Alright. So, last time, Harry was a piece of shit. Today, back to what he was doing when the book opened, back before he made it clear that yes, this book would be horrible.

Michael and I plunged through the hole I’d torn in reality and into the Nevernever. It felt like moving from a sauna into an air-conditioned office, except that I didn’t feel the change on my skin. I felt it in my thoughts and my feelings, and in the primitive, skin-crawling part of me at the base of my brain.

The book makes a desperate attempt to make me forget about that.

The little leather sack of ghost dust in my duster pocket abruptly increased its weight, dragging me off balance and to the ground. I let out a curse. The whole point of the ghost dust was that it was something extra-real, that it was heavy and inert and locked spiritual matter into place when it touched it. Even inside its bag, it had become a sudden stress on the Nevernever. If I opened the bag here, in the world of spirit, it might tear a hole in the floor. I’d have to be careful. I grunted with effort and pulled the little pouch out of my pocket. It felt like it weighed thirty or forty pounds.
Michael frowned down at my hands. “You know, I never really thought to ask before—but what is that
dust made of?”
“Depleted uranium,” I told him. “At least, that’s the base ingredient. I had to add in a lot of other things. Cold iron, basil, dung from a—”

And it does really good job! It’s not good enough and I still hope Harry gets mauled soon, but I’m willing to let the subject drop for a moment.

So yeah. It seems it doesn’t inherently harm ghosts, it’s just sticky. Extra-real is interesting…depleted uranium is just literally heavy. Cold iron is worked material, I don’t see why it’d be more real – bear in mind, it’s not killing fairies because it’s more real, it’s killing them because they’re natural and it’s a violation of the natural order. (For that matter, the only time you’re going to find lots of cold iron not worked by human hands is by dialing time back all the way to before life itself existed – as soon as we started breathing oxygen, that was it for iron.) And not only have I never heard anything in modern times about basil, but checking now it seems quite the opposite of what he’s going for – throughout history people have had polar opposite opinions of basil. It can’t be all that extra real if we can’t even decide one thing about it.

So what would extra real be? Well, one option is that radioactive material is, maybe the fact it’s constantly spitting out bits of itself and making a sort of halo around its physical location gives itself an extra weight to reality. You could go with extremely stable materials, since metaphorically, they’re the rocks are in a hole at the bottom of a hill and aren’t going to move without a lot of effort. Or the opposite, you could say reality has a corrupting influence but that the ghost’s reality has to finish corrupting away the substance before it can move again, so metals that rapidly tarnish would lock down a ghost but not keep it in place forever. You could also go for literal weight – you want to weigh a ghost down, you cover it in dust that speck by speck weights a lot to counter how mote by mote a ghost doesn’t weigh anything.

I assume this is following potion logic of multiple ingredients that have to each cover a sense, but the reasoning I’ve seen hasn’t impressed me so I’m not going to assume there’s reasoning behind this that makes it work. Plus, not everything should need potion logic. Having the ghost’s weakness just be “weight” and Harry one-ups the old timey people using lead by chucking depleted uranium in their faces would work fine. (Interestingly, tungsten is a little heavier but significantly more pricey, so we’ve even got a ready explanation for why he stopped there on the peridic table rather than continuing.)

Anyway in conclusion, uranium dust is deadly for reasons unrelated to radioactivity so those babies Harry’s trying to save are pretty fucked regardless. With luck, Harry will get a lungful or five before this is done as well.

Back to the book, we’re seeing Chicago.

It looked like a mishmash of Agatha Hagglethorn’s memories of Chicago at the end of her life. Edison’s bulbs were mounted in some of the streetlights, while others burned with flickering gas flames. All of them cast hazy spheres of light, doing little to actually illuminate their surroundings. The buildings stood at slightly odd angles to one another, with parts of them seamlessly missing. Everything—streets, sidewalks, buildings—was made of wood.
“Hell’s bell,” I muttered. “No wonder the real Chicago kept burning down. This place is a tinderbox.”

Also people had to use flames for everything. That’s generally the biggest factor for why the past spent so much time on fire.

Harry mentions that while they’re here they need to see if there’s any sign of why the ghosts keep getting mad, which is a perfectly reasonable thing for anybody but a person who just argued in favor of letting babies die rather than darting in even long enough to take out the ghost. Instead it’s Michael, who isn’t desperate to get back out as soon as possible, who’s questioning the wisdom of spending an extra few minutes trying to examine the murderous ghost.

The argument is interrupted by their wooden surroundings exploding.

up and out in a deadly cloud of splinters. I threw one leather-clad arm across my eyes and went tumbling one way.

See how practical that jacket is?

