Last time, yes, this book is this terrible. Today, can it get worse? Yes. Yes, it fucking can.

Susan tugged at my neck and jerked my head down to hers for a kiss. As kisses went, well. It was, um,
extremely interesting. Perfectly passionate, abandoned, not a trace of self-consciousness or hesitation to it. Or at any rate not from her.

When I first read this, I thought it was an acknowledgement this isn’t her. Doesn’t actually have any connection to what the sentences are saying, it’s just hard to see anything but the elephant in the room.

No, it’s saying Harry’s got a trace of self-consciousness or hesitation. Just a trace, given:

I came up for air a minute later

But, you know, he comes up for air at all, so he’s the reluctant Romeo being jumped by hot women.

she stared up at me with burning eyes. “Take me, Harry. I need you.”
“Uh, Susan. That’s not really a good idea right now,” I said. The potion had taken hold of her hard.

Harry will insist this whole time that this is Susan in the grip of the potion, as opposed to the potion straight up puppeting her body, to the point he goes on to say, No wonder she had recovered from her terror enough to come back up the stairs and fire my gun at the demon. It had lowered her inhibitions to a sufficient degree that it must also have dulled her fears.

Mindlessly reciting porno dialogue is just what lowered inhibitions look like, boys, just like unconsciousness is consent.

She goes on to grope his erection. “Your mouth says no,” she purred, “but this says yes.” thus showing that sexism hurts men too. The book then goes out of its way to make it clear that yes, she’s so right Harry wants to fuck her and that erection totally does count as consent, it’s just that right this precise instant it’s a bad idea. Just like it’s not rape if she’s too drugged to say no, it’s not rape if the guy has an erection. Thanks, book. You’re really contributing great things to society.

She was beyond reason. The potion had kicked her libido into suicidal overdrive.

What also strikes me is she doesn’t seem to actually have much of a libido. All the sexuality comes off as a performance. We can extrapolate by the fact she’s trying so hard to convince Harry to say yes that she might want sex, but it seems to be all tied up in pleasing him. She’s not saying she wants to have sex, precisely, and she’s only interested in groping him, not being groped. There’s no sign of her being turned on and certainly Harry doesn’t seem concerned that saying no will just make her try to rape him. In fact, the focus is weirdly on staying upright, like as long as they’re standing sex just flat out can’t happen.

I’m not sure if this is that the author doesn’t even think of that or that a woman grabbing a guy’s dick is just a slightly off color joke but getting his hand in her vagina is XXXXX-rated nastiness so you can’t write women as anything but plasticy sex dolls and sell. But then again the Anita Blake books are just increasingly weird porn and they’re still on shelves, so who knows.

While Rodriquez is chewing his ear, Harry remembers the other potion that last I remember was in his coat but at some point he brought back down and put next to the love potion again. Bob says he could throw it to Harry (remember this for much later) and Harry says that he’ll let Bob out for five minutes.

“No, boss,” Bob said, his voice maddeningly cheerful.
“No? No?!”
“I get a twenty-four-hour leave, or nothing.”

See, tone is an important thing. Supposedly, the main issue right now is the demon, but the focus has shifted solidly to the wacky hijinks of a woman who wants to have sex with a man and a man saying no, which is hilarious because it’s the opposite of how things are supposed to work right? I mean that’s just crazy! And now we’ve completely lost the original imminent death threat to put the focus on put-upon Harry who’s got to bargain with the dumb skull.

Now, Bob not giving a shit about Harry’s life is fine. He’s a spirit, maybe they have no sense of morality. But this shouldn’t come as a surprise to Harry.

Furthermore, here’s Harry’s objection:

“Dammit, Bob! I’m responsible for what you do if I let you out! You know that!”

Not that the things Bob does are wrong, and Harry doesn’t want to cause them. That other people find them wrong, and Harry will be punished for it.

