Dresden Files Reread - Summer Knight Chapter 11

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Harry enters Reuel's building disguised as a flower deliveryman. The first time I read Summer Knight, I had never previously encountered the name FTD, and didn't know what Harry was pretending to deliver until more than halfway through the chapter, when Grum said he didn't smell flowers. Founded in 1910, FTD was the first floral wire service, which is sort of like Doordash for flowers, originally handled by telegram, although the process was a little inelegant compared to modern food delivery brokerages (partly due to the necessity of having physical locations from which customers could place orders). FTD originated as a member-owned cooperate of florists, but was sold to a hedge fund in 1994, after which it operated as a for-profit company. When the organization was founded, FTD stood for Florists Telegraph Delivery, but in 1965 the name was changed to Florists' Transworld Delivery. Harry observes that a hat, a package, and a confident stride can get you into a lot of places. 

He's looking for residual energy or other signs that magic was involved in Reuel's death, but doesn't find any, indicating that either magic wasn't used or it was cleaned up very thoroughly. It's my vague, misty recollection that while it wasn't done by a human, Reuel really was just pushed down the stairs, and Summer Mantle or no, he's old. Kind of a Hound of the Baskervilles situation - the dog wasn't some kind of hellhound, just a regular dog with some phosphorus smeared on, but it scared the old guy into having a heart attack. Actually, come to think of it, iirc that entire thing was also some sort of complicated inheritance scheme. Might need to reread it so I'm better equipped to catch further references. 

He hears something, and stops to Listen, and we're briefly told what Listening is, which is mildly interesting inasmuch as it was referenced earlier without explanation. To be clear, not explaining during the conversation with the Gatekeeper was the right call, it would have badly broken up the tension of the scene, but it does lead me to wonder if there was some editing weirdness. He hears someone muttering curses down the hall, pulls his blasting rod out of the box, and goes to find Reuel's apartment very directly and physically broken into, and a very large man in a bowler hat going though the papers on his desk. Harry's immediate thought is that this means Reuel was hiding evidence, which like, I don't disagree that it indicates he was in possession of evidence, but "hiding" feels like an odd word to use at this stage. We also get a description of the apartment, which is overdone and Victorian, looking like it could have been imported from "429-B Baker Street". I assume Butcher means 221 and just forgot the actual number, and the Light alone knows the editing on these early books was minimal enough that it could have gotten missed, but it's possible this is referencing some specific story in which Doyle or a subsequent author got Holmes's address wrong. The more overt Sherlock Holmes reference is also making me think there might actually be something to my Hound of the Baskervilles notion, but I haven't read it in like 20 years. 

Harry, who got a proper night's sleep pretty recently and hasn't been hit on the head even once this book, stops to consider his options. Grum - Harry does not yet know his name - isn't gonna just let him look at the papers, and a fight in such tight quarters isn't a great idea. Harry, by his own accounting, isn't very good at evocation, although I wish we had a better sense by this point of what being good at evocation really looks like. He's got the fuego thing and then I think two wind spells all of which seem to work just fine for him, so I guess the issue is one of repertoire and flexibility. I know he nearly has a panic attack in Proven Guilty just at the thought of trying to use fuego in an unusual way. He considers a more physical confrontation, but then Grum picks up a very heavy couch one handed, so obviously that's not a good idea. So he walks in, asks Grum to sign for the flowers, and steals what he thinks might be an index card out of the bag Grum is using to hold Reuel's papers.

The ruse falls apart almost immediately, because Grum doesn't smell flowers and, more to the
point, does smell magic. He picks Harry up by the neck, but Harry pulls an iron nail out of his pocket and stabs Grum in the arm. Grum throws him all the way out of Reuel's living room, where Harry actually lands on the bed. Twice, since he initially bounces off it and hits the wall, but still. Grum drops the human disguise, apparently revealing himself as a twelve-foot tall ogre, although of course rereaders will know he's actually a Sidhe knight or something. I don't remember that guy's name or title. Harry uses ventas servitas to get his blasting rod back, and then tries to set Grum on fire, but the magic just...doesn't take. He shrugs it off like it's not even there. Harry narrowly avoids having his bones ground to make Grum's bread because someone down the hall asks what the racket is, and says she's already called the police. Grum tells Harry he got lucky, and leaves, just as they start to hear sirens. 

Harry takes a moment to look at what he took from Grum, it's not an index card but a photograph of Reuel at one of the Disney parks, along with the four young people whom we will later learn are Meryl, Lily, Ace, and Fix. Interestingly, Harry doesn't even sort of suspect that they might be changelings, instead figuring Meryl and Lilly's green hair for a dye job, and Fix's near-white for bleach. Harry doesn't want to get arrested by the mortal police either, and leaves the building, wondering what would have made Grum want to remove this picture from Reuel's apartment. 

I'm sorry this one took so long. My partner, who I think I have mentioned is a game designer, was getting his first publicly released game ready for open beta for two of the past three weeks, so I was doing editing and page layout for that, making the website, setting up the itch.io page, the patreon, the Discord server, y'know, etc. Shadows From Another World is a social deduction game, sorta One Night Werewolf (or Mafia, if you're old fashioned) meets The Thing. The open beta is free, and the materials to play the game are available at literally all of those links, so you should go check it out. Until next time, be Gay, do Crimes, and read All The Things! 

