So, Harry is finally slightly motivated to do something now that he was dragged kicking and screaming to the problem. Now he just needs to figure out what’s wrong with Micky. Maybe he should start off making sure Micky isn’t faking. Could be a scam, I mean. Or maybe it’s totally justified ghost or angel or demon revenge. There are so many, many possibilities, remember Harry? So many reasons why it might be okay not to help. Surely that’s always your biggest concern when dealing with someone in trouble.

Nope, looks like somehow when it’s not a sick, starving homeless girl, Harry doesn’t worry about that. Huh. I wonder why.

I made sure to keep my eyes away from his. Hells bells, I did not want to get drawn into a soulgaze with Micky Malone at the moment.

In other words, Harry knows that he can’t play his usual game of alpha male chicken and expect to win so he flinches first, but he’s going to keep doing this every time he can get away with it.

He does work up the guts to touch the guy, and feels a mysterious cold energy as well as feverish skin. While I’d often complain about something like that, the setup this time makes a great deal of sense. In the far better Unsounded, one character accidentally lights a chunk of the underlying magical half of reality on fire. Reality glitches, trying to fix itself by removing heat to put out the flames, but it’s only able to affect the mundane half which isn’t on fire and just causes intense cold there while the spectral flames keep burning.

So, physically there’s no cold, but his nervous system is presumably feeling the magical cold. His body starts trying to raise its temperature to compensate against something that isn’t really there.

However, that raises a new point – although dangerous fevers are rare, that’s because your body normally knows what your temperature is and is deliberately raising it to a certain point to hurt whatever’s causing your illness without overshooting into hurting you. Here, that’s not happening. His body’s internal thermometer is presumably what’s malfunctioning…and our bodies have more than enough capacity to spike our temperature well above deadly levels. By 108, your brain is cooked. And it’s not hard at all for you to generate that much heat. (Worse, a sudden spike in temperature alone can be enough to produce seizures.)

Instead of the standard possessed creepiness, in other words, Harry could be facing a situation where he’s on a very tight time limit. The people involved are’t idiots and could’ve been trying to ice his head down, which would keep him alive for a while, but his body won’t be able to handle the strain long. Also, high temperatures can cause delirium and madness, so we have a reason for him to have tried to attack his wife that isn’t just “magic said so”.

But it’ll be magic said so, won’t it?

Harry says that he can feel possession through skin, which would’ve been yet another more reassuring response to Murphy than just “I don’t know.”

Micky stared at me for a second and then thrust his head at my hand, his teeth making snapping motions. I jerked back even though he couldn’t have reached me.
Someone trying to bite you makes you react, more than if they take a punch at you. Biting is just more primal. Spooky.

Human jaw muscles are strong enough to shatter our own teeth, you fucking idiot. I’ll agree there’s something primal involved here but it’s the primal instinct of people getting chunks chewed off or contacting the horrible infections that come from combining human spit with an open wound all being too dead to pass on their okay with getting bit dumbass genes.

“All right,” I breathed. “I’m going to have to get a little desperate, here. If you weren’t a friend, Micky…”

I realize what Harry’s about to do is a sacrifice on his part. He’s explained why he doesn’t like using wizard sight and it’s a good reason.

But.

“If you weren’t a friend…” sums up why Harry isn’t a hero. Even when he does get involved, it’s for something directly impacting him. If this wasn’t someone Harry knew, he wouldn’t do this. He’d abandon them to their fate. And this is some of the best behavior we’ve seen out of him – usually he has to be personally in danger before he’ll do anything about it.

We know there’s no other halfway viable option, because Harry hates using the sight and he’d try the other things first. So it’s sight or nothing, and for anyone else, he picks nothing.

Harry’s description of the sight doesn’t sound much like what he said before, besides the part about getting burned into your brain.

With my Sight, I can see even the most ethereal of spirits. I can see the energies of life stirring and moving, running like blood through the world, between the earth and the sky, between water and fire. Enchantments stand out like cords braided from fiber-optic cables, or maybe Las Vegas-quality neon, depending on how complicated or powerful they are. You can sometimes see the demons that walk among mankind in human form, this way. Or the angels.

Last time it was a lot more wide ranging than this, which was pretty, but admittedly narrowing it down a little is probably wise. The part where it also covers the past and future and metaphor and so forth…yeah, probably not necessary.

It was also just an all-around bad idea to add in that bit about demons and angels. That’s Singular Creator God talk. While we haven’t explicitly seen angels yet, we’ve seen the mortal faithful thinking physical human-made weapons are what God wants us to use, which doesn’t make sense if there are autonomous god weapons you can call on, and we also have an inkling of what angels must be from their supposed counterparts, the demons. The demons we’ve seen don’t seem like anything capable of acting in this manner, and the one who expressed any opinion claimed being on the mortal plane is exhausting if not outright painful.

But that’s general. Harry, the specifics of what you’re seeing now?

