Last time, Harry either puts some arrogant murderers in their place OR is a bullying prejudiced jerk to people.

Today, remember sexy godmom? Time for Harry to remember last time’s sexy adventures with sexy godmom, which, yes, I guess the idea he got molested at sixteen was decided right from the start, as was that it was sexy.

It began in a cave, its walls made of translucent crystal, all but glowing in the dim light of the fire beneath the cauldron. The silver manacles were tight on my wrists, and I was too dizzy to keep my own balance. I looked to the left and right and watched my blood glide down over the manacles from where they pierced my wrists like thorns, then fall into a pair of earthen bowls set out beneath them. My godmother came to me, pale and breathtaking in the firelight, her hair spilling down around her like a cloud of silk. The sidhe lady was beautiful beyond the pale of mortals, her eyes bewitching, her mouth more tempting than the most luscious fruit. She kissed my bare chest. Shudders of cold pleasure ran through me.
“Soon,” she whispered, between kisses. “Only a few more nights of the dark moon, my sweetling, and you will be strong enough.”
She kept kissing me, and I began to lose my vision. Cold pleasure, faerie magic, coursed through her lips like a drug, so sweet that it was almost an agony of its own, and made the torment of the bonds, the blood loss, almost worthwhile. Almost. I felt myself gasping for breath, and stared at the fire, focusing on it, trying to keep from falling into the darkness.

People are all “fanfic is awful and porn and think of the children!!!” but something like this would have multiple warning labels on it while a third grader can pick this up off the shelf at the library.

Also…so sixteen year old boys getting molested while tortured by mind-controlling older women with the threat of death hanging over him is your kink! That’s okay. But maybe you should just write that as a separate piece of smut and keep it out of the stuff that’s supposed to be a serious plot.

If we have a story that’s just kinky stuff happening to somebody, we can section that off as “this is for the sake of titillation, and does not represent how it works in real-life” a lot more easily than if we have a plot with supposedly realistic reactions pause midway to say, “Also, by the way, the main character got raped when he was sixteen and it was super hot for everybody :D :D” There’s an argument to be made that porn itself warps expectations of what’s normal, but I don’t know if that would be such an issue if we didn’t have bits and pieces of porn showing up everywhere, so there’s never a dividing line between realistic depictions of sexuality and there for the sake of kink.

There’s pounding on the door that morning, so Mr. Wizard goes to get his gun.

My .38 had been lost in the battle with the gang of half-mad lycanthropes the year before, and I’d replaced it with a medium-barreled .357. I must have been feeling insecure that day, or something.

I’m sure that means something to people who care about the numbers on guns in their magic wizard fiction.

“You’re not going to have much luck breaking down that door,” I called out. I didn’t point the gun at the door, yet. Never point a gun at anything you aren’t sure you want dead. “I replaced the original one with a steel door and a steel frame. Demons, you know.”
The pounding ceased. “Dresden,” Michael called from the other side of the door. “I tried to reach you on the phone, but it must be off the hook. We’ve got to talk.”
I frowned, and put the gun back in the drawer. “Okay, okay. Sheesh, Michael. Do you know what time it is?”

God damn are you easy to kill.

Doesn’t take a look at who’s there or anything. A voice says it’s his friend, so sure, let’s invite them in after making sure the gun is hard to get a hold of.

For that matter, what sort of idiot buys a reinforced door without any way of looking out? If a monster IS breaking down your door, aren’t you better off being able to identify it in advance of it actually getting in?

Michael is here to ask about that poor girl Harry so grudgingly told where she could hide for the night. Apparently, the priest called him because something assaulted the church. Harry doesn’t react with “holy shit I almost got someone killed because I was too much of a dick to want to help them”, because Harry is too much of a dick, and then Michael’s all “so…premarital sex :/” and Harry’s all >:| and they start to discuss if he said he loves her and god I wish Harry was getting acid spat in his face right now.

