Last time, Harry got dragged to his house by Murphy. He kept thinking he was forgetting something, but ended up falling asleep because concussion.

Now he awakes to a thunderstorm (and discovers Murphy left him a bunch of pity cash).

Thunder rumbled again, growling outside. I could feel the storm, in a way that a lot of people can’t, and that most of those who can put down to nerves. It was raw energy up there, naked and pulsing through the clouds. I could feel the water in the rain and clouds, the moving air blowing the droplets in gusts against the walls of the house above. I could sense, waiting, the fire of the deadly lightning, leaping from cloud to cloud above and seeking a path of least resistance to the patient, timeless earth that bore the brunt of the storm’s attack. All four elements, interacting, moving, energy flashing from place to place in each of its forms. There was a lot of potential in storms, that a sorcerer could tap into if he was desperate or stupid enough. A lot of energy to be used, up there, where the forces of ancient nature brawled and tumbled.
I frowned, thinking about that. It hadn’t occurred to me before. Had there been a storm on Wednesday night? Yes, there had. I remember thunder waking me for a few moments in the hours before dawn.
Could our killer have tapped into it to fuel his spells?

This is debatably foreshadowed. Harry does say wizards can tap places for energy, but then fails to identify natural phenomena as counting. More importantly from a character standpoint, this should’ve been a really fucking obvious option.

Presumably the rider about “desperate or stupid” is meant to present this as something that almost never happens, but we’re really not given any proper reason. Harry goes on to say Such tapped magic was often too unstable or volatile to use in such a carefully directed fashion. but a) we have no idea how important “carefully directing” magic is and b) “often” just means that maybe you can’t use every single storm.

This is one of those difficulties with magic systems. Supposedly they’ve been in play for thousands of years, but at the same time the author has only so much time to think up exploits. The end result is that it makes everyone look like idiots for not taking advantage of this long ago.

We can’t just say it’s dangerous and no proper wizard would do it, because Harry already said that the very act of killing with magic is breaking wizard law and even doing it with cause gets them breathing down your neck. He knew from the very start this was someone desperate and/or stupid. Plus, even if it’s generally dangerous, this is a very wide ranging magic system and so there should be some relatively safe way you can use free magic. People using storms for something that needs a power boost would be standard enough it’d come to mind. This is even more true if Harry’s level of power is rare – that means other wizards have a lot of incentive to find ways to boost their abilities. I mean, we just saw that making two potions at once, something Harry says is ideal timewise, was draining for him. So weaker wizards should be wiped out by doing a single potion, and that single potion is a bigger timesink than one of Harry’s. Making potions while it storms (or prepping them in advance and storing them) seems like it’d be a good idea. The same is likely true for enchanting objects. Eve if you can only safely tap a little, that’s still really useful if people have fixed levels of magic and it’s the only way to break that cap.

So in sum, it’s horrible writing for Harry to take half the book to consider that maybe the spell that takes way too much power for a single person to pull off was done using a well known and commonly occurring source of bonus power.

Going back to my exploration post, this would be fixed if wizards born prior to the magic returning cutoff were out of sync with the new magic, and so couldn’t tap it at all. (Bonus, this would explain why places like Stonehenge are currently abandoned. It always annoys me when people try to throw that in when obviously if Stonehenge was really a magic place and if wizards really existed who could use that, the place wouldn’t be sitting around for tourists to gawk at.) So it doesn’t occur to Harry because to his knowledge, it can’t be done. Perhaps whoever he was apprenticed to either lied or didn’t think anything of Harry saying he could sense magic in it – maybe older wizards can still “see” its magic but can’t “feel” its magic, so they can’t actually grab onto any of it. Perhaps Harry just filed it as part of his wizard third sense, figuring it’d be mentioned if it mattered so clearly it didn’t.

This would also serve the purpose of setting up that the current age is one where you can’t rely on well established rules of magic, but a time in flux, which lets you just completely sidestep the issue of how people should’ve figured this all out thousands of years ago, and makes it clear that the new wizards that’ll be popping up can be really, really dangerous, rather than setting up with Harry being exceptional and it being hard to see how the average enemy can be any problem.

Speaking of Harry problems…

My stomach was furious with me-like a lot of tall, skinny men, I eat endlessly, but it never stays on. I have no idea why. I shambled into the kitchen and started building up the grill.
“Mister?” I called. “You hungry, bud? I’m gonna fry up some burgers

It’s time for the continuing adventures of being poor while having infinite stuff.

