I’ve done smarter things in my life. Once, for example, I threw myself out of a moving car in order to take on a truckload of lycanthropes singlehandedly. That had been nominally smarter. At least I had been fairly certain that I could kill them, if I had to, at the time.

That’s really not how that went down.

God, the “last time on” things in this series are always so annoying.

Anyway, just as Harry ended last chapter poor-meing all over the place, he’s opening this one going on about how this is the worst thing ever, because it’s always the worst thing ever with Harry.

He goes have a pretty cool description of what cemeteries feel like magically: A dull, restless energy pressed against me, like when weariness and caffeine mix around three-thirty in the morning. And I guess the fact the ghosts are thick on the ground says nothing for or against an afterlife given they’re actually created by death rather than being the person.

We then get the so-clever observation about graveyards having fences:

There are always fences around cemeteries. Always, whether stone or brick or chain-link. It’s one of those unwritten things that people don’t really notice, they just do it by reflex.

And it really does seem like the exact chain of reasoning was that joke about dying to get in, followed by wondering WHAT IF THERE WAS A REAL REASON AND IT WAS MAGIC, missing all the while that we don’t just reflexively put up fences.

There’s two big components of the fence, neither of which is some sort of subconscious thing people won’t admit to.

1) Emotionally, it’s nice to keep a clear division between where the corpses are and where they are not. There are a lot of aspects of this, from making your fences of iron because you do believe in monsters to just kind of feeling icky about walking over dead bodies. There’s behavior that’s Not Done in cemeteries but is okay to do when you’re walking by outside the fence, rather than having to estimate precisely how far you are from the graves themselves it’s acceptable to go about your regular life or having to operate on some sort of sliding scale of respectful hush.

2) Practically, the fence does in fact serve a purpose in keeping out those just dying to get in. Humans will wreck or steal things, and you want to avoid most other big animals as well. Nobody wants to find a pack of stray dogs fighting over Grandma’s dismembered corpse, and they probably aren’t going to be too pleased with a bunch of dog shit lying above her eternal resting place and urine staining her name.

The nightmare has torn a hole through the wall, but Harry describes the ghosts as clustering at it so it doesn’t seem they can actually get through the hole, in which case, jeeze, might as well have just said the guy walked in through the gate.

Even if only one death in a thousand had produced a ghost (and more than that did)

…so how many deaths per ghost, then? This is such terrible writing. (And what percent of ghosts are produced but don’t hang out with their corpse?)

We could extrapolate if we knew the size of the cemetery, as he says there’s generally “dozens” of ghosts about, but because of the wobbly boundary there’s hundreds of spirits, easily crossed over from the turbulent Nevernever which, I think, should mean that there’s really always hundreds but normally you can’t feel them. And the boundary is still mostly intact, which, in turn, would suggest that it’s not about how many deaths it usually takes to get a ghost, but that actually, every death leaves one and you just can’t sense most of them.

(Also another issue with kitchen-sink settings…we already have non-ghost spirits. When you’re trying to make every possible permutation of belief a separate real thing, you can’t keep using them as synonyms too.)

The inmates of Graceland felt my fear. They pressed close to the break in the wall, and I began to hear actual, physical moans.

Similarly – this sure doesn’t sound anything like how the ghost we were introduced to behaved. We’re told ghosts are on a script, that they’re fossils of a person in the time before they died…but now they’re also moaning almost-zombies who hate the living.

He feels buffeted by a crowd when he enters, but Harry is a magic powerhouse and so just casually triggers his mom’s pentagram.

The blue wizard light began to glow, to cast out a dim radiance, not so bright as usual.

Yeah, but “as bright as usual” would be good enough to hold off a raging vampire indefinitely, so it’s still more than enough.

Harry doesn’t know if it’s weak because he’s low on magic or if his faith is failing him, because apparently those feel exactly the same. Yet another point to the theory Harry’s emotions are fucked – the only way he can be wondering if his faith is faltering is if he’s so emotionally numb he doesn’t even realize faith is a feeling and he should be able to know if he feels less confident in it than before.

I tried to think of how often I’d had to set something on fire, the past few years, how many times I’d had to blow something up. Or smash a building. Or otherwise wreak havoc.