For some reason, the ghost is now screeching about how the babies are hers, and that’s the disjoint, isn’t it? She did suggest that her husband was threatening to separate her from her baby, but that has nothing to do with the main trauma of being afraid her husband would beat the kid to death and accidentally smothering the kid herself, then snapping and going murder-suicide on him. So, why does she just keep shrieking MINE over and over now, instead of, say, thinking they’re her husband who she needs to kill? I’m assuming because women are all about babies.

Also snarling and drooling Would a ghost drool, really?

Harry tries his shield charm as the ghost tries to ram him.

I’ve stopped bullets and worse with that shield before, but that was on my home turf, in the real world. Here, the Nevernever, Agatha’s ghost overloaded my shield, which detonated with a thunderous roar and sent me sprawling to the ground.

This isn’t really new, but it’s interesting to get a very specific look at how Harry interacts with the Nevernever…namely, apparently he doesn’t.

We’ve been told that getting from here to our world can take up most of a monster’s energy, so they have much more on hand here, but generally, going to magic central boosts everybody. But Harry makes no mention of that, suggesting that the real thing making wizards special is their stability.

My guess is that everybody has X magic capacity, and the world drains Y magic for magic creatures to exist, but there’s no further surcharge for just using magic. It takes exactly as much energy to blow everything up in both worlds, it’s just magical creatures are less likely to have that much on our side. If one does make it through with or gather afterward, they can set it off fine.

This doesn’t seem in line with wizards causing the world to glitch around them or anything, but it seems like the best way to model what we’re seeing here.

Blood stained my tingling fingers, the skin swelling with dark bruises and burst blood vessels.

What a weird description. I think the blood stain is trying to say it’s the under the skin spreading rather than how we usually mean it, but that’s just confused further by the part where he then says bruises, and then all sense is lost when he then says in addition there’s burst blood vessels that are somehow not bruises. (And he later says his hand becomes red from wiping a cut on his face, so there’s definitely no surface blood at the moment.)

Harry wobbles around while the ghost either similarly wobbles or has hit peak rage and can’t move. I’m not sure why that’s apparently a plausible option but Harry lists it first so I guess ghosts can lock up from emotion a lot. Given ghosts aren’t under any selection pressure, I guess them just glitching out makes sense.

Michael circled the stunned spirit and arrived at my side. His expression was concerned, rather than frightened.

It’s time for an idiot ball that makes Harry suffer! Yup, Michael sidles AROUND the dangerous ghost while it’s temporarily out of commission and they begin bantering about how the ghost is pissed off and going to maul them. Michael doesn’t try to take it out, neither of them try the dust to at least pin it down.

Michael adds that additionally, hellhounds (oh my god don’t cross the streams fairy and hell don’t make sense together) coming! So, you know, they have to wrap this ghost thing up pronto, which is why they’re bantering instead of doing so.

I could hear haunting, musical baying, ghostly in the midnight air. “Holy shit,” I breathed. “Hellhounds.”
“Harry,” Michael said sternly. “You know I hate it when you swear.”
“You’re right. Sorry. Holy shit,” I breathed, “heck-hounds. Godmother’s out hunting. How the hell did she find us so damned fast?”

This is completely fitting with the priorities of people who stood around bantering in the first place.

That said, the beautiful thing about stories is that if you want fucking banter, just rewrite until there’s a second to breathe! If Michael had sidled over to get the dust and chucked that over the ghost, then this kind of thing would’ve worked. Or if Harry was saying this before entering or after leaving the Nevernever, at which point he’d have plenty of time to discuss how he feels about hellhounds and people who don’t like swearing.

Michael offers to cover Harry’s retreat, and he takes this opportunity to explain that what’s coming is basically the most scariest thing possible.

But I was also angry. I hate it when I get shown up. Besides, Michael was a friend, and I’m not in the habit of leaving friends to clean up my messes for me.

It’s amazing how consistently the books put noble motivations second. Harry’s doing this because he’s a cranky stupid asshole, just like every other time, but what he was already doing dovetails with something a halfway decent person would do, so he adopts the second reason as well.

Banter complete, they finally engage the ghost, right as the ghost gets free of Harry’s magic that’d somehow been pinning it down or distracting it or something, by accident since he didn’t cast anything meant to do that. Michael tries to slash the ghost now that it’s totally free and mobile, and being totally free and mobile this doesn’t work. Harry tries to do a charged shot and again, totally free and mobile ghost decides to do her own charge. Because Harry is Harry, this is of course fire, even though he just through about the whole everything burning issue.

They burst into flame as though soaked in gasoline.

I really do not like this description. This is old, very well seasoned wood getting hit by a giant blowtorch. I’m pretty sure they’re bursting into flame like the bunch of dry wood they are.