The room was freezing, and I could see Susan curled into a ball beneath the heavy blankets on my bed. Mister had lain down with his back against hers, and watched me with sleepy, self-satisfied eyes as I came in.
“Rub it in, fuzzball,” I growled at him

So. Is Mister trying to make Harry regret going off to do good, or is he just trying to make Harry crankier and subtlety more of an asshole while doing so?

Oh my god I just realized. If your cat is Mister Something, what are some words you’d pick for a name? What is Mister really?

He’s Mister Scratch.

That revelation aside, Harry lists off the jewelry he’s wearing, as apparently getting laid has fixed that hangup of his.

Mom’s amulet, around my neck, and a little silver charm bracelet with a half-dozen shields dangling off it, fixed to my left wrist in place of the charm I’d given to Lydia. A plain silver ring, its interior surface inscribed with a number of runes, went onto my right hand.

And as little as I care for Harry’s wellbeing at the moment, I’m still pleased both by the implied competence and the part where we’ll be doing magic stuff.

Michael and I left, piling into his truck, a white (of course)

I’m assuming this came before we realized white was the preferred color for asking kids to come in if they wanted free candy and/or disposing of bodies.

They head off in the serial killer trunk for the church, which is a huge church. It’s so huge. It’s a whole block in size. It’s very, very big, is his point.

It does look pretty snazzy!

Now, is a snazzy church the best place to hide in? There’s obviously the argument that true faith is satisfied with humble surroundings, but there’s also the idea of the majesty of God. It’s pretty hard to figure out how to run a proper experiment in our world…but not here! Summon two demons and fling them at different churchs. If you tested the wards of both, we could finally resolve one of the great Catholics vs Protestants debates. It wouldn’t answer any questions about God, given faith appears to have inherent power, but it would at least answer which of their prayer harvest buildings works better at gathering faith power.

The sun came up as we entered the parking lot. I felt the golden rays slice across the morning skies, the sudden, subtle shift of forces playing about the world. Dawn is significant, magically speaking. It is a time of new beginnings. Magic isn’t as simple as good and evil, light and dark, but there’s a lot of correlations between the powers particular to night and the use of black magic.

“Magic isn’t as simple as light and dark! It’s just as simple as black and white.” Jesus christ proofreading could’ve at least hidden the shitty worldbuilding.

Harry then starts whining that The Church had killed a lot of wizards in its day, believing them in league with Satan but after two books and a couple chapters with Harry, I’m coming around to the idea that maybe they needed killing. Even if that did eventually turn into assuming all wizards should be killed, there’s a big difference from “People using magic must be in league with Satan!” and “The people we keep finding in league with Satan are magic users!”

And if they weren’t literally working with Satan himself but instead had familiar spirits they paid by letting them mind-control people into sometimes fatal sex…I’m not too fussed that maybe the church didn’t quite use the right classification when hunting them down.

(Really, with the ability to control people into repetitive behavior, anything can become an atrocity.)

It felt strange to just be strolling up on business. Hi, God, it’s me, Harry. Please don’t turn me into a pillar of salt.

Harry really goes out of his way to appropriate bad things happening to women, doesn’t he?

They see that the cars in the parking lot have been destroyed. But like, kids with crowbars destroyed, and not even very strong/motivated ones:

Someone had done one hell of a job on them. The windows had all been smashed, their safety glass fractured and dented. The hoods were dented as well. The headlights lay mostly on the ground in front of the cars, and all the tires were flat.
I walked around to the back of the cars, frowning. The taillights lay shattered on the ground. The antenna had been torn off each car, and were not in sight. Long scratches, in three parallel rows ran down the sides of both cars.

I recognize that something that can do that can hit hard enough to kill us squishy humans, but, uh…”smashed” as in, the windows themselves held but there’s cracks in them? So if you were outside the church but just inside these totally non-warded cars, you’d still have been untouched? I mean, maybe if it put all its effort into this it could’ve gotten through, but still, it was trying to break something here and it failed.

Harry then finds some innocent rosebushes have been murdered.