This comes right after him wondering if his faith in magic is what’s dim, so it would appear to be an attempt to reignite that.

And yeah, so that’s what magic is. The ability to wreak havoc. To will the world into chaos. He doesn’t think of his shield spell. Doesn’t remember finding lost kids. Harry’s faith in magic is its ability to destroy everything around him.

I heard a short sound, a call, off to my right, but it cut off swiftly. I turned toward it and began moving forward at a cautious lope, glowing pentacle held aloft like Diogenes’s lamp.

What a story about walking around at noon waving a lamp to make a point about how incredibly hard it is to find an honest man has to do with this is unclear to me.

The rain had already soaked the grass, made the dirt beneath my feet soft and yielding. A brief, disturbing image of the dead tearing their way up through the softened earth brought me a brief chill and a dozen spirits clustering close as though to feed from it.

This is minor but interesting. “as though” means we don’t know if the ghosts actually feed on fear/any emotion or if the chill made his protective area shrink (or weaken, if it’s the type that’s more a gradient radiating outward than a discrete barrier).

But I don’t think it’s setup for Harry to actually learn the answer to any of that, so it really should be more precise. Ghosts aren’t real in our world and ghosts are among our most varied monsters so we can’t use our own folklore to guess how it works here. What’s lost by Harry directly saying that the ghosts leaned forward to try to feed or clustered closer as the barrier hiccuped?

Really, let’s compare this to the Anita Blake books, which are garbage.

Something grabbed my ankle. I jumped and walked forward without looking down. Never look down. It’s a rule. I got a brief glimpse just behind my eyes of something pale and mistlike with wide screaming eyes.
A ghost, a real-like ghost. I had walked over its grave and it had let me know it didn’t like it. A ghost had grabbed me round the ankles. Big deal. If you ignored them, the spectral hands would fade. If you noticed them, you gave them substance, and you could be in deep shit.

She then goes on to discuss how ignoring works with ghosts but here’s a laundry list of all the other supernatural beasties who don’t need attention to murder you. We learn how ghosts work and then she tells us a bit about how other stuff works too. Harry, in contrast, tells us nothing about what’s currently happening, let alone anything else.

(Also, although she has super necromancer powers, here as in much of the plot she has to deal with things like any other person in her place would.)

Meanwhile, what do we know about Harry? There are ghosts. They, or at least some of them, cluster. They’re trapped in here by the walls, but breaking the walls doesn’t let them out, and also these walls have no affect on the range of other ghosts.

I found Charity laying upon a bier within a marble edifice that looked like nothing so much as a Greek temple, the roof open to the sky. Michael’s wife lay upon her back, her hands clutched over her swollen belly, her teeth bared in a snarl.

Speaking of other media, the snark community around Sword Arts Online talks about how the main character is a mesovore, an eater of character agency. Once he arrives, things don’t happen so he can do them.

Harry, while broadly similar in overpoweredness, has a different quirk. It’s more like he’s a RPG character hitting cutscenes.

Why is Charity laid out in such a perfect image? So Harry can see it. Why is she cupping her belly rather than trying to shove the thing away? So Harry can see it.

It tilted its head and watched me approach.

Having set the scene, it waited patiently for the player to arrive. Charity too, stays in position.

In the edges of my wizard’s light, shapes moved, flitted, spirits swirling around like moths.

Perhaps you thought earlier that I was just being pedantic to complain about using spirit to mean ghosts, and look, just a few paragraphs later we run into exactly the problem.

There are ghosts about. There are also spirit creatures that cluster around energy vortexes, and here we have an energy vortex standing in the middle of an energy vortex while a tornado rages. What’s currently swirling about?

Harry names the nightmare “demon”.

“Is that what I am,” it said. “Interesting. I wasn’t sure.”

So is this amnesia or some sort of metaphysical identity crisis where it wasn’t sure what traits carried over into undeath? Why does it think Harry’s words are anything to go by after chowing down on this idiot?

It lifted its hand from Charity’s throat, pointed a finger toward me, and murmured, “Goodbye, wizard. Fuego.”

Why not fry her?

