We jump now to Harry on the phone. He’s saying he hasn’t gotten the chance to do something due to the whole Micky issue.

it’s four hours of daylight lost.” I filled him in on Mort Lindquist and his diaries, as well
as the events at Detective Malone’s house.
“There isn’t much more time to find this Lydia, Harry,” Michael agreed.

What do you mean, “agreed”? Since when was Harry attempting to do that? Sure, he said he would when you guys left the priest, but then he wandered over to bully Morty instead.

Harry goes on to claim that he is totally working on finding, uuuuhhhhhhh, Lydia, yeah, he super cares, because doing this favor for Murphy got his car back (…so Harry’s intensely tepid “god I GUESS I’ll help BUT ONLY BECAUSE YOU’RE A FRIEND AND ANOTHER FRIEND BEGGED ME TO AND ALSO YOU WERE CRIPPLED BECAUSE OF MY FUCKUP” has led to a major narrative reward). Point is, now that he has the car and doesn’t have to rent one he’s somewhat willing to try to find the poor girl.

“Murphy put out the word to the folks in blue-so if one of her friends on patrol sees a girl matching Lydia’s description, we’ll hear about it.”
“Outstanding,” Michael said. “You see, Harry? This detour of yours to help Detective Malone is going to help us a great deal. Isn’t that a very positive coincidence?”

YOU ARE LITERALLY TALKING TO EACH OTHER ON A PHONE WHY THE FUCK DIDN’T YOU JUST CALL THE POLICE TO START WITH JESUS H CHRIST YOU SHOULD NOT NEED GODLY INTERVENTION TO TELL THE POLICE ABOUT AN ENDANGERED CHILD.

Then Susan calls.

“I don’t want to add to your day, but do you remember the name of that guy you and Special Investigations took down a couple months ago? The ritual killer?”

Did Harry seriously do nothing else between this book and the last?

I closed my eyes, and grubbed about in my memory. “Leo something. Cravat, Camner, Conner. Kraven the Hunter. I didn’t really get his name. I tracked him down by the demon he was calling up and nailed him that way. Michael and I didn’t hang around for the paperwork afterwards, either.”
“Kravos?” Susan asked. “Leonid Kravos?”
“Yeah, that might have been it, I think.”

This is probably the most natural-sounding dialogue we’ve seen so far, though!

Anyway, Susan just vagues a bit about it’s for a something, rumors, nothing big, and Harry’s all yeah whatever.

“Did you sleep all right, last night?”
“Maybe,” she teased. “It’s hard to get really relaxed, when I’m that unsatisfied, but your apartment’s so cold it’s kind of like going into hibernation.”
“Yeah, well. Next time I’ll make sure it’s a hell of a lot colder.”
“I’m shivering already,” she purred.

And…then there’s this? What? So they didn’t fuck, and she’s saying that since it’s so cold she fell asleep anyway, and his sexy banter is next time he’ll make sure it’s cold enough she can fall asleep after again either not having sex or the sex being extraordinarily unsatisfying on her part?

Harry then heads down into his basement and lists off the stuff there, including the plastic containers with resealable lids which nope, sorry, tupperware was invented 1946 and didn’t become popularized until the start of the 1950s, and Harry is almost certainly using some far more modern knock-off. Given his car dies on him all the time despite being older, and given he has a whole lot of these containers, he must be constantly battling mishaps.

Worse, this means Harry actually has an excuse for glass bottles with cork stoppers! Why wouldn’t you want that?

He tries to get his rapist skull awake and suddenly there’s major time limitations despite the fact previously Bob was capable of going all day long, and as we all recall, all day long is here a euphemism for forcing college student into a twenty-four hour orgy with god knows how many deaths.

But hey, maybe multiple nights of possessing crowds and forcing them to have sex eventually wear down a spirit. He’s saying he’s exhausted and given this story will be far better if the rapist skull is incapable of doing anything, who am I to argue?

“All right then,” Bob said. “You want work, we make a deal. I want to do a ride-along the next time Susan comes over.”

Oh right because the rapist skull being unhappy about anything means still more sleeze, that’s why.

Harry, showing why they deserve each other, drops a pile of exposition on what exactly a spirit is, anyway:

“Any time you want to head back to the homeland, Bob, feel free.”
“No, no, no,” the skull muttered. “That’s all right.”
“I mean, there’s still that misunderstanding with the Winter Queen, but-”
“All right, I said.”
“You probably don’t need my protection anymore. I’m sure she’d be willing to sit down and work things out, rather than putting you in torment for the next few hundred-“

So yeah. The rapist skull is not technically enslaved or anything, it’s just that Harry has the power to turn him over to be tortured any time he feels like it. Consent issues played for laughs are just everywhere when Bob’s involved, aren’t they? Truly, you can see why he has so many fans and apparently keeps being featured in future books and will never ever go away.

