at the beginning of Cold Days (earlier than this, I'm not sure she had the capacity, later she is, of course, not a human practitioner), Rashid, and Elaine. Wouldn't surprise me if other members of the Senior Council could do it, although as we discover in Turn Coat, some wizards of the White Council don't even know adequate defenses against mind magic because of the prohibition on using it, but we don't know enough about what Mai, Martha Liberty, or Kristos can do to be certain, and what we know about Listens to Wind's abilities doesn't suggest that this kind of big scale conjuration is his strong suit. But it's interesting to me that Harry doesn't say any of this, not even that a large-scale mind fog would be pretty hard to do, which is hardly lifting the veil of secrecy. In general he hardly ever talks to the Alphas about how magic actually works, despite the fact that they are technically practitioners themselves, albeit ones who only know how to do the one really difficult spell really fast. Any of them could probably learn to be better evocators than Harry is, if, and this might be a big 'if', their abilities work the way he thinks they do. Now, it's possible that Jim Butcher determined that none of them have the interest in putting in that kind of time and effort, since they're also basically citizens with day jobs in a way that isn't really practical for most wizards, and that the resulting conversation about it wouldn't be that interesting to the reader, so there's no reason to put it on the page, but I also think it's possible that Harry really hasn't talked to them about magic very much, and that at some point in the future it's going to come up and we're gonna find out that their werewolf trick actually works according to some principle Harry isn't familiar with, rather than being a spell in the way he understands them. After all, whatever they're doing, they learned it from Tera, who certainly isn't human and probably isn't a wizard in the conventional sense. 

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What Harry does talk about is that events at the Walmart will probably be explained as a gas leak. Billy finds this implausible, since none of the evidence will really point that way. Harry's thing is that they won't want to admit that they don't know what really happened, which is fair up to a point. This kind of incident involves Paperwork, and you have to put something on it, preferably something that fits an existing checkbox and doesn't require too much additional documentation. That said, I'm not sure what involvement he expects "City Hall" to have here, or why he thinks anyone would be publicly embarrassed. Unless you actually know the supernatural circumstances, it was a workplace accident, and nobody died. No one's gonna care that much what really happened, except the Walmart's insurance company, and possibly the shareholders, their lawyers, the board of directors, and whoever else the board can implicate to cover their own asses if this reduces shareholder value. And the people it happened to, I guess, but since they're not going to remember what happened, and weren't actually harmed as best I can tell, even they're probably not going to be that fussed. Now, obviously none of that means anyone will look for magic as an explanation. The people likely to be tasked with looking into this probably don't have that within their frame of reference, and I'm pretty sure you'd have to be looking for it. I don't think many practitioners work for Walmart, the gas company, or the Chicago Office of Emergency Management and Communications, although I'm not sure how likely the lattermost are to get involved. Gotta figure there's some supernatural types working for the fire department, but that doesn't mean they're in a position to say anything about what's going on. On the other hand, most of the Changelings we see who don't work directly for the Courts seem to have pretty normal jobs, so it's possible some of them work for Walmart. There's actually sort of a larger issue here wherein we don't really have a clear picture of how big the supernatural community actually is. There aren't a ton of wizards, obviously, but most humans with some kind of magical something going on aren't wizards. Heck, the Alphas all have day jobs, once they get out of school. To say nothing of the nonmagical but clued families of minor practitioners, the human parents of changelings, people who have Seen Something, etc. Without knowing how many of them there are, it's very difficult to estimate the odds that one of them might be involved in the follow-up to this incident. There's stuff in later books about people who've had a run-in with the supernatural and dismissed it as a bad dream or whatever, and based on personal experience I just don't buy that, but we'll get to that when it actually comes up. Of course, there's a substantial chance that we're meant to understand, or at least be able to infer, that Harry's whole "the twenty-first century doesn't want to admit it doesn't know things" bit is just, incorrect. I was reading the third Codex Alera book a couple months ago, and what we see there about how battles work stands sharply at odds with, and is far more accurate than, Harry's whole "organized formations are just for history books, the reality is total chaos" thing from Grave Peril. Not to say that there's no inaccurate nonsense in Codex Alera, but it's pretty clear if you read both series that the evaluation of battles we get in Dresden Files is Harry's opinion, not Harry imparting something the reader is meant to take as objective truth. 

Georgia tells Murphy that she needs to see a real doctor about her knee, and it kind of needs to be now, although she allows time for Murphy to have some pizza first. When Harry hands her a can of Coke, she asks if there's any Diet. I think this is the first time Murphy's thing with diet soda comes up - in Storm Front she takes her coffee with real sugar, but I'm not actually sure we've seen her with a soda before this. Notably, between the completion and the publication of Grave Peril, there was an episode of Stargate SG-1 in which, for reasons that don't matter at all for this post, the team has occasion to place large orders at a steakhouse, and Samantha Carter orders the same Large Pile of Food plus a coke as the rest of SG-1, but requests that her soda be diet and, when this draws skeptical looks, explains that she likes the taste. Sam, as a woman in the US Air Force of the late 1990s and early 2000s, naturally invites comparison with Murphy, although rather less fuss is made about her being A Woman, partly because a long-running TV series has less reason to reiterate what each character is dealing with on any kind of regular basis, and partly because there were some deeply awkward moments near the beginning of Season 1, which the show was understandably reluctant to revisit. I don't know if this bit with Murphy is a reference to that, or if both things are responding to something else. I don't think Anita Blake does the Diet Coke thing, and the only other example I can think of is the Luidheag, from October Daye, which didn't start until 2009, and she's a different type of character in any case. Billy has Phil and Greg go get a blanket to make a litter so they can get Murphy down to Georgia's car without straining her leg further. Neither of these Alphas have been mentioned before - the name "Greg" does not appear in Fool Moon at all, and "Phil" only in the context of Phillip Denton - and I don't think they're mentioned again after this. Murphy isn't happy about being carried out, but Harry points out that if it were anyone else, she'd tell them to cooperate with medical advice. She also spots, and neatly interrupts, his impending guilt spiral about her getting injured (which, I want to be clear here, was absolutely his fault - the initial injury was caused by the marbles he left on the floor), basically by putting him on the defensive about how thoroughly she saved his ass. This wouldn't have worked if he was really comitted to spiraling about it, but he isn't, so it does work. 