Naturally, Harry just throws up a shield (“recklessly”, he says, I guess because he’s out of power, but it sure seems to work fine), but also, it’s currently pouring rain so it’s not like there was all that much to block. Harry goes on to say, I would never have been stupid enough to try for a gout of flame in a downpour like this. It was too easily defeated. which I guess we could take as an answer to my other question – it’s significantly dumber than Harry is, which is why it’s fallen for Harry’s “I Am Definitely A Magic Geek Who Knows Magic” claims.

Now, it seemed scarily competent before, and capable of magic Harry not only can’t do but has no idea how it’s even possible to do. And it’s also been noted that it should be able to take the appearance of other people it’s chowed down on but has been sticking to Harry. What if keeping a form and abilities takes up something like RAM? What if the strain of running Harry.exe is making the rest of the operating system slow down? It’s not like Harry has a ton of magical knowledge and any given bite will be worth it. It probably had to eat a whole lot of Harry’s opinions about women to get that one fire spell. Maybe it choked midway through one of Harry’s manpain memories before it could swallow a shield spell.

Furthermore, now that Harry’s there to observe, the other characters in the cutscene can do stuff.

Charity moved, the instant the Nightmare’s attention was distracted. She spun her feet toward it and, with a furious cry, planted both her heels high in the thing’s chest with a vicious shove. Charity wasn’t a weak woman. The thing grunted and flew back, away from her

Harry tells Charity to run for it, I guess because he felt she wouldn’t think of it herself, and decides it’s time to fight. He explains that, while this thing ripped its way through a brick wall like it was nothing, it’s time for fisticuffs because I had a sinking feeling that I was outclassed in the magic department. If he got another spell off, I didn’t think I could counter it.

From what we’ve seen, it’s not all that hard to counter the dumbass using a flamethrower in torrential rain. Even assuming it has more energy reserves than Harry, it’s obviously blowing through those without a thought – but if you think about it, that’s normally Harry’s MO. I think what we’re really seeing here is Harry realizing it’s eaten half his mary sue powers. Harry wins magical fights by just pouring energy on blindly until suddenly he’s won, and when he realizes that’s this thing’s gameplan, he knows he’s fucked. That means it’s time to use the other half of his powers: the dogged insistence than NO ONE EXPECTS A STRAIGHTFORWARD PHYSICAL STRIKE!

I had speed and surprise on my side. I hit it hard and it staggered back.

NO ONE.

Anyway, attempting to wrestle with a superpowered undead works out badly for Harry. He knocks it over, tries to run, then gets grabbed.

the Nightmare simply whirled me by one leg, whipping me into a circle in the air. Then I flew upwards and saw one of the columns coming toward me.

And then Harry…doesn’t die, fitting with the various other times when he’s clearly not a squishy human by any stretch of imagination. Harry specifies he hits directly on his forehead. This is at a speed sufficient to by flying through the air. Not only is he alive, he’s conscious and both his skull and spine are still intact. He even manages to stand up. He isn’t able to do much else and starts whining about how much blood he’s losing from the head wound, as if it isn’t five dozen miracles that he’s got a brain to whine with.

It’s now that Sexy Godmother appears, because Harry’s gotta continue this whole not dying thing.

Lea’s skin had evidently recovered from the ghost dust I’d dumped upon her in Agatha Hagglethorn’s demesne. Her olden cat-eyes studied me with their old, familiar warmth, her hair spilling around her in a mane that seemed unaffected by the rain. She didn’t seem to mind it soaking her dress, though. It clung to the curves of her body, showed the perfection of her breasts, their tips clearly showing through the silken fabric as she knelt down beside me.

As you can see, he isn’t even losing much blood. See, if you start actually bleeding significantly, it drops your blood pressure, which drops your ability to feed the more oxygen-intensive nerves, which means your vision cuts out. Bleeding a dangerous amount from the head would easily push you past that point into your brain itself cutting out from lack of oxygen. Here, it’s clear he’s got enough spare blood in his body for not only his brain and eyes, but also his dick.

There’s a whole lot of sexy femdom cougar etc etc banter at this point, where she explains that she kinda wants her future pet alive so hey, let her help here.

I heard Charity whimper. I had tried. Dammit, I had done my best to help the woman. She didn’t even like me. It wasn’t my fault if she died, right? I had done everything in my power.
Hadn’t I?