He had been ravaged. Torn apart. He was missing flesh, everywhere. Something had attacked him and taken out sections of him in huge bites. I’d seen pictures of people who’d been attacked by sharks, had hunks of meat just taken, gone. That’s what Micky looked like. It wasn’t visible to the flesh, but something had torn his mind, and maybe his soul, to bloody shreds. He bled and bled, endlessly, never staining the sheets.
And wound around him, starting at his throat and running down to one ankle was a strand of black wire, oversized barbs gouging into his flesh, the ends disappearing seamlessly into his skin.
Just like Agatha Hagglethorn.

Nicely gruesome in general and good to see a specific example to go with Harry’s repeated concern of seeing something he can’t unsee while in never-forget wizard sight mode. “mind, and maybe his soul” is interesting here – what’s the distinction, and why is damage to the spectral body always going to count as mind damage? I could understand if mind and soul were basically the same thing that rending a projected body would rend the soul, or if the spectral body was soul and not mind, but this way confuses me.

We also continue to have the question of why barbed wire pain makes you murderous instead of curling up in a ball. And the possibility it’s some sort of metaphor and not just literally painful seems unlikely, because Micky suddenly becomes slightly lucid:

His smile didn’t look mad to me anymore. It looked agonized, like a grimace of pain twisted and cranked until the muscles of his face were at the snapping point.
His lips moved. Shook, his whole face writhing with the expression. “Uh, uh, uh,” he moaned.
“It’s all right, Micky,” I said. I clasped my hands together to keep them from shaking. “I’m here.”
“Hurts,” he breathed at last, barely a whisper. “It hurts, it hurts, it hurts, it hurts, it hurts, it hurts …”

And a hurt person might lash out, but to actually chase someone around the house and try to break down doors?

But at least Harry’s willing to infodump a bit on the spell itself. Magic, as he told us back in the first book, is powered by life. Even evil magic is supposed to be pumping out energy while looking all cool and glowy. This stuff, though, is void.

dull, flat, matte-black. I reached out to touch it, and it almost seared my fingers with how cold it was.

Harry doesn’t know what to do and again to his credit, actually tries anyway. He grabs the wire and starts pulling it off.

Barb by barb, inch by inch, I tore the wire-spell free, drawing it up through his flesh at times

Again, gruesome, and again, really horrible to think that this is something that’ll always be as fresh in his mind as this moment. This isn’t a pleasant process, given Micky screams himself mute before long, but Harry gets it off…and then it tries to crawl down his throat. Pretty quality stuff! Harry promptly screams and apparently Murphy can tell the difference between that and Micky, because while the door stayed shut this whole time now she flings it open.

(…really, why not just have her in there with him? There’s no need to do it privately and we see now there’s a problem occurring because he’s all alone.)

her eyes living flames of azure blue, her hair a golden coronet around her. She held a blazing sword in her hand and she shone so bright and beautiful and terrifying in her anger that it was hard to see

Hey, it’s not a sexualized description! There’s not even a bit about how she looks too cute to wield the sword properly.

I was seeing her for who she was.

I know I shouldn’t feel hope but maybe this is character development. Maybe he won’t go on about how surprising it is every time she behaves like a cop for the rest of the book. This just got magically seared into his eyeballs. Every time he looks at her from now on, this is what he’ll remember.

I struggled against the wire, knowing that she couldn’t see it or feel it, gasping. “The window. Murph, open the window!”
She didn’t hesitate for a second

And god, I hope this gets branded into him as well. Every time anyone asks something of him, he demands paragraphs of explanation for why he should do it. Murphy reacts as if she believes in people. And Harry is not acting sanely here. But she sees him flailing at an invisible wire, staggering around like he’s losing control of himself, snarling with rage as he uses emotion to power his magic, knowing another person in the same room went murderously mad for no known reason – and she doesn’t hesitate for a second.

He manages to get it under control just long enough to detach it and throw.

I snarled, jabbed a finger at it, took all that anger and fear and sent it coursing out of me, toward that dark spell. ” Fuego!”

And once again, I really wish more was done with the idea that strong emotion isn’t just required to power spells, but it consumes that emotion in the process. Harry should turn back to Murphy with a smile. Everything’s fine now! No trauma, no rage.

Instead…somehow wizard sight, which Harry hates, is now an evil temptation.

Just keep it open all the time and let everything pour in and really know what everything is like. That sounded like a good idea, really. Just bask in all the beauty and horror for a while, just drink it all in and let it erase everything else, all that bother and worry about people being hurt or not being hurt–
I found myself sitting on the floor, aching from cold that had no basis in physical reality, giggling to myself in a high-pitched stream, rocking back and forth. I had to struggle to close my Sight again, and the second I did, everything seemed to settle, to become clearer.

Why? He had no trouble turning it off last time, or being lucid the whole time he was using it, and each time he’s described it, the whole problem is that you can’t just check out but are forced to actually see and engage with what’s going on even if you don’t want to. Also I’m pretty sure he said that there’s a point in wizard training where the sight gets turned on and you have to work out how to turn it off, which isn’t possible if you go nuts this fast.

