Dresden Files Reread - Summer Knight Chapter 22

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We pick back up at Billy's apartment, just as Harry and Murphy finish filling the Alphas in on the events
of the previous few chapters. This is where we get the explanation of where they got the gasoline for the super soaker and the chainsaw. We get an update on the Alphas as a group, which mostly aligns with what we were already told about Billy, although it's new information that a lot of the girls are in knit pullover dresses. This is interesting, because while knit pullover dresses aren't precisely formal, they are acceptable clothing that won't stand out in a considerably wider range of circumstances than the sweats most of the boys are wearing, meaning that the girls among the alphas may be better equipped to respond to supernatural problems that arise, say, while going to the bank, or in a business casual work setting. I have no idea how often this realistically comes up - most things that go bump in the night tend to do it, y'know, at night, not at the church's ice cream social. They've got massive amounts of pizza and soft-drinks, which is appropriate for twelve werewolves in what I think is at this point still their early 20s. Georgia's working on Murphy's injured leg, cutting away her jeans and cleaning the scratches. It's reasonably realistic that the baby psychologist would also be the team medic, not because the skill sets overlap (they do, but not much), but because the interests tend to. People who like fixing people tend to...like fixing people. Nonetheless I'd be interested to know if at this stage, Butcher already planned for her to eventually get her Masters in Psychology, or if she was originally on a track to be the doctor when a plot called for one, until Butters demonstrated that he needed to be more than a one-off. I don't remember if Georgia's being a psych major is maybe referenced later in this book, but it's not in Fool Moon. 

Billy asks why, if mind fogs are a thing, he hasn't heard about them before now. Most of the discussion focuses on how people don't believe, or don't want to believe, in the supernatural, and we'll get to that in a minute, but the first thing Harry says is that they're rare. This is pretty reasonable, inasmuch as they're illegal, and also it does, as they say, have to be real mist. I would imagine that the overlap between people with the fine manipulation and, do they actually call it "psychomancy" in this series, am I remembering that right? Whatever they call it, the skill with mind magic, to do this, and people with the raw power to conjure up something, even a relatively insubstantial something, big enough to fill a Walmart and part of the parking lot, is not large. Among human practitioners, the ones I'm entirely confident could do it are the Merlin, Ebenezer (who would probably have to try pretty hard), Molly Carpenter at the beginning of Cold Days (earlier than this, I'm not sure she had the capacity, later she is, of course, not a human practitioner), Rashid, and Elaine. Wouldn't surprise me if other members of the Senior Council could do it, although as we discover in Turn Coat, some wizards of the White Council don't even know adequate defenses against mind magic because of the prohibition on using it, but we don't know enough about what Mai, Martha Liberty, or Kristos can do to be certain, and what we know about Listens to Wind's abilities doesn't suggest that this kind of big scale conjuration is his strong suit. But it's interesting to me that Harry doesn't say any of this, not even that a large-scale mind fog would be pretty hard to do, which is hardly lifting the veil of secrecy. In general he hardly ever talks to the Alphas about how magic actually works, despite the fact that they are technically practitioners themselves, albeit ones who only know how to do the one really difficult spell really fast. Any of them could probably learn to be better evocators than Harry is, if, and this might be a big 'if', their abilities work the way he thinks they do. Now, it's possible that Jim Butcher determined that none of them have the interest in putting in that kind of time and effort, since they're also basically citizens with day jobs in a way that isn't really practical for most wizards, and that the resulting conversation about it wouldn't be that interesting to the reader, so there's no reason to put it on the page, but I also think it's possible that Harry really hasn't talked to them about magic very much, and that at some point in the future it's going to come up and we're gonna find out that their werewolf trick actually works according to some principle Harry isn't familiar with, rather than being a spell in the way he understands them. After all, whatever they're doing, they learned it from Tera, who certainly isn't human and probably isn't a wizard in the conventional sense. 