Susan whispered, into my ear, “I’m not wearing any underwear,”

And here’s where it really turns into a mess.

We keep getting told this is actual Susan with no inhibition, and now we’re being told she had no underwear from the start, so totally okay for Harry to sleep with her after all. It’s not wrong to take advantage of her now because whatever, she’s a slut. The potion is just speeding things up.

I would like to remind everyone that it’s not just that this is vile, but this is literally used in rape trials to prove that the woman is lying.

Harry releases Bob to go perpetuate more of this sort of thing in return for the potion, then they each drink half and he manages to get them to rematerialize outside.

and promptly sat down on her butt on the ground, in the rain. “Oh, God. I feel terrible.”

Turns out potions shouldn’t be mixed and now she’s sick but no longer love potioned, maybe. She doesn’t act like she’s a sex doll for the rest of the chapter, at any rate. Harry says there’s a road nearby that floods in the rain, and running water will hold the demon off. I’m dubious of this – running water is generally considered pure and good, but so’s rain and the demon’s doing fine in that. Running water vs the dead is a much stronger case. You even have a chance of screwing fairies up if you assume flowing water counts as a sort of boundary, maybe enough to be unpleasant or tiring to cross.

Plus, if running water’s actually a good solution to this: PIPES. All houses are now packed running water. Possibly this particular house was built in a way where all the pipes stay on the outer wall, but in that case it’s incredibly stupid of Harry to not consider “at least one water pipe runs across the house” as the deciding factor in choosing where to live, given apparently running water works on everything demon and presumably a lot of things that aren’t too.

Harry even claims running water is so potent It kills him if he tries to go over it after us,” so shouldn’t it be getting pretty messed up by the rain? Even if we assume that somehow, rain running down its body doesn’t count and the water has to be running over ground first, when it rains water is running over the ground all the time, and you’ve got to imagine the cumulative damage of crossing that many tiny rivers is adding up. That’s why most myths go with a scaling effect, where the more water the better a barrier it is, and also, and this is terribly important, generally say “can’t” not “could, but X would happen”.

In general, the more you understand, the less magical things are. This is here you get ideas like magic and technology being interchangeable – if “magic” follows rules, it’s science in a world with different physics.

If you know demons die if they try to cross running water, there’s stuff you can extrapolate from there – like, shoving a demon into running water might kill it too. If spraying it with a hose doesn’t work, maybe you need extra dirt to make it approximate a river, or maybe it’ll die if you spray directly in front of its feet. There are a lot of things you can guess are now reasonably likely. If you just know demons don’t cross running water, it’s a lot harder to make any guess how things work. Why don’t they cross running water? Maybe it hurts them, maybe they can’t perceive anything on the other side, maybe there’s no reason we can understand. What happens if you shove one into water? Well, maybe nothing, maybe it freezes in place until it’s out of the water, maybe it bounces off, maybe reality divides by zero then explodes you.

“Don’t cross” gives you almost nothing to work with. “Die” gives you a lot.

I think a lot of my complaints about the magic boil down to this issue. The author doesn’t seem to have thought out his magic system overall, but gives way too much detail on the few bits that do come up. If we’d just been told wizards fuck with complex technology so he needs an old car, think of how much less complaining I’d have done! “Complex technology” is a lot vaguer than “anything past the 1940s”.

But back to what Harry is saying, he now mentions that, by the way, mixing potions sometimes does irreversible horrible things. He gives no statistics on this, despite the fact it’s kind of relevant we know the odds when he just knowingly told her to risk it in large part because he was in danger – he never even figured out if the demon would attack her at all.

This would probably run more smoothly if Harry was shocked the mixed potions had a bad effect, because they generally don’t, but when they do it can mean irreversible horrible things happen.

But exploring Harry’s morality isn’t a concern. Or perhaps more accurately, the concern is in an entirely wrong direction.

