Ah, the ides of January. Let’s check in on these idiots.

The Merlin’s evil anti-Harry plan is accurately pointing out that they need a full Senior Council even more now that the wolves are at the gate.

“Let me guess,” I whispered. “He wants to fill the opening on the Senior Council so that he’ll be able to control the vote?”

I’m pretty sure he wants to fill the opening because the previous guy is dead and the wolves are at the gate, Harry. I really doubt he’s having to choose between “the person best for the job” and “the person who’ll agree with me Harry is a problem” – and yes, this is true even if he thinks disagreeing with him about you would disqualify an otherwise fine candidate, because you are at the center of this mess and he is trying to pick someone he thinks will help with the mess, no one would pick someone who was starting from the position of disagreeing about what the mess even is.

Ebenezar explains that this is but plan 1 of 3 for screwing Harry.

“He always does things that way,” Ebenezar muttered. His eyes glittered with something ugly. “A plan, a backup plan, and an ace in the hole.

Why “something ugly”? Given Ebenezar is (supposedly) good, this can’t be just hatefulness for the sake of it. It should be a reflection of something done to Ebenezar. But this kind of a reaction suggests something really bad happened due to the Merlin having enough backup plans to get what he wanted. That’s pretty worrying when this is the leader of the WC, and especially worrying when it’s coming from one of the eldest members. (And why wouldn’t Harry know the details, if so? It doesn’t seem like Ebenezar kept quiet about his feelings on the WC when Harry was living with him, and the shit the WC can pull would’ve been directly relevant for Harry to know at the time. Maybe it’s something too awful to bring up at all.)

But that’s assuming we’re dealing with a person who functions in person ways, and that may not be true, because what Ebenezar says next is some certified fae stuff:

I’ll shoot down the first one, and I’ll help you with the second. The third is all yours, though.”

See? That makes no sense.

If Ebenezar knows what all three plans are, then even if the third is completely impossible for Ebenezar to interact with, he could tell Harry in advance so Harry could start planning. (Forewarning Harry of the second would also improve the odds, and forewarning Harry of the first would still help just in case Harry does something that’ll ruin Ebenezar’s plan for dealing with it.) But if Ebenezar doesn’t know what the third is, which is the only reason to stay silent about it, he wouldn’t know for sure only Harry could deal with it.

This sequence of do it for you/help you halfway/it’s all on you? That’s something you get in fairy tales, because it’s a pleasing pattern. It’s not how things actually go between human beings. (It’s also intensely weird that it would happen to work out this way at all – you’d think the first plan the Merlin tries would be the stronger one, but it can’t be “I’ll help you with the first and shoot down the second” because that wouldn’t be escalating tension.)

Now, you might think the WC would notice one of their members getting eaten and replaced by a fae. But consider this: Ebenezar has been avoiding WC meetings. His stated reason is finding the politicking tiresome, but what we’re seeing here is him diving right into that politicking – not impossible someone could be good at it but not like it, but definitely odd, as is the way he seems to be acting like he hasn’t missed anything, which would require him to have kept up on the political situation this whole time and that’s definitely not what someone avoiding tedious politics would do. And he hasn’t been socializing because he’s been stuck to Harry. That’s not in itself suspicious, but it does mean there’s been few/no opportunities for the other wizards to notice if he’s acting strange in other ways. And that’s assuming this is a straightforward fae doppelganger situation. If it’s more a matter of him getting influenced and gradually coming around to their line of thinking… Fae changing people slowly (sometimes just through contact, even) is common enough in stories, plus, if Lea can turn people into fae dogs, a transformation from human to humanish fae should be easy. And Harry sure seems familiar, even chummy, with the more common fae. Really unlikely he’d act like that if Ebenezar was at odds with them.

A balding wizard with bristling white eyebrows and a bushy blue beard, his scalp covered in flowing blue tattoos, leaned forward from the far side of the table and glared at me. “Shhhhh.”

Also, evidence continues to accrue for the theory the wizards are badly gender imbalanced and probably racially imbalanced – sure, that scalp could be brown next to the blue, but you really think Harry wouldn’t mention it?

