The Merlin instructs the wizards in attendance to disperse as soon as the meeting is over, and to check in with their local Wardens every few days. If the Wardens per square mile we see for the US are at all typical, this seems like a lot for the Wardens to deal with, even if they just need to keep a log of check-ins so we have a "last heard alive" for everybody, but I suppose there were more Wardens at this point in the war than we see later, and this is the kind of thing that can probably be handed off to apprentices, if they have them. A "grizzled old dame Warden" give a presentation on wards, including a few new types thought to be particularly useful for vampires. I do wonder if this is Luccio. Various allies of the Council (frustratingly unspecified) make speeches announcing their support, and Wardens begin escorting wizards to the beginnings of their routes home. I suppose many of them will be traveling through the Ways, despite the risk, although the meeting was scheduled at the end of Grave Peril, so it's possible some of them are traveling by ship, although that's kind of a pain from Chicago if you live overseas.
McCoy tries to catch Harry's eye after the meeting, but he's tired and about to be very busy and drives off as quickly and angrily as he can. For reasons passing my understanding, he brought the dossier on Reuel's murder with him in the car, rather than leaving it at either his office or his apartment, and so is able to go straight to Murphy's house. We get a detailed refresher on what SI is and does, any why Murphy has lasted as director when so many others failed within a few months. We get refreshers on a lot of things in this chapter, actually, including thresholds, psychic trauma, and ectoplasm. Murphy's door is reinforced steel, just like Harry's, and she opens it holding a crucifix and a gun that's referred to here as an automatic, but I'm going to assume that was an error on Butcher's part since those are illegal, and at this point in the series Murphy still holds the law in pretty high regard. She looks pretty bad, and refuses to invite Harry in, forcing him to very literally leave his power at the door before entering. Harry thinks this is a bit silly given how bad he looks, but does it. The threshold on Murphy's house, which we haven't seen before this, is very strong. The interior looks, although of course Harry does not make this comparison, like it was decorated by Anaiya from Wheel of Time, frothy with lace and draped with doilies. The only touches Murphy has put on the place herself are the katana and wakizashi on a stand on the mantle (a matching katana and wakizashi like this are called a daisho, apparently - there does not seem to be any special term for the stand), and her gun cleaning kit. Despite Harry's having crossed the threshold, thereby demonstrating that he's not some kind of spooky from the Nevernever, Murphy remains sullen and withdrawn. Even as exhausted and preoccupied as he is, Harry can tell that as much as he needs her help, she needs his too, which is honestly better insight than he usually gives himself credit for. When Harry asks her what's wrong, by means of sarcastic charades, she indicates the photo album she's been looking at, open to wedding pictures from her marriage to her first husband. She was 17, so as best I can tell she would have needed written consent from both parents in order to get married, even if he wasn't like ten years older, and I'm honestly a little surprised she was able to get it, given what we know about Murphy's parents. Like, I believe she could have convinced one of them, but both seems like a stretch. This may be our first observable instance of Jim Butcher failing to account for the differences between Missouri state law and Illinois state law, as in Missouri you only need the consent one one parent to get married under 18. At present, people over 21 can't marry anyone under 18 in Missouri (honestly this is one of the most eminently sensible approaches to age of marriage laws I've ever seen), but I would readily believe that this was not yet the case in the late 1980s, although it's remarkably difficult to look up changes to age of marriage laws that are not either very recent or before 1900. In any case, the ex husband just died of cancer, age 43.