Sick from the potions, Rodriguez collapses and throws up. The book says that, while naturally a fine alpha specimen like Harry is normally able to carry fainting dames, this time he’s exhausted and near collapse himself. It’s not clear if this is because he’s still fucked up from the concussion or because magic exhaustion = physical exhaustion. (Also, it’s unclear how much of his magic reserves are left in the first place – he said that if he kept up his shoving match with the demon, he’s eventually get exhausted, but that was why he almost immediately stopped, and since then all he did was trigger the circle. Hey, why couldn’t he have used his gust of wind to get the potion rather than release the rapist skull?)

With Rodriguez now thoroughly damseled, it’s time for the villain to show up. A voice speaks.

There, to one side, a spot of cold-not physical cold, but something deeper and darker that my other senses detected. A pooling of shadows, an illusion in the darkness between lights, gone when lightning flashed and back again when it had passed.

Okay, so let’s insist this is second sight, I think that works best. Harry is clearly perceiving something with his wizard senses that is distinct from turning on third sight.

“Do you expect me to give you my name?” the shadows scorned. “Suffice to say that I am the one who has killed you.”

I really have to point out there is literally no point to this guy showing up in the first place. In terms of stupid mistakes, showing up to taunt your victim is so stupid that giving a name really doesn’t make it worse. For that matter, Harry shouldn’t need the name once he survives this and has a second to think about what happened.

Mind you, Harry apparently can’t even tell if the voice is male or female, but I’m going to choose to interpret this as him refusing to let go of his insistence the villain was a woman. If the voice sounded even slightly feminine, he’s be doing a little jig of TAKE THAT MURPHY IT TOTALLY WAS A WITCH, but since it’s masculine, he’s left waffling about well who knows really.

He does point out that hello, kind of not dead. I feel this is a much bigger point than in most stories. Wizards have a great deal of power and their main limiting factors are usually current world-rending juice quantity and knowledge of where to aim the world-rending. A wizard botching an assassination of another wizard just ran through his own juice while painting a bullseye on him.

Sure, Harry has no clue who he is or how to find him, but Harry forgot he had a wind summon spell and had to barter with his pet rapist skull. Harry knew there was a drug on the street claiming to give wizard vision that called itself by the term wizards use for said vision and had effects that matched what wizard vision is actually like and ignored the possibility it might have anything to do with actual wizards until some guy thirdeyed him to his face about how he was a wizard with wizard scars only wizards can see.

“Soon,” the shape said. “You can’t last much longer. My demon will finish you before another ten minutes have passed.”

Bear in mind at this point they’re thirty feet from safety. It’s not just that a lot can happen in ten minutes, it’s that one of those things is already in progress.

I guess this works if you assume this is a massive bluff. The guy realizes his demon isn’t going to catch them in time, so he pops up to gloat sure that Harry will care more about asserting that he’s the most alphaest. And indeed, instead of trying to get Rodriguez moving again (or just dragging her, the ground’s even nice and slippery and they’re presumably going downhill) Harry proceeds to lecture him about how it’s crazy to summon demons because they’re dangerous when they get loose. Bear in mind this is the guy who’s using storms to get bonus power, which Harry already said is so insanely stupid dangerous it didn’t even occur to him anyone would do it, while he’s clearly familiar with demons. This is like criticizing someone playing Russian roulette for smoking.

Harry extended my senses toward the shape, however this all works. Sense-extending happens a lot when dealing with extra senses, probably because it’s hard to actually remember to have them always on but it’s easy to say the character extends them to check when you think of something they should notice.

Anyway, he says it’s sort of like a hologram. (Harry uses odd comparisons for someone who probably can’t even watch the original Star Trek.) He pokes it with his senses and it’s all wtf.

The image cried out in surprise and reeled back. “How did you do that?” it snarled.
“I went to school.”

So Harry should know exactly what’s going on and who this is at this point.