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When the Alphas leave with Murphy, Harry goes out on the balcony for some space and air, and uh, Meryl is out there. I've been trying since I started working on this book to remember the context of their balcony conversation, only to discover that the reason I couldn't is that it doesn't make any sense. There's no indication that she was part of the gathering inside, and no plausible reason why she would have been. I'm genuinely not sure how, physically, she even got there. She's strong enough to have climbed, but I'm not sure how the (explicitly wooden?) balcony railings of this apartment building would have handled it, or how a dozen hyper-vigilant werewolves didn't notice. Stealth is not part of the conventional troll power-set last I checked. She asks Harry if watching Murphy gets injured hurt. I think living with Lily might have done strange things to Meryl's sense of boundaries, because this is sort of a strange thing to ask someone that you met like, yesterday. But Meryl also clearly thinks she's gonna learn something about Harry based on his response, and she's probably right, so we've got some pretty good layered characterization here. The codependent roommate situation has made Meryl a bit weird, socially, but she's also smart and perceptive. And fae, come to think of it. Titania does basically the same thing in Cold Days when she asks Harry what he thinks of the gay men having casual sex in the park, although obviously that hasn't happened yet. This is important because smart, perceptive, and fae are not traits fiction sets us up to expect from large, physically unattractive women. Meryl says he's not how she thought he'd be, and runs him, and the reader, through an update of how he's perceived by different groups of people. Most of this isn't news to people who have read the series in order, but it's good to have it confirmed that the "vampire wannabe crowd" think Harry is a "psychotic vigilante", and interesting as heck that he's already perceived as Mab's pet by the sidhe (and from the context, likely most changelings) given that he only started working for her a day or two ago. Meryl's own opinion is that Harry needs a haircut, which is certainly accurate. She's also drinking beer, which is just...such a detail. Almost no one in the Dresden Files drinks beer out of cans. Almost all the beer anyone drinks is Mac's ale, which comes in bottles. It's an indication to the reader, and maybe to Harry, that Meryl really is just kind of hanging out - she's drinking, and Harry's not, and that gives us a bit more reason than we'd otherwise have to trust her honesty and sincerity here. But it's also a clear reminder that Meryl and the other changeling "kids" are in fact young adults, only a few years younger than Harry. Speaking of which, she tells him that "Bill" finished calling the morgues and hospitals and didn't find anyone matching Lily's description. It honestly took me a couple of passes as this part to be confident who she was referring to, because literally no one else in the entire series has ever referred to Billy Borden as "Bill". He's Billy in this book and for the next several, Will thereafter. Is "Bill" something he was trying out that he just didn't bring up with Harry? Did Meryl just decide on her own that "Billy" was infantilizing? Was this literally just a typo that got missed in editing because Bill is a perfectly reasonable-looking name? Harry says he talked to Aurora and she seemed concerned, and Meryl says that Aurora is everyone's big sister, thinks she needs to take care of the whole world, which is obviously foreshadowing for her misguided efforts to save the world by breaking a fundamental cycle of nature, but also this is the final reinforcement of a thing that's been going on this entire chapter. The Alphas are their own little community - they hang out and eat pizza and cooperate smoothly and are comfortable sitting around a very small apartment in a very big group. Meryl knows the word on the street about Harry in half a dozen different mundane and supernatural communities - she knows more than Harry does about how he's seen by the magical crowd, which is, strictly speaking, his crowd. She's sufficiently integrated into the fae community, and given her connections with Aurora and Reuel probably the local art scene as well, to know how Aurora relates to "everyone" in those spaces. And I think this really underscores how isolated Harry is and how unnecessary that isolation is. The supernatural community is a community. He could be hanging out with people. He's choosing not to, and some of that is for legitimate reasons, like he's basically kind of introverted and prefers to spend much of his free time reading or making potions and enchanted objects, and as a full wizard he's gonna get Asked For Things if he's more accessible, but much of it is just deliberate, unhelpful, unnecessary self-isolation. And that's particularly significant here because he has so much of a thing about how knowing some of the stuff he knows could put the people around him in danger, and I'm still not 100% sure how that works, but leaving that aside, I think a lot of changelings and minor practitioners and the like probably know more than Harry assumes, and that there's a great deal they know that he doesn't because he's not hooked into the right social circles to hear about it. I mean, we know there is because this is a pretty big plot point in White Knight, but at this stage Harry is still having to ask Bob about basic shit like the structure of the Faerie courts, and he could be up to speed on a lot of that a lot easier if he were actually in the world and talking to people. And that's very good writing, because trauma makes you do weird maladaptive stuff that's bad for your mental health and personal life, but that weird, maladaptive stuff can also create direct, material inconvenience, make you worse at the things it's important to you to be good at, and it's nice to see that all sort of put together this way. Speaking of which, Meryl asks Harry what it's like being a wizard, and he starts off with how it's like being a watch fob repairman, which I had to look up (it's the chain on a pocket watch), but Meryl gives him space to keep talking and he actually opens up a little. Here again, we've got writing that's doing multiple things at the same time. It's a look at where Harry's at emotionally, and an honest and believable reflection of how it can be easier to talk about things, especially things tied to recent trauma, with people you don't know as well, and we're kind of speedrunning some genuine emotional connection between Harry and Meryl, which is important to making her death later in this same book hit the way it needs to. There was the possibility of a real friendship here. Harry asks her what being a changeling is like, and she lays out her own experiences in a way that provides a reasonable framework for guessing at what other changelings with different fae parents went through. Normal until puberty, and then instincts, emotions, and abilities that humans don't have, or don't have as strongly, start coming up. The more you use the abilities, the more prominent the instincts and emotions become, and the more you change physically. Interestingly, Meryl says here that she doesn't know "the details" of what happened with her conception, despite having told Billy earlier that her mother was raped by a troll. Both work for the scenes in which she says them (blunt and a little hostile there, open and vulnerable here), but they do seem to contradict each other, although it's possible that what she told Billy earlier is a best guess about what happened, not something she knows for sure, or that what she means here is that she doesn't know anything specific about how it happened, just that it did, and we're not going back over it because it's not necessary. She also says that sometimes she thinks it would be easier to just choose Faerie, stop dealing with all the difficult emotions, the guilt over how angry she gets. Harry says that she'd be a monster, and she says yeah but she'd be a happy monster. Obviously this is, not even foreshadowing, exactly, but setup for when she does make her Choice near the end, but it's also reflecting Harry's difficult feelings about his anger, his power, his capacity to destroy. Meryl says she might choose her Sidhe side if there weren't people who needed her, but it goes unsaid that if there weren't people who needed her, she could also Choose to be mortal, give up her power, and just be a regular person. She'd still have to live with whatever unspecified harm she's done up to this point, but she wouldn't hurt anyone else, and she wouldn't have to choose to be a monster. Harry has that available too, although it would be trickier for him since he's got the Red Court after him personally at this point, and I don't think the option of a wizard setting their power aside has come up yet at this point in the series, but it is an option. Just... one he can't take, because people need him. 