Harry says the usual sympathetic things, including that he knows how Murphy feels. Murphy asks if he
really does know, if he lost his first love, and he says "Yeah." which has a very different tone than a lot of the other things he could have said. Murphy asks for details, prompting Harry to explain about Elaine. This is a really textbook example of getting a scene to do more than one thing. See, for the purposes of what's going on with Murphy, it doesn't matter all that much
what she's upset about. One of the things this scene, this interaction, is supposed to do is to showcase the psychic trauma Murphy experienced, and we could do that with almost anything that she might be validly but a bit disproportionately upset about. It would even be reasonably possible to
just have her dealing with the night terrors that are described later, although that would be less effective. But because it's her ex husband, we can use this to lead into a discussion of what happened with Elaine, which needs to happen, and in fact needs to happen
now, before she appears at the end of this chapter. This is one of the most crucial techniques in fiction, to try and make sure that every moving part, every scene, every character, every substantial aspect of the worldbuilding, is doing at least two things for the story. So Harry explains about Elaine. Some of what Harry explains here was covered in
Fool Moon, including
her involvement with Justin's attempt to turn Harry to the dark side, her death (her apparent death - Inner Harry suspected she was alive in
Fool Moon), and that Justin and Elaine were both also wizards. I believe it's new information that they were both adopted by Justin. He says here that they were ten, but I think in
Proven Guilty Harry says he was 13, not really sure what's going on there. He also says they were 16 the last time he saw her, while she's 18 or 19 in Inner Harry's image of her back in
Fool Moon, but this may be Inner Harry aging her up enough that being attracted to her isn't weird. That an enemy of Harry's sent He Who Walks Behind after him was established all the way back in
Storm Front, but I think this is the first we hear that Justin, specifically, sent a demon after him, although Harry doesn't name the demon here. He explains that Justin tried to enthrall him, and that Elaine put a binding spell on him to facilitate it, which of course is going to be important later. Murphy tells Harry that she and Greg tried to talk a few times after they split up, but always ended up fighting, apologizes for being a mess, and goes to change into real clothes. This gives Harry the opportunity to look at her prescription bottle, a "moderate" dose of Valium that she's apparently been mixing with alcohol. Alcohol and benzodiazepines suppress the central nervous system in the same way, making it very dangerous to mix them, especially since benzos are much less systemically toxic than alcohol, so you're less likely to vomit before becoming lethally poisoned than you would be with alcohol alone.
When Murphy comes back, Harry, still holding the pills, rather awkwardly asks if she's okay, and something that starts with "do you need". It's possible the rest of that sentence was going to be something to the effect of "medical attention", but Murphy cuts him off and says she's not suicidal. While we're doing PSAs, if you think someone you care about is planning to kill themselves, or thinking about it, the best thing to do is straight up ask "Are you considering suicide?" We learned about the warning signs, and what to do if someone shows them, in my sixth grade health class, and I didn't find out until much later that this isn't part of the standard middle school health curriculum. For the next couple weeks, the kids who didn't take anything seriously (which was most of them on account of us all being 11 and 12 years old) would just ask each other randomly, like "Good morning, Ben, are you considering suicide?" or if someone experienced a minor mishap, "Ah, crap, I spilled my soda." "Are you considering suicide?" But y'know what, I'll bet every one of them still remembers the lesson. I like that Harry and Murphy's friendship is finally really being established here, after she was so awful in the first two books and essentially absent from most of the third one. I like that they do actually try to take care of each other, even though they're awkward and masculine about it. Harry points out that mixing alcohol with drugs is a good way to get dead even if you're not trying to, and Murphy says it's not his business and, when he says that he's worried, that if he came to lecture he can leave. He says he's just trying to understand, and she explains that she has night terrors, and that neither the alcohol nor the Valium are sufficient for her to stay asleep through them. She's frustrated, feeling like she should be able to handle this, aware that she shouldn't be so upset about her ex-husband's death either. Harry, who has been around the Run Ins With Mind-Affecting Monsters block a few times, correctly guesses that she's dreaming about her encounter with Kravos. She keeps going over the events, trying to figure out what she could have done differently, even though there isn't anything. She's still afraid, even though he's dead and can't hurt her again. To be fair, Kravos was already dead when he hurt her the first time, so I don't know how inclined I'd be to trust that to keep me safe in her position. Psychic attacks are inherently traumatic, and we'll talk about that more in a little bit, but obviously part of Murphy's thing here, and this is kind of explicated, is that she can't really say "Oh, he caught me off guard, but I'll be ready next time." She doesn't have any way to defend herself from things like this. She's also probably not used to her emotions acting up without what she considers a good reason, which is gonna compound her sense of having lost agency.
Harry describes, in narration, how psychic trauma can sensitize you to things like unexpected bad news. One of the fun things about this series is that Harry, while he knows a great deal about the setting, and a decent amount about how people work generally, is not terribly self-reflective. So when he tells us something about how a magical phenomenon affects people, in the abstract, or is affecting some specific other person, he's unlikely to tell us whether or how that might also apply to him. We have to be on the lookout for it. In this case, Harry experienced a pretty substantial psychic trauma of his own in Grave Peril, when the Nightmare took a bite out of him. We already looked a little at how his reactions to events in that book might have been skewed, but there was so much else going on that it's hard to isolate the effects of psychic trauma from all the other things impairing his judgement. But we should be looking out for what bad news or sudden emotional shocks Harry experiences here, and how his ability to handle them might be affected by the Nightmare's attack. Although of course we still don't really have a clear picture, because there was also the more mundane trauma of what Bianca did to him.
