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she did when Harry first met her. She tells Billy she'll get the first aid kit for the scratches on his face, and Harry flees before someone tries to get him to socialize.
In the car, Harry takes a proper look at himself in the rear-view mirror, the first time he's done so in weeks, as he doesn't keep mirrors of any kind in his house. This is brought up, using almost exactly the same wording, all the way back in Storm Front, but isn't mentioned in Fool Moon and is only referenced, not explained, in Grave Peril, when Harry brings up his lack of mirrors while expressing his confusion over how the Nightmare got to him. This recurring thing with the mirrors is, of course, mostly a justification for Harry not to have mirrors in the house, and therefore not always know what he looks like (and to avoid what I suspect would otherwise be a succession of rather tiresome scenes of him talking to himself - he seems like the type), but I have a fondness for characters being diligent about issues that never come up, like in October Daye when Toby checks to make sure she can read Walter's handwriting. It's not foreshadowing, his handwriting or her ability to read it are never plot points, it's just an offhand sentence establishing that Our Hero is thinking ahead and taking steps to prevent problems. I suspect this is a product of many UF writers coming up through tabletop roleplaying games. Games of the old school tradition often rely on this kind of thinking. Anyway, Harry is surprised to discover that he looks awful. He's unhealthily pale, with dark circles under his eyes, and his hair and beard have both grown out without any kind of maintenance, leaving them not only longer than he'd like but scraggly and uneven, especially his hair, part of which was burned off by the pizza bomb he received at the end of Grave Peril. He's been working constantly, down in the lab where there are no windows, no sunlight, and his circadian rhythm has become somewhat unmoored from things like the actual passage of day and night.
The events of the end of the previous book, what happened to Susan, are summarized in detail. If you're reading this, you've been following me through Grave Peril for the past year and more, even if you weren't reading along in the actual book, so we don't need to go over this except to note that he says "The monster's got her." which we'll come back to in a moment. He's been looking for a treatment, some way to remove the infection of the Red Court. "There had to be a way. Had to be. There had to be." As he spirals into self-recrimination, this three times repetition is matched by a string of seven "should have"s. Very tidy, and even a kind of foreshadowing, given that threes and sevens are generally significant in fairy lore, and that this book specifically will be dealing substantially with the seven laws of magic and the triads of Queens for each fairy court. Come to think of it, there are seven fairy queens in this book, too because there are two Summer Ladies, and there are generally seven fae monarchs because of the Erlking. I don't know if this was at all intentional - it may be that the rhythm just sounded good, but the wonderful thing about literary analysis is that not everything we notice has to be intended by the author. Eventually Harry realizes that sitting pulled over on the side of the road and crying is not a very safe position to be in if the vampires decide to make another attempt on his life, and that he does actually need this potential job Billy set up for him if he wants to remain housed, and pulls himself together enough to head over to his office.
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- First floor: Security desk, unclear if there are offices.
- Second floor: ???
- Third floor: ???
- Fourth floor: orthodontist
- Fifth floor: Harry
- Sixth floor: psychiatrist
- Seventh floor: insurance office
- Eighth floor: ???
- Ninth floor: accountant
- Top (tenth?) floor: law firm
We are told here that the scorpion incident raised everyone's rent, which is mildly interesting inasmuch as it may mean the Red Court have bought the building at this point. Changes establishes the purchase to have been made "eight years ago" and I'm not entirely sure how much time passes between this book and that one. Currently we are two and a half years out from start of series, but I can never remember what time of year Death Masks, Blood Rights, or White Night are set, which makes the total passage of time a little difficult to figure from here. But we do know from Changes that the vampires raised the rent. It's also established there that the building is twelve stories, implying the existence of a tenth and eleventh floor between the accountant and the lawyers, although there are inconsistencies between the description of the building there and the one here that we'll get to when we get to Changes.
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In the midst of all this untidiness stands Mab, Queen of Air and Darkness, although of course Harry doesn't know that yet. She's got white hair, the whiteness of which is emphasized enough to make me wonder if Harry, or perhaps Jim Butcher, forgot that regular humans can have white hair. Usually that's older humans, but lots of perfectly ordinary things can make someone's hair lose color prematurely. Her skin somehow manages to look pale next to the hair, and her lips are the color of frozen mulberries, which I must admit does not summon up any particularly clear mental image for me. She's wearing a charcoal gray suit with enough of a slit up the side to make someone notice, although since I don't wear skirt suits, I don't know whether this is likely to be primarily for sexiness purposes or if it's more of a mobility thing. Her jewelry is all opals, and her nails have "somehow" (I suspect nail polish?) been lacquered to match. Her eyes are described as "oblique", but I don't know if that means like, she looks obscure and difficult to figure out, that she has epicanthic folds, or if her eyes are more literally at some kinda angle on account of how she isn't human. She's also described as having "the kind of beauty that makes men murder friends and start wars", so we're not starting out well on the misogyny front. To be clear, I would be less upset with almost any verb that isn't "makes". "The kind of beauty that inspires men to murder friends and start wars" would be acceptable, and so would "The kind of beauty for which men murder friends and start wars." It's reasonable to acknowledge that a lot of men murder friends and start wars because of beautiful women, but let's not deny their agency in this process or suggest that women, or their looks, are somehow directly responsible for men's actions.
