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| Photo by Avi Richards on Unsplash |
Harry asks Justine, who has gone back to hiding behind the washing machine, what they should do, and she says there's nothing to do - Susan will kill them, and once she does, she'll be gone, wholly replaced by her vampiric nature, and come into her full power as a vampire of the Red Court. She confirms that right now, the real Susan is still there, but even if Harry is able to get through to her, her bloodlust will continue to grow until she loses control and eats someone. She suggests that they could kill Susan now, while she's new and weak, before the hunger makes her desperate, but Harry isn't gonna do that, and Justine has an emotion about his refusal that Harry can't readily classify as "warm" or "heated". We'll come back to this in a minute, but I think it's interesting how this scene displays Harry not being a leader. In this particular tough spot, the first thing it occurs to him to do, after the trick with the towel, is ask a relative stranger what they should do. I don't mean that derogatorily, to be clear. Different people have different skill sets, and crisis leadership isn't among Harry's, especially at this stage. When he's had time to come up with a plan, he can direct its execution just fine, and his planning gets faster as time goes on. But so very often, texts treat leadership as an aspect of competence that must naturally occur at the intersection of "man" and "protagonist", and I quite like that Dresden Files doesn't do this. Harry's thinking as fast as he can here, but he's not taking charge. This willingness to express uncertainty, to defer to someone else's even slightly greater understanding of a situation, also helps set up, for the next book, the contrast between Harry and the rest of the White Council. Heck, arguably it helps set up his getting his mother's knowledge of the Ways from Lea in...oh, in Changes, at the opposite end of the war arc. In some ways then, this is supposed to reassure us that with the Winter Mantle and everything, Harry is going to be okay, he's not going to lose himself, because we already saw him hold onto these essential positive qualities of collaboration and humility in the face of several substantial increases in personal power that might reasonably have eroded them. Also, I would love to know if this "You're not a full vampire until the first lethal feeding" thing also applies to the Black Court. It doesn't necessarily matter, but this seems like it may be part of why these three very different types of creature are all classified as "vampires", despite differing in their diets, physical nature, abilities, and means of reproduction.
Susan, getting tired of the towel, makes eye contact with Harry and tries to mesmerize him. He's able to pull away pretty easily, since she's not a full vampire and he is a full Wizard with years of deliberate practice building up his will, but it gives him an idea. Susan soul gazed him, shortly before the start of the series, and memories of a soul gaze can't be removed, since the soul gaze is technically a manifestation of the Sight. Lea could have obscured those memories, but she can't have taken them away. He plucks a hair from Susan's head, wraps it around his right hand (power hand) and spits on his fingers, then takes hold of her left hand (receiving hand). The left and right correspondences are not actually explicated here, but this is a pretty standard aspect of 20th century magical theory (it may be older than that - the claims theosophy, Thelema, and Wicca made to ancient origins have obscured the readily accessible record on such points; let me know in the comments if you want me to get in there and figure out where and when this one actually originated). The touch, the sympathetic physical materials, allow him to amplify the natural bond between them, the one created by their regular human intimacy with each other, making it a channel for his magic. He calls up his own memories of his time with Susan, and tries to press them into her mind, but Lea apparently anticipated his trying something like this, and her spell actually forms a barrier, thin and flexible, but becoming rigid when strained, preventing the memories from getting through. Susan leans in and starts licking Harry's neck. Then she bites him - not that hard, but Harry is nonetheless acutely aware that she is a half-turned vampire and she's biting him, and probably would be even if her saliva weren't making his skin go numb. She's figured out that the blood she wants is inside Harry. So Harry starts talking, about how he can't lose her, he needs her, she could give herself amantin poisoning if she feeds upon him... and then he says "I love you." and the spell breaks through. There's a little bit here about how some words have a power that has nothing to do with magic, but of course we know from Fool Moon that "There's more magic in a baby's first giggle than in any firestorm a wizard can conjure up", and this likely works on the same principle. With the barrier broken, Susan's own memories are pulled back out of Lea into her, and she is herself again, give or take the vampire thing.
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| Photo by Felix Mittermeier on Unsplash |
blood), how he's weak and sick and she could take it, he couldn't stop her. Harry just...agrees, in some cases reflecting her words back ("You couldn't stop me. You're weak, sick." "I couldn't stop you."). I... don't know if he would actually have just let her eat him, here. Honestly I don't think he knows either. But here again, he doesn't seem to feel any need to assert himself. She asks him to "Say it again" and after a second of confusion her tells her, again, that he loves her. The words seem to hit her like a physical blow, and he says it again, and when she looks into his eyes, her eyes are hers. "Dark, rich, warm brown, bloodshot, filled with tears." That's a good sequence of descriptors right there, starting with the strictly physical, moving though the symbolic, "rich" and "warm brown" (in this context clearly meant to suggest emotions of warmth as well as physical color), to the situational. The words and phases mostly get longer as the sentence progresses. This is something writers are taught not to do, because the transition from longer words, phrases, or sentences to shorter increases tension, impact, while moving from shorter to longer does the opposite, and kind of verbal-emotional righty tighty lefty loosey. However, within this moment, that loosening is earned and effective - the relative untidiness of "filled with tears" compared to "dark" reminds us that we are, in fact, in a mess, but that same looseness creates a sense of open endedness, even of possibility. He fills her in on the events she missed, including his best guess that no one is coming for them in any kind of useful timeframe. She says "We've got to get you out of here." and this, to me, is part of the payoff for "What do we do?" and "I couldn't stop you." It's a direct echo of Harry saying the same thing to her at the party, after Lea took her memories, and it helps underscore that their relationship is healthy, balanced, good for Harry, probably good for both of them. "We've got to get you out of here" is something heroes say to damsels in distress, and I just, I love that they can trade those roles back and forth as the situation calls for.
Unfortunately, getting Harry out of here is complicated by the fact that he used up the last of his reserves on the spell to restore her memory. He's not sure he can walk, much less break down a door and fight his way out through a building full of vampires. Susan asks if it would help if he slept, but of course, as he says, if he did that, Kravos would immediately enter is dreams and start fulfilling those threats about making his last moments a nightmare that lasts for years. But, as Harry apparently told Molly off-screen sometime between the end of Proven Guilty and the end of Cold Days, if you have one problem, you have a problem, if you have two problems, you might have options. In this case, he's got about four problems. He asks if Susan can keep control for a couple of hours, while he sleeps. Susan reminds him that he just said Kravos would kill him, and Harry says he's counting on it.
We're very close to the end of this book. I'm going to try to write a little faster so we don't all forget what's going on between these last few chapters. Until next time, be Gay, do Crimes, and read All The Things!
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