The hologram growled, then raised up its voice, calling out in rolling syllables. I tried to hear what had been said, but another peal of thunder blocked out the middle half of what was undoubtedly the demon’s name.
From within my apartment, the distant, faint sound of the demon’s smashing ruckus came to an abrupt halt.

…huh, I totally forgot this is how this went. So not only could hologrammy here have informed the demon to go after Harry at any time, but Harry would’ve had plenty more time to get to safety if he hasn’t been spending his time arguing with the other guy and then poking him instead of trying to find out any useful info.

“Now,” the image said, a sneer to its voice. “Now you will pay.”
“Why are you doing this?” I demanded.
“You’re in my way.”
“Let the woman go.”
“Sorry,” the image said. “She’s seen too much. She’s in the way, too, now. My demon will kill you both.”
“You bastard,” I snarled.
It laughed at me.

Harry has repeatedly antagonized this guy in their conversation, and yet now he’s surprised that the guy who was already trying to kill him is committing to killing him.

I also like how very token the effort with Rodriguez is. This isn’t about saving her, it’s about establishing hero vs villain. Harry doesn’t try to talk the guy out of it by saying she’s a mundane and all she’d know is that the acid-spitting demon ate him, plus he’s got a spirit he released that saw the demon too and actually has a chance in hell of telling anyone who can do something based on that info. Harry doesn’t go off the fact he just said he knows this guy has no schooling and likely doesn’t understand how wizards work to bullshit about how wizards accept that wizards kill each other but involving other people will get them investigating the criminal.

His response to the guy he antagonized not doing what he asked? Swearing at him, because being alpha male is so much more important than helping Rodriguez.

It’s kind of like how, in Graceling, Katsa claims she’s upset by the noble facing what she’s going to do calmly, because when people beg and plead for her not to hurt them, that makes it okay to torture them. And while it’s rare to have someone say so outright, it’s far from unique in attitude. We really loathe the idea of begging for some reason. I can sort of understand the concept of dying with dignity for yourself, but when it’s someone else’s life on the line and you feel your ego is more important…

Speaking of, Harry sees the demon coming and so decides the first order of business to send a full-fledged attack. ” Stregallum finitas.”
Scarlet light abruptly flooded over it, devouring its edges and moving inward.

At the image. The hologram. Not the demon.

Incidentally, somehow this makes it/the magician give a scream of anguish because REASON NOT FOUND. I’m going to just go with backlash and not think about what’s even the point of a hologram spell if people can still attack you through it.

(Also, what connection does this have to Harry being about to fall over?)

I looked back at the water, gauging the thing’s speed. It was coming, fast, but not quite as fast as a man could run. I could still escape it, if I ran, full out.

I think this is just a minor error. Harry earlier said that in addition to being stronger, the demon was faster, which was why they couldn’t just run for it. Now, apparently its top speed is less than Harry’s – and he’s got a good lead.

So what I think the author means is that the demon is coming but Harry has enough distance that, at top speed, the demon won’t be able to reach him before he reaches the water. That fits far better, and it also works with his statement that if he slows down for any reason, like trying to lug Rodriguez, they’ll both die.

As I said a bit before, the book has no problem with Harry endangering Rodriguez by telling her to drink the potion, just as it saw no purpose in having him acknowledge fucking someone after a love potion would be rape and he didn’t want to do that to anyone, regardless of if there was a toad demon about to kill him.

No, the point that it needs to defend Harry on is his stance on abandoning women to be eaten by demons. That he does have an issue with.

I think it’s very telling that harming Rodriguez in the process of his escape plan (the second potion) is completely appropriate, but her coming to harm because of something another man does is unacceptable. Because this is ultimately all about his own ego.

This is an important part of the women in refrigerators complaint – it’s not just that they mostly exist as secondary characters and so are used to motivate protagonists, not just that their deaths are viewed almost entirely in how it affects the protagonist. There’s also the fact that it’s presented as much as insult as anything – that the issue is not a person died, but that it shows the villain is smarter/more powerful than the hero. It’s all about being the alpha male.