Look, food costs money even when you don’t pay money for a person to cook it for you. If you’re poor, you’re not making yourself burgers every night, and that’s doubly true when supposedly you eat an enormous amount of food.

Furthermore, how the fuck is Harry stocking his kitchen with burgers? Lightbulbs and the electrical system at large don’t work, but a refrigerator does? Maybe he’s got a freezer. If he has a well insulated one, then as long as the power comes on periodically, it could keep stuff reasonably cold. But those are pricey too.

I guess grumbling about rent is an acceptable poor, but eating crappy food isn’t. It’s okay to live by candlelight, because that’s not a poor person thing, but lacking appliances is uncool.

Harry then says he sees his kitty in a lightning flash.

though he had the cat-lazy look of any lounging feline, his ears were tilted forward, and his gaze focused unwaveringly upon the door.

Dog people, cats can also look alert. It’s not just a dog thing. The particular look of a cat crouching on top of a tall thing glaring at a door is full-body tenseness, ready to lunge or flee.

Then someone knocks. He gets scared, then eventually remembers his date with the not yet dead hooker.

I berated myself for getting spooked so easily, and then again for sleeping so long, and then again for looking and smelling like I hadn’t showered in a couple of days or combed my hair or shaved or anything else that might have made me marginally less unappealing. Ah, well. I got the impression that with Linda, that sort of thing didn’t seem to matter too much.

I hate this book.

So he heads for the door, but it’s poor Rodriguez and he’s like oooh shit right. Because he has shit for poker face, she immediately can tell he’s surprised it’s her at the door and gets suspicious.

Susan turned away from me as I hung up her coat. Her dress showed her back, the long curve of her spine, all the way down to her waist. It had a fairly tame hemline, and long, tight sleeves. I liked it. A lot.

And we learn more about Harry’s exact type. He wants you to be showing flesh, but in a classy way. Remember to stick to tame hemlines and keep those slutty wrists covered, womenfolk.

He tells us more about how she’s very pretty. She fishes for any info and Harry’s totally taken by surprise. He says he’s got to go take a shower, and Rodriquez has no complaint at all with that.

His cat continues to watch the door.

Get clean, I told myself. You smell like a horse. Get some cool water over your head and work this out. Linda Randall is going to be here in a minute, and you need to figure out how to keep Susan from prying her nose into the murders.

“Susan, I can’t go out because I have a concussion and might suddenly vomit on you and then die.”

He goes to get a cold shower because water heaters are too ritzy for him but steak isn’t.

Actually, given how often I, and wizards in general, get to date actual real women, maybe that’s just as well.

Wizards evidently aren’t women. They can’t even be lesbian only because then some of them could date each other.

He catches a glimpse of something outside and freaks out.

I leapt out of the shower, my head all a-sudsy, wrapped a towel around my waist, and headed out into the front room.
I couldn’t let Linda just come to the door and have Susan answer it. That would be the cattiest thing you’ve ever seen, and I would be the one to get all the scratches and bites, too.

I thought this was him realizing something else was going on, but nope, shower lunges are to avoid catfights.

Luckily Mister, a tomcat whose brain has probably pickled in testosterone, is still smarter than Harry and snarls at the door.

A figure stood in the doorway, rather squat, less than five feet tall, dressed in a plain brown trench coat, illuminated by blue lightning overhead. There was something wrong to the shape, something that just wasn’t a part of good old Mother Earth. It’s “head” turned to look at me, and sudden twin points of fire, as blue as the lightning dancing above, flared up, illuminating the leathery, inhuman curves of a face that most closely resembled that of a large and warty toad.

It’s demon time!

Rodriguez screams. Women.

The demon then spits acid at Harry and he watches it dissolve his couch.

He orders Rodriguez to hide in the kitchen, because apparently she was just standing there with no idea what to do. She then fails to do anything.

“Why isn’t it coming in?” Susan asked from the far corner, near the door. Her back was pressed to the wall, and her eyes were wide and terrified. My God, I thought, just don’t pass out on me, Susan.
“Homestead laws,” I said. “It isn’t a mortal creature. It has to gather its energy to push through the barrier around a home.”

But it can chuck acid with no problem.