I crouched down beside several fallen branches, picking them up one at a time, squinting at them in the dawn dimness.
“What are you looking for?” Michael asked me.
“Blood on the thorns,” I said. “Rose thorns can poke little holes in just about anything—and something that tore them up this hard would have been scratching itself on them.”
“Any blood?”
“No. No footprints in the earth, either.”
Michael nodded. “A ghost, then.”
…
“A ghost can usually only manage to move things, physically, in bursts. Throwing pots and pans. Maybe really stretch things and stack up a bunch of books or something.” I gestured at the torn plants, and then back toward the wrecked cars. “Not only that, but it’s limited to a certain place, time, or event. The ghost, if it is one, followed Lydia here and rampaged around on blessed ground tearing things apart. I mean, wow. This thing is way stronger than any ghost I’ve ever heard about.”

Well, that’d be really worrying if there was nothing else that could do the same thing as this. Hm, are there any other magical beasts that might be able to damage things but leave no trace?

Oh right, there’s EVERY FUCKING LAST ONE OF THEM BECAUSE THEIR BITS TURN INTO CLEAR GOO AND THEN VANISH.

While my first through is this shows again you can’t be making up your magic system on the fly and also writing detective stories, that’s not the whole problem. Yes, he established that even physical constructs evaporate when destroyed, but nothing stops Harry from saying that he can still use his wizard powers like a blacklight because they only disappear to muggle senses. Harry even literally has wizard vision that he can flip on and off! While readers solving the problem in advance is a lost cause, we could still have a story where a character does detective work.

So, let’s pretend for a minute that’s true.

So, what might happen if we remember constructs and demons exist? Demons appear to be varied, so the whole “roses scratch absolutely anything” seems…unlikely. But perhaps that’s the real trick – a ghost WOULD be scratched up by it, because ghosts are rather flimsy, but a strong one just keeps pulling itself back together. So Harry’s figuring anything capable of smashing things up, and willing to grab thorn-covered bushes in the first place, would be either invulnerable and not leave traces or a ghost.

If we really need for this to not end with Harry saying that yes definitely ghost, then have him flip on wizard vision explaining he’ll see magic traces from constructs, washed-out brightness for fae, and a deformation as if a weight from a demon. The only thing that leaves no trace is ghosts, since like wizards, they’re partly of this world already. This allows him to rule out a number of suspects but technically can’t prove it wasn’t a gorilla with gardening gloves.

(There’s also the issue that, because the previous fight had to be super badass, it’s hard to believe ghosts are physically weak. She was tossing Harry around just fine even before diving into doublemagic land, plus ghosts just haven’t been established well before this. The Anita Blake books, for all their many many many many many faults, actually did this pretty okay back before the heroine started on her harem. Her ghosts gained power as you paid attention to them, so there’s a moment a hand manifests as she’s walking over the grave and she just breathes calmly until it fades away again. Spend a bit developing ghosts as minor nuisances, then introduce poor Agatha as an example of how, while weak overall, they can be dangerous in specific circumstances like a ghost having the ability to suffocate anyone under the age of one month, and then BAM SUPERSTRONG GHOST OH MY GOD WHAT’S HAPPENING THIS ISN’T SUPPOSED TO WORK LIKE THIS.)

They go to say hi to the priest.

His eyes were normally a shade of blue so bright as to rival robin’s eggs, but today they were heavily underlined, shadowed.

…how does having bags under them change the color they are?

They are, apparently, Catholic Catholic, so the priest does the double cheek kiss on Michael and then’s all “oh…you” at Harry, as Harry asked for a big batch of holy water this one time.

Michael peered at me, evidently surprised that the priest and I knew each other. I shrugged, a little embarrassed, and said, “You told me I could count on him in a pinch.”

It’s weird this wouldn’t have come up. For that matter, why doesn’t he carry holy water normally? He should be making trips for it regularly. If he’d been spraying that ghost with holy water, there wouldn’t be the issue with the babies breathing in all that uranium dust. Harry even goes on to say it was used on ghouls, and while obviously the book doesn’t specify which mythology it’s using here, we can assume those are basically fast zombies that live in graveyards as that’s the shittiest and most pop interpretation. In other words, holy water works on the dead.

