Harry wakes up in a cheap hotel. He’s also in pain, bandaged, and otherwise naked. So, a regular night for him.A book entitled SAS Survival Manual lay open to a page with several black and white illustrations of bandaging techniques. Beside it were some empty cardboard boxes whose labels declared them to have once contained cotton gauze wrapping, medical tape, that sort of thing. A brown bottle of hydrogen peroxide lay on its side atop a hacksaw with a nicked blade. A paper sack sat on the floor beside the bed, its top folded closed.

This is a really nice bit laid low by the fact it actually doesn’t make sense Tera would manage it. Even if we assume she was using just the pictures and didn’t need to read anything, being able to interpret diagrams is also a learned skill. You can’t even use the fact Tera’s brain is currently humanshaped to get around this, because default human brains actually can’t understand this stuff either. Try teaching an adult who’s never seen a book before that the black and white flat image is actually telling you to do a specific motion and you’re going to run into an amazing amount of difficulty. A lot of what we take for granted as a human ability actually requires certain inputs as small child to build the structures needed. Our civilization is basically an enormous hacking project on our brains.

It would make a lot more sense for Tera to have learned this from someone instead.

I glanced up into Tera West’s amber-colored eyes in the mirror and said, “Tell me I didn’t get lucky last night.”

Tera has no idea what this means and assumes he’s talking literally about his survival chances. The thing is, that’s creepy. It’s creepy that when you immediately pull out innuendo with strangers and creepier when they have childlike traits like not getting it.

Like many things Harry does, by itself this would just be a meaningless blip, but every time it happens, it builds.

She was still dressed in the same clothes and still held herself with the same relaxed composure she had always displayed.

The most likely answer here is that, like most wild animals, she’s good at staying composed, but she may also be high on dopamine. Sitting around is a great idea! Hanging out with strange wizards is a great idea! Everything is a great idea!

Tera shrugged. “Pain is to be endured. It ends or it does not.”

Now, wolves do have to keep going despite injuries an awful lot. However, another interesting note is that feral children are even more honeybadger about everything. There’s case studies saying they just don’t seem to react to, say, getting sprayed in the face with freezing water. You can teach them what the shower knob is, but they don’t get why they should make the temperature change.

This means that, depending on how shapeshifters make their bodies, Tera might actually be even more detached from pain when in human form.

That actually might explain why she’s sticking to it – she can better ignore both pain and anxiety like this.

I saw her consider my back, and then lower portions. “You are in reasonably good condition. You should be able to withstand it.”
I felt a hot rush of blood to my face, and I fumbled for a towel and awkwardly slung it around my hips.

Note that despite treating women like this all the time, he’s incredibly uncomfortable when he’s the one being looked over, showing that it’s not that he just has a very laid back approach to sexuality or anything.

She continues to not care and says they need to move to find her fiance quick:

The sun will set soon, and the moon will rise soon after.

I must yet again remind everyone that the moon and sun are totally not synced up, and therefore a good chunk of the month he’ll be transforming during the day, which serves to further underline how the movie system is just a pile of cool images that don’t make any coherent sense and shouldn’t be taken literally.

“I used cash. MacFinn told me that the police can track the plastic cards.”

This is your standard nonnative speaker dialogue. Like it so often does, thinking about it for a split second makes you wonder why she wouldn’t sound like the people she learned the language from – who taught her what “plastic” and “cards” instead of just saying that this item was called a “credit card”, leaving her to construct a way to talk about it rather than usual the standard term?

She insists they go, Harry decides nope, he wants answers, because Harry is never not a total dick. She walks off assuming he’d follow, no doubt thinking that no one would be this petty when a werewolf is about to go on another killing spree, but Harry just sits on the bed and makes her come back. She then explains that he can get answers from MacFinn, and Harry continues to be totally fine with sitting around and letting the guy go on another killing spree and just starts asking her questions.

I think this is the author trying to hit another check box. See, normally in this situation, the issue is that someone’s trying to get the detective to help a person who may be involved, so holding your help hostage until they give you some answers is reasonable. But the author doesn’t have any clue what the reasoning is, so he sees no problem with Harry doing it when he’s being tapped to prevent a murderer from continuing to murder.

“Why should I?” I snarled, and for once I didn’t avert my eyes. I stared into her gleaming amber eyes and braced myself for the impact of looking into her soul, and for her to peer into mine.

So Harry is angry and that makes it okay to soulfuck her, because she’s being such an unreasonable bitch by asking him to do a necessary thing.

Harry is someone who hurts other people by any means available to him when he’s angry.

Luckily for our rape subtext, Tera continues to be awesome and is immune, and Harry proceeds to flip the fuck out upon realizing she’s not human.

“We will leave now,” she growled.
I felt a surge of defiant grumpiness course through me. “Why should I?” I whispered back.

Even being terrified to realize he’s trapped with an angry nonhuman isn’t enough to override Harry’s most basic refusing to do anything instincts.

Tera has had entirely too much of this shit and explains she called the police and said he was here, acting crazy, and so very armed and dangerous.

They will be likely to shoot you rather than take chances.”

And only this is able to finally get Harry to get off his ass.