Like with barriers in general, I feel the author doesn’t grasp the spirit of the rule. You can’t throw part of yourself through a barrier that’s keeping you out. It just doesn’t make sense. You can’t throw anything through it. Vampires aren’t allowed to knock on your door, spit you on a pike, and drag you out.

“Can it get in?” she said. Her voice was thin, reedy. She was asking questions, gathering information, data, falling back on her ingrained career instincts-because, I suspected, her rational brain had short-circuited.

While I am generally displeased, at least here Harry is saying she’s falling back on her professional behavior and that she’s normally rational, as opposed to “because her female brain short-circuited because it was so female”. And he goes on to say this is normal for people in general seeing a demon.

He drags her over to the door down to the subbasement, and Rodriquez notices that also, Harry’s naked. He clarifies that he’s lost the towel but you’re still pretty naked even if you’d kept your grip on it, this isn’t a comic book.

She fails to flee properly and then the demon pushes through the barrier, so he shoves her down and decides it’s time for magic. He uses Gust of Wind to blow the acid back at it.

The acid sizzled and spat little electric blue sparks on its skin, but it didn’t seem to harm the demon.

This is a pretty reasonable exchange. Harry likely wasn’t expecting the acid to do anything, but he didn’t want the acid to hit him and blowing it back on the demon accomplishes that fine, so he loses nothing finding out if he can hurt it with its own attacks in the process.

Harry then uses the same spell to blow his staff to him and tries to order it out, but it’s way stronger than him and he realizes it’ll happily burn through his strength in this shoving match, then kill him.

and it was not going to stop until I was dead or the sun had come up or one of any of a number of other unlikely conditions were met.

This is sort of an author shrug. What are the rules for demons? Whatever.

For everyone feeling in this position, I’m not saying you can’t use anything until you’ve mapped every inch out. But it’s like technobabble, there’s a good and bad way of doing it. In this case, one option would be for Harry to say that each demon has different summoning rules. He knows what banishes demons A, N, and G, but he doesn’t recognize this one. We could later follow this up when we find out that the magician behind this learned from some ancient book that’s been lost for a long time, so the particular magic spells and summoning he learned aren’t common knowledge.

(Harry could get hints of this fact when other things the magician does seem like square peg round hole issues – modern magicians, who talk to each other every blue moon, have filtered through various schools of thought to find the best one for different applications, so now everyone’s using the same dry cleaning charm. His enemy should be doing stuff off the beaten path, so Harry has no idea how to counter it, but isn’t actually particularly strong when it comes down to it, so Harry can work out a solution on the fly. Maybe the toad demon could be weak to salt and Harry would be all wtf people stopped using demons you could ward off with salt centuries ago when the stuff became common.)

“Why don’t you set it on fire? Shoot it! Blow it up!” Her voice had a searching quality to it, as though she were looking around, down there in the lab.
“I can’t,” I said to her. “I can’t pump enough juice into it to hurt the thing without blowing us up along with it.

Hey, that fits with my sympathetic magic theory. And…nothing else we see Harry ever actually do.

I’d have gone with, “Demons are super durable. And/or have magic resistance!” Maybe add in a touch of zombie – they’re not real living things, so they don’t have any vital organs. Stab it a million times and it’d just keep coming, barely slowed down. Hack it in half and it’s slowed, but both parts keep coming for you.

Harry thinks maybe he could draw it away and give her a chance to run, but then that it might just chase her down. So he remembers the escape potion, and not that it’s sitting right next to the love potion, and just says to drink “the potion”. (Actually, didn’t he take the escape potion? Did he ever put it back?)

“Nothing happened,” she said. “Dammit, Harry, we have to do something.” And then she came pounding up the ladder, dark eyes flashing, my .38 revolver in her hand.

Okay, so I guess he put the potion back when he put the gun back, which I also don’t remember actually happening but whatever.

Anyway, as you see here, she’s a coward and needs a daterape potion to be brave enough to get anywhere near the demon.

A .38 Chief’s Special carries six rounds, and I use a medium-speed load, rather than armor-piercing or explosive bullets or anything fancy like that. Fewer chances that something will go wrong in the presence of a lot of magic. A gun is a pretty simple machine. A revolver approaches very simple. Wheels, gears, and a simple lever impact to ignite the powder. It’s tough for magic to argue with physics, most of the time.