I guess it doesn’t come up so Michael can be all WHY DIDN’T YOU ASK FOR MY HELP while Harry preens and reminds Michael that he can totally handle himself fine.

The priest, like Michael, reminds Harry of how one day he’ll realize the true glory of God etc. I’m starting to get annoyed by proxy. If Harry had come here on his own it’d be one thing, but if Harry’s with Michael and the priest knows Michael, then he knows Harry’s already had a least one pitch this morning and probably one the previous night. It’s polite at that point to leave the subject be.

“The young woman arrived yesterday, just before sunset.”
“Was she all right?” I asked.
He lifted both eyebrows. “All right? I should say not. All the signs of an abused personality. Borderline malnutrition. She had a low-grade fever as well, and hadn’t bathed recently. She looked as though she might be going through withdrawal from something.”
I frowned. “Yeah. She looked like she was in pretty bad shape.”

It’s really the last line that sells it.

There’s the obvious horror of him listing off all the things Harry didn’t see fit to mention, the realization that a starving sick battered girl is what Harry was actually seeing when he’s talking about what a manipulative little sexpot she is, but then there’s Harry saying that yes, he knew she was in bad shape. It’s not that he’s ignorant of any of this. It’s not that he missed it. It’s that it didn’t matter to him in a way her perky nipples did.

Now an extra bit of fridge horror – you don’t have much in the way of boobage when you’re getting phrases like “malnutrition” thrown about. Or much in the way of hips. So, it’s not like she should even have those signs of sexual development people use when claiming that they didn’t know she wasn’t eighteen, they swear, really. She likely looks younger than she is.

Harry was staring at the nipples on a kid’s flat chest and saying he’d fuck that if only he wasn’t offended by her thinking she would get something out of it.

In fact, here, let’s have her full description:

She was a slight girl in a black knit dress, black combat boots, and hair dyed to a flat, black matte. The lines of her face were soft and sweet, and her skin was pale as chalk around eyes that were sunken, shadowed, and glittering with alley-cat wariness.
…
She pushed back her asphalt-colored hair with one hand and gave me a look of pure calculation. Then she simply crossed her legs, so that the cut of her dress left one pale leg bare to mid-thigh. A subtle motion of her back thrust out her young, firm breasts, so that their tips pressed visibly against the fabric.
…
She didn’t bother to cover her leg again. A rather pretty leg, actually, with a tattoo of some kind encircling her ankle. I tried not to notice.
…
This wasn’t a girl who was used to playing things fair and square. Unless I was grossly misreading her, she had bartered sex for goods and services before—and she was awfully young to be so jaded about the entire matter.

So in retrospect, “young” breasts is presumably code for “looked twelve”, and “slight” is code for “starved chicks are hot”. We also know that last book had what sure looked like highschoolers with COLLEGE STUDENT hastily scrawled over them, so I’d peg her as middle school.

What does it say about Harry that he finds homeless child prostitute something he’s got to struggle to say no to? Honestly, nothing we couldn’t already guess.

Our priest, like anyone who isn’t Harry, gets her clothes, food, and a bed. Then she’s hit with a seizure vision.

“Cassandra’s Tears,” I said.
“Or narcotic withdrawal,” Forthill said. “Either way, she needed help.

This is interesting. Harry gave non-supernatural reasons for why the disorder is disbelieved by muggles, I just speculated there was a supernatural component based on how the conversation played out. Now our priest responds with “or the drugs muggles always stupidly blame for it because they’re dumb muggles” to him saying she’s got the disorder dumb muggles blame on drugs. The guy must know what Cassandra’s Tears are or else he’d assume Harry was saying the name of the drug she was on. They both know that she predicted an attack well enough to come here in advance of it. And he still says it’s just drugs as soon as the possibility is floated, followed by Harry not arguing.

So yeah, it’s supernatural and the fact Harry’s description didn’t say that is probably part of the effect.

she had such a look in her eyes …” The old priest sighed. “That resolved look that they get when they’re sure that they’re lost. Despair, and in one so young.”