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What Harry does talk about is that events at the Walmart will probably be explained as a gas leak. Billy finds this implausible, since none of the evidence will really point that way. Harry's thing is that they won't want to admit that they don't know what really happened, which is fair up to a point. This kind of incident involves Paperwork, and you have to put something on it, preferably something that fits an existing checkbox and doesn't require too much additional documentation. That said, I'm not sure what involvement he expects "City Hall" to have here, or why he thinks anyone would be publicly embarrassed. Unless you actually know the supernatural circumstances, it was a workplace accident, and nobody died. No one's gonna care that much what really happened, except the Walmart's insurance company, and possibly the shareholders, their lawyers, the board of directors, and whoever else the board can implicate to cover their own asses if this reduces shareholder value. And the people it happened to, I guess, but since they're not going to remember what happened, and weren't actually harmed as best I can tell, even they're probably not going to be that fussed. Now, obviously none of that means anyone will look for magic as an explanation. The people likely to be tasked with looking into this probably don't have that within their frame of reference, and I'm pretty sure you'd have to be looking for it. I don't think many practitioners work for Walmart, the gas company, or the Chicago Office of Emergency Management and Communications, although I'm not sure how likely the lattermost are to get involved. Gotta figure there's some supernatural types working for the fire department, but that doesn't mean they're in a position to say anything about what's going on. On the other hand, most of the Changelings we see who don't work directly for the Courts seem to have pretty normal jobs, so it's possible some of them work for Walmart. There's actually sort of a larger issue here wherein we don't really have a clear picture of how big the supernatural community actually is. There aren't a ton of wizards, obviously, but most humans with some kind of magical something going on aren't wizards. Heck, the Alphas all have day jobs, once they get out of school. To say nothing of the nonmagical but clued families of minor practitioners, the human parents of changelings, people who have Seen Something, etc. Without knowing how many of them there are, it's very difficult to estimate the odds that one of them might be involved in the follow-up to this incident. There's stuff in later books about people who've had a run-in with the supernatural and dismissed it as a bad dream or whatever, and based on personal experience I just don't buy that, but we'll get to that when it actually comes up. Of course, there's a substantial chance that we're meant to understand, or at least be able to infer, that Harry's whole "the twenty-first century doesn't want to admit it doesn't know things" bit is just, incorrect. I was reading the third Codex Alera book a couple months ago, and what we see there about how battles work stands sharply at odds with, and is far more accurate than, Harry's whole "organized formations are just for history books, the reality is total chaos" thing from Grave Peril. Not to say that there's no inaccurate nonsense in Codex Alera, but it's pretty clear if you read both series that the evaluation of battles we get in Dresden Files is Harry's opinion, not Harry imparting something the reader is meant to take as objective truth. 

Georgia tells Murphy that she needs to see a real doctor about her knee, and it kind of needs to be now, although she allows time for Murphy to have some pizza first. When Harry hands her a can of Coke, she asks if there's any Diet. I think this is the first time Murphy's thing with diet soda comes up - in Storm Front she takes her coffee with real sugar, but I'm not actually sure we've seen her with a soda before this. Notably, between the completion and the publication of Grave Peril, there was an episode of Stargate SG-1 in which, for reasons that don't matter at all for this post, the team has occasion to place large orders at a steakhouse, and Samantha Carter orders the same Large Pile of Food plus a coke as the rest of SG-1, but requests that her soda be diet and, when this draws skeptical looks, explains that she likes the taste. Sam, as a woman in the US Air Force of the late 1990s and early 2000s, naturally invites comparison with Murphy, although rather less fuss is made about her being A Woman, partly because a long-running TV series has less reason to reiterate what each character is dealing with on any kind of regular basis, and partly because there were some deeply awkward moments near the beginning of Season 1, which the show was understandably reluctant to revisit. I don't know if this bit with Murphy is a reference to that, or if both things are responding to something else. I don't think Anita Blake does the Diet Coke thing, and the only other example I can think of is the Luidheag, from October Daye, which didn't start until 2009, and she's a different type of character in any case. Billy has Phil and Greg go get a blanket to make a litter so they can get Murphy down to Georgia's car without straining her leg further. Neither of these Alphas have been mentioned before - the name "Greg" does not appear in Fool Moon at all, and "Phil" only in the context of Phillip Denton - and I don't think they're mentioned again after this. Murphy isn't happy about being carried out, but Harry points out that if it were anyone else, she'd tell them to cooperate with medical advice. She also spots, and neatly interrupts, his impending guilt spiral about her getting injured (which, I want to be clear here, was absolutely his fault - the initial injury was caused by the marbles he left on the floor), basically by putting him on the defensive about how thoroughly she saved his ass. This wouldn't have worked if he was really comitted to spiraling about it, but he isn't, so it does work. 

