Dresden Files Reread - Grave Peril Chapter 18

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Harry isn't tracking well, so Bob has him go over what happened with Kelly and Kyle while he calms down. This is a classic technique for interviewing the survivors of Bad Things, and and I don't think that's something Bob knew how to do like, yesterday. We find out later in this chapter that he was reading Mort's journals while Harry was asleep, and I have to wonder if he didn't pick it up from there. Mort talks to a lot of distraught people, probably, and it would speak well of him if he learned on purpose how to make that easier on them - an early reflection of the kind of compassion and character we see most clearly displayed in Ghost Story. 

Harry does level out some, but he's still in pretty bad shape emotionally. This chapter is 14 minutes long, and while I didn't time it, I think two or three of them, cumulatively, are things like "I wanted to throw up" and "I started shaking again." This is his second psychic trauma today, for those keeping score, between which he was attacked, concussed, and drugged. Plus nearly losing his basket from leaving his Sight open too long. Dude is going through it, is what I'm saying. is what I'm saying, and of course that's only going to worse from there. 

Bob tells Harry that he got torn up badly, spiritually speaking. Harry isn't initially sure how that's possible, since while his threshold is weak, his doors and windows are all warded, and he doesn't have any mirrors. (This is actually also minor setup for Mort in Ghost Story, he too is a bachelor with no human housemates, and he's running a business out of his home - he must be warded all to hell). Bob gets very excited, which is honestly fair, because the mechanism at work here is pretty cool. See, sometimes, when a mortal dreams, especially if it's vivid, it creates a little bubble in the Nevernever, a temporary demesne not unlike the ones powerful ghosts create. Under such circumstances, your you is in that bubble, in the other world, rather than in your body on the mundane plane. Naturally, that means you're not actually behind any of the wards or thresholds that might be protecting your physical body. So someone or something in the Nevernever can attack you in your dream bubble. Harry objects that if he was attacked by a spirit in the Nevernever, it should have been able to destroy him pretty easily, but as Bob points out, it's your dream, your demesne, and that gives you the home turf advantage. If you're not prepared and don't know what's happening, you won't be able to really use that advantage, but it means it's not trivial to tear you apart like a wet paper towel. Now, ordinarily, it's pretty rare to get one of these bubbles, even if you're a wizard having an intense nightmare, but the recent disturbance in the veil between worlds works both ways. As well as making it easier for ghosts and spirits to enter the real world, it's easier for the minds and souls of mortals to slip through to the Nevernever. 

Having established what exactly happened to Harry, Bob asks if anything in the dream went differently from how it did in real life, and Harry tells him that the demon was stronger than it should have been. I note here that that that isn't actually the first thing that went wrong. The first thing was Harry's binding inexplicably turning against him. Under the circumstances, Harry can absolutely be forgiven for focusing on the big monster that took a bite out of him and killed the dream versions of his friends, but it's interesting that there's a clue here, for the astute reader, that the demon isn't the real problem. Anyway, Harry asks if a demon can leave a ghost, and Bob says yes, but you'd have to actually kill the demon, not just disperse its ectoplasmic body. Harry asks if Amoracchius could do that, and Bob tells him it's possible, although he doesn't sound that confident. 

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This leaves the question of the barbed wire spells, since presumably the demon didn't do that, and when Bob suggests that they were the work of a third party, Harry immediately jumps to Bianca. It's obvious that she's tangled up in this somehow, and while she wasn't a good enough sorceress two books ago to pull these spells off, she was a sorceress, and she could have improved in the interim. And of course, she has a grudge against Harry, blaming him for the death of one of her humans, who is referred to here as "Rachel", rather than Paula. Gah. The idea is that Bianca did the torture spells to get ghosts stirred up and, then poked the Nightmare in Harry's direction. This uh, manifestly fails to explain why Malone, who notably isn't a ghost and with whom Bianca has no particular beef as far as we know, was hit with a torture spell, or why Lydia was targeted by the Nightmare, but at least the shakiness of the reasoning is acknowledged. 