A lot of Harry’s behavior, after all, can be explained by Harry just being the kind of piece of shit who thought this kid was hot. But you can see the priest is a sympathetic, observant person. When she says she’s scared and asks him to stay, he believes that and stays with her to comfort her. Here he’s recounting how, minutes before the attack, she looks like she’s given up all hope. He’s talking about how strange it is to see this, how inexplicable. It’s as if she was regularly assaulted by visions of the exact moment of her inevitable agonizing death. In conclusion, narcotic withdrawal.

What comes is your standard ghost – wind, footsteps, voice calling your name. The priest ties to engage it, it doesn’t care, so he tries to use God to control it, and it throws a tantrum at the cars.

“The girl tried to leave. To go out to it. She said that she didn’t want me harming myself, that it would only find her in any case.

And this is interesting too.

I’d expect someone in her position to be bitter, but she knows the term for what’s happening and she’s probably worked out the same thing about the incomplete official description. Maybe, when no one ever believes you, you can believe it’s not that they’re bad or don’t care, it’s just your curse. In some ways, maybe the world even seems better to her than it really is, because even when faced with actual maliciousness, like Harry’s, she mistakes it for just the curse, believes he’d be a good man if it wasn’t the curse preventing him from understanding what was happening.

And unable to rely on others, she’s only ever been able to control her own actions. She can’t advise others or ask for help. This likely isn’t the first time she’s faced a situation where she knows she’ll have to do something on her own, however bad that’ll be for her.

So here we are. Despite how horrible her life has been, how horrible people have been to her, she is the sort of person to walk out to that she most fears because this way it only happens to her.

The priest, at least, seems someone worthy of this sort of regard, because he refuses to let her. Hours pass. The sounds stop. She goes to sleep, or seems to, and he takes the chance to see if anything happened to the rest of the church – and she disappears before he gets back.

Then we get another conversational hiccup. The priest explains that this is why he called Michael. Harry agrees that under the circumstances, they need to find her, since she’s not going to be safe if she’s not back at the church by dusk.

And then:Forthill shook his head, his expression grave. “Mr. Dresden, I am certain that only the power of the Almighty kept us safe within these walls last night.”
“I won’t argue with you, Father.”
“But if you could have sensed this creature’s anger, its … rage. Mr. Dresden, I would not wish to encounter this being outside of a church without seeking God’s help in the matter.”
I jerked a thumb at Michael. “I did seek God’s help. Heck, is one Knight of the Cross not enough? I could always put out the Batsignal for the other two.”
Forthill smiled. “That’s not what I meant, and you know it. But as you wish. You must come to your own decision.”

Suddenly, the priest is saying that she’ll only survive by being at the church like it’s an argument against finding her – and I’m pretty sure it’s still morning, so this is extra weird. Perhaps he’s assuming that she won’t return so if found, the only thing they can do is stay to personally guard her, but that really doesn’t make much sense and still isn’t an argument against just finding her.

Then our already bizarre turn of conversation veers off again:

“I hope, gentlemen, that I can trust your discretion on this matter? The police report will doubtless reflect that persons unknown perpetuated the vandalism.”

While if they say it was ghosts, the police report will say persons unknown perpetuated the vandalism and also some dumbass who hadn’t even been there that night tried to tell me it was ghosts, he could tell by the rose bushes, long story short he’s in the drunk tank now shouting some bullshit about how he just got out and this isn’t fair.

Why is this here? Because the book needed the priest to explain the church’s opinion on magic, which is they’ve got people to deal with it secretly But spreading word of it to everyone, even to all of the brethren would accomplish nothing but to frighten many people and to make the enemy that much more able to do harm.”

I’m not sure if it’s that the author didn’t take an extra second to realize he could get the same effect by having a grumpy Harry ask how come if the priest knows magic is real he doesn’t tell his flock or if it’s that doing it this way positions Harry as important and capable of wrecking things for the guy if he choses, setting consistency be damned.