On to our also male Council candidate: Klaus Schneider Just in case you forgot this was the German dude here to German German German.

Martha says that they’re supposed to debate appointments to the Council, and when the Merlin evilly reminds them that look, can we just get this done, Listens to Wind (that is not how the narration refers to him, though it is how the evil Merlin speaks to him) says nope, he’s going to complain that the dude is young for such a responsibility. There are wizards present who are his senior in experience and the Art.

And the Merlin evilly makes yet another bid for oh my god people can we please move along: There is no one present senior to Wizard Schneider who has not already declined a seat upon the Senior Council

This is interesting, because while Listens to Wind phrased it as if it was a matter of merit that just happened to overlap a lot with age, the Merlin’s phrasing here is that the Senior Council is literally just made of the most senior wizards who didn’t refuse the seat. (And, in a moment, we’re going to get the Merlin’s version confirmed.)

That suggests that unless the last few days involved the vampires absolutely decimating the ranks of the wizards, they’re either naturally lacking in what they consider “old enough” (is there a spike of attrition around the first century or so? if so, why?), Listens to Wind is flat-out lying in his excuse (and everyone knows as much) to forward his agenda of blocking the Merlin’s pick for the sake of it, or it’s normal for most of the wizards with any power and experience to refuse to have anything to do with the WC.

The Merlin evilly claims he just didn’t want to waste ages on the call and response of “name?” “still not interested”, to which Ebenezar accuses:

sotto voce but loud enough for the Merlin to hear him, in English. “You had intended to shove your favorite down everyone’s throats while they were too worried to notice.”

And yeah, that’s presumably the intent, but god is it not being pulled off well.

We need to have some idea of how this usually works. Given wizard lifespans and how very important the WC is, it would make sense that appointments to the council are serious business and normally involve an enormous amount of debate. Tie that to the bit about how it seems most of them didn’t even know the guy was dead, and you can easily spin this as the Merlin using the current war to consolidate his power.

But we’re about to see that the appointments are almost entirely seniority and take only as long as it takes to run down a list followed by a vote. Even if you assume this is faster than usual (and I don’t buy that given most of the time is spent reading the list to hear that the person hasn’t shown up, instead of just “hey, is anyone over five hundred years in attendance? okay, anyone over four hundred?”) faster than usual is still going to be proportional to the usual timeframe. In this case, it’s a question followed by people saying Aye in a way that sounds kinda consensusy. (And yes, that sure does seem like an easy system to game. I’m not saying I expect much from wizards, but given they have magic that can probably manage to alter sounds, it seems like they should be a bit more rigorous than “I think it sounded like 51% of the people here made a noise so it is now law”.)

It’s hard to portray the Merlin as subverting everything for personal gain when we have no grounding for what’s being subverted.

It’d also have helped a lot for the Merlin to be trying to rile people up more than just “welp, somebody’s dead, vampires, chop chop people”. Show him really playing up the crowd’s fears before claiming he’s manipulating them.

…Also? Why English? The whole point of the accusation is for the rest of the wizards to hear it.

Furthermore, it seems like whatever bad blood was implied by Ebenezar’s nasty glimmer is very mutual:

“Go back to your mountain, Ebenezar. Back to your sheep. You are not welcome here, and never have been.”

But! Everyone else just heard the head of their government tell one of their citizens – one of their most senior and respected citizens, no less – to fuck off from the entire organization.

This seems like a massively bad idea, politically, and that’s even before we get to the specific fact that the Merlin is about to try to convince the wizards that he’s being impartial when calling for Harry, yes the guy Ebenezar is standing next to, yes the one Ebenezar practically adopted, that one, yeah he needs to be murdered and it’s got nothing to do with trying to get back at Ebenezar. (Or the more general fact that shouting I AM MASSIVELY BIASED AGAINST INDIVIDUALS in response to someone accusing you of trying to pack the court is…well, less than an ideal reaction.)

Anyone with any ounce of sense should be sticking to the high road right now.