Bob promptly suggests that they kill Bianca immediately, and that's interesting. That's interesting as, uh, as heck. See, Harry's objection here is ethical. He's not wild about just up and killing Bianca when they don't know for sure that she was responsible, and he's dead set against killing the human staff who will inevitably be present and try to protect her. And that's all extremely valid. Admirable, even. Only, think what would have happened if he had. If he'd just gone out and killed Bianca right then. Bianca, maybe Kyle and Kelly, as many as half a dozen humans, based on the staffing level we see at the Velvet Room in the first book. That's...substantial, but is pales in comparison to the number of people Harry personally kills in this book alone, to say absolutely nothing of the total body count of the war with the Red Court. Here lies Harry Dresden, he died doing the right thing, yeah? Except he didn't... and a whole lot of other people did. This is one of those things you can really only catch on a reread. To be clear, I'm not criticizing Harry's decision-making here. No matter how many chilling realizations he has about Bianca's true motives later in the book, there's no way he could have reasonably seen this coming. But including the suggestion explicitly adds a great deal of complexity to the text's handling of the moral issues involved, while allowing Harry to retain his own comparatively black and white perspective. Also isn't this basically what went wrong in Hamlet? 

When Harry goes to light the candles so he can get to work, the spell, one of the easiest he knows, doesn't work the first time, and takes more effort than it should. When he asks Bob what went wrong, Bob is initially cagey, saying only that Harry didn't put enough magic into it. Harry has to ask three times before Bob will explain. That's significant, on account of Bob is a spirit, so giving him the same order three times likely more or less forces him to cooperate. (Technically this is only confirmed for the Fae, which is why I say "likely". I also don't even have any good guesses about why Bob is being vague here.) When he's finally cornered into it, he says the Nightmare took a "big bite" out of Harry's magic, and offers as reassurance that at least it didn't get Harry's penis, and his magic should be back to normal in a couple of months...or years...or decades. Harry honestly doesn't seem that worried about the loss of much of his power. His concern is that the Nightmare will be stronger now, and that this somehow makes him responsible for what it does going forward, since it will in part be doing it with his magic. I'm with Bob in thinking that this doesn't really make sense, but okay. 

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We've got a written out of order, or at least revised out of order, issue here, When discussing the Nightmare's behavior and victims, Bob says ghosts can only act on things related to their particular bailiwick, and Harry apparently needs this explained, despite having verbally reviewed nearly all this information himself like four chapters ago. It's not a huge thing, and we do get more details here, but I noticed. The important thing is that no matter what enticement Bianca might offer, the Nightmare can't affect anyone outside its scope of practice unless that person forces the issue the way Harry did with Agatha Hagglethorn. So far, the Nightmare seems to have targeted Mickey Malone, Lydia, and Harry. Harry can't figure out what Lydia has to do with anything, since he met her like, yesterday. It does not seem to occur to him, or to Bob, that she could have been one of the young people they arrested at Kravos's hideout, and I honestly don't remember if it's ever confirmed that she was. Bob suggests they try taking Lydia out of the picture, leaving them with a pattern of exactly two victims that we know about. A moment later, Harry announces that if it's the ghost of the demon, it wants payback against the people who took it down, and that he has to go find Murphy. 

It looks like the anticipated Big Freelance Project is maybe not happening. This is good for blog regularity, but is actually all the more reason you should support my Patreon. If the rewards on offer aren't really grabbing you, and you can think of something else what would, let me know in the comments. Until next time, be gay, do crimes, and read All The Things!

Dresden Files Reread - Grave Peril Chapter 17

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Content Note: Opioid use. If you have a complicated or unpleasant history with your own, or someone else's, use of opioids, you will likely have some feelings about the events of this chapter. 

Harry did drive himself home, which is such a bad idea I literally can't even. Red Court vampire venom is basically heroin. Don't drive when you're on heroin. He gets home, somehow, and we get a rundown of the effects of the venom as he's experiencing them. He feels numb and light "all over", and is feeling euphoria that later gets broken down into "pounding happiness" and "giddy delight". Also when he moves his eyes, everything goes blurry until he refocuses, indicating some difficulty with his vestibulo-occular reflex. That's one of the fastest reflexes in the body, so if it's slowed enough to notice, his other reflexes are probably in even worse shape. Of course, that could be from the concussion Kyle gave him. 

He goes to lie down, which is really the only reasonable thing to do under the circumstances. Mister gets up on the bed and starts walking around Harry's head. Harry apparently doesn't remember that Bob is currently possessing Mister's body, and thinks the cat is just trying to make Harry get up and feed him, which Harry is not really inclined to do. Bob/Mister bats at the burn on Harry's throat, which hurts, and this provides adequate motivation for Harry to get up, throw some cold cuts in the cat's food dish, and stumble into the bathroom to check himself for injuries. His pupils are dilated all the way out, and the places where he got drooled on look sunburned, but he doesn't have a visible bite mark, which is good, because a bite would create a link between him and Kelly, allowing her to get into his head and do what is ever-so-helpfully described here as "usual mind control enchantment", and never elaborated on, ever, so far as I can recall. Red Court vampires can potentially control people they've fed upon, even if their victims don't become addicted to the venom. Probably no big deal. Harry also notes that this is a violation of the laws of magic, which is isn't, since those are only for humans, but I think that can be forgiven considering the state of his brain right now. 