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him, she might pay him money which he can use to pay bills and eat food. He worries briefly that it's somehow unwizardlike to be concerned about money. Obviously this is something of an ongoing neurosis on Harry's part - Nicodemus calls him out on it at least in Small Favor and I think in Death Masks as well - but he wasn't quite as broke in Storm Front as he is now, and he was a lot more comfortable openly considering that he needed money in that book than he is here. He's also late, although only by a couple minutes, and he looks like shit, neither of which is likely to impress "Ms. Sommerset". Indeed, she pretty much opens by telling him that she doesn't like to be kept waiting, and confirming that the condition of his office and personal grooming do not exactly have the feel of professionalism. He offers her a cup of coffee, which she declines, citing unwillingness to take the risk of something unsanitary. He asks if she's the "kind who takes chances", which is sort of an odd thing to say under the circumstances. She says she likes to hedge her bets (true of Mab's behavior generally, I think, although not always where Harry is concerned), and that she's deciding whether to gamble on Harry. He doesn't look like a good bet so far. She goes on to call him out pretty comprehensively, for being desperate, preoccupied, and apparently unable to manage his daily life, which does not bode well for his ability to do what she wants him for. He asks her to at least tell him what she needs, and she responds by asking him to soulgaze her. This serves to remind the reader what a soulgaze is and how it works, which is odd because I don't think we actually get a soulgaze in this book, but I also don't know what Mab was hoping this would accomplish. She has no soul to gaze upon, not the way a human does, she's got as much leverage as she needs over Harry here and so doesn't stand to gain much from, idk, mesmerizing him, and I don't think Harry's noticing that meeting her eyes doesn't initiate a soulgaze would be sufficient to establish his qualifications here, which seems to be her primary objective.
In any event, Harry refuses, and she gets up to leave again, but Harry says he thinks she's underestimated his abilities, points out that she seems too good to be true, and points a gun at her. He tells her to put her hands on the desk, and Mab doesn't drop the Ms. Sommerset act, playing 'frightened but imperious' for all it's worth by swallowing delicately and widening her eyes as she demands to know what he thinks he's doing. I think it's possible that the reader is meant to wonder if Harry has actually misread this and is holding a gun on an innocent rich lady here, but mostly it's just that this is how Mab has chosen to test Harry's perceptive abilities, and she's not going to give him anything more to work with than she already has. He pulls a box of nails out of his desk (I honestly have no guesses about whether he keeps steel nails in his desk specifically so he can fae-test prospective clients or if they were ready to hand for some more mundane purpose), and rolls it at her, until at the last second she not only pulls her hand away but takes several steps back. Some of that may be the sidhe's normal aversion to cold iron, but I do wonder if her outfit mightn't be illusory, if she wasn't concerned that it would land on her shoe or something and reveal that she's not wearing real clothes. Harry says out loud that she's a faerie, and she visibly drops the act. He also reminds her that there are months left on his bargain with Lea. Mab smiles; he passed her test, and may be what she's looking for after all, although she wants to know how he figured it out. He cites the static on the doorknob, which is another idea borrowed from spiritualism, that she danced around his questions rather than answering them, which upon review I don't really think she did - he didn't ask many questions, and her answers to the ones he did were all within human parameters - but I suppose it's important to establish that the fae generally do this, that the door was unlocked when it shouldn't have been, and that she's not carrying a purse. She says again that he'll do nicely, and he starts to get a bad feeling, telling her that if she leaves now they can both forget this ever happened. She's not having it though - he passed her little test, so now he's gonna do what she came here to hire him for. There's a little bit of back and forth on this point, during which she tells him what she wants him to do: recover something that's been stolen, catch the thief, return it to its rightful owners, and vindicate her in the process. Harry refuses, unwilling to make another deal with a faerie, especially when he doesn't even know who she is. She tells him the bargain has already been made, and explains that she purchased his debt from Lea.
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responsibility to Harry that would be a lot easier to fulfill if he could be turned into a hellhound until whatever apocalyptic event he's destined to avert was on the immediate horizon, and even if she can't do that his debt to her makes it easier to stay involved and keep an eye on him. Even if he doesn't understand her motivations, he's correct in thinking that her interest in him is sufficiently personal that she wouldn't ordinarily give it up. If we'd had more time with Lea before this, it would actually have been a pretty decent clue that there's something up with her, which might prompt the astute reader to go looking for information about what it was. Unfortunately, we've seen very little of her, she was acting kind of weird for most of it, and Harry was deeply incurious about her motivations, which was understandable (drugged, concussed, exhausted, traumatized) but means that if this is meant to tip us off that something's up, it's not really successful. Then he pulls out a letter opener, presumably intending to use it to defend himself, and Mab makes him stab himself in the hand with it. Just like, the webbing between the thumb and forefinger, nothing load bearing, but still, ow. I'm... not sure Lea could have done that. I feel like if she could exert that kind of direct bodily control, she would have done so in the previous book, so either more has changed about the deal than just Mab buying the debt, or this is just an indication of Mab's much greater power. Harry asks who she is, and she tells him.
Sorry this one took a little longer than planned. Mostly just a consequence of the 27 minute chapter. Chapter 3 is only 14 minutes, so you shouldn't be waiting quite as long. Until then, be gay, do crimes, and read All The Things!