(Also apparently the Merlin’s got a British accent and Ebenezar is Scottish, and I think it’s supposed to be that there’s preexisting ethnic tension, but given wizard ages, I’m dubious such a division would outweigh the division between you and your countrymen several hundred years later. People in even the same continent probably glom together like expatriates so long as it wasn’t on the level of the Native American genocide. And speaking of America, Ebenezar being a Scottish-born dude who moved to America means that the bit about the Merlin wanting a German instead of another American is nonsense.)

But anyway. I will say the list of reasons why the elder wizards aren’t there is great.

“Research trip in the Yucatán,” Martha Liberty said.
Peabody nodded. “Wizard Gomez.”
“Still sleeping off that potion
…
“He got real married,” “Living under the polar ice cap,” and “Pyramid sitting,”

This is all a great eldritch touch the books could have used more of. Obviously there shouldn’t be too much of it in the main storyline – Harry’s supposed to be noir detective on the streets wizarding. But the best way to really feel how human he is, as well as play into the whole being the only one in the phone book and viewing himself as an ambassador between the magic and mundane worlds, would be to have the elder wizards be a remote and alien contrast. The WC is already designed to have difficult rules and be utterly unhelpful, but currently the former’s being done by them just enforcing the rules unreasonably, rather than that the rules themselves are bizarre, and the latter by ERROR REASON NOT FOUND.

I particularly love the potion one. It’s not that weird, just a tad mad-sciencey! But the tone suggests this is what they said the last time this came up, if not several times before. We’re talking years if not decades here. Think about how detached from the world you have to be for that to seem like no big deal.

Consider the first book. What if instead of the threat being Harry getting executed by the council, it was getting dragged off for another trial by a bunch of people who not only don’t have laws about due process but even if you explained would be just ??? we’re just asking for a couple years of your time, jeeze, I can’t believe you’re acting like this is some huge imposition. Harry’s issue is trying to solve the case before Morgan arrests him/murders him for resisting arrest, and trying to ask for help about the case is similarly futile because senior wizards think “urgent” means “within the century”. (This would also allow room for Morgan to be doing abusive shit like threatening to arrest Harry over nothing if it’s important we view him as an evil rather than heroic antagonist – active enforcers are probably similarly younger, more human wizards, so they’re able to take the laws made by the out of touch elders and use them for wholly unintended purposes.)

(Incidentally, one of the people speaking is in a grey robe – they’re by the wall, so I think they’re an apprentice, but those wear brown robes, and full wizards wear black ones. Most likely explanation is the author forgot, interesting explanation is that we now have proof there’s a stage between the two that Harry missed out on and he’s not so much a legitimate full wizard as a high school dropout who’s gotten an honorary PhD in what seemed like a nice gesture but was actually a bid to make sure he never actually went to further classes.)

Anyway, everyone older than Ebenezar is absent, and everyone between him and Schneider is absent – which is just a half dozen names, so unless something incredibly weird is going on with their death rates, it does not seem like there’s any legitimate reason to claim Schneider isn’t old enough.

Then something happens that just makes the whole what we’re told vs what seems to be happening problem get worse:

A small, round-cheeked man with a fringe of gauzy white down over his scalp and a round belly stretching his robes stood up and gave Ebenezar a brief nod. Then he looked up at the Merlin and said, in Latin with a heavy Germanic accent, “While I am grateful for the offer, honored Merlin, I must respectfully decline your nomination, in favor of Wizard McCoy. He will serve the Council more ably than I.”

See, this does not exactly scream “hand-picked yes-man”. In fact, it may be worth bringing up that Ebenezar normally doesn’t show up for these either, meaning that the Merlin’s evil attempt to shove his choice down everyone’s throat with a too-young pick violating all established protocol was to nominate the oldest wizard he expected to attend. (You could argue the guy is only attending at all because he was told this, but the other characters have not been shy accusing the Merlin of things and yet they’ve made no such claim.) And it may also be worth considering that, while we’re told to root against the Merlin because he’s going to unfairly screw Harry if he succeeds at anything, so far it was Ebenezar who went after him first and then we learn the two just outright loathe each other. If the Merlin was manipulating anything, it seems more likely he was just trying to keep Ebenezar off the council far more than he was trying to get anyone else in particular on – and, since again, Ebenezar does not seem to be behaving any better…

Let’s consider Ebenezar as a council member.