I studied her as she got in the car. She was tall and lean and pretty in a knife-edge sort of way.

Yeah, he’s still doing this even though he’s already “studied her” a bunch of times.

Her eyes moved around constantly-not nervously or randomly, but with the cool precision of someone making herself aware of everything surrounding her at all times. Her hands were scarred, long-fingered, and strong. The bruise on her head, where I had smacked her with my blasting rod the night before (no, two nights before; I had lost a day sleeping in the hotel room) was probably hurting like hell, but she didn’t seem to notice it.

That said, at least she’s otherwise a solid badass.

She proceeds to drive and now that Harry could ask questions without risking being too late, he chooses not to, because Harry never feels actual interest, he just pretends to super interested in doing minor work as an excuse to avoid major work.

Tera West made me nervous. She had appeared from nowhere to save me from the back of a police car, true, but what were her intentions? Was she really trying to help her fiancé keep from falling victim to his family curse again? Or were the two of them working together to remove anyone who could rebuild the magical circle that could contain MacFinn and render him harmless? That would make sense, given that once Kim Delaney was dead, they came after me.
On the other hand, that didn’t fit with a lot of the other facts.

Like the part where she had so very many chances to kill you?

Nope, apparently the unfitting facts are just that MacFinn’s transformations don’t match every kill and also his fiance is some nonhuman shapeshifter oh wait that fits fine.

God this is so stupid. But she’s a bitch (get it get it get it) so it doesn’t matter how blindingly obvious it is that this isn’t how she would act if they wanted him gone, he won’t trust a sneaky, evil female like her.

Anyway, he then says she must be something he doesn’t know about.

Most of my background on the paranormal was Western European in origin. I should have been reading more books on Native American beliefs, South American spooks and haunts, African legend, East Asian folklore

Harry, please, the only werewolves Bob the rapist skull told you about were also Western European and you didn’t know jack shit. You don’t read any books. I’m currently dubious if you watch movies, because you failed to notice the werewolves actually do follow a whole bunch of movie rules so it seems like your crack about that was just on general muggle-superiority principles.

Incidentally, this does not get into if there’s actually different spirits in different areas but the fact he doesn’t begin and end at Native American but lists off every possibility suggests they’re universal, which then raises the new question of why the humans in each given area apparently only notice a tiny proportion of total monsters.

Come to think of it, if there was a much stronger masquerade in place, you actually could have this work. What if the reason folktales are so scattered and confused is because monsters almost never leave a witness? One fairy clan got sloppy in Europe so they learned a little about fairies. A transforming fox screwed up somewhere in Asia and people learned that was a thing/a tribe of transforming foxes was converted by a priest once in Japan, and people heard of them from that.

Monsters who are still totally unknown in a given area have a better chance of staying unnoticed because people don’t know what to look for, and also any inconclusive glimpses tend to be folded in to existing myths and strengthen people’s memories of that one rather than become a new thing. The end result would not only give you a kitchen sink setting, but also allow for the possibility of any number of monsters that no one had ever escaped to tell stories of.

Anyway, Harry finally grudgingly admits that bandaging him is odd if the goal was killing him, then goes back to wondering what she could possibly really want because she’s been so unclear with her one-note insistence that he help her fiance already.

Also, he wonders if the group he saw her with was like the shapeshifter version of a vampire cult, without even the second of thought that vampires actually have a reason to cultivate a bunch of followers so there’s nothing about that to suggest it’s normal supernatural creature behavior. If he wanted that, he could’ve brought up fae and how they’re interested in mortals too, but the author appears to have forgotten that fae exist this book.

They park and then it’s time to run around in the forest looking for the guy.

I studied the usually quiet Tera. She was walking with exaggerated motions, planting her feet down solidly with each step, as though intentionally trying to make noise. Once or twice, she stepped out of her way to tread on a branch, snapping it with a dry popping sound.

Harry the detective cannot, however, make any guess as to why this might be.

Anyway, despite her efforts, she walks into a snare. Not sure why she didn’t just go wolf and smell the guy out.

In lighter news, the guy then punches Harry right in his stupid face.

I landed badly, but on my unwounded side, and rolled out of the way as a muddy, naked foot stomped down at my head. I grabbed on to it and jerked with more desperation than strength, and the foot’s owner fell down beside me. Instead of being slowed, he slapped his arms at the ground as he hit it, in much the same way Murphy did when practicing falls. Then he rolled as I struggled to my hands and knees, and slid a hard, strong forearm beneath my throat, locking it there with the other hand and pressing back against my windpipe.
“Got you. I got you,” snarled my attacker. I struggled against him, but he was bigger than me, stronger than me. He had me down, and he hadn’t been shot or beaten up anywhere near as often as I had in the last fifteen hours or so.

Right, Harry, sure, you could totally take him in a fight otherwise, it’s just this guy happens to have some physical advantages and not that also he actually has a clue what he’s doing.

Given the comparison to Murphy, I’m going to assume she also takes him down regularly and Harry just blocks it out so it only comes through subconsciously.

All that really matters is that this guy is doing god’s work in providing us with the part of the book where the detective gets beat up.