Meryl goes to deal with other stuff, and Harry stays outside, reviewing the facts and trying to make sense of them. If the attack at the Walmart was to stop him solving the case Mab gave him, it doesn't make obvious sense that the Tigress tried to kill him before he'd even met with Mab. Of course, Meryl's observation about the Sidhe perceiving him as Mab's pet also doesn't track with the timing of their meeting, word doesn't get around that fast, not in the days before social media, but Harry doesn't put that together at this time. The frost on the windshield suggests Winter involvement, obviously - a Wizard could do it, but like, why? But the Chlorofiend doesn't make a ton of sense, especially before Harry figures out that it was a construct actively being operated by someone, not a monster for hire like the Tigress. From there it isn't a huge leap to figure out that its failure to seriously hurt Murphy, after thoroughly kicking Harry's ass, means it couldn't, which would mean it was being operated by someone who couldn't, which is as much as to say one of the Queens. This likely means "Grum" couldn't have killed Murphy either, although it's possible the Tigress could have. The exact parameters on the Queens' ability to have other Faeries, or other supernatural creatures in general, do their dirty work aren't entirely clear, but the use of human Knights and Emissaries suggests they're pretty tightly restricted. The Mind Fog, of course, does suggest the possible involvement of a human wizard, although it's possible one of the Queens could have done it. Naturally as soon as Harry starts trying to follow this thought anywhere, it starts raining, getting ready to storm, out of basically nowhere, forcing him back inside. As I cannot currently charge my laptop while on the porch, I sympathize deeply with how this can derail a person's train of thought. As he's coming in, Billy turns up the TV, where a weather report describes the inexplicable collision of an "arctic blast" and a "tropical front" over lake Michigan, leading to flash floods, a tornado watch (that's the one where there's not a tornado yet, but there could be), and a travel advisory. As Harry tells Billy, they're running out of time. 

Dresden Files Reread - Summer Knight Chapter 21

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 Hi, everyone! Sorry I kind of fell of the map for two months there. It has been a Time over here at Mint and Brambles, and unfortunately I can't get into hardly any of the details. Broke my phone, bird covered in motor oil, all kinds of other nonsense. Anyway. 

Harry and Murphy leave the Walmart through the back door, and run into Grum. Murphy, covered in a blanket, screams and pretends to trip and fall trying to run away, while Harry distracts Grum with some theatrics, allowing her to pull out a chainsaw and cut one of Grum's legs most of the way off. I think this is our first proper look at what steel can do to the fae if it's deliberately wielded against them, as opposed to, for example, the Chlorofiend crashing into a metal shelving unit. I don't think it's every explicitly established that intent matters here, the way it does with so many other magical things, but the infected-looking dark patches that Grum's leg gets here hardly ever show up except when someone intentionally uses steel or cold iron as a weapon. Grum is still upsettingly formidable without the ability to stand, and almost gets Murphy, whose leg is genuinely in pretty bad shape after the run-in with Harry's marbles, but Harry sprays him down with a squirt gun full of gasoline, and then ignites it using a can of Sterno. I had a whole thing here questioning where they got the gasoline, but this is actually addressed almost immediately in the next chapter. I do, however, still doubt that they could have managed to get to the backup generators for the freezers, filled the squirt gun and fueled the chainsaw, and gotten out the door, in the three minutes we're told it's been since the end of the previous chapter, even supposing that they backup generators and their fuel supply were reasonably near the back exit. 

In any event, setting Grum on fire works well enough to discorporate him, but Murphy's injury was exacerbated in the fight, and she can't really walk. Harry settles her against the wall and goes to get the car, to bring it around to her. She pretty well insists on his taking her gun, pointing out that if the monsters come for her, it won't be much help anyway, but there was someone with a rifle earlier, and Harry doesn't have "most of [his] magic stuff". Using magic to kill a human, even one who's trying to shoot him, would also violate the laws of magic, but she doesn't know that yet. When Harry expresses concern about leaving her unarmed, she pulls out another, smaller gun - the one she keeps in her ankle holster. Honestly passing gear around this way also feels to me like something more likely in a tabletop game than a novel, but I don't know if I'd read it that way without some of the stuff that's already happened. Harry also reminds her to confirm that what comes back for her is actually him, since some monsters can change their faces. I uh, don't think she needed the reminder on that one.

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As Harry starts walking around the building, he gets a physical shield ready, which has to share focus, and use of his left hand, with his protections against the Mind Fog. This means he'll have to do any shooting using only his right hand, which is awkward since he's not a great shot anyway. I believe that's the first time we hear about that. The Chlorofiend seems to have torn its way through the chain-link fence around the garden center, and isn't anywhere in sight. Given that the car is apparently closer to the garden center than to the door they went out, I feel I must once again point out that they could have saved themselves a lot of trouble but just using the bolt cutters to go through the fence their own damn selves. Ah well. The fence was apparently frozen, then shattered, rather than melted or simply torn, implying that winter is involved here. Harry says that "wasn't much of a stretch", but I do hope he takes the time to think about it later. Nothing we know about Maeve at this point really suggests the kind of attention span necessary to try to kill him here, so either she didn't do this or we have a new clue, and it would be immensely informative if Mab had done so. Additionally, the Chlorofiend itself really has the feel of a summer thing, and if Summer and Winter are working together here, that's also something Harry should be very interested to know about. It takes him a bit to find his car, and he eventually tracks it down by following a coolant leak. At some point it's probably worth a more detailed exploration of what kinds of things Harry does and doesn't have trouble keeping track of, because you'd really think the kind of focus and memory required to do Wizard thing would lend itself to being able to remember where he left his car, at least if he made any real effort to do so, and yet. On the other hand, we're two concussions in at this point, one of which was between parking and now, so maybe Harry usually does know where his car is. 