He responded to the Merlin’s talk about holy shit guys the vampires this is serious and we have to deal with it now and as a community with accusations against the Merlin’s leadership that manipulating the community as a whole, making it clear that he thought the Merlin wanting something was reason enough to try to block it, and a demand that no, they go exactly as slow as they always do. Also, he’s only taking this seat because of his strong ties with Mr. Aggroed The Vampires himself.

Would anyone, in the Merlin’s position, not do everything in their power to avoid having to work with this guy?

Furthermore, I’d like to return to my complaint about Ebenezar being a demisue to support Harry. This all would just be so much better if Ebenezar forced the issue in order to get someone else on the council – then, the accusation that the Merlin’s actions were a political play would have a point, because he was trying to sway one of the older wizards who didn’t really want to get involved into taking the position by suggesting if they don’t, the Merlin’s going to stomp all over their independence. There’d be tension on if people who’d presumably had refused previously would accept the position now, and then when they did, more tension because we couldn’t be sure of the person’s vote. Harry getting his greatest supporter on the WC is ridiculous and part of the general failure of these books to have any grasp of what being an underdog is.

Especially when it’s followed by a call for anyone else to throw their hat in, which even Harry knows isn’t going to happen: I was betting no one would, especially given the looks on the faces of the wizards nearby.

The Merlin does not appear to have much power if the actual body of wizards is this unified against him, and Harry clearly can’t be that badly regarded given Ebenezar’s extremely public support of him isn’t giving anyone pause.

“All in favor?”
The room rumbled with a second, more affirmative “Aye.”

Just want to really emphasize what a stupid way of doing it this is.

And that’s that, Ebenezar is now in the wizard government, after introducing us to the topic with “the Merlin’s picked somebody, and also even though I have senority he won’t let me be one of the picks because he thinks there’s too many Americans”.

Now to the next item and, because the world revolves around Harry, presumably right to the next evil plot to evilly have him face consequences for his actions. Morgan’s here!

Morgan placed a glittering gem or crystal of some kind upon the podium. Behind that, he set a candle, which he lit with a muttered incantation. Then he framed the candle with his hands and murmured again.

This makes the crystal make a hologram of the Earth. Very torn on this. See, it’s cool – when aren’t crystals cool – but this is magic, why would they need a light source and something to refract it?

the Earth, its continents vaguely misshapen, like something drawn from a couple of centuries past.

First, I refuse to believe Harry has even the vaguest idea of what the Earth’s continents look like, let alone that he can easily identify outdated maps.

Second, I refuse to believe that a magic representation of a globe had to be drawn. It’s magic.

A murmur ran through the room, and Bluebeard, at my table, muttered in Latin, “Impressive.”
“Bah,” I said in English. “He stole that from Return of the Jedi.”

Nothing about this exchange makes sense.

It isn’t actually impressive given how, again, magic.

It definitely shouldn’t be impressive to a far older wizard who’s been actually showing up to the council meetings.

It is utterly absurd to say that Morgan using what’s almost certainly standard-issue council tech stole it off a movie none of them watched – and I include Harry in that, it’s way past his cutoff date for safe technology use.

The only thing that’s actually going on is the author stole the idea from a movie, and why exactly would you think having your mouthpiece pretend that’s an unimpressive hack move help with that?

Bluebeard blinked at me, uncomprehending.

Harry thinks this is because the guy doesn’t speak English, but it’s not like speaking English would help. It certainly didn’t help me.

We also learn Morgan’s Latin is “rough” which, given this is a major component of wizard culture and it’s more likely Harry’s education just sucked, fits well with the idea Morgan’s quite young himself. (And also, possibly hasn’t been showing up at these himself? Which would actually fit fine with how he uses them as a threat a lot but not only doesn’t seem to have any power over what they do, but can’t even reasonably predict how they’ll take things.)

Red lights appear on the holomap showing where the vampires have attacked. It sounds like a lot:

like the glowing lights of a Christmas tree.