Even if part of this is the spell fucking him up, wizard sight should combat that because again, forced to engage with everything and can’t just check out. It’d make more sense if he turned his wizard vision off, then crashed under the weight of residual damage. He’ll go on to say he feels numb and cold – since nothing can dull wizard vision, that shouldn’t have been able to impact him until he turned it off, at which point he’d find all the horrible stuff he was feeling suddenly muffled, which could make him want to stay like that rather than return to reality.

And what was Murphy doing while he behaved precisely like the murderous guy on the bed, giggling madly?

Murphy stood over me, her eyes wide, her gun held in one hand and pointed at the door.

She didn’t even have her gun aimed at him. She was trying to protect him, even as he displays all the signs he’s about to turn on her.

Harry manages to stutter out a minimal explanation. It’s actually pretty forthright for him – either that vision of her with a sword is actually impacting him or lying takes energy and he’s out. He explains that Fire even burns in the s-spirit world as opposed to the other elements which…

This does remind me of a book I can’t recall the name of and which wasn’t very good anyway, but where a military experiment left a boat twisted up in another dimension, and also people got random powers like mind control or the ability to set stuff on fire by staring at it, but most importantly, it was a dimension where things were tilted away from entropy. They could kill each other but the bodies would just stay there, unrotting. And one of the effects of this was that no fire could be sustained within the universe – only sustained will could make any fire exist, and the second the power stopped being applied, the burning did as well.

Since fire is a reaction, while the other elements are just there, it would make sense to say that magic fire is defined as having the ability to burn things regardless of if they can technically be burned. The behavior of the wire otherwise suggests it should be immune to fire attacks – it’s a void of cold, absorbing heat should be easy, but if magic fire isn’t applying heat to create combustion but causing combustion itself, anything and everything burns.

(That said, in a story that hadn’t just explained interacting with the wire in any way requires magical ability and muggles can go fuck themselves because only Harry can solve problems, “fire burns spirits” would be a good rule, it’d mean mortals could chuck the things into a fireplace.)

Murphy then checks on Micky, and further confusing me about what’s metaphor and not, he doesn’t seem traumatized by what’s happened, just exhausted, and then he goes to sleep, as if there was a physical toll and he needs to recover, but then Harry says that no it was trauma:

He’s going to need rest, Murph. Peace. Something tore him up inside, real bad.”
…
“It’s like … when someone close to you dies. Or when you break off a relationship with someone. It tears you up inside. Emotional pain.

Uh. He’s really chill about that. And…maybe I’m just not a true romantic, but, somebody dying is as bad as breaking up with someone? I mean, if we were talking “someone you know”, there’s definitely levels of knowing people, and the loss of a relationship that was cherished can hurt a lot and be similar to dying in that a person important to you is no longer part of your life, but someone you’re close to, like a family member, and they’re dead, and this is as bad as breaking up with someone? Not even being broken up with, because it’s you choosing to to end the relationship in that sentence.

You’d think the guy who both broke up with and watched his girlfriend die at about the same time wouldn’t consider those two things basically identical.

Murphy, being practical, wants to know what the something is.

“I don’t know yet…I’ve been calling it the Nightmare.”

What? You have fucking not. Morty called it the nightmare while you bullied the poor guy into telling you things you should’ve already known.

I wonder if this is an artifact of some earlier draft where Harry works out something’s up earlier or if it’s just bad plotting from the start.

“How do we kill it?”
I shook my head. “I’m working on it. It’s staying a couple steps ahead of me, so far.”

…it hasn’t even existed for a full day, and all you did was talk to one guy you should’ve talked to at the start. You didn’t even know it was anything that abnormal until you tried to get general information from Morty and had him call it a nightmare.

“Damn,” Murphy said. “I get sick of playing catchup, sometimes.”
“Yeah. So do I.”

You fucking liar, you do nothing but procrastinate until the last second.

Somehow, wife powers let wifey know that now is time to enter despite no one bothering to get her (even though Micky asked for his wife right before he went to sleep), because we’re done with that conversation and need a reason for them to leave.

Harry limps out, heavily relying on Murphy to support him. She thanks him.

“Any time. You’re my friend, Murph.

Would that this be better conveyed in the earlier section, but again, maybe this is the new, post-flaming-sword Harry.

And I’m always up to helping a lady in distress.”
She glanced up at me, a sparkle in her eyes underneath the brim of the baseball cap.
“You are such a chauvinist pig, Dresden.”

And nope, laid low by the author still not knowing what sexism even is.

Murphy goes to get him food while he rambles about how he swears he’ll get the nightmare thing and kill it. Kill it dead. Murphy says she’ll help however she can, because unlike some people she’s not a lazy ass. Then she asks why he gave her that really weird look earlier.

“You’d laugh in my face if I told you,” I said.

What an actually valid time to try to avoid telling the truth! It’s awkward, it is something she’d probably laugh at, and it’s not information she needs to do her job. All may not be fixed but really, he’s actually been pretty tolerable.

We end with him confirming that yes, flaming sword Murphy is burned into his brain and he has no excuses for misjudging her ever again, and then explaining again that he has no idea at all what’s up with the void wire and he’ll have to investigate, and he sounds like he’ll actually go it. Man, Harry needs to get nearly murdered by evil torture void wire more often.