Harry's going back past the garden center when the car is abruptly covered in frost. He sticks his head out the window in time to see the Chlorofiend slam its first down on the hood of the Beetle. Fortunately, it's a Volkswagen bug, so what's under the hood is mostly empty space - the car doesn't flip, and none of its important internal bits are disabled. Harry, in response, hits the Chlorofiend with his car. Twice. This leaves it in pretty bad shape, and he has time to get back to Murphy and get out to open the passenger side door for her before it pulls itself together enough to attack again. Unfortunately he's a lot more vulnerable outside the car, and the Chlorofiend manages to grab him. The specific phrase used here is "It got me.", harkening back to "The monsters got me." in the previous book. Murphy's not the only one having some PTSD about the events of Grave Peril, nor, I suspect, the only one whose confidence in their ability to deal with the things that go bump in the night has been somewhat shaken. The Chlorofiend, or whatever's driving it, calls him a "meddler" and tells him he doesn't know what's at stake. That's true, of course, he doesn't know what's actually going on yet, but he doesn't really have a choice about meddling. Incidentally, we who have read this book before know that it's Aurora sending Grum and the Chlorofiend after Harry, but how did she find him? In Small Favor, she's tracking him using the oak leaf pin (and his fire magic), but there isn't anything like that here, and I don't remember if it's ever explained. In any event, Harry tries to defend himself magically, but he's being squished and squeezed in all manner of uncomfortable ways, and then the Chlorofiend breaks his shield bracelet. Worse, his concentration on the spell protecting him from the Mind Fog wavers, so his brain starts turning to mush. 

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Murphy, however, is protected by a charm, temporary but not directly dependent on Harry's ability to focus. And she's still got the chainsaw. I have questions about why she still has the chainsaw - it doesn't seem like carrying it when she's too injured to walk unassisted would be a good use of anyone's hands or energy - but I feel like I've poked at logic and continuity enough for one chapter. She dismantles the plant monster quite handily while Harry mostly stares off into space. Adding to the list of stuff to keep an eye on, I think the first book might be the only one where Harry isn't physically rescued by a woman at least once. No sooner has she finished taking it apart than someone starts shooting at them, so she prods Harry into the car. I'm pretty sure you shouldn't drive while under the effects of a Mind Fog, but he manages to get them out of there. 

So that's what we have for this week. Honestly I am hoping I'll have a little more motivation to post now what we're out of this damned Walmart. Until next time, be gay, do crimes, and read all the things!  

Dresden Files Reread - Summer Knight Chapter 20

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The chlorofiend shakes Harry, preparing to throw him. Harry considers that he can't call it a plant monster, as this would apparently make him a laughingstock. To whom, I am not entirely sure, and I think this raises some questions about to what extent to story as it's presented to us is a written record constructed from Harry's notes and recollections after the fact. In many cases, the concealment of certain information from the reader until the point at which Harry realizes it is reasonably attributable to his having a decent instinct for storytelling, justified by his extensive consumption of paperback novels. This, however, is more difficult to explain as an inclusion in a written account of past events - if the concern is being a laughingstock, why include it at all? Although I suppose it's possible that he feels an honest account of his thoughts at the time, including his fear of judgement for what he calls a monster in the privacy of his own mind, may be instructive to his anticipated reader or readers. He gets a decent shield up in time to not just go splat when he collides with the chain link fence and subsequently lands on the concrete. This is where we get the description of "azure and argent" light flashing in a "vague sphere" around me, which I could have sworn was in Fool Moon. I believe I expressed some confusion at its absence at the time. I have complicated feelings about this description, because "azure and argent" is a bit... much. I kind of thought so even on a first read, when I was seventeen, and now I also have something of a reflexive annoyance with the word "azure", due to its overuse in translations of words and phrases involving 青 (ao in Japanese, qīng in Mandarin Chinese), but I actually quite like "vague sphere". It's evocative. In any event, the shield converts some of the impact into heat and light, and spreads the rest out over his body. It knocks the wind out of him, but that's a lot better than he could have hoped for without it. When it tries to hit him again, it connects with a metal shelving unit instead, and is burned by the steel, revealing that this thing, too, is a fairy, or constructed with fae magic. There's also an empty shelf advertising weedkiller on sale, which I think is a pretty tidy way of acknowledging and dismissing a possible solution here. Yes, weedkiller would work on the chlorofiend, but it's not available to Our Heroes at this time - it's sold out. We need not dwell on how I felt seeing weedkiller advertised, even on sale, for less than the current price of a box of off-brand Cheez-Its at Aldi. That or this is foreshadowing that doesn't pay off for another chapter or two and I've just forgotten. One of those. 

The thing with the shelves gives Harry the beginnings of a plan. He runs away, to give himself time, and then uses a ventas servitas whirlwind to knock over a bunch of shelving, directly onto the chlorofiend, which collapses, but clearly isn't dead or permanently incapacitated. We also get an explanation of the difference between thaumaturgy and evocation, and how Harry doesn't consider himself very good at the latter, even though this was already discussed a bit in Chapter 11. It's possible this is just meant to provide more detail, but I do wonder if the plant monster fight in the Walmart might not originally have been conceived as a short story or otherwise written out of the context of this book, and used here because it fit, without being entirely purpose-built for the novel around it. With the chlorofiend temporarily out of commission, Harry begins looking for a way out of the garden center. Grum did his twisting trick to every exterior gate, so that's not going to work, and the damage suggests that the ogre's fingernails were able to score the metal, despite its being steel.  He's making another attempt to climb the fence, when Murphy emerges out of the fog, pointing her gun at him. They get that taken care of pretty quickly, and she reiterates that when she tried to follow the Tigress outside (through what fucking exit, please?), someone shot at her. Harry asks if she got hit, because she's limping, but it's because she tripped on one of Harry's marbles. He suggests that she get a rake, for some purpose which is not really clear to me from the description, but she points out that they're right by the hardware department, and gets a set of bolt cutters instead. Then they start talking about how to get out, and honestly I'm a little confused. I guess she's letting him back into the main area of the Walmart, but if they have bolt cutters, they should be able to open a route back into the parking lot, or at least away from the damn Walmart, through the exterior fence, and not have to worry about the exits as such or if they're being covered by snipers. However, either this didn't occur to them or there's some undescribed reason why this wouldn't work. 