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When the Alphas leave with Murphy, Harry goes out on the balcony for some space and air, and uh, Meryl is out there. I've been trying since I started working on this book to remember the context of their balcony conversation, only to discover that the reason I couldn't is that it doesn't make any sense. There's no indication that she was part of the gathering inside, and no plausible reason why she would have been. I'm genuinely not sure how, physically, she even got there. She's strong enough to have climbed, but I'm not sure how the (explicitly wooden?) balcony railings of this apartment building would have handled it, or how a dozen hyper-vigilant werewolves didn't notice. Stealth is not part of the conventional troll power-set last I checked. She asks Harry if watching Murphy gets injured hurt. I think living with Lily might have done strange things to Meryl's sense of boundaries, because this is sort of a strange thing to ask someone that you met like, yesterday. But Meryl also clearly thinks she's gonna learn something about Harry based on his response, and she's probably right, so we've got some pretty good layered characterization here. The codependent roommate situation has made Meryl a bit weird, socially, but she's also smart and perceptive. And fae, come to think of it. Titania does basically the same thing in Cold Days when she asks Harry what he thinks of the gay men having casual sex in the park, although obviously that hasn't happened yet. This is important because smart, perceptive, and fae are not traits fiction sets us up to expect from large, physically unattractive women. Meryl says he's not how she thought he'd be, and runs him, and the reader, through an update of how he's perceived by different groups of people. Most of this isn't news to people who have read the series in order, but it's good to have it confirmed that the "vampire wannabe crowd" think Harry is a "psychotic vigilante", and interesting as heck that he's already perceived as Mab's pet by the sidhe (and from the context, likely most changelings) given that he only started working for her a day or two ago. Meryl's own opinion is that Harry needs a haircut, which is certainly accurate. She's also drinking beer, which is just...such a detail. Almost no one in the Dresden Files drinks beer out of cans. Almost all the beer anyone drinks is Mac's ale, which comes in bottles. It's an indication to the reader, and maybe to Harry, that Meryl really is just kind of hanging out - she's drinking, and Harry's not, and that gives us a bit more reason than we'd otherwise have to trust her honesty and sincerity here. But it's also a clear reminder that Meryl and the other changeling "kids" are in fact young adults, only a few years younger than Harry. Speaking of which, she tells him that "Bill" finished calling the morgues and hospitals and didn't find anyone matching Lily's description. It honestly took me a couple of passes as this part to be confident who she was referring to, because literally no one else in the entire series has ever referred to Billy Borden as "Bill". He's Billy in this book and for the next several, Will thereafter. Is "Bill" something he was trying out that he just didn't bring up with Harry? Did Meryl just decide on her own that "Billy" was infantilizing? Was this literally just a typo that got missed in editing because Bill is a perfectly reasonable-looking name? Harry says he talked to Aurora and she seemed concerned, and Meryl says that Aurora is everyone's big sister, thinks she needs to take care of the whole world, which is obviously foreshadowing for her misguided efforts to save the world by breaking a fundamental cycle of nature, but also this is the final reinforcement of a thing that's been going on this entire chapter. The Alphas are their own little community - they hang out and eat pizza and cooperate smoothly and are comfortable sitting around a very small apartment in a very big group. Meryl knows the word on the street about Harry in half a dozen different mundane and supernatural communities - she knows more than Harry does about how he's seen by the magical crowd, which is, strictly speaking, his crowd. She's sufficiently integrated into the fae community, and given her connections with Aurora and Reuel probably the local art scene as well, to know how Aurora relates to "everyone" in those spaces. And I think this really underscores how isolated Harry is and how unnecessary that isolation is. The supernatural community is a community. He could be hanging out with people. He's choosing not to, and some of that is for legitimate reasons, like he's basically kind of introverted and prefers to spend much of his free time reading or making potions and enchanted objects, and as a full wizard he's gonna get Asked For Things if he's more accessible, but much of it is just deliberate, unhelpful, unnecessary self-isolation. And that's particularly significant here because he has so much of a thing about how knowing some of the stuff he knows could put the people around him in danger, and I'm still not 100% sure how that works, but leaving that aside, I think a lot of changelings and minor practitioners and the like probably know more than Harry assumes, and that there's a great deal they know that he doesn't because he's not hooked into the right social circles to hear about it. I mean, we know there is because this is a pretty big plot point in White Knight, but at this stage Harry is still having to ask Bob about basic shit like the structure of the Faerie courts, and he could be up to speed on a lot of that a lot easier if