Dresden Files Reread - Summer Knight Chapter 10

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 Harry dreams, the same dream he's been having over and over since Susan disappeared. They're kissing - the text is a lot more detailed than this, but you can go read it if you want details about how soft everyone's skin is - and when they pull apart, he asks Susan if she's okay, and she shakes her head, then turns away and tries to go into a nightclub. She wants him to go with her, he refuses, her eyes go all dark and vampirey, and hands reach out of nowhere to start pulling her inside. He is suddenly overcome with lust, and starts kissing her again, now with the addictive vampire venom. They tear each other's clothes off, with help from the hands, and start having sex up against the wall of the alley. Then she bites him, injecting him with more of the venom, until he physically collapses, mid-sex. He leaves his body, and looks down on the rest of the scene as Susan kills him, completes her own transformation into a vampire, realizes what she's done, and screams. 

Harry wakes up, upset and horny, and takes a cold shower about it. He hasn't had sex, experienced much in the way of sexual desire, or (it's sort of implied) even masturbated since Susan left, so that aspect of the dreams tends to hit him pretty hard. He starts guilt spiraling again about how everything that happened to Susan is his fault, but relies on his two best coping skill, routine and activating the drowning reflex by sticking his face in cold water, to start getting his head clear. He shaves, finally, and does all the other shower things, and by the end of it he feels enough like himself to go down to the lab and get to work. 

The lab has seen some changes since the last time we saw it. It's organized now, with most of his supplies lined up on wire shelves, in appropriate jars or boxes with labels telling now only what they are, but how much is left and when he got them. The work tables are clear except for notes, candles, and pens, and the summoning circle is completely clear, although he's been doing that since the toad demon incident in Storm Front. He wakes Bob up, and we get a brief description of who and what Bob is. He starts trying to tell Bob about the situation, but Bob cuts him off to say that they aren't going to be able to find a cure for Susan, other people have tried and the thing simply can't be done. Harry says that he hasn't tried yet, and Bob calls him Captain Ahab, until Harry explains that they're actually gonna work on something else today. He lays out the basic of the case, until Bob freaks out when Mab's name comes into it. He thinks Harry would have been better off stealing a baby to pay Mab off, and it's sort of implied that he warned Harry not to make that first deal with Lea, although I'm not sure the timeline on that works out. He tells Harry that Reuel was the Summer Knight, and lays out roughly what that entails: Knights are mortals granted power by the Queens of Faerie, they can kill people, including mortals, who aren't part of the Courts, which the Queens themselves can't do directly, and they're relatively disposable. I note here that in I think Cold Days, Harry says he's "assumed" that the Summer Knight's role was pretty similar to his own, in its emphasis on killing people for Mab, but I don't think it counts as an assumption if someone who's usually right about almost everything tells you outright that something is the case. Harry asks if that means he won't get himself killed on this case, and Bob clarifies that first of all, his debt to Mab means she can hurt him if he wants to, but also the restriction is only on killing him directly. She could, for example, trick him into walking into quicksand, which is a tidy bit of foreshadowing for the mud pit incident later. In any event, no one in Faerie is likely to be that upset about Reuel's murder per se, which means this is about power, because it's almost always about power when the Fae are involved. 

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Harry, who is a hell of a lot smarter when he's actually slept, puts the pieces together from there. Mab said
something had been stolen, Reuel's power comes from the Summer Queen, it was supposed to snap back to the Queen upon his death but for some reason it didn't, and Titania naturally figured it was Mab's doing. This puts Faerie out of balance, which could account for the rain of toads. It's also pretty bad news for anyone who has to live in earth's ecosystem, since that's gonna get all out of whack if the imbalance persists, until the Queens almost inevitably go to war about it, which could restore the balance but will more likely end up with one side or the other a clear victor, which could result in either an ice age or an era of rampant growth - presumably the latter is what happened with the Cambrian explosion and later with the Cretaceous period. Bob doesn't give examples, but does say he hasn't existed long enough to have seen the last time this happened. It's also noted here that Mab never actually said she didn't do it, although she couldn't have done it directly. Bob says a fall down a flight of stairs, or even several flights of stairs, wouldn't have killed one of the Knights, which given that Reuel is supposed to have broken his neck, may be subtle setup for Harry's becoming the Winter Knight when his back gets broken in Changes. A regular mortal could have killed Reuel, but they probably would have left a smoking crater. A wizard could have done it, but it would have taken both power and finesse to make it look like an accident. Even narrowing it to those with that kind of skill, there are too many wizards to investigate them all just yet, so Harry sets that aside, assuming for the time being that it's internal business, which he thinks leaves three suspects, the Faerie Queens and the Winter Knight. Bob informs him that there are three Queens per court, and describes the system, naming Aurora and Maeve, but not the Mothers. Harry expands the list to seven, and then, reluctantly, to eight.  He tells Bob that Elaine is alive, earning an "I told you so", and pretty directly asks Bob to contradict him and say Elaine wasn't powerful enough to do the thing, to which Bob says that while she doesn't have Harry's raw power, she's basically better at magic. He's also impressed - so am I, honestly - that Harry's willing to consider her a suspect. 

Harry figures that his next step is to learn more about Reuel, so he's gonna break into his house and then go to the funeral and see who shows up. 

As is often the case with the "confer with Bob, get the worldbuilding" chapters, this is kind of a short post relative to the length of the chapter. I've also got an absolutely bonkers week coming up, but honestly I'm liking my chances of getting another post by this coming Monday or Tuesday. Until then, be Gay, do Crimes, and read All The Things!