If you’re shocked by actually seeing just how fast that is, something along the general lines of “I knew x would burn but it was still shocking how fast the fire spread” works fine. Describe how it seems like one second there was his fire and then the next second it was everywhere or something.

I jammed the end of the blasting rod into her mouth and prepared to fire again, but she tore it from my hands with a ferocious doglike worrying motion

Also, while I’m not sure this is inherently bad, when you already have so much shit going on with women, shoving your penis substitute into a woman’s mouth trying to shoot off only for her to behave like a dog should probably not happen.

I shoved a leather-clad forearm into her mouth and shouted, “Michael!”

This I approve of, though. Further demonstrating how useful leather is with shades of the whole Fenrir thing.

Harry flails around, unable to get her off and she starts choking him to death. Not sure where her ax went.

Michael shouted, and swept Amoracchius at the spirit. The great blade bit into her back with a wooden-sounding thunk

Continuing our questionable descriptions! Even assuming that magic sword vs ghost sounds anything like that, hasn’t Harry been hearing ghosts get sworded to redeath quite a lot? He should be familiar enough with the sound that it’s become the sound of sword vs ghost rather than a comparison, especially since really, how often does Harry hear sword vs wood for comparison, especially ever since Morgan so cruelly left him?

and made her arch up, screaming in pain.

And also it causes her horrible pain. I’m going to guess that there’s probably a cleaner way of doing this, like maybe taking her head off, but Harry was too chivalrous to just dust her and let Michael kill her, and therefore she’s suffering, because “flaw” means “make others bear the brunt of your error while you don’t give a fuck”.

Because all is fire and fire is all, the sword has white light because holy, and where it’s touched her she lights on fire and begins very slowly burning away, which, just in case there was doubt, is so amazingly painful that a ghost that voluntarily ripped her own arm off is distracted and turns on Michael in a frenzy. This sounds amazingly sadistic for a loving god.

Agatha Hagglethorn’s blazing ghost prepared to fly at his throat.
I sat up, seized the sack of ghost dust, and with a grunt of effort swept it at the back of her head. There was a sharp sound when the improvised cosh struck her, the superheavy matter I’d enchanted hitting like a sledgehammer on china. The ghost froze in place for a moment, her feral mouth wide—and then toppled slowly to one side.

From woman screaming in agony because of Harry’s choices to slapstick that easily.

Michael says there’s something on the corpse of the corpse. Specially, there’s this long piece of barbed wire wrapping around her entire body.

“Sun and stars,” I breathed. “No wonder she went mad.”
“The wire,” Michael asked, crouching down next to me. “It was hurting the ghost?”
I nodded. “Looks like. Torturing it.”

Kinda like you assholes!

There’s also the problem that she didn’t seem in pain before. Michael wonders why they didn’t notice the wire back in their world, and Harry speculates it’s only visible here, but what about the fact she didn’t seem crazy from pain back there either? Or even crazy from pain here until she got a sword in the back and lit on fire?

I mean, if it’s metaphorical wire that’s annoying and getting under her skin so she’s more active, maybe. But they’re both acting as if the ghost was reacting to being tied up in spiky wire the same way anybody would.

We can’t even say that ghosts, being fossil emotion impressions, respond to any stressor by acting out their particular drama harder, because we just saw them interacting with a ghost and pissing her off and she didn’t go into her drama at all, she got steadily more violent to them personally and eventually tried to chew out someone’s throat.

But we don’t have time for plot holes, because Harry’s realizing that this means someone’s behind the sudden boost of ghost activity, that apparently not crossing his mind prior to this.

They chat still further despite, you may recall, the whole hellhounds and Harry supposedly being desperate to leave thing. It’s only when Michael points out that everything is on fire and does fire hurt them here that Harry says yeah and that they should leave for that reason. Then Harry hears something and tries to discuss that instead of running faster.

Anyway, it’s godmom he supposedly was trying so hard to avoid.

A very tall, slender, inhumanly beautiful woman stepped out of the smoke. Reddish hair curled down past her hips in a riotous cascade, complementing her flawless skin, high cheekbones, and lush, full, bloodred lips. Her face was ageless, and her golden eyes had vertical slits instead of pupils, like a cat.

Will the cat comparisons keep her from being called a bitch, or will Butcher just think that makes it all the more clever? I’m sure we’ll find out soon.

“Hello, my son,” Lea purred

I will say, points for having someone who refers to Harry as “her son” get a comparatively non-sexualized description. Okay, the detail on lips is a bit excessive, but no chest comment, no mention of her legs, and in fact the focus here is almost entirely on facial features rather than body.