Dresden Files Reread - Summer Knight Chapter 29

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Harry makes some phone calls, showers, and gears up again, with the same stuff he took to see the Mothers, plus his gun, the stuff the Gatekeeper gave him, and a change of clothes. The lattermost includes a black ball cap, despite Harry's later assertion that he doesn't do hats. I guess it's different when you're going to war. You want what head protection you can get, even if it's just a baseball cap. A couple of minutes later, Billy pulls up with a minivan full of werewolves. And I do mean full - he's got like, 10 werewolves in the back, along with Meryl and Fix. (This number took some figuring - we're initially told that there are "ten or eleven" young people in the van, but later that there are half a dozen young men and half a dozen young women, plus Meryl and Fix. So the best I can work it out, we've got ten werewolves and two changelings in the back, and our initial number doesn't include Billy and Georgia up front). Harry is initially surprised by their numbers, and reminds Billy that he said "only volunteers". To be clear, I really like this trope - it's great when the protagonist is like "this is too dangerous to drag other people in with me, but if someone really super extra wants to come, they can" and then everyone shows up. However, there's a reason you usually see this trope with like, military and quasi-military organizations. The Alphas are already an entirely voluntary organization. They take orders from Billy and Georgia, and I expect if someone disobeyed in the field, Billy might nip them, but this isn't a situation where I would expect consequences for refusing an assignment, and it's not like there are advancement opportunities their access to which could be complicated by having turned down a mission they were asked, rather than ordered, to participate in. You do the "volunteers only" thing in situations where there are strong norms against saying "no" to a task even when it's presented as a request, rather than an order, and that's usually backed by an organizational context where it is illegal, forbidden, or at the very least strongly frowned upon to not do as you're told. If the Alphas have that going on, it hasn't been communicated to the reader like, at all. 

Harry reminds everyone that they have to do what he says, even (implicitly) if it's something like "wait here", "go back", or "don't touch that", and that he's not bringing anyone who can't agree to those terms. He also thinks a little bit about how young everyone here is, and how, while the Alphas have had a couple years of practice dealing with "low-intensity rifraff", they're in over their heads here. I think it's a pretty fair assumption that the Alphas are in over their heads, because Harry is in over his head here, and he does have more experience than they do, but I also wish we'd been given a clearer sense of how much he actually knows about what they've been getting up to. I think we talked about this some in the chapter after the Walmart fight, but Harry is in sort of an odd position relative to the supernatural world. He is, or considers himself to be, sufficiently "above" the Alphas, changelings, minor practitioners, etc to be unaware of a lot of what's going on in the sort of street level supernatural community - regular people whose lives sometimes, or even routinely, involve the supernatural but who have mundane day jobs, and don't have fully equipped magical laboratories or membership in widely recognized supernatural organizations. He doesn't, for example, have like, any friends who aren't connected to the supernatural in one way or another. He's had two entire romantic relationships, one with a fellow wizard-level practitioner and one with an investigative journalist who reported on the supernatural and eventually became a half-vampire. But he's also an outsider to the White Council, and blissfully unaware of the politics of the various courts (faerie, vampire, etc) except when they're actively trying to kill him, and at this point in the series he needs Bob to fill him in on some entire segment of the supernatural community basically every time he gets an important case. This is great from a storytelling perspective, because it means he can be plausibly unaware of basically anything at any level of the supernatural community, since he's sitting on his own little mezzanine between them and trying to focus on reading a paperback thriller, and need those things explained once they become his problem, but it does occasionally call his credibility into question when he makes assertions about what anyone else does or doesn't know, deal with, etc. 

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Harry asks Billy if he "has them", and Billy produces a plastic bag full of cheap orange box cutters, saying that he took so long to get here because the Walmart still had police tape and cops all over the place. This is a nice bit of continuity, what with Harry having kinda wrecked parts of the Walmart back in the middle chapters, but it's also by far the biggest failure to acknowledge the urban setting in this book, and maybe one of the biggest in the entire series. Somewhere like where I live now, this would be a very realistic outcome. Someone had a Wizard Fight in the Walmart, so now I have to either deal with the extra time that added to Walmart, or go farther out of my way (and likely pay more) to get the same box cutters from Target or Home Depot or something. However, in an urban environment, I mean first of all, it's like 40 minutes by car from Billy's neighborhood to Wrigleyville, where we're told that Walmart is, but also, you just go to another store. There are other stores. There was not, in 2002, another Walmart in any convenient way, but you could try the Jewel-Osco on Cottage Grove (I could not confirm that this existed in '02), or literally any drugstore, hardware store, department store (have not been able to confirm the availability of one of these), an auto parts store, or if necessary the University of Chicago bookstore, which if it's anything like the University bookstores I'm familiar with, will almost certainly have lab and art supplies down in a basement somewhere. Idk, the first three cities I lived, including the one where I grew up, didn't even have Walmart, but I would not drive 40 minutes in city traffic to get to a Walmart I knew was also a recent or active crime scene to buy box cutters there vs buying them literally anywhere else, and I don't know any city-dweller who would. Anyway, Harry puts the box cutters in the doctor's valise he brought for this exact purpose, and they get on the road, following a tracking spell on Harry's fragment of the Stone Table. 

