Dresden Files Reread - Fool Moon Chapter 32

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 Murphy says she wishes they'd had more time to talk things through. I have no idea what she thought could still happen in the way of productive discussion - "I'm incapable of trusting you and I think the only productive resolution to this situation involves arresting everyone" doesn't leave room for any response other than "Well okay then, wish you didn't feel that way" and I don't think it would help anything for her to keep elaborating on how much she doesn't trust Harry, but maybe she really did have something to add, or there was something Dresden could have said that would have changed things. 

Tera covers Marci's eyes (at least, I think it's Marci), and tells her not to look. 

Harry has the thought that they're all going to die "because of him", but then goes into how it's unfair, because they've come so far and because he didn't do anything grossly stupid. He literally knows that this isn't actually his fault, it's just an automatic thought, something he could probably clear up with a few months of cognitive behavioural therapy if he could afford it. This raises the question of where exactly he picked up this habit of self-blame. It wasn't there in the flashbacks to his life with DuMorne. 13 year old Harry was a little confused about the normal amount of violence to expect from an adult caregiver, but he doesn't see DuMorne's quick, corrective, violence, or the more prolonged and less predictable attacks from previous foster parents as something he caused. I'd have to check whether he's doing it in "A Restoration of Faith" but I think he is. This leaves essentially three possibilities, all of which are interesting. Wait, four possibilities. Three and a half? 

This could be something he picked up from Nick Christian, when he was apprenticed at Ragged Angel Investigations - Nick definitely has some kinda misplaced sense of responsibility, although we don't know if it's this exact shape. It could be something Ebenezer caused, intentionally or not, in the course of everything he tried to teach Harry about taking responsibility for his emotions, his actions, and his magic. Ebenezer's own tendency is to have a very internalized locus of control, but also a strong sense of self-justification. He's willing to accept blame, but he doesn't feel bad about many of his actions (there are exceptions, and they get a lot of attention, but you can see quite a few places where he clearly needs to feel like what he did was right, or at least the rightest thing he could do under the circumstances). Even if "Blame yourself for everything, Harry - if you're standing there when it happens, if you're anywhere near it, it's your fault" isn't what he meant, it would be very easy for a traumatized teenager to take it that way. 

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And speaking of traumatized teenagers, this could obviously be related to the end of Harry's time with Du Morne, to the things with Elaine, and He Who Walks Behind. This is where we find that awkward "and a half". This could be regular trauma, survivor's guilt and all that, but it could also be related to that like, scar on his aura from the confrontation with He Who Walks Behind - psychic trauma. I find this possibility the most interesting, in terms of series plot, because this is the vulnerability that the fallen angel exploits in Changes, "And it was all your fault, Harry". Obviously, even if the self-blame thing in the early books is psychic trauma, that doesn't mean there's any causal relationship, beyond perhaps the fallen angel seeing a weak spot in Harry's defenses and taking advantage of it. But so far, we have very little idea how, if at all, Down Below relates to Outside (except that some Denarians, including Nicodemus, are not arrayed with the Adversary). So even this scanty evidence of coordination is intriguing. 

Harry yells up at Marcone, a pretty desperate idea considering he's drawing the Loup Garou's attention, and that last we checked Marcone was unconscious, but it's infinitely preferable to standing around doing nothing and waiting to die. 

And as it turns out, Marcone is awake, and able to move an arm. He has a little fun with Harry, being like "The knife you saw earlier? They found it and took it off me." before revealing that he has another knife that they didn't find, and sets to squirming around into a position where he can use it. Murphy insists that he's just going to cut himself loose and leave them there, which is one of the most reasonable things she's said all book. She's wrong, obviously, but not trusting the literal crime lord is at least understandable. Marcone, out of either a sense of honor or an awareness that he's in more danger untied without backup than staying strung up a little longer while his allies, be they ever so temporary and uneasy, are free to act, throws the knife, cutting one of the ropes near where it's anchoring the platform to a pine tree, so the length of the rope hangs into the put, allowing Dresden and the others to climb out. 

The Loup Garou jumps at Harry when he's most of the way up, forcing him to drop several feet back down, but Marcone distracts it, pulling the probability slider several notches closer to "honor" than "practicality". 

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Even as a ravening beast, MacFinn is smart enough to recognize that the target currently dangling from a
rope probably isn't going anywhere, and he goes after Harry again as soon as he's out of the pit. Harry gets out of the way, barely (after inherited silver, a Loup Garou's biggest weakness seems to be its own momentum), and Tera, who got up the rope considerably faster than Harry did, says she'll deal with MacFinn, and tells Harry to go after Denton. 