He goes back to bed, and starts trying to "focus", blocking out the effects of the venom so he can think his way through the case. This is solid supporting evidence that Harry has been working way the hell too hard for way the hell too long. While I can understand, on general principles, wanting to resist just lying there in a drugged stupor when that wasn't how he intended to spend his time, and yes, the Nightmare is still out there and will likely kill or torture someone else tonight if it isn't stopped. Too, there remains the issue of elevated ghost activity - any number of spooky and unpleasant things might happen if Harry isn't personally there to stop them. But he's gotta know that he's not going to accomplish anything productive tonight anyway, and while we are shortly to learn that it's not safe for him to go to sleep right now, he doesn't know that yet. Chalk it up to the concussion, I guess. I think at this point most people know that a concussion (that's any head injury that causes you to see starts or a bright flash, feel dazed or dizzy, or lose consciousness for even a few moments) can affect your executive function, but we tend to think of executive function as the thing that lets you start your homework or avoid acting on impulses. It also includes your ability to realize that your current course of action is unproductive, and decide to do something else. So it's not like, highly unexpected that someone with a concussion might stay kind of stuck on accomplishing whatever they were working on when they were injured, even if a little thought should make it obvious that it's no longer a good idea. 

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So Harry considers what he knows about Lydia. She left the church, and the protection of holy ground, but why? She appears to be connected to the Nightmare, somehow, but there's nothing to connect her, or the Nightmare, to Malone, or Bianca for that matter. The Nightmare could be working with Bianca, but then why would she send Kelly and Kyle to kidnap Lydia? Harry seems to be forgetting that Lydia's kidnapping was a trap, for him, and if Bianca were working with the Nightmare, and it can possess Lydia, it wouldn't have been hard to fake the whole thing in order to get Harry out to that old factory. He does not, however, forget that Lydia's pulse was a fairly human normal sixty beats per minute, and if she was drugged with vampire venom, that doesn't actually make sense, nor is there any explanation for the Nightmare's being able to possess her when she was still wearing that talisman. 

Unfortunately, pain blocking techniques don't actually work all that well, or all that long, against, y'know, basically heroin, and Harry keeps getting distracted thinking about how nice it would be to let it take him under, until eventually these thoughts actually address him by name and start speaking in the imperative. While he's not explicitly mentioned here, it seems pretty obvious that this is Inner Harry, Dark Harry, who is generally on board with things that feel good, and is also aware that they're drugged, concussed, injured, overworked, and in desperate need of sleep. Harry feels his defenses crumbling, and panics, which increases his heart rate and thus how intensely he's feeling the venom, vicious cycling until he loses consciousness. 

And so we finally get to find out what happened with Kravos, via flashback dream. We've got Murphy, Stallings, Rudolf, and Malone, from SI, plus Harry to lock down the sorcerer's magic, and Michael to deal with his pet demon. The plan, basically, is to round up his followers, who should be drugged out and pretty helpless, and then have Harry do his thing so Kravos can't do his thing, allowing SI to take him on as four humans with guns against one human who might have like, a ritual dagger. If the demon is there, everyone is to stay back and let Michael deal with it. If he goes down, they're to throw holy water at it and run away. Incidentally, this is, I think, the first time we get "sorcerer" defined as a magic user who focuses on destructive magic, potentially as powerful as a wizard, but a lot more specialized and commensurately less flexible. This is also where we get Dark Sorcerer Ken. In light of the recent Barbie movie, I feel like I should have a "She's everything, he's just Ken" joke here, but honestly I got nothing. 

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This was a good plan, and in real life it went off without a hitch. In the dream, only the first part goes how it's supposed to. Harry's spell to contain Kravos's magic not only fails but somehow turns on him, binding his power instead. The demon kills Michael and then the SI team, except Rudolf, who runs away, although it lets Malone empty his shotgun into it first. Harry realizes that it's a dream, but frightened and unprepared, he isn't able to alter it's course. He says "This isn't the way it happened." and the demon says "That was then. This is now.", our first indication that this is something more than an ordinary nightmare, before biting a chunk out of Harry's stomach. 