This would be such a nice moment if Harry had actually tried. Also, if he didn’t have a long-established pattern of actually making these very excuses and then following through on it.

But here, I guess because Charity is a proper married lady and not some whore kid, he agrees he’s got to save her.

Sexy Femdom Cougar explains the terms of the deal: Harry has to double pinky promise he’ll for real definitely this time come to the Nevernever and get turned into one of her loyal puppies. This is incredibly stupid.

Harry then does the usual bit about how this is the very worstest thing that could’ve happened to him: Lea already had me over a barrel. If I deepened our pact, reconfirmed it, I’d be letting her nail it closed with me inside. Because, before Harry only broke a pact then the agreement to finally obey that pact (pouring agony dust on the other person while doing so), while now he’ll be…breaking the pact again.

She kisses him and, although he keeps whining he’s in agonizing pain, he seems fine and starts doing his usual trash talk of the baddies. This time he decides a good tactic is to make fun of it for using thee/thou. He, and I cannot overephasize this enough, does nothing other than that incredibly lame excuse for an insult, at which point Michael appears. So really, he could’ve accomplished all this by just shouting he wasn’t dead yet loud enough for the nightmare to hear, because that’s the only thing it was actually distracted by.

Michael starts fighting it and tells Harry to go help Charity leave. To justify why Harry needs to be alive at all, she explains that “Oh, Lord help me. I think-” Her whole body tightened, and she let out a low gasp, pressing her hand against her belly. Which is to say, she’s about to give birth, because women definitely work this way. You see, I think my water broke earlier. When I fell.” That is to say, about five minutes ago.

Now, some people might point out that a baby physically does not fit through until the cervix dilates, and the reason we connect water breaking to a birth is that it’s caused by existing contractions midway through labor when this dilation is well on its way. Other people, despite having children their wife presumably gave birth to, think the way it works is women have a water balloon stuffed in their uterus and give birth when it pops.

Charity, as someone who actually possesses a uterus and presumably multiple books on how pregnancy works, should instead be terrified she is about to miscarry or die. The amneotic sac breaking prematurely is bad. It means way too much force struck the uterus and it means the baby has to come out now rather than when it’s ready – but “now” is more along the lines of, she’ll be giving birth sometime in the next day. The bigger concern is if the placenta was damaged, in which case one or both may be bleeding out (given it’s night, they won’t even be able to get a heads up by seeing if blood’s coming out).

Harry then takes this problem and makes it worse by shouting back to Michael that hey, quick, be distracted by surprise baby time! As if Charity giving birth is itself the problem and not the part where it’s keeping them from leaving.

You know what’s the most annoying part of this? She could just have twisted her ankle. The only point here is that she can’t walk under her own power and Harry’s too weak to carry her.

the Nightmare appeared from the darkness behind me, moving almost more swiftly than I could see. It reached down and simply tore a marble headstone from the earth, lifting it high. I threw myself between it and Charity, but even as I did, I knew it would be a futile gesture-it was strong enough to crush her right through me. But I did it anyway.

It’s actually a worse than futile gesture. It wants them both dead, which means it might choose to crush Harry instead of Charity if it had to pick. It even already decided it wanted to smash Harry’s head in more than it wanted to torment Charity. Throwing yourself in the opposite direction may not be as photogenically heroic, but it’d have had a hope in hell of doing any good.

Michael runs over and establishes he’s Lawful Stupid by agreeing to put his sword down despite Harry explicitly pointing out it’s just going to kill them as soon as he does anyway.

“My quarrel is with thee, wizard, and with the knight. The woman and her child are nothing to me, so long as I have both of you.”

Of course, Harry’s partly to blame for not chiming in here as well to point out it intentionally went after Charity to start with.

Now, Michael tossed Harry a crucifix earlier, and now Charity uses it to blast the nightmare with holy light. Why the fuck the uberCatholic wife doesn’t wear a crucifix and needs to have her husband deliver one is unclear.

Of course, neither of them are named Harry, so we’ve got to find a way for him to save the day. During Sexy Femdom Cougar’s time with us, she gave Harry the advice that the solution was all around him and, by implication, he’s an idiot. Harry remembers now that running water hurts magic things.