Yeah, I’m going to reiterate that the wizards are completely fucked. The vampire’s opening move was to murder everyone who knew how to fight them, so I think we can assume “vampire attack” and “our people were slaughtered” are the same thing.

While Harry says they’re scattered all over, fitting perfectly with the Christmas tree metaphor, Morgan says,

“As you can see, most of the activity has taken place in Western Europe

Well, Harry self-evidently can’t see that, so either it’s actually very subtle and Morgan is just using that as a filler phrase to lead in to the topic, or Harry is extremely bad at extrapolating from data points, which…well, actually that makes the last three books make perfect sense, doesn’t it?

Harry then tells us that The Old World was the domain of the Old School of wizardry— the “maintain secrecy and don’t attract attention” way of thinking. and then does his bit about how he’s a phone book wizard and the only one in there, apparently not noticing that it makes little sense to say “over there it’s Masquerade-o-clock unlike here, also no one here is publicly a wizard I’m just special like that”. He doesn’t even phrase it like “the wizards wouldn’t stand for me doing something like that in Europe” or “America’s more open though nobody else has gone quite as far as the phone book”. Just HEY READER REMEMBER MY GIMMICK IT’S THE PHONE BOOK WIZARD THING.

Also, come to think of it, Mort’s working publicly. We don’t technically know if he’s offering his services in the phone book as opposed to other advertisement options, but that’s really splitting hairs, and even Harry mocking him about how much he sucked only had the accusation that Mort’s powers were flaking out to the point a portion of his otherwise legitimately magic seances were faked. Mort also published a book, and by the fact Harry had read it without the two of them interacting it seems likely he didn’t “publish” by hand-writing twenty copies or something, it was probably an actual printed book that you can find in the kinds of bookstores that have crystals and incense.

“We have known for a long time that the main power center of the Red Court is somewhere in South America.

This seems a weird way of putting it, like there’s a literal hidden castle they do their vampiric rituals at. Imagine saying “We have known for a long time that the main power center of the White Council is somewhere in Europe. Maybe the reason you’re having trouble narrowing it down is that there doesn’t have to be a specific location in order for a bunch of people to gather together and discuss things.

Anyway, I’d just like to take a moment to applaud the vampires for the fact they apparently do have a fixed location and they’ve managed to keep it a secret for at least a few hundred years (whether or not anyone native knew about it already is likely moot, so we’re just counting their ability to keep the Spanish and everyone after them from finding the place). Good job, vampires! You really seem to know what you’re doing. May you be slightly less shit overlords of humanity than the wizards. (Bianca did do some very fucked up shit last book but I’m willing not to hold that against the rest of you, she obviously was under a lot of stress and also it’s hard to tell how much of it was deliberately over the top to fuck with Harry.)

Morgan then claims that actually the war is going fine:

We have had advance warning of several attacks, and the Wardens have managed to intercede with minimal losses of life, with the exception of the attack at Archangel.”

What advance warning? How?

Possibly the rest of the attacks were feints designed to do things like figure out how many wardens the wizards have and how fast they can react (again, what advance warning? are there spells that can tell when someone decides to attack a place? were the vampires actually trying to calibrate for that and see how fast they need to go from intent to attack to an actual attack?)

Alternatively, given they had no issue slaughtering the guy who knew how vampires work and everyone else who he might’ve taught how vampires work, maybe the issue is more trying to convince the wizards that nah it’s okay no need to panic and actually come together as a group to fight us off…

Alternatively alternatively, everyone’s dead but the Wardens decided they need to lie about that. Maybe they know that the rest of the wizards are a selfish and cowardly lot and the only chance of keeping the WC organized and on the offensive is if the individual components don’t know that they personally are likely to die in the process.

Morgan goes on to bring up wizard death curses, but as if only Pietrovich could’ve done so because I guess you only get one if you’re a named character. It’s phrased like it’s a definite thing which… If this was a story about non-wizards facing wizards, it might be interesting to have it be that the act of killing a wizard always produces a death curse and you have to figure out how to deal with that. As a story about wizards, it’s definitely more interesting if the death curse isn’t definite because then the antagonists can try to do things to bypass it. (Also, Harry has killed two wizards and a