“All right, I said!” Bob’s eyelights flamed. “You can be such an asshole, Dresden, I swear.”
“Yep,” I agreed. “You awake yet?”
The skull tilted to one side in a thoughtful gesture. “You know,” it said. “I am.” The eye sockets focused on me again. “Anger really gets the old juices flowing. That was pretty sneaky.”

And then suddenly we get this bit which seems to have been lifted from a completely different scene. Someone who’s sleepy might be woken up by annoying them, but someone who’s exhausted is running out of energy and you’re not accomplishing anything by getting them worked up in a bid to waste what few bits they have left. They’re also very unlikely to then tell you what a good idea you had there and that you should definitely pull it again next time this happens.

“I’ve run into some new stuff. Maybe you can help me out. And we’ve got a missing person I need to look for.”

It’s here in the comfort of the sub-basement of his home, away from anyone with the slightest moral compunctions, that Harry can be truly honest – he’s got a bunch of stuff he’s got to do, and by the way also there’s some girl who’s going to die horribly tonight, so yeah, I guess that too. No hurry.

Bob whistled, no mean trick for a guy with no lips. “Let me get this straight. This creature, this thing, has been torturing powerful spirits for a couple of weeks with this barbed-wire spell. It tore up bunch of stuff on consecrated ground. Then it blew through somebody’s threshold and tore his spirit apart, and slapped a torture-spell on him?”
“You got it,” I said.

Wait, what? No. No, that’s not it at all.

“God, I need a drink. Get out of town, Dresden. Something came across last night like nothing I’ve ever felt.” I thought of ruined cars and rosebushes planted in consecrated ground. “Do you know what it is?”
“It’s big,” Morty said. “And it’s pissed off. It’s going to start killing, Dresden. And I don’t think you or anyone else is going to be able to stop it.” “But it’s a ghost?” He gave me a smile that showed me his canines. It was creepy on that florid, eyes-too-wide face. “It’s a nightmare.”

A ghost manifested last night (for the first time ever) that was extremely strong. Previously, a lot of abnormally powerful ghosts were popping up, presumably due to the barbed wire spell.

There’s no actual reason to think the superghost and the barbed wire are the same. They’re happening at the same time, sure, but the barbed wire’s maker is obviously trying to make murderous ghosts, so it’s not like it’s a weird coincidence.

The only real connection is that the barbed wire isn’t behaving like living magic, which would point to it being ghost magic, and if we assume ghost magic is high level stuff it stands to reason that the anomalously powerful ghost could also be the anomalously magic-using ghost. On the other hand, the only things we know about the ghost are that it couldn’t get through a church threshold while the barbed wire user evidently had no problem with the relatively strong threshold of Micky’s house.

But…that’s the summary, so it must be fact. Somehow Harry went from having no clue what was going on to ironclad certainty that they’re the same creature.

Even more irritatingly, despite the fact I’m obviously supposed to take Harry’s pile of wild guesses as him knowing what he’s talking about:

“So. What kind of ghost are we dealing with, and who could have called it up? And what is this girl’s connection to it?”
“Harry,” Bob said, his tone serious. “Leave this one alone.”

Harry not only doesn’t know the basics, but doesn’t even know enough that this kind of thing is basically impossible and a sign to run for the hills. Even after he watched the ghost expert do exactly that a few hours ago.

“I know a guy who’s possessed a travel agent for a few days, and he could get us tickets cut rate.

So that’s a thing. Well, we at least know not all spirits are necessary rapists, or if this one is it’s at least not non-stop, but…how many of these things are out there? Why doesn’t Harry care?

Harry, instead, is all confused by the idea that his rapist skull is scared, despite a few paragraphs back playing on this very fact. He does a quick recap of how very useful a pet rapist skull can be, what with it knowing a lot of information.

No spirit could have that kind of knowledge without it translating into considerable power.

Except you live in a word where power is power.

See, knowledge is power makes sense when talking about humans. There’s differences in ability, but they’re not insurmountable.

Harry really isn’t human in that sense. Harry can do things we can’t, no matter how smart we are, or what we learn, or how much we practice. A human being, given enough time, might well be able to memorize everything uses the skull for but would never be able to cast a single spell. Even among the magic-using haves, Harry’s quick to smugly point out how they’re really the have-nots by his standard, lucky to pull off a single spell that he could fling around all day, so it’s not even that there’s two classes of people. There’s a huge spectrum of ability completely divorced from knowledge. Worse, that huge spectrum includes easy torture, mindcontrol, and magically enforced contracts. A weak but knowledgeable person might leverage that knowledge into power, sure. But good luck doing that when regular power includes the ability to control you or kill you at distance or god knows what else.