Now, as we may have gotten into back in the first book, it’s kind of confusing why rain of any kind doesn’t count, but apparently it does not.

I could feel the cold sharpness of the rain, feel it coursing down over me, flowing down the gentle slopes to run in rivulets and streams to the nearby pond.

So the rain flowing over the ground doesn’t count. Rivulets don’t count. However, once they just up to “stream” level, they apparently do, so he tackles it into one.

It jerked and twisted atop me in eight or nine inches of running water, shrieking. The thing’s body just started melting away, like sugar in water, starting at its feet and moving up.

This may give us our answer, though – while Harry just rambles about running water acting as a ground for magic and namechecks the Legend of Sleepy Hollow? Remember the part with poor old Ichabod riding like blazes for the covered bridge and safety? where it’s obvious that the creature can’t cross above water in the traditional way, the description here is that it’s harmed when immersed. This would suggest monsters can use bridges just fine and that they’re hurt by contact with it – so it was probably taking minor damage with the rivulets, but they couldn’t do more than chip away. You could even say the part where it uses fire magic in a storm kinda foreshadows this – the rain is weakening it, but it’s got enough magic energy in both cases to power through.

Michael picks up his wife and Harry informs us Like I said before, Michael’s buff. Real reason Charity doesn’t like him is probably how he keeps eying her husband. Michael asks Harry the nonbelieving witch to pick up the holy blade.

That was when Lea arrived, appearing before me with a trio of her hellhounds around her. “My sweet,” she said. “It is time to fulfill your bargain.”

Why can she suddenly hassle him in this world? It’s unclear. Personally, I’d go with the idea that promises are binding based on the world you say them in. Harry made the last promise within the Nevernever but he made this one here. Mentioning this could replace his currently general whining that making the same promise twice means the second one suddenly counts.

Harry then tries to argue that Lea did pretty much jack: “You just blanked out some of the pain. It isn’t as though you made the water, Godmother.” and who fucking cares Harry you should’ve thought of that before you made the agreement of “I’ll double sell my soul to you for anything at all you feel like giving”. For some mysterious reason Lea actually tries to argue that she gets credit for pointing it out. Dammit Lea, it doesn’t matter!

Either way, she doesn’t accept his frankly awful attempt to argue he should be allowed to stick around long enough to actually beat the nightmare, and again, christ’s sake Harry you made a deal with a fairy if you were concerned about beating the nightmare you should’ve specified.

Harry decides to go to Plan F: Hit them with the sword. Michael yells out that this is a terrible idea and Harry ignores it and tries to cut a doggy in half.

Then there was a flash of light and a jolt of pain that lanced up through my hands and arms. The blade twisted in my grasp, fell out of it and spun to the ground. The hellhound snapped at me, and I stumbled back, my hands gone numb and useless.

God loves all doggos.

It’s now we see that Lea wasn’t being dumb with her decision to ask for another promise from a known oathbreaker, except…she already wasn’t because somehow the promise was enough that she could collect now anyway? Regardless, apparently her real goal was to get Harry to fuck up the sword, even though at the time she showed up, it was firmly in Michael’s grasp and it’s hard to see how she predicted that this precise sequence of events would happen.

Maybe this would work better if Harry wasn’t in any danger and just refusing an oath while holding the sword would fuck it up. He said earlier that Lea is capable of showing up in our world normally, she’s just got no power beyond gifting it to mortals. If she popped back in powerless to demand he come with her with no ability to enforce it, Harry would probably still refuse before Michael could stop him, though we still have the issue it’s hard to see how she was predicting Harry would end up with the sword at all. Maybe the real idea was just that so long as Harry’s upright, sooner or later he’ll fuck up Michael’s sword by virtue of being him.

So, she makes off with the sword she can touch thanks to Harry’s fuckup and Michael is horrified and you know, I do have to defend Harry for this a bit, Michael, I can get the sword falling out of someone’s hands if they’re unworthy but who the fuck makes their magic artifacts fall out of the unworthy’s hands so that a fairy can steal them? Why would you even bother HAVING anti-fairy protections if they turn off as soon as anything goes wrong? Getting people to do something wrong is kind of the fae’s entire thing!