I was exhausted, and it had caught me unprepared. The heavy rain would keep fire, man’s ancient weapon against the darkness and the things it hid, from being effective in holding it back. And I didn’t have enough left in me to do anything else. It would be as good as suicide to stand against it.
Susan sobbed on the ground, helpless in the rain, sick from my potions, unable to rise.
I leaned my head back and let the rain wash the last traces of shampoo from my eyes, my hair. Then I turned, took a step toward the oncoming demon. I couldn’t leave Susan to that thing. Not even if it meant dying. I’d never be able to live with myself afterward.
The demon squalled something at me in its hissing, toady voice, and raised both its hands toward me, coming up onto its hind legs. Lightning flashed overhead, blinding bright.

It’s all about being the alpha male.

Harry suddenly realizes that we’ve only spent a chapter or two on the subject of storm power and he’s currently under attack by someone using storm power, so, what if he used storm power, the thing we were told over and over didn’t occur to him because it was just as much suicide to try using?

This was dangerous work, tapping the storm. There was no ritual to give it shape, no circle to protect me, not even words to shield my mind from the way the energies of magic would course through it

So to recap: no one ever uses storm energy, because it’s suicidally dangerous. Also, the reason it’s dangerous here is because Harry’s doing it with zero prep work.

Would you believe one of the things this gets recced for is its great magic system?

At my will, a spark leapt up from the tip of my staff toward the clouds above. It touched the rolling, restless belly of the storm.
Hell roared down in response.
Lightning, white-hot fury, with a torrent of wind and rain, all fell upon me, centered around the staff. I felt the power hit the end of the soaking wet wood with a jolt like a sledgehammer. It coursed down the staff and into my hand, making my muscles convulse, bowing my naked body with the strain. It took everything I had to hold the image of what I wanted in my mind, to keep my hand pointed at the demon as it came for me, to keep the energy surging through me to wreak its havoc on flesh less tender than mine.

Best part: Mr. Ten Mile Sword just saw all of Harry’s naked lightning.

Susan sat up, blinking, her face blank. She stared at me.
“What are you doing next Saturday?” I asked her.
She just kept on staring for a minute. And then quietly lay down again on her side.

God, Rodriguez. I’m sorry you’re in this book, but you make it easier on me.

But yeah, Ten Mile Sword is here now to say that obviously Harry just summoned that demon, because people are so unfair to Harry. Harry points out he killed it, which is like the the opposite of summoning, doy.

“I saw you defend yourself against it,” Morgan said. “But I didn’t see anyone else summon it. You probably called it up yourself and lost control of it.

I guess part of the reason the magic system isn’t fleshed out is that the author, somewhat rightfully, feels it’s irrelevant. We don’t need to know if this is a reasonable statement or not, after all – Harry is Main Character, Morgan is Antagonist, so whether or not the specifics of his accusation are extremely plausible or flat-out insane doesn’t matter, does it? It’s not like Harry can justify his actions, beliefs, attitude, etc, on anything but being Main Character.

The problem is it’s completely at odds with character type. We’re told that, supposedly, Morgan is a sort of noble antagonist, where he sincerely believes Harry’s evil and furthermore (and this is the real problem) won’t break rules to get him killed. That means what he’s saying has to be something completely reasonable, despite it not making much sense. But the character type is supposed to be understandable, and nothing he says makes sense. Does he just literally mean “I just got here while it was attacking you, and I don’t see anybody else, so it’s your fault”? Is there some valid reason why it’s very weird for a demon to be moving more than a short distance from the summoner? Because that’s at complete odds with how Harry reacted to it and its general actions. Does this prove Morgan is so devoted to his one true love of LAW that he doesn’t even notice Harry’s naked and that it’s a bit weird for him to have been summoning naked? Or do you have to be naked for a good summon, so Morgan’s actually being totally reasonable with his disbelief. Like sure, maybe you just happened to be eating raw meat for this new diet and were really messy about it and then heard someone screaming outside so you rushed out and that’s why you’ve got blood on your mouth while standing over a chewed corpse.