Because guns sure don’t regularly jam. Definitely they don’t explode in your hands if something goes particular wrong.

Rodriguez then misses three times and the rest of the bullets bounce off, so it seems like the right answer was indeed that demons are durable and not that Harry would explode them in the process. But one hits it in the head and this makes it fall, so he grabs her and drags her back down.

At my will, the tip of the staff I still held burst into light, illuminating the room.

So why doesn’t he just do that instead of candles? I would have bitched so much less at “I’m magic and I light my house because magic, magic magic magic.” He could have a few candles on hand for when he’s exhausted and just needs to stumble into his bed.

It’s at this point Bob the Rapist Skull wakes up. It makes little sense that he’d miss the screaming and gunshots, but I have a suspicion he’s faking. More in a second.

Harry doesn’t have time for this and is desperately trying to clear the floor.

I was struggling to get to the circle I had laid in the floor, a perfect ring of copper, an unbroken loop in the concrete that could be empowered to hold a demon in-or out.

You’ll recall, though, that Harry had no issue dropping leaves on top of the circle he drew last time and still having it work. And that was one just drawn in dirt, where putting extra stuff should’ve actually altered the circle itself.

He drags Rodriquez in and turns on the circle, and now it deflects the toad’s acid.

Given the toad itself was able to bust in, a much better explanation for the acid would’ve been for the toad to poke its head through the boundary and then spit, but need time to work the rest of itself through. That’d establish the boundary stops the acid too, which is a lot more consistent.

I could see it clearly in the light of my staff, and I wished that I couldn’t. It was horribly ugly, misshapen, foul, heavily muscled, and I compared it to a toad only because I knew of nothing else that even remotely approached a description of it.

Like with the heartspolosion being the worst thing ever, this doesn’t really impress. The author is passable at description but not at the level of awesome it takes to pull off being told something is a horror from beyond.

Harry says that definitely the demon will disappear at daybreak. I’m not sure if it’s occurred to him that there’s any connection to the storm. See, Rodriquez points out it’s not going to be hit by sunlight because basement. He says,

It’s got a sort of power cord stretching back to whoever summoned it. A fuel line. As soon as the sun comes up, that line gets cut, and he goes away, like a balloon with no air.”

Which means it doesn’t take a one time investment of energy but a constant stream. That means that if this is the same wizard who likes to use storms for a boost, it’s likely this demon’s fuel line goes right through the summoner and up into the thundercloud. Indeed, while standing in a circle for hours will likely be unpleasant, at least Harry could take some consolation from the fact if the demon does disappear early, he’s confirmed someone’s tapping the weather.

Even if he has no idea who, which sucks for Murphy, that’s still really good for him. He can go see Ol’ Naked Steel and say that he’s had a breakthrough. Morgan told him that he was the only guy around with that much power, but he just realized that the killing happened on the night of a storm. If there’s someone who knows how to tap storm power, then Morgan needs to widen his search net. Btw three eye ™ drug is actually magic, you guys should deal with that too, thanks! Tell me when you’re done and I’ll take credit because I know you’re all super into the masquerade business and wouldn’t want anyone knowing it was really you~

It’s at this point Bob the Rapist Skull starts saying he needs to tell Harry something important.

She looked up at me, her dark eyes smoky. “We’re going to die, aren’t we Harry? Have you ever thought you’d want to die making love?”

So yeah. Rape potion. The very next thing she says is “I’ve thought that, many times,” she said, against my skin. so unless you seriously think she spends her time thinking about how great it would be to die while mid-fuck, she’s been hijacked by a talking blowup doll.

“I tried to tell you,” Bob wailed. “I did! She grabbed the wrong potion and just chugged it down.” Bob’s skull turned toward me a bit, and the lights brightened. “You’ve got to admit, though. The love potion works great.”

Why, look at that. Bob the Rapist Skull’s description of events is now talking about what Rodriguez did while she was down there, before he supposedly woke up to wonder who she was, yet he’s talking about it as if he saw her drink.

It’s almost like Bob the Rapist Skull woke up much earlier, then sat there silently hoping she’d grab the wrong one.

Proving he’s little different, Harry’s objection to this turn of events is there’s no room so if they lie down to have sex they’ll end up out of the circle and demon chow. Because I mean, doing it on purpose would be cheating, but if you happen to get lucky, hey, all’s fair.