Dresden Files Reread - Grave Peril Chapter 28

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Harry is pretty reasonably pissed off, but as Michael points out, this is not a great place to stand around swearing. Susan still doesn't want to leave until she manages to interview a vampire. She also insists on being addressed as Miss Rodriguez, and when Harry impulsively reaches out to touch her, she pulls a knife on him. 

They're able to ascertain that Lea took only memories that directly involve Harry or Michael, leaving some weird gaps. Susan remembers making a copy of the invitation, but not here she got it. She remembers going to the police station, but not why she was there. Drawing her attention to these gaps does at least convince her that something's up, even if she's not necessarily prepared to trust Harry all that much. She agrees to leave the party, and to let Harry and Michael walk her to her car, although she won't let them take her home. Michael briefly suggests that he should stay behind and see if he can get the sword from Lea, or discover where she's keeping it, but as this is an objectively terrible idea, he doesn't press the issue when Harry objects. 

They get as far as the stairs, but Harry senses bad vibes and stops to bring his Sight up for a second. Doing so makes Mavra visible to him and his companions, which suggests that she actually perceived him using it, and dropped her invisibility spell. This makes a certain amount of sense. When Harry's a ghost, he can see Molly's Sight as a light emanating from the middle of her forehead. Having no physical body, and being invisible to most people (and thus permeable to light), his ability to see anything at all obviously didn't operate along normal lines, since he had no retinas for light to hit, so his ability to see someone else's Sight in action is about as expected as anything else. Black court vampires are, even on the scale of vampires, pretty dead. Like, they look like corpses. They sound like corpses, when they move or speak. Mavra's eyes are described as cloudy, as though she has cataracts. However she sees, it's clearly not with her cloudy, desiccated corpse eyes. So it stands to reason that she, too, can perceive things not visible to conventional eyeballs. 

She's the one in the Hamlet outfit, and she brought a real, upsettingly fresh human skull as a prop. She insists on her right to exchange names and pleasantries, in a way that suggests to me that "hour for socialization" is a concept covered explicitly in the Accords. Apparently if Harry refuses to cooperate, she can take insult and demand satisfaction. Her angle here seems to be that if Harry insults her and then lets Michael fight her as his champion, she gets to fight Michael. (Also I may just spend too much time on Tumblr, but the whole notion of Michael fighting as Harry's champion is reading a little gay to me, especially given the whole warm, calloused hands thing from a few chapters ago). Harry asks Michael if he knows her, and Michael makes what on the surface appear to be very proper introductions. Except, he introduces Mavra to Harry, not the other way around. Now, Mavra is a little ambiguous in her gender presentation, and Michael makes a point a little later of saying that she's not a "lady" and referring to her as "it", but gender notwithstanding she's at least a hundred years older than Harry, and by any conventional standards has the right to have him introduced to her, rather than the reverse. Either Jim Butcher was not trained on the same kind of stuffy etiquette I was as a child, which honestly strikes me as unlikely given that we essentially never see Harry make this kind of mistake (excepting in chapter 26 of this book, which is accounted for by the head trauma, drugs, exhaustion, etc), or this is a deliberate, calculated insult, either calculated to stay below the level at which Mavra could respond or in hopes that she would take insult against him directly rather than trying to force Harry to do something for which she could demand answer. Susan turns on her tape recorder, because if she can't interview a vampire, she can at least observe a conversation with one. 

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Harry asks again if they know each other, and Mavra confirms that "some little time ago" Michael killed a bunch of her "children and grandchildren". Since Michael clarifies that it was 20 years ago, these were presumably vampires she turned, and the vampires they turned, not her biological offspring, since Mavra is way to old to have living human children, although I suppose they could have been both. This also brings me back to the question of exactly how old Michael is. The ages and dates are deliberately a bit fuzzy here, but we know Harry was 13 years old sometime between 1982 and 1986, as Knight Rider was on the air during his first year living with Justin. Word of Jim is that he's around 25 at start of series, which fits with that timeframe. Storm Front is set in early November I think, which means he'd probably either just turned 25 or just turned 26, although I suppose 24 isn't out of the question. That means he's at the oldest almost 28 here. So 20 years ago he was probably around 7 years old. And Michael was not only already in the monster hunting business, but able to take on a nest of Black Court vampires and emerge more or less intact. Harry tries the same thing three books from now, and loses most of a hand in the process. Maybe Michael had better backup, but still. He must have already been fairly experiences, and since it's apparently The Rules in this setting that you can't start fighting evil until you're at least 16, he was probably already in his 20s at that point, and seriously how old is he? How long have he and Harry known each other? How did they meet?