Harry runs Murphy through an ogre's capabilities, which I still have questions about given that "Grum" does display these abilities but is not, y'know, actually an ogre. Come to think of it, why was... I don't remember his name, the Sidhe lord, why was he in his ogre disguise at Reuel's apartment? Summer couldn't possibly have known exactly when Harry was gonna be there, unless they were keeping tabs on him in some way that either isn't established or I don't remember. Anyway, Harry leads them back into the store - apparently he has a new plan. 

Estimating the Population of Women Who Can Channel With the Spark Inborn

I somehow lost most of March to spending two weeks helping with my cousin's school play, so here's a cross-post of an essay I originally wrote for Tumblr. 

The White Tower estimates that 1-2% of the population has the ability to channel, but seems to have no firm estimate of the fraction of that 1-2% who will channel whether they try to or not. There are a few sets of information which offer possible formulae for working this out.

Wilder and "Sparker" Aes Sedai 
There are 15 or 16 named Aes Sedai known either to be wilders or to have had the spark inborn, although many "sparkers" who are not wilders are established only in the Companion. The 15 or 16 reflects the uncertain status of Saerin Ansobar, who is listed on the Wiki as a wilder, but may be so classified only because she was initially trained by the Daughters of Silence rather than by Aes Sedai. There are additionally four present-day Aes Sedai known or strongly suspected to be from Far Madding, who it seems unlikely could have discovered their ability to channel without possessing the Spark, given that they could not channel in Far Madding itself and would not have been encouraged to seek testing or try to channel on their own. For the purposes of our estimates, we will assume that Saerin Ansobar is a true wilder - with numbers so small and uncertain, any potential inaccuracy this introduces will be dwarfed by the potential inaccuracy introduced by the sheer volume of what we do not and cannot know. Results will be figured with and without the Far Maddingers for comparison.

If we assume that every Aes Sedai with the spark inborn is named and identified as such at some point in the series, this would give us 16 or 20 sisters out of roughly 950 living Aes Sedai at start of series. Estimated population with the spark inborn: 1.7 to 2.1% of women who can channel, 0.02 to 0.03% of the total human population.

If instead we assume these 16 or 20 named Aes Sedai with the spark are representative of the roughly 277 named Aes Sedai in the series, we instead have 5.8 to 7.2% of women who can channel, and 0.08 to 0.1% of the human population.

Watch Hill Novices 
In The Shadow Rising, Alanna and Verin report having found four girls in Watch Hill who can be taught to channel, and one who may have the spark inborn. If she does (they cannot tell for certain given her age), and if these numbers are in proportion to the general population, that would make for 1 in 5 women who can channel, 20%, and about 0.3% of people. This is, of course, a nice round number, and has fewer uncertainties than estimates based on Aes Sedai, but five is not a good sample size. Suldam and Damane There are 30 named Sul'dam in the series, and 22 named Damane from Seanchan. In the unlikely event that these numbers are in proportion, this would mean that 42.3% of women who can channel have the spark inborn. This is ridiculous on the face of it, especially as we are told explicitly that there are always "many" more sul'dam than damane.

The Shaido In The Fires of Heaven, the Shaido have about 160,000 spears, although some number of these are mera'din. Together, the forces of the other 11 clans seem to represent about 480,000 men and maidens, which would make for about 43,600 per clan. However, Couladin brought the entire clan across the dragonwall, while the other clans did not commit themselves so thoroughly. If we assume that each of the eleven non-Shaido clans committed roughly half their available forces, and that roughly five percent of the warriors of each non-Shaido clan were mera'din and thus among Couladin's men instead of their own clans', we might reasonably place the actual population of Shaido warriors at very, very roughly 100,000 spears. I believe it is established somewhere, that the Shaido are one of the larger clans (along with the Goshien and Taardad), so this feels pretty reasonable. (Number of septs has not been taken into consideration here, as the Shaido have more than 8 times as many septs as any other clan, and their population clearly is not that much larger. It is to be assumed that the Shaido have smaller septs for some reason.) This would put the adult population of the Shaido in the neighborhood of 200,000. (At least half again as many are children, but we can ignore them for these purposes since they cannot channel). Of course, we will need to divide this by two again immediately to get the population of women, taking us back to 100,000, assuming maidens of the spear are roughly balanced by blacksmiths, very old men, and other adult male noncombatants.

In Crossroads of Twilight, it is established that when the Shaido crossed the Dragonwall, they had "fewer than five hundred" (by implication, more than four hundred) Wise Ones who could channel, and perhaps 50 apprentices who could do so, making the total number of Shaido Wise Ones who can channel very close to 500. All Aiel women who have the Spark inborn are trained as Wise Ones, and as far as I can tell, no effort is made to identify girls who could learn but do not have the spark. This would indicate that 500 out of 100,000 Shaido Women have the spark inborn, making for about 0.5% of their population, and about one third of those who could learn to channel. I confess to a certain degree of surprise at this figure. Even if we assume that the mera'din do not contribute a significant portion of the Shaido forces in Cairhien, and that their real adult population is more like 320,000, making for 160,000 women, this makes those with the spark inborn about 0.3% of the population and almost 21% of those who can channel or learn to do so. Remarkably, this seems to corroborate the proportions implied by our laughably small sample of girls from Watch Hill.

Limitations 
The Aes Sedai figures are a bit of a mess. It is established in Beonin's perspective in Knife of Dreams that the Tower tends to focus on "bringing in girls born with the spark, and those already on the brink of channeling through their own fumbling". We know almost nothing about the personal histories of most Aes Sedai. This Beonin perspective is the only place in the text to firmly establish that some girls without the spark learn to channel without formal training, and there is nothing to tell us what their outcomes are like. Channeling sickness is endemic to the Westlands, and it is difficult to estimate how this has affected the population of Aes Sedai with the Spark inborn. That only about two thirds of women who can channel are strong enough to attain the shawl leaves another substantial number of women, some of them Tower trained, unaccounted for.