And, of course, all this for a bullshit nonexplanation that utterly fails to explain how knowing things like that churches are literally magic safe zones is something that it helps people not to know. They so successfully kept that tidbit under wraps that it was down to fucking Harry to tell someone in need, and if that doesn’t make you want to reevaluate everything, you may want to check that you aren’t secretly a devilworshipper.

Harry then leaves to not actually search for the girl but go find someone they can talk to about ghosts, because evidently the conversation took enough twists that we’ve completely lost track of the plot itself.

That psychic in Oldtown.”
Michael scowled and spat. “The necromancer.”
I snorted. “He’s no necromancer. He can barely call up a ghost and talk to it. He’s got to fake it most of the time.” Besides. Had he been a real necromancer, the White Council would already have hounded him down and beheaded him.

And this is why black/white magic is so lame. What about necromancy is bad beside the fact it’s a spooky word that gets attached to villains a lot? Harry says he isn’t on the basis that most of the time he fails to contact ghosts, which would sure imply that just reliably chatting with ghosts makes you a necromancer, which in turn means that doing so gets you more murdered than black magic murdering your mentor does.

Presumably that’s just shitty wording and what Harry’s actually trying to say is that necromancy requires even more than reliably summoning ghosts while this guy can’t even manage the prerequisit, but that just leaves us with no idea what necromancy is. If ghosts were human souls, we could at least guess maybe the leveled up version of ghost chats is binding ghosts to your will, but apparently they’re just magic fossils, and we don’t declare people evil for using chalk. And if it’s physically raising the dead, well again, the only real argument for that to be evil are magic systems where you have to tear the soul from its eternal rest and bind it to the corpse. If even ghosts aren’t souls, why would animated corpses have anything to do with souls? And we already saw undead scorpions and those were just powered by magic. So, if binding ghosts isn’t evil and animating the dead isn’t evil, why are necromancers inherently black magic? Is it killing people? Because anybody can kill people, I don’t see what’s so special about that.

Harry says he’s also got his rapist skull on the job.

Michael frowned at me.

Good! Yes! That is an appropriate reaction!

“I don’t trust this business of communing with spirits, Harry.

So like lying vs flaming tits, Michael has some warped priorities.

He calls Harry’s pet rapist skull a familiar, and apparently he isn’t!

“Familiars work for free. I’ve got to pay Bob.”

So why do familiars work for free? That sounds awfully sketchy.

Michael demands to know what horrible things he pays his rapist skull with, and the answer of romance novels is apparently way grosser than whatever Michael was picturing because he then demands Harry stop telling him. What the hell was he expecting, some good wholesome virgin murder?

Isn’t there some way that you could work some kind of spell here, instead of relying upon these unholy beings?”

And again the question of faith raises its head. Why are they unholy? How to you reconcile the fact there’s other things that are completely unrelated from demons with the idea all non-angel powers belong in the same bin?

Harry finally starts talking about ruling out things. He claims that a demon would leave footprints, because apparently demons can be shaped like anything so long as anything doesn’t have wings.

and maybe some kind of psychic trail I could follow. But I’m pretty sure this was pure spirit. And this is interesting, because it suggests he did not check for any psychic trail – he was pretty sure there wouldn’t be one, and he didn’t want to fire up his wizard vision and risk seeing any unrelated horror that just happened to be hanging out.

Ghosts don’t usually inhabit a construct—a magical body. They’re just energy. They don’t leave any physical traces behind—at least none that last for hours at a time.

Okay but again, neither do magical constructs. They explode into colorless stinking goo that disappears shortly afterward. There’s no point in making a distinction here.

Harry at least claims that as a result, there’s nothing he can do about the ghost, and I guess by his tone implies there’s no way to find the girl magically either. We know Harry’s track record, so it could just be that either of those would involve more effort than he’d like.

Harry ends the chapter by listing off to himself everything he’s going to do with more than a dollop of self-pity about how hard it’s going to be. This list conspicuously does not at any point involve “save girl from horrible death”.