he were actually in the world and talking to people. And that's very good writing, because trauma makes you do weird maladaptive stuff that's bad for your mental health and personal life, but that weird, maladaptive stuff can also create direct, material inconvenience, make you worse at the things it's important to you to be good at, and it's nice to see that all sort of put together this way. Speaking of which, Meryl asks Harry what it's like being a wizard, and he starts off with how it's like being a watch fob repairman, which I had to look up (it's the chain on a pocket watch), but Meryl gives him space to keep talking and he actually opens up a little. Here again, we've got writing that's doing multiple things at the same time. It's a look at where Harry's at emotionally, and an honest and believable reflection of how it can be easier to talk about things, especially things tied to recent trauma, with people you don't know as well, and we're kind of speedrunning some genuine emotional connection between Harry and Meryl, which is important to making her death later in this same book hit the way it needs to. There was the possibility of a real friendship here. Harry asks her what being a changeling is like, and she lays out her own experiences in a way that provides a reasonable framework for guessing at what other changelings with different fae parents went through. Normal until puberty, and then instincts, emotions, and abilities that humans don't have, or don't have as strongly, start coming up. The more you use the abilities, the more prominent the instincts and emotions become, and the more you change physically. Interestingly, Meryl says here that she doesn't know "the details" of what happened with her conception, despite having told Billy earlier that her mother was raped by a troll. Both work for the scenes in which she says them (blunt and a little hostile there, open and vulnerable here), but they do seem to contradict each other, although it's possible that what she told Billy earlier is a best guess about what happened, not something she knows for sure, or that what she means here is that she doesn't know anything specific about how it happened, just that it did, and we're not going back over it because it's not necessary. She also says that sometimes she thinks it would be easier to just choose Faerie, stop dealing with all the difficult emotions, the guilt over how angry she gets. Harry says that she'd be a monster, and she says yeah but she'd be a happy monster. Obviously this is, not even foreshadowing, exactly, but setup for when she does make her Choice near the end, but it's also reflecting Harry's difficult feelings about his anger, his power, his capacity to destroy. Meryl says she might choose her Sidhe side if there weren't people who needed her, but it goes unsaid that if there weren't people who needed her, she could also Choose to be mortal, give up her power, and just be a regular person. She'd still have to live with whatever unspecified harm she's done up to this point, but she wouldn't hurt anyone else, and she wouldn't have to choose to be a monster. Harry has that available too, although it would be trickier for him since he's got the Red Court after him personally at this point, and I don't think the option of a wizard setting their power aside has come up yet at this point in the series, but it is an option. Just... one he can't take, because people need him. 

Meryl goes to deal with other stuff, and Harry stays outside, reviewing the facts and trying to make sense of them. If the attack at the Walmart was to stop him solving the case Mab gave him, it doesn't make obvious sense that the Tigress tried to kill him before he'd even met with Mab. Of course, Meryl's observation about the Sidhe perceiving him as Mab's pet also doesn't track with the timing of their meeting, word doesn't get around that fast, not in the days before social media, but Harry doesn't put that together at this time. The frost on the windshield suggests Winter involvement, obviously - a Wizard could do it, but like, why? But the Chlorofiend doesn't make a ton of sense, especially before Harry figures out that it was a construct actively being operated by someone, not a monster for hire like the Tigress. From there it isn't a huge leap to figure out that its failure to seriously hurt Murphy, after thoroughly kicking Harry's ass, means it couldn't, which would mean it was being operated by someone who couldn't, which is as much as to say one of the Queens. This likely means "Grum" couldn't have killed Murphy either, although it's possible the Tigress could have. The exact parameters on the Queens' ability to have other Faeries, or other supernatural creatures in general, do their dirty work aren't entirely clear, but the use of human Knights and Emissaries suggests they're pretty tightly restricted. The Mind Fog, of course, does suggest the possible involvement of a human wizard, although it's possible one of the Queens could have done it. Naturally as soon as Harry starts trying to follow this thought anywhere, it starts raining, getting ready to storm, out of basically nowhere, forcing him back inside. As I cannot currently charge my laptop while on the porch, I sympathize deeply with how this can derail a person's train of thought. As he's coming in, Billy turns up the TV, where a weather report describes the inexplicable collision of an "arctic blast" and a "tropical front" over lake Michigan, leading to flash floods, a tornado watch (that's the one where there's not a tornado yet, but there could be), and a travel advisory. As Harry tells Billy, they're running out of time.