The 1-2% figure for the portion of the population who can channel (averaged in all calculations above to 1.5%) is from The World of Robert Jordan's The Wheel of Time, and it is possible that this figure is simply incorrect. World of (or the implied author thereof), believes this number to have be consistent between the Age of Legends and the present day, but in the Rhuidean flashbacks, Coumin was passed over at age ten because he "lacked the spark". It is to be assumed that the Aes Sedai of the Age of Legends could accurately identify the ability to channel in children that young, perhaps using a ter'angreal as the Seanchan do in the present day, but the use of the word "spark" here suggests the possibility that those who did not have the spark inborn were not identified or taught in the Age of Legends, and not included among their estimates for the portion of the population who could channel. This would mean that, unless something has changed, 1-2% of the total population have the spark inborn, meaning that, at the highest end, it is possible that as much as 10% of the population could learn to channel. For a sense of the scale here, Andor has a population of roughly 10 million. Allowing that half of them are men, that 75% of those with the Spark inborn die (we will assume for mathematical tidiness that none of these are found and trained before it's too late), and that 37.5% are not strong enough to meet the Tower's criteria for the Shawl, if the White Tower found and trained all of them, this would produce a bit over 300,000 Aes Sedai from Andor alone, compared to the 950 Aes Sedai from the entire Westlands that actually exist. However, it is equally possible that only the da'shain Aiel needed the spark inborn to qualify for training (there is tenuous evidence for this in current Aiel practices), or that the Aes Sedai of the Age of Legends did not use the word "spark" the same way it is used in the present day.

It is possible that some girls who become Wise Ones for other reasons (such as a Talent for dreaming) subsequently discover that they can learn to channel and are taught, but it is not clear whether such discovery would occur in the natural course of their training, nor whether the Wise Ones are aware that a girl without the spark even can be taught.

Figures for the Shaido adult population are, of course, somewhat imprecise. I don't think there's anything seriously wrong with them, but I could easily have missed something.

Conclusions 
The true percentage of people who can channel who have the spark inborn is almost certainly not less than 2%. Estimates using White Tower data would likely put it in the neighborhood of 5%. However, the Shaido figures call this into question, and it seems uncomfortably likely that the true figure is in fact around 20%. Certainly, it could not realistically be higher.

Dresden Files Rearead - Summer Knight Chapter 19

Photo by Bálint Szabó on Unsplash

As they try to find a way out of the store, Harry explains to Murphy that he thinks what they're dealing with is a mind fog, and roughly what it does. This is a nasty piece of spellwork, and what we know about how magic works, I think even at this point in the series, suggests that it's also a pretty substantial outlay of power. Presumably this kind of thing is easier with thaumaturgy, but at that point I think you'd have to get a circle up around an entire walmart supercenter, and that sounds both time consuming and impractical. He also says he's not sure, because he's never seen one before, since they're illegal. Murphy says he never mentioned anything about magical law, which is a bit puzzling if he actually told her the whole situation he's dealing with, since his own status as a former warlock is sort of central to why the White Council is treating him this way. 

Murphy tries the fire alarm, which doesn't work. Neither does trying to go out the back, indicating that whoever's behind this is not just trying to force Harry out an exit of their choosing, and likely means to kill or capture him right there in the Walmart. There's a little bit of discussion and banter here about Murphy's Colt 1911, how it's better in a magic-heavy environment than something newer, but Harry still thinks revolvers are more reliable. This gear comparison, people explaining the virtues of their loadout, criticizing other people's, happens a lot in Dresden Files, and either that's evidence that the series draws from a genre or medium I don't spend a lot of time with, or it's specific to Jim Butcher's work, because I don't think I've seen it anywhere else. Literarilly, it's a good tool - it gives the reader a picture of what resources everyone has ready to hand before they come into play, telegraphs that an action scene is coming up, can often tell us something about the nature of the setting or the particular threat they're up against, and establishes everyone involved in the conversation as equals who respect each other (most of the time - like when it happens in Blood Rites, it's actually partly about establishing that Kincaid has a lot more experience with this kind of fight than Harry or Murphy). Sometimes it also builds, introduces, or reinforces other aspects of the dynamic between the characters, but that's just the nature of dialogue. They retreat to the automotive section, decently far from the mist, and Harry uses the stolen salt shakers to put up a circle. He makes a protective charm for Murphy using some of her hair and a thread from his own shirt, string around her finger so she won't forget. I notice that a lot of Harry's best and most reliable magic is based on these little ingrained cultural ideas: follow your noise, flicum bicus, string around your finger so you won't forget, pocket full of sunshine. I'm curious if wizards from other cultures have similar results with different culturally significant images, ideas, and metaphors, or if this is specifically a Harry thing. He wraps his pentacle around his hand, preparing to use that for his own protection. Murphy is visibly kind of freaked out here, due primarily to her trauma at the hands of the Nightmare, although honestly this is the first time she's really seen Harry properly doing magic, and I think that might be kind of unsettling either way. She's pretty open with Harry about it when he asks, and when she expresses concern that she won't fully recover, he says that if she doesn't he'll make fun of her and...put aprons on her car? and call he a sissy girl in front of her coworker every day. This seems to calm her down. 

Harry drops the circle, and they step into the mist. Their protections hold, although Harry's takes some active upkeep, and they head for the garden center. Why they chose this over an exit that would take them more directly out of the store I genuinely have no idea. It's possible they just got turned around in the low visibility, but I kind of thought Harry had a better sense of direction than that. They stop briefly so Harry can help an old man sit down, because Harry has an affinity for old people and we have to be reminded about this every couple of books. They've just made it through to the garden center when a woman whom they mistook for an employee caught by the fog reveals herself to be the Tigress and attacks Harry with a pair of gardening shears. This causes Harry to fall and hit his head on the floor, "complete with a burst of phantom light", bringing this book's concussion count to 2. When we get closer to the wrap-up post for this one, I'm gonna do a quick reread of the first two books and count the head injuries there too so I can make a graph. When this doesn't immediately kill him, the Tigress pulls a gun, but Murphy gets her in a grapple and either breaks or dislocates her wrist, causing her to drop the gun. This is mildly interesting inasmuch as it suggests that while they're considerably stronger than humans, ghouls don't have much sturdier connective tissue than we do. If I remember correctly, they do have some pretty serious accelerated healing, so they may just rely on that to compensate for being strong enough to pull their own skeletons apart. Or maybe there's a magic thing related to their transformation abilities that protects their joints and tendons from being damaged by their own movements, but not by external forces. Murphy tries to arrest the Tigress, whom she likely doesn't realize is anything other than a hostile human, but the ghoul changes shape and Murphy panics and freezes. Unfortunately the Tigress decides to tease Murphy a little before going in for the kill, which is frankly surprising behavior in a contact killer, giving Murphy time to recover and empty an entire clip into the Tigress. As an aside, Harry confidently asserts that bullets rip through a human body "like lead weights through cheesecloth", and I find that a little puzzling because most of the cheesecloth I've personally interacted with has been pretty sturdy for how thin it is. Maybe if you, I don't know, dropped a lead weight on a taught piece of cheesecloth from high up it would go through, but that isn't specified, so I'm not really sure what I'm supposed to be picturing here. Jim Butcher is just not at the top of his descriptive game these last couple of chapters. 