Most of the drive is spent on an extended recap, clarifying the "who", "how", and "why" of the current situation for readers who might have gotten lost on some of the twistier bits of a fairly twisty plot, and addressing some pretty reasonable "why didn't they just"s, like "If Aurora is willing to do this by handing power to Winter, why not just approach Mab about it?" This is perhaps not the most elegantly it's ever been done, but the werewolves and changelings needed to be filled in, and I don't see a lot of other good opportunities to get some of this on the page more smoothly. This is also where Harry lays out the actual objective: get to the stone table before or at the same time as Aurora, and stop her from de-statueing Lily and sacrificing her. When they get where they're going, or as close thereto as they can get in the mortal world, Harry puts faerie ointment on everyone. There is just exactly enough in the jar, which strongly suggests that the Gatekeeper's involvement here was informed by Hindsight - he knew how many people Harry would have with him, if he got this far, and prepared his gifts accordingly. If Harry were paying close enough attention, the contents of the jar might even tell him that the Gatekeeper knew some of what was coming, that at least some of what he's walking into has been foreseen and planned for, but honestly without the ability to read and reread the book, they'd probably have to be on whatever shared wavelength Katniss Everdeen and Haymitch Abernathy have for Harry to figure that out. 

While Harry is getting his kit situated how he wants it, and Meryl is putting on a battle coat made by covering an old denim jacket with cutlery, and Fix collects a toolbox that probably weighs half as much as he does from the van, Billy, now in wolf form, hears something, or smell something, and he and the other Alphas spread out to investigate. So Harry proceeds with the changelings towards the lake. They find a gate, locked until recently, with the chain broken by something strong enough to twist it apart and hot enough that the rain still hisses where it touches the broken metal. Just about as soon as they're past that, the lights go out, and when Fix and Meryl pull out a flashlight and a glowstick respectively, someone shoots Meryl. In Turn Coat, when the lights go out, the first thing, the absolute very first thing Harry does before he has any real idea what's going on is yell "No lights!", and I think this moment is helping set that up. The second shot hits Fix's toolbox, and he drops his flashlight, which lands in such a way as to reveal the Tigress bearing down on them. Harry gets to just kind of watch this fight for a while, because the Alphas immediately close in on her and start doing their thing. It's a more refined iteration of the tactics we saw in Fool Moon, and which will be presented as familiar and practiced in...Turn Coat again, I think? Yeah, it must have been Turn Coat, because Madeline was there, and she didn't have any involvement in the events of Small Favor. The Alphas tear the Tigress apart pretty good, and they get Meryl behind some cover to have a loot at her injury, which isn't too bad. 

Then one of the Alphas (Harry can't tell them apart in their wolf forms at this point), leads him to where a few of their number are keeping Ace pinned down. Apparently he went to the Red Court for protecting after Reuel's death, and their price for that protection was that he kill Harry, so he hired to Tigress. I don't know where the hell he got the money to hire a high-profile assassin, but that's what he says happened. I think Summer Knight might have a little too much going on, because this wasn't, from where I'm standing, foreshadowed at all. He's in like, one scene before this, and yeah, he has a gun, and he's the most suspicious of Harry, but it's a longish step between there and working with vampires or hiring ghoul assassins. I'm not gonna summarize most of the interrogation, but he says towards the end of it that the Reds told him that Harry would be here, and I don't remember if it's ever explained how the hell they knew that? I mean, presumably they have some degree of sensitivity to what's going on in the Nevernever, since they're at least partly of that world themselves, but that feels really specific unless someone more highly placed in the Fairy courts than Ace is working with them, and if that's the case I don't remember learning about it. Meryl tells Ace to leave before she kills him, and Harry tells the Alphas to let him go. 

Now that they aren't dealing with any more immediate bad guys, Harry gets his special rock back out. It points him up, which isn't terribly helpful, but he applies just a little bit of magic and a staircase of solidified moonlight forms over the lake, leading them up into the clouds. 

So, that's what we've got for Chapter 29. The whole book is only 34 chapters, so I think there's an outside chance that if I really apply myself, we might finish before the end of the month. Also, stay tuned for the announcement of a new project. In the meantime, be Gay, do Crimes, and read All The Things!