The most knowing a lot gets you is that you’re too useful to be actually killed outright, and that certainly won’t save you facing something with no use for your knowledge.

So unless we’re to believe the rapist skull can personally do all those magic spells he knows, then no, it doesn’t have to translate into much power.

Anyway, Harry decides his best course of action is to blow off his rapist skull’s concerns in favor of recapping ghost info.

They don’t change, they don’t grow-they’re just there, experiencing whatever it is they were feeling when they died. Like poor Agatha Hagglethorn. She was loopy.

Loopy but capable of acting on new information. It’s possible that she’s incapable of actually remembering new events but she definitely remembered she hated Harry even after she lost sight of him for a bit. I can believe there’s some sort of reset going on with the ghosts, but a person with brain damage preventing them from holding onto any new memories is still considered a person. By all appearances, that’s what a ghost is.

There have been documented incidents of ghosts blotting out the sun for a while, causing minor earthquakes, all sorts of stuff

Okay, so also, our “nightmare” really isn’t unprecedented at all. I suspect the author is thinking of the effects of a minor earthquake, which is a bit of plates rattling, and not that you have to move an enormous amount of the earth itself to get that slight spillover aboveground.

“So, if someone leaves a strong enough imprint when they go, you got yourself a strong ghost. I mean, badass. Maybe like this Nightmare.”

The more interesting question is what is a strong imprint? It seems connected to emotion, but apparently a good student killed in a gang shooting would make for a stronger imprint than someone abused by her husband who accidentally killed her baby then hacked her own hand off before killing him… And, of course, the idea the boundary being in flux is also a factor. Maybe, to get back to the plastic-wrap metaphor, it’s about how much your death on this side pushes into the other side. The thinner and more stretched the boundary already is, the easier it is to deform it yourself. Certain types of death resonate differently – no moral component to it, it’s not about which person suffered more or was more unfairly treated.

We also know focus is a factor in this – ghosts only do things directly related to their obsession. But although it’s repeatedly mentioned it doesn’t seem like it’s a factor. It’d make sense to think a lot of the power disparity has less to do with overall strength and more to do with what the ghost does with it, and maybe the wobbling border/agonized ghosts is a way to get them to act more broadly.

Harry says that something’s messed up the border to make the ghosts come across more.

“Not necessarily,” Bob chirped up. “Maybe you’re looking at it from the wrong angle.”

I don’t believe “chirped up” is a valid speech tag. If it is, it shouldn’t be.

But point is, the rapist skull thinks the point of torturing the spirits is to get them to weaken the boundary, which…seems kind of obvious? I mean, back when all we knew was that ghosts were popping up, it made sense to think that the ghosts could just get across more easily, but the barbed wire is obvious meant to make them shove their way across the boundary.

So Harry himself has really figured out nothing. He knows the nightmare and barbed wire are the same, but that’s a plot hole, and everything else someone’s handed him. He really can’t put information together, which is a real problem if he’s supposed to be detectiving.

“But who would do that? And why?”

Any asshole?

The weakened boundary will let ghosts get across more easily, and presumably that’s true for all magical creatures. So, any magical creature that could do this would benefit from it.

The magic appears to be necromancy related, and oh hey, vampire party. Maybe this is the vampire equivalent of fluffing the pillows for your guests. Harry presumably never heard of them doing that, but all Harry knows about vampires is the basic weaknesses and what he observed firsthand in his one and only encounter. He’s obviously got no idea what the party’s protections for guests are – he thought of the worst case scenario, weighted it against how he had no reason to want to go in the first place, and decided not to touch it.

Now, add in the mysterious missing people, the fact he doesn’t know what the barbed wire is and so he doesn’t know what the components to make it might be, the fact the only info we have is that there were a lot of mangled animals around…even if he’s not willing to go with the nuclear option just yet, he definitely has more than enough reason to call Bianca and tell her that either she helps make sure this problem is fixed before the police ask more questions or he’ll have to say to them that, in his professional opinion, it was totally her.

Harry ignores my reasoning in favor of rambling that all he knows is someone’s doing something to make it easier for something to appear. The rapist skull, evidently just as sick of Harry blathering about basically nothing rather than actually putting things together, says it’ll help and explain a bit more.

And that’s our cliffhanger!!! Because seriously, that’s where the chapter ends, mid-conversation. It then picks up with Harry saying the next line of the conversation, almost like there’s really no point in dividing it up like this, but hey, who am I to argue?