Morgan goes on to be all LOL like that’d have beaten me and Harry, being the clever little detective he is, says basically that he has totally worked out he could take Morgan sans demon, which seems like it’s worse than usual because Harry went on and on and fucking on about how figuring out the spell for heartsplosions would get him stabbed good by some long hard steel, so clearly wizards are completely into the idea of thoughtcrime, and here he seems to be saying that he totally worked out how to take out the guy in charge of stopping him if he goes evil.

Furthermore, he says “I sure as hell wouldn’t risk calling up a demon which, like the storm, seems to be one of those things that really doesn’t seem to have half the risks people are saying it does. Like, I’m sure you could fuck up either, but there’s no sign of what makes them the most dangerous things ever, and Harry will in fact go on to summon demons and for stupider purposes than not getting his head cut off.

Anyway at this point Morgan is 110% done with this and says he’s already called a wizard meeting to stamp his I CAN HAZ MURDER NAO form.

Morgan smiled at me, the kind of smile sharks reserve for baby seals.

Actually baby seals aren’t really preferable shark food. Well, I guess it depends on size.

“Dawn, on Monday, you will be brought before them. I don’t usually enjoy my position as executioner, Harry Blackstone Copperfield Dresden. But in your case, I am proud to fulfill that role.”

See what I mean about this being so confused? We’re not given any basis for why he’s saying this stuff, so we’re clearly meant to treat it as a matter of antagonist bad, protagonist poor woobie baby. But we’re also told that he’s supposedly a good guy who doesn’t get off on murdering things and there’s something about. So that means he should have some sort of point to his accusations, but then we need enough of a grasp of the world to understand why Harry’s so unlucky to have someone legitimately thinking he’s evil.

Anyway, Harry just freaks that his name was just pronounced almost right, and thinks that probably Morgan knows his name exactly because some people at Wizardmoot know it and could’ve told him, plus it’s a reminder that even if Morgan doesn’t yet, the wizarding body at large has people who’ll be able to hunt him.

Monday morning, Morgan would bring his suspicions and level his accusations, and it would likely be enough to get me voted dead. Whoever Mister or Miss Shadows was, I had to find him, her, it, or them before Monday morning, or I was as good as dead.

So going with the history of this being an attempt to actually do what his teacher suggested he do for once, I guess maybe the reason there doesn’t seem to be much underpinning the character is that he was following a checklist and deliberately refusing to give a fuck about why. Noir has the detective get into steadily worse situations, and here we are checking off “situation gets worse”. Why does the situation get worse? Uh. Cuz.

I mean, apparently Morgan’s “I tots saw him lightningspode a demon” is enough evidence to convict Harry of illegally summoning demons, because wizards are apparently dumb as rocks. But in that case, finding the other wizard will do jack shit. No one will take Harry’s word for it, nor the word of a witness given Morgan gave negative fucks about Rodriguez’ presence. (Regardless of if wizards are the sort of dicks to say mortal testimony doesn’t count, that Morgan doesn’t even ask when he has an interest in knowing what happened suggests it wouldn’t matter if all of Chicago lined up to confirm Harry’s shower alibi.) That leaves the wizard confessing, which should be useless because not only do wizards regularly do master/apprentice stuff and not only are they good enough at working in groups to have a (worldspanning?) wizard council, but also Harry just told us that wizards can totally work together on the same spell, so Harry and the other guy could’ve teamed up to heartsplode and demon summon. The other guy saying he was working alone doesn’t matter, since he has every reason to lie, which brings us to our next problem, the other guy has no reason not to blame Harry in his confession. And that’s assuming Harry drags him in alive somehow.