Her distinctly nonhuman sense of what constitutes a short time notwithstanding, Mavra can count, and she knows Susan and Michael can't both be covered by guest right. If Harry claims that safety for Susan, she'll try to take vengeance on Michael. If he claims it for Michael, she'll eat Susan because Harry's association with Michael offends her and eating Harry's girlfriend is apparently an appropriate response to that. Harry asks Michael if he can handle Mavra, and Michael says he'll manage, but Susan isn't terribly interested in being rescued. Rather than argue with her, Harry starts rummaging in her picnic basket, and unearths a clove of garlic, which he tosses experimentally at Mavra. She jumps back, confirming the vulnerability. Harry observes aloud that Dracula is basically a how-to manual for killing Black Court vampires, and that this was probably a significant factor in the Black Court's decline. I believe this is out first introduction to book publishing as a weapon against the supernatural, which comes up a few other times in the series. 

Mavra calls shadows into her hands. It's not entirely clear what he means to do with them, but it's probably not anything Our Heroes will enjoy. In doing so, however, she also gives herself way. The feel of her magic matches the barbed wire sell, so now they've got the information they came for and there's absolutely no reason to stick around. Susan asks if vampires can do that, and Harry says that wizards can. It is Best Practices to make sure we know not to expect this from and random Blampire we encounter, and that we might see it from practitioners, vampire or not, but so far as I can recall we don't ever see anyone,v do this particular spell again. Mavra says if they try the garlic thing again, she'll take it as an attack on her person, which, honestly, y'know, that's fair, it would be. Deliberately exposing someone to a substance that's poisonous, or to which they're allergic, is assault under human laws too.

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She invites Harry to try and have a wizard fight with her, but he uses his damn brain for once in this stupid book and realizes she can't make the first move, at least not against him, without violating guest right and insulting Bianca. She could, I suppose, attack whichever of Michael or Susan isn't covered by Harry's invitation, but her insistence that he choose strongly implies that she doesn't know which one of them arrived with him, and she can't afford to guess wrong. Harry threatens to turn her into a greasy spot on the floor if she tries anything, and she comes at him in that blurry-fast vampire way, but Michael and Susan were apparently ready for this, and brandish crosses in her face. (Technically, Michael's is his knife, held upside down, but it's the shape, and the faith, that matter here). 

Michael...says something rather odd. I mean, most of it is a fairly articulate "you have no power here" abjuration, but the first bit of it is "Blood of the Dragon, that old Serpent." Without any fucking context (and we never get any context on this), this epithet is a skosh confusing, because we just met a dragon two chapters ago, but this doesn't, I don't think, have anything to do with that. One would assume it has something to do with either Vlad Dracul or Vlad Dracula, but neither possibility makes as much sense as I would like. Vlad Dracula was, or is, a Black Court vampire. Per Blood Rites, he became involved with the Black Court as kind of "teenage rebellion" which would confirm that his father wasn't part of the Black Court, even if the same book did not also explicitly state that he was something else - a scion, offspring of a human and a demon. And it was Vlad Dracul, not Vlad Dracula, who was called Vlad the Dragon. So connecting Mavra with Dracula would make a lot of sense, but calling her "Blood of the Dragon" appears to connect her to the other Vlad, the one who isn't a vampire. Notably, he was called "the Dragon" because he was a member of the Order of the Dragon (not to be confused with the Dragon Society (secret society at Dartmouth) or the Order of the Dragon King (highest decoration of the Kingdom of Bhutan)), a chivalric order fashioned after the military orders of the crusades, including, y'know, the Knights Templar, meaning that Michael himself ought to have more in common with Vlad the Dragon than Mavra does, notwithstanding VtD's apparently being half demon and referred to later in the series as The Creature. Of course, Elizabeth Bathory, who is almost certainly a vampire in this setting, had her coat of arms inspired by the Order of the Dragon, so it's possible Michael was suggesting Mavra has a connection to her, although I'd rather figured her for the Red Court. It's also possible that if Mavra was turned by Baby Vlad, who was Vlad the Dragon's son, there's sort of a line of descent there, and depending on what the Black Court turning process entails, it might even involve blood. It's also possible that I'm overthinking this, and Jim Butcher, who had neither Google nor Wikipedia when Grave Peril was written, simply noticed that "Dracula" means "(son) of the Dragon" and ran with it for a minute. 

It's tense for a second there. Harry and Michael are both Done, and pretty ready for a fight, even if they wouldn't necessarily have chosen this one. Mavra would very much like to have this fight, specifically, but isn't willing to start it. Susan doesn't know what's going on. Fortunately, the hour for socialization ends at just that moment, so they don't have to talk to Mavra anymore. 

Thomas, sporting a lip shaped burn on his neck from Lea, asks if he and Justine can stand with Harry. The burn, presumably a result of Lea having recently absorbed all Susan's memories of her relationship with Harry, would be great reinforcement that however weird and repressed and anxious they might both be about it, the love they have for each other is strong and real, and has tangible power that could get them out of a tight spot later (as, in fact, it does), if only the whole "White Court vampires are burned by love" thing had been established earlier in this book, rather than not even mentioned until Blood Rites. As they stand there in the dramatic, spooky darkness, Thomas tells Harry that Bianca is about to start Court, and distribute gifts. The chapter closes with Bianca making her entrance, smeared with blood and ready vto cause problems as yet undreamt of by Our Heroes.