Photo by Me

Murphy reloads and seems to be considering putting a whole second clip into the Tigress since the first one failed to kill her, but Grum the Ogre, armed with a hoe and a gardening shovel, interrupts them. Harry taunts Grum and tries to lead in further into the garden center, away from Murphy. This is when he tries the thing with the marbles, which doesn't work at all because Grum simply crushes them. Murphy, meanwhile, has new problems of her own, because someone is covering the exit with a rifle. Exactly which exit, at this point I'm honestly not sure - maybe back from the garden center into the main body of the store? Again, Butcher isn't doing his best description here. Harry gets out into the open air area where they sell baby trees and thing, getting a substantial lead on Grum in the process, but Grum has twisted the latch out of shape so it can't be opened. He asks why Grum is doing this, but Grum just does this "guess you'll die not knowing" bit. Escaping into the Nevernever is a dubious option at best (I certainly wouldn't want to visit whatever's across the Veil from a Walmart garden center on a summer night, although Harry is more concerned about time distortion), so he forms the notion of piling stuff up to get over the fence. I have serious questions about how quickly he can really do this when Grum is "several yards away", but sure. He tells Murphy he thinks he has a way out, and to get herself to safety if she can, but she refuses to leave without him. He's just starting to actually climb the fence when the saplings and mulch he piled up physically grab him, as they start coming together into the chlorofiend. 

I never have as much to say as I'd like about these action-heavy chapters. Maybe if I can find anyone, I'll try to get a guest blogger to come in and talk about what works and doesn't about the way Butcher writes fight scenes, because it's honestly a little out of my wheelhouse. As always, I'm gonna try to be faster going forward, but I still can't give this blog the kind of time it really deserves and still make enough money to eat and live indoors. Until next time, be Gay, do Crimes, and read All The Things!  

Potato Soup For People Who Can't Be Trusted With Perishable Ingredients (Or The Stove)

Photo by Sandie Clarke on Unsplash

 I was hoping you get you some more Dresden Files before doing another recipe post, but honestly this one is too good not to share. Also apparently my last recipe post was more than a year ago, so that makes me feel a little better. Technically, the title on this one may be a little misleading - it contains somewhere between 2 and 5 perishable ingredients depending on how fancy you want to get, and how you define "perishable", but they're things I always have around and that usually get used fast enough to avoid problems. Your mileage may vary, depending largely on how many coffee drinkers with different needs you have in your house. The only absolutely non-optional perishable ingredient here is butter. The version of the recipe presented here is how I actually made it, possible variations, substitutions, and improvements are discussed below. I made this one in the big 10 cup rice cooker, and I'm uncertain about scaling it down enough for the 2 cup model, but it could probably be adjusted for a medium sized cooker. As with the previous recipe, all measurements were done by eye or with a 2 cup Pyrex. 

Ingredients

• Potato Flakes - 3 cups
• Chicken Broth (from cubes or a box) - 8 cups
• 1 small yellow onion, chopped up fine
• Dried chives - a couple tablespoons
• Dehydrated chopped onion - a couple tablespoons
• Black pepper
• Salted butter, chopped up - 4 tbsp (half a stick)
• Whole milk - 1/2 cup
• Heavy cream - 1/2 cup 
• Salt

Directions 

1. Measure out the potato flakes and put them in the rice cooker.
2. Put the first 2 chicken cubes in 2 cups of water, if you're using cubes, and put them in the microwave for two or three minutes. 
3. While that's going, start cutting up the onion
4. Remove the chicken broth from the microwave and finish dissolving the cubes
5. Pour the chicken broth into the rice cooker
6. Start the next 2 cups of broth
7. Plug in the rice cooker 
8. Finish cutting up the onion and add it to the rice cooker
9. Add the next 2 cups of broth to the rice cooker (you're at four now), and start the next 2
10. Cut the butter into 1tbsp slices
11. Cut each slice into rough squares
12. Put the butter into the rice cooker and stir
13. Add the next two cups of broth to the rice cooker (you're at six now), and start the next 2
14. Add the chives (about enough to cover the surface of the liquid) and stir
15. Add the dehydrated chopped onion (about enough to cover the surface of the liquid), and stir
16. Add the pepper (about enough to cover the surface of the liquid, and then a little more) and stir
17. Add the last two cups of broth
18. Add the milk
19. Add the heavy cream
20. Stir it up real good
21. Set the rice cooker to "cook"

Nothing here really needs to be cooked in the conventional sense. If "let it run until you can smell it from two rooms away" does not work for you, give it maybe 30-40 minutes. My rice cooker did not recognize itself as "done" at this point, but the soup was boiling a bit. Makes about 4 servings, if this is your lunch, more if you're using it as a side dish. I forgot to add any salt before cooking it, except what was already in the butter and the broth, so add salt to taste after serving. 

