Dresden Files Reread - Fool Moon Chapter 34

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Harry wakes up on Marcone's lawn, which is a bit of a surprise since last he checked he'd been shot. Even
more surprisingly, Murphy is there, and she hasn't arrested him, nor does she seem to be trying to. He says he can't believe she shot him. She says he should have gotten down, even though at this point she knows why he didn't. She also knows that she did not, in fact, shoot Dresden, but has for reasons best known to herself chosen not to share that information just yet. 

Harry says "I forgive you", and when Murphy figures out what he's talking about, she gets super offended. She thinks it's unreasonable that he thought she thought he was one of the bad guys and shot him for resisting arrest. Despite the fact that almost the last thing she said to him before reappearing and pointing a gun at him was that she was staying until she could sort out who's a good guy and who isn't, and literally the last thing was "Fuck you, Harry Dresden." And like I said in the previous post, if she meant "Get down so I can shoot the guy behind you" she did the worst possible job of conveying that. A certain degree of frustration is understandable - no one likes to be misunderstood, but her reaction is all out of proportion given how very reasonable Harry's interpretation of her words and actions was. Unless this was a mind control thing, and she doesn't entirely remember what she said. In any case, she tells him to sit up and look behind him, basically letting him figure out from his ability to do so that he hasn't been shot after all, and there's Denton with a neat little hole in his forehead and a great big stick near at hand. Apparently what hit Harry was the stick. Murphy came to help after she got done doing CPR on Tera, a detail I'm almost sure is only here so we can all enjoy the mental image it creates. 

They do collect and burn the belts, so that's one less thing to worry about. Murphy has to throw them into the fire because Harry can't quite bring himself to it. It's kind of a theme, especially in the early books, that Harry is susceptible to addiction, to the wolf belts, to vampire venom, because he's walking around with an absolutely untenable amount of emotional and physical discomfort. Lara Raith calls him out on it in like, Turn Coat, and now that I'm thinking about it, so does Aurora in Summer Knight. In Ghost Story, he notes that his disembodied state doesn't actually feel "all that amazing", it just doesn't hurt. I'm not yet entirely sure what to make of this, so I guess it's another one for the "things to keep an eye on" list. 

From here, we move into a kind of montage sequence. Harry going with Murphy to Carmichael's funeral. Murphy going with Harry to Kim's. Harry and Hendricks in the ambulance, where the latter turns out not to be dead after all - he was wearing kevlar. Marcone was arrested but nothing stuck (I...think the only crime he actually committed here was having the Streetwolves kidnap Harry?), and he calls Harry to try the "you owe me your life, come work for me" thing. Harry points out that he also saved Marcone's life. 

Photo by Michael LaRosa on Unsplash

Susan, who absolutely did not tale take the opportunity to run (I hope she at least took the Alphas back to the van first), got decent footage of the final confrontation with the Loup Garou, and it was on the news for two whole days before mysteriously disappearing, gaining her enough attention to get her column syndicated, and making Murphy, who shot MacFinn on reflex after Harry did the thing, but before he reverted to human form, look sufficiently heroic that Internal Affairs was pressured to drop the investigation. 

Harry and Tera meet up at Wolf Lake Park. She's wearing a cloak, likely in deference to Dresden's human weirdness about nudity, and says that she's there to say goodbye. Harry asks if she'll call, and she says it's not the way of her people, but he should come to the Cascades (she says "the great mountains of the Northwest") some winter. Then she drops the cloak, turns into a wolf, and walks away, leaving Harry to deal with the realization that she's a wold who can take human form, not the other way around, and the reader to wonder why, if her base form is the wolf, she apparently shifted to human after losing consciousness during her fight with MacFinn. (And she definitely was in human form after. Murphy says she did CPR on a naked woman, not a wolf.)

Harry sits at home considering how Denton and Victor Sells both had benefactors with greater knowledge of the supernatural. I don't think this was actually mentioned in Storm Front, but whatever, Harry's had six months to think about it. He notes further that someone must have pointed him out to Denton, and on the basis of all this information, concludes that someone might be trying to kill him. He's wrong, of course, or at least not entirely right, but it's not a bad guess, given what he knows at this point. 

We get a little bit more evidence that Mister is part Malk, here at the end. Apparently he can recognize phone numbers and has opinions about Harry's social life, because when Harry goes to call Susan, he purrs "approvingly". 

Wow, yeah. We got through a whole 'nother book. 34 chapters, and the tiniest hint of series plot right at the end. Expect the retrospective post later this week. It will contain, among other things, a codified list of the things we're keeping an eye on. Until then, be gay, do crimes, and read all the things!