Dresden Files Reread - Summer Knight Chapter 10

Photo by Morica Pham on Unsplash

 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. 

Photo by DIRK TOERIEN on Unsplash

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!