Possible modifications and substitutions

• If you don't have an onion, you could probably use half a bottle to a whole bottle of dehydrated chopped onion instead
• You could also make up some of the difference with onion powder, but I almost never use onion powder so I'm not sure how much you'd want
• If you're using broth from a box or a can, rather than cubes, you don't have to microwave it two cups at a time. Feel free to add it all at once after the potato flakes, but put the seasonings (chives, dehydrated onion, and pepper) in before the butter. 
• Doing everything while the cubes are in the microwave is the fastest way, but if you want to sit down while the broth is microwaving, you can do everything except the spices first, mostly take a break while you do the broth, and then add the spices at the end. 
• There are a lot of different ways you could get the amount milk-stuff this recipe calls for. A cup of half and half is a perfectly good substitute for the milk and heavy cream. A cup of milk (any kind, although higher fat content is better) and 4 extra tablespoons of butter (another half cup) would work. A bit more than half a cup of heavy cream, and an extra half cup of broth, or even water, would probably be fine. If you have absolutely no milk or cream of any kind, even powdered, use five additional tablespoons of butter and it will probably be basically okay. 
• You will probably be okay without the chives, but consider adding a little more onion to compensate. 
• Unsalted butter is fine, but if you're not deliberately being low sodium, you'll want to add a couple teaspoons of salt.  

Possible improvements

• It's hard to go wrong adding more milk to a potato dish of this kind. You could probably replace up to half the liquid volume with milk. 
• If you have access to fresh chives (from the store or a window box) that would probably be great. If you're confident in your foraging abilities, or have access to someone who is, feel free to give wild chives a shot (I intend to as soon as the ground isn't covered in ice and snow), but if I remember correctly they have at least one poisonous lookalike in my area, so please be careful and don't poison yourself. 
• My version does not use any garlic, because I don't generally have fresh garlic on hand and lately garlic powder upsets my stomach. This would probably be good with garlic. 
• You could definitely add a couple teaspoons of salt to the cooker, rather than doing it all at the end. 
• This would probably be great with bacon, tvp-based "bacon bits", or anything bacon-y that you happen to have on hand. 
• This would also probably be great with cheese. 
• I'm almost sure there's a productive way to add sour cream to this, but I've been struggling to work out exactly how. If you have an idea, please let me know in the comments. 

Unlike the rice cooker chicken and rice that I make a hard minimum of once a week, this was an experiment that just went really well. I tried making mashed potatoes in the rice cooker a few weeks ago, and they came out kind of soupy, so I thought maybe I'd just lean into that and see how it went. The next Dresden Files post is happening as quickly as I can get it to, I promise. Until then, be Gay, do Crimes, and read All The Things!  

Dresden Files Reread - Summer Knight Chapter 18

Photo by me.

Harry calls Murphy from the nearest payphone, and asks if they can meet, somewhere public but quiet enough to talk. Since it's pretty late at night, they end up at the "generic cafe" inside a Walmart supercenter in Wrigleyville. As best I can tell, while there was a Walmart in this area until 2023, it was a neighborhood market, which is almost the opposite of a supercenter. Neighborhood markets are grocery stores, not department stores, and considerably smaller, 40k or 50k square feet compared to a supercenter's 180k. Neighborhood markets also sometimes have gas pumps, which are uncommon at Walmart discount stores, and rarer still at supercenters. Chicago has two supercenters, but they're both farther out. Also the parking lot for the one near Wrigley field was on the roof.  I'm also having some trouble with "generic cafe" - first of all, it's a very odd phrase to use, especially from an author who's normally very competent at scene setting, and second, I could have sworn it was a McDonalds. This matters, a little, because I started reading these books when I was 17, and hadn't set foot in Walmart above a dozen times in my life until my late 20s. The first time I saw a McDonalds inside a Walmart, likely in Delaware (it may have been Maryland's eastern shore), I actually said, out loud "Oh, like in the Dresden Files", much to the confusion of my housemates. So I can't think of any reason I would have imagined this if it weren't the case, but my audiobook and ebook both say "generic cafe". Is it possible they go to a Walmart McDonalds in a later book? I actually went to some effort to try to find a Walmart that still had a McDonalds in it, to take a picture for this post, before I reread the chapter, but the one in Delaware (probably) has either switched theirs for a Subway or is just hiding from me, and the supercenters closest to my house and my parents' house both have Subways as well. The picture up there is of my local Walmart discount store. 

Anyways, Murphy asks Harry what's going on, and he tells her the shape of the thing, including how upset he is and how hopeless it feels. She asks why he called her, and he says he needs help, and the only backup he has is too inexperienced, that the list of people he trusts is basically just Murphy. She asks if he'll tell her what's going on, and he says he will, but warns her that knowing some of it could put her in danger, although part of why he's willing to do it now is that dealing with this stuff without the full picture would also be dangerous. He also tells her that if she tries to bring SI directly into the conflict, it will go very badly for her and everyone else involved, because bringing the mortal authorities into a supernatural conflict is the nuclear option, which I believe is the first time this comes up. Murphy agrees to these terms, if not enthusiastically, and Harry reads her in, including telling her about the White Council. She's gratifyingly pissed off at the Council on Harry's behalf, and spends most of the rest of the chapter asking clarifying questions. This is also what I would charitably describe as an odd writing choice. Her questions about Harry's potential suspects tell us something about how she thinks, including the level of intellectual caution she brings to ruling anything in or out, and her advice to focus on why Reuel was killed, and why Harry was attacked, in order to try and pin down who was responsible, is a valid thing to include, but a lot of this is repeating information the reader already has, much of which we didn't get that long ago, in a book that's not nearly long enough to require the kind of "recap episodes" that, for example, Derin Edala uses. The only new information we get is that the ghoul who attacked Harry committed several armed robberies on her way to Chicago, at each of which someone was abducted and probably eaten, that she's probably a hired killer who operates under the name "the Tigress", and that Harry is likely going to have to ask Lea for help talking to Titania and the Mothers. Probably the most significant thing that happens here is that Harry says he doesn't think Mab did it, but he can't put his finger on why, and Murphy says it's because if she had, she would have hired a less capable investigator. This gives us the beginnings of a sense of how Harry and Murphy work together when they're actually working together, which is important since this is the first book where they really do that. Harry trusts Murphy to check his reasoning, and she's often quicker to see the...structural elements of why people do things than Harry is. It's very X-files, actually, except she doesn't routinely overreach into ascribing specific psychological motivations to Harry being wrong about things. 

Harry says they need to get going, and is on the point of asking Murphy to do something, when the lights go out and a spooky fog comes up. Harry, naturally, pick up the salt shakers. 

Sorry for the very short post. A great deal of this chapter really is reiterating old information in ways that don't tell us anything new about it. The next one will likely be longer, and at the very least include fewer Walmart facts. Until then, be gay, do crimes, and read All The Things!