Murphy asks what Harry's doing there so late, and he tells her that he needs to see the file on Ronald Reuel, to see if there are any clues the police might have missed. I'm not at all sure what he thinks is going to be in the police files that Mab didn't already give him, especially since he hasn't actually looked at most of what Mab gave him yet. This feels like it might be an editing issue, like there might have been an earlier version where he didn't resist taking the case quite so hard, and therefore had already looked at the case materials before visiting Murphy, and where for the same reason it made sense that he had the file in his car. There's also a little bit of an oddity here - Harry says he got the pictures in the folder from the client, and that he doesn't know where she got them, and later that a "magical faerie" told him Reuel's death wasn't an accident, but he doesn't actually confirm here that the magical faerie
is the client, and I can't tell if he's obscuring this on purpose or not. Murphy agrees to get him what he needs, on the condition that if this is a murder, Harry brings her in on it. He's reluctant, not wanting her to get hurt again, but actually recognizes that keeping Murphy out of this, denying her agency and trying to protect her in ways she doesn't want to be protected, is going to hurt her
more. Growth!
Harry takes a quick nap while Murphy goes to use the computer in another room. When she comes back, she notices his hand injury, and insists on seeing to it while Harry reviews the material she printed out for him. This too is about reclaiming agency, and I think insisting on seeing to someone's injuries because it's something you can do might be a proper motif in this series, for it's in this very house that Butters will do the exact same thing, albeit with more discussion, in Dead Beat. He dodges a question about why he had to unwrap it after bandaging it the first time, but we can take comfort that this ridiculous secrecy about the existence of the White Council will end during this book. The security guard at Reuel's building didn't see anyone come in, and the cameras didn't pick anyone up either, nor do they show any bursts of static that would indicate magical interference. I really like that Murphy checked this herself, because it cements that Harry's willingness to include her is not misplaced, and is one of the first signs the reader gets of her growing fluency with the supernatural world, since prior to this, almost all the information about magic that we've seen her act on has been stuff Harry told her earlier in that book, specifically regarding the particular case he's consulting on. Same thing with her already having a rough idea what the Nevernever is, even though she didn't know that humans can enter it. The first officer on the scene reported slime at the top of the stairs, although no one who investigated later saw it, and Harry notices a damp spot on Reuel's sleeve in one of the photos. This goo could be ectoplasm, which Harry explains to Murphy here, which may indicate that something from the Nevernever attacked Reuel, or that someone, human or otherwise, used the ways to get in and out of the building unseen. I note here that the lack of interference on the cameras actually tells us that this was probably not a human wizard, since opening a portal the way humans do it is pretty big magic. Neither Harry nor Murphy brings this up, but it's something an attentive reader could catch, even on a first read. They also don't really explore the possibility that something from the Nevernever could have been visiting Reuel for some other reason, and he might really have just slipped in a patch of left-behind ectoplasm. I'm pretty sure this happens to Harry at least once in a later book.
Murphy is pretty close to asleep at this point, but she asks Harry if he's heard from Susan, and says that she must be okay since her columns are still coming in at the Arcane. Harry says he hasn't made any progress in finding a cure, and Murphy says that Harry's a good man, and that if anyone can figure it out, it's him. Honestly I always forget until I'm rereading this part how seriously the series wants us to take the possibility that Susan will get de-vampired so she and Harry can be together again, up until she reappears in Death Masks. Once Murphy is all the way asleep, Harry tucks a blanket around her and drives home, intending to try and get some proper rest so he can actually think clearly about the case. Unfortunately, when he does get home, Elaine is in his apartment, described in sufficient detail that we can recognize her from his memory in Fool Moon even before Harry says her name.
I'm thinking of playing with the blog theme a little, since I have to go in there and make the Patreon button reasonably visible anyway. Don't know when I'll get to it, but don't be alarmed if the look changes. I'm also gonna try to update the progress bars so you can get an accurate picture of how I'm doing on my goals for the year. Until next time, be gay, do crimes, and read All The Things!