Now, finally, after like four chapters of hinting, readers who didn't know or guess the nature of Harry's "ace in the hole" learn that it is, in fact, Harris's belt. I'm not sure why this struck Harry as a good idea, or even a not-unacceptable idea - I'm pretty sure Bob warned him that the belts can mess with your head and are generally inadvisable, but heck, maybe it's already started to mess with his head. I don't know. Certainly, once it's on, it feels like a pretty good idea. Harris wasn't exaggerating with the drug comparison. In addition to the obvious and expected effects: turning into a wolf, heightened senses, a desire to go kill things, there's a euphoric sense of "rightness". Some of this is probably just a massive dopamine rush, but it's making me wonder about the lycanthropes. Bob said they're a natural channel for the same kind of spirits of bestial rage that inhabit the belts. The belts physically transform the wearer, but the lycanthropes can't shapeshift. Should they be able to? Is part of why they seem to be having such a bad time like, species dysphoria? Should someone be teaching them how to do the wolf thing the Alphas do? Hell, is there a case for a compassionate use exception to the Second Law, so someone else could turn them into wolves, the way the Fourth Law allows sleep spells on people dealing with psychic damage? File under "Things Unlikely To Get Any Proper Follow Up". Anyway, Harry is suddenly having a great time. 

The first hexenwulf he finds is not Denton, but Benn. Harry takes a chunk out of her throat, hamstrings her. Wilson tries to come to her defense, but she snaps at him in her distress, and he kills her on instinct. Harris arrives, in human form of course, since Harry's got his belt, and opens fire on Wilson, assuming he's one of the Alphas. The wounded Wilson takes his belt off and shoot back, even as Harris realizes what he's done. It's a bad time for everyone, and Harry leaves all three hexenwulfen dead on the ground, even though he barely had to life a finger (a paw?) to make it happen, since he didn't personally kill any of them, which neatly sidesteps the issue of whether doing so would have been a violation of the First Law. 

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Harry feels a sense of kinship with Denton, now that they're both wearing the belts. The fight is vicious  but utterly without malice and is described so as to suggest an almost balletic formality. This is a ritual. Denton, stronger but slower (hi there, '90s fiction tactical and moral superiority of speed), makes the first mistake, and Harry gets him bleeding, making the rest of the fight mostly a question of not doing anything stupid until Denton loses enough blood to become an easy target. There's a kind of irritated regret that Denton insisted on making this a fight - Harry is pretty sure that if Denton had submitted to him instead of, recognizing Harry's authority without resistance, Harry would have accepted him as a follower. This brief fantasy transitions very naturally into a consideration of how he could make more of the belts, give them to a few other people, give one to Susan so they could hunt together. Because Harry is so incredibly isolated that that even in the thrall of a real live cursed object, all he's thinking about is how much nicer it would be to bring his friends along. 

Denton returns to human form so he can beg for his life, which Harry is not especially inclined to grant. But he hesitates, and he's annoyed that he's hesitating. He knows that killing Denton this way will change him, deeply and irrevocably, and in the moment he feels like that's a good thing. 

But, 'cause we gotta work in one more werewolf myth before the end, Susan says his name. She's scared of him, and that realization eventually snaps him out of it. He takes the belt off, throws it away, does the same thing with Denton's. Susan tries to go to him, but he tells her not to touch him. He's understandably horrified by the headspace he was just in, by the fact that he was about to kill a guy with his teeth. He's probably still got Denton's blood in his mouth. He's also experiencing a kind of hyper-acute withdrawal from the belt, and I think he feels like that sense of loss and incompleteness, the initial struggle to cope with the sudden return of pain and fatigue, is personal weakness rather than just like, neurochemistry. 

Susan seems to have some sense of what's going on, at least in the ways that matter, and says they need to get Harry away from the situation, but there's no time to do that, or even discuss it, before Murphy shows up, along with the Alphas. Obviously Harry isn't gonna do the emotional vulnerability thing in front of Murphy, so he tells her and Susan to take the Alphas and get the hell out of dodge. Murphy refuses, and says she still needs to "sort out who is a good guy and who isn't". She also notes that Harry has blood all over his mouth, so, good to have that confirmed. When it becomes clear that Murphy means to be recalcitrant, he tells Susan to get the kids back to the van, and when she starts to argue he screams at her. She leaves. 

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Harry and Murphy hear what sure sounds like Tera going down in her fight with MacFinn, and Murphy asks "What do we do?" Gods, I think she has been tampered with. Any time she's faced with it directly, she insists that she can't trust Harry, that her only viable option is to arrest everyone, but when she's not immediately reaction to someone asking her to trust Harry or stop trying to arrest people, she's totally normal. She's concerned about Harry, and she defaults to the tactical "we", the assumption that they're working together. Hell, back at MacFinn's house, the last thing Harry says before she starts hitting and arresting him is "you've got to believe me". If someone just put a decontextualized "don't trust the wizard" in her head, it might look like this, and the desire to arrest everyone and sort them out in a controlled environment may be a natural response to the confusion that would cause. We see something similar in Wheel of Time with the "don't trust Aes Sedai" compulsion Morgase got hit with. She's fully capable of trusting Aes Sedai as long as she's not confronted directly with the choice to do that or not. 

Harry says they should split up, that whoever gets past the Loup Garou should help Marcone, who did just kinda save their lives, while the other keeps the Loup Garou busy, Murphy tells him this feels like a setup, Harry points out that his first suggestion was actually for her to go back to the van, where it's safe, and refrains from pointing out, or maybe doesn't ask, that she literally just asked him what they should do. You see what I mean?

I genuinely can't account for how long this got, although maybe it will become clear when I'm typing it up. (Update: it did not). We're properly into Frantic Catch Up Season now, so the next post should be sometime in the soonish. Until then, be gay, do crimes, and read All The Things!