You just can’t have a plot about how solving the case is now personal as the detective is going to take the fall otherwise without having a justice system that works on some level. That’s why it’s important to have reasons why people are blaming the detective, so that it’s established that if the detective can give them better evidence of the true culprit, they’ll willingly accept it. It’s also important to have more evenhanded higher authorities, but Harry says nothing about the fact that he’s worried Morgan will lie to get him convicted and so he needs his own evidence, and expresses absolute certainty that they would absolutely vote to murder him on the basis of a demon existing without anyone dancing next to it shouting they’re the one who summoned it.

Here’s a good one: Harry just did the thing he figured out the killer’s doing. Morgan has come to the same conclusion (bonus – that’s what Morgan was talking about this entire time, he didn’t mean he thought regular Harry could group heartsplode people), and seeing Harry lightningsplode a demon proves he’s talented at harnessing the storm. Instead of Harry being a total badass, maybe Harry could collapse from the drain and Morgan could be all “I don’t know what shocks me more about trying that gambit, that you think I’m that stupid or how willingly you humiliate yourself, god I hate you so much” while Harry’s all “no but seriously I need an ambulance I think I cooked my spleen” and Morgan’s just “you’re already going to die could you at least not go out lying to the wizard police, you scum” and stalks off. Then maybe Harry tries to use Rodriguez’ cellphone but it blows up.

And now Morgan has a totally great argument for the wizard council! Binding a demon takes lots of energy, so Occam’s razor is that after heartsploding people with Storm 1, Harry, scared by Morgan, decided to summon a demon with Storm 2, but while the volatile energy is a perfect fit for heartsploding, it’s absolute shit at binding, allowing Harry to summon a really nasty demon but have no chance of controlling it. He then taps the storm again to save himself from it.

That makes much more sense than that Harry’s been running around after the case because he’s such a fuckup he’s out of money despite how much he makes and how numerous witnesses can confirm he hasn’t been acting like money was an issue (“I mean who pays $20 for regular coffee?” the fairy adds, “Do you know how much pizza you could get for that? I mean assuming you left the airport.”), and that it was only this desperation for the sweet payout of police money that’s behind him scrawling out calculations on heartsploding, and then despite being in it for the money he goes to harass Bianca (can’t you just see her sobbing about how he was just so amazingly strong, unnaturally even? that’ll teach you to sear a lady’s face off, Harry) even though he’s not getting paid for that and other witnesses can confirm was told repeatedly not to, so it would seem he risked losing the money by pursuing it, and then right after he contacts the lead Bianca gave him the woman dies, and also somehow the real killer came after him, but didn’t use his signature heartsplode, but it was totally the same guy, who showed up to tell Harry this for no reason, at which point Harry effortlessly wizardpunched him away despite claiming this guy is a powerhouse and that’s why Morgan didn’t see any spectre hanging around to give orders by the time he arrived, and then Harry rolled a crit on his first storm-tapping attempt and another crit on his save vs lightning.

Anyway, for a better attempt at this, the mundane cops have arrived, and we’ll see Harry getting in semi-legitimate trouble shortly. For now, we end on still another sour note.

Susan shielded her eyes and then looked at the spotlight. All the throwing up she’d done must have gotten rid of the potion in her, ended its amorous effects. “This,” she said, in a calm and dispassionate voice, “is the worst night of my life.” The officers got out of the car and started toward us.
I grunted. “That’s what you get for trying to go out with a wizard.”
She glanced aside at me, and her eyes glittered darkly for a moment. She almost smiled, and there was a sort of vindictive satisfaction to her tone when she spoke. “But it’s going to make a fantastic story.”

See, everyone? Ladies don’t mind a guy having roofies just lying around or anything. You’d have to be some ball-busting feminazi to take issue with that. Harry’s fiery Latina is just cranky so much went wrong when she was intending to have a nice night out, because Harry has no luck with women.