Mister/Bob scratches Harry's face, waking him up. He's curled up in a corner of his bedroom, screaming and throwing up, which is a pretty valid reaction from where I'm standing. He briefly senses a dark presence, but it's gone before he can focus on it. He's terrified, and he feels violated and vulnerable, so he goes down to the lab, gets inside his summoning circle, activates it, and then curles up again and just cries for a while, while Mister/Bob prowls around the outside, purring. Man, it feels so weird to say at this particular moment, but I am going to miss Harry being this emotionally healthy. He's having a very bad time of it just at present, but he's handling it really well, for values of handling it well that include getting into a safe place and then letting himself feel his feelings. 

Bob removes himself from the cat and returns to the skull, so he can talk to Harry. Once he's confirmed that Harry can hear him, he says he saw the Nightmare, that he tried to help but Harry wouldn't wake up. He seems genuinely sympathetic her, and says "I'm sorry" when Harry asks what he's talking about, although I don't know if he's apologizing for not being able to help faster, or for bringing this up when Harry is traumatized and disoriented. He thinks he knows what just tried to kill Harry. 

So yeah. Plot's finally underway, kinda. If I remember rightly, we're about to get the "ghost of a demon" theory that Harry runs with for like half the book. Until then, be Gay, do Crimes, and read All The Things!

Dresden Files Reread - Grave Peril Chapter 16

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The chapter opens with a reflection on how very many people go missing every year, and how hard it is to
find people who don't want to be found. Harry doesn't know whether Lydia is villain or victim, but he needs to find her either way, to protect her or confront her, as the case may be. 

There's a pretty cool piece of magic here. Because Harry made both the talisman he gave Lydia and the shield bracelet, he can use the latter as a sympathetic link to the former. That makes a lot of intuitive sense, and it may also offer some additional context on why Harry seems to be unusual in the number of magical doohickeys he creates. Actually, it kinda helps explain why he thinks anyone would go to the trouble of sending Lydia to get the anti-possession bracelet away from him, too. It wouldn't just be to deprive him of the item itself. It's a link back to him, not quite as good as hair or nail clippings, for direct harm, but someone could use it to find Harry, or to disable all his magical gear, or even violently destroy it in ways that could hurt him. That's a substantial vulnerability, and it's not a huge surprise that most members of the magical community aren't prepared to take that risk. I note also that if Harry were feeling a bit more calculating than he usually is, he could start selling things like that bracelet, and other low-level charms, and equip himself with a way to track and/or inconvenience a lot of people who might either become problems or need his help at some point in the future, especially if he's willing to not be too picky about customers. 

Apparently, he has also taken the time to figure out a more dignified tracking spell than the one he was using back in Storm Front. Instead of setting himself up to follow like, the scent of grave dirt, he keys the spell to a tuning fork, which chimes more loudly when he's facing his target. That does mean he's just walking around holding a tuning fork, which probably looks a bit weird, but it's a city, so tolerance for harmless weirdness is pretty high, and it's not like he wouldn't look weird sniffing around like my housemates' dog when she thinks I might have dropped a potato chip.

We get a review of the difference between evocation and thaumaturgy, and how the latter is what Harry's really good at. I with we got to see more of Harry working with other wizards who aren't like, his apprentice. Harry feels like he isn't very good at evocation because there are only a few things he can reliably do with an appropriate degree of control, but most of what he uses evocation against are monsters that don't use magic the way wizards do, and while a couple of characters, like Morgan and I think McCoy, are supposed to be skilled evocators, we don't get much chance to see them in action, making this something of an informed flaw on Harry's part. The two really good evocators we do get to see work are Ivy, who is an outlier adn should not have been counted, and Molly, who is usually marked our for being good at "delicate" magic, not for being gifted at evocation as such, and who is in any case no longer human. 

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The trees look all creepy and ominous, and so does the abandoned factory to which the tuning fork eventually leads Harry. This is like, the third chapter in which what should have been ordinary city scenes described like "the shadows of the trees...stretched out like black fingers creeping toward my throat." Either Harry is stressed enough that he's just interpreting everything in the most ominous way possible (by no means out of the question), or the turbulence in the barrier between worlds is causing such pervasive spooky vibes that it's affecting the appearance of the mundane landscape. 

Harry looks at the factory, and reflect that the smart thing here would be to call for backup. He has no idea who or what is in there, other than Lydia (and technically he only knows the talisman he gave her is there, not the girl herself), and going in not only alone but without anyone knowing where is went is...not a great plan. Of course, the really smart play here would have been to call Michael, Murphy, or both before he left the house, so they would at least know where to start a search if he failed to check in after, and give them the opportunity to meet him there should they be so inclined (and relative travel times permitting - I don't know how far Harry, Michael, or Murphy are from Wicker Park, and they might take longer to get there than he would, which is a real consideration). At this point, by the time he found a pay phone, called Michael, and Michael got there, it would be after sunset, making the expedition considerably more dangerous. If he can get in, perform an exorcism if necessary, and get out before the sun goes down, this could all be over, and that's understandably appealing. 

So in he goes. The factory is dark and creepy. Aside from the Extremely Conspicuous White Van, it appears to be empty, but Harry has the sense that there's something in there with him. He stops, looks, and listens, but he must really be overworked or something, because he neither extends his wizards senses nor uses his pentacle to get some decent light on the area. Having failed to detect whatever set off his instincts, he doesn't directly dismiss them, but does proceed without investigating further. 

Lydia is, of course, in the van, wrapped in blankets, unresponsive, apparently drugged, and still wearing Harry's talisman, although it somehow contrived to get both burned and bloodstained since he gave it to her. Harry has just enough time to check Lydia's pulse and realize that this is super definitely a trap before Kyle the Tennis Vampire slams into him from the side. Harry blasts Kyle with his force ring, the first time we've seen it in action. Honestly, it's one of Harry's cleverest gadgets, for innovation and out-of-the-box thinking. The staff and rod are traditional wizarding gear, and it doesn't take a genius to figure out that around your wrist is a good place for a protection charm that needs activation, or that it might be a good idea to put passive protection spells on the coat that you wear all the time anyway. But it takes some actual though, some imagination, to go "Hey, when I move my arm, that's a lot of energy serving no real purpose, maybe I could store this for later use" and it probably took serious work and research to figure out how to do it. 

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Anyway, the blast of force tears the face off Kyle's flesh mark and throws him into the ceiling, giving Harry time to get out of the van and get his shield bracelet ready. There's some banter, which really only serves to let Harry find out that "Lydia" isn't Lydia's real name and give Kelly time to get into position. Harry's instincts seem finally to have gotten up to speed though, and he doges her. For reasons I don't remember, if they were ever given, Kelly is in a serious state of disarray, with blood all over her mouth and stains on her clothes, and when Harry asks why they took Lydia, she responds by asking Kyle to let her kill Harry because she's hungry. I say "asking", but the dialogue tag here is "moaned". Seriously, why are so many of Butcher's female villains, especially the less important ones...like this?

They exchange some more threats, and then Kyle throws a chunk of concrete at Harry's head, which he's only able to partially deflect with the shield bracelet. It hits his temple and sends him "spinning", so I think we can safely add a recent concussion to the list of things compromising Harry's judgement for the rest of this book. Kelly follows up, and Harry tries to fuego her with his blasting rod, but misses by a wide margin and slices into the wall instead. Incidentally, Kyle is still in his tennis whites, but Kelly has changed into what sure sounds like a superhero costume. White bodysuit, white boots and gloves, short white cape with a deep hood. I didn't really catch this until the cape is mentioned again at this point, and...what the hell? Mildly interesting precursor to Justine's white bodysuit in Turn Coat, but literally why is she dressed like this? 

Kelly...look, I know some of what I'm gonna have to talk about later in this book, so we're not gonna preview that here. Suffice it to say that she gets some saliva on Harry, thereby dosing him with narcotic vampire venom. Then the wall Harry hit with that fire blast collapses, letting the light in. It burns the shit out of Kelly, physically knocking her off of him, and we find out that vampire venom is phototoxic - if it's on your skin when you're exposed to sunlight, it burns you, although not as badly as the sun burns a vampire. Interesting. Also Harry seems to have cracked either a rib or his sternum when Kyle first attacked him, although he can't really feel it just at present. 

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Kyle grabs Kelly and books it out of there in the van. Harry takes a little longer to get moving, on account of the venom and the head injury and all, but likewise flees the scene, aware that it's getting dark now and he needs to go home. I really hope he doesn't actually take his car, though. He's in absolutely no shape to drive. 

Man, the trauma really just keeps on coming in this book. I might be taking on some intense new freelance work soon, which is good because the summer tutoring rush was less rushful than I'd hoped, and I need money in order to eat food and live indoors, but makes it harder than I'd like to predict how much blogging time I'll have in the next while. If you want more regular posts with less disruption from my other, uh, seven jobs, consider supporting me on Patreon. Until next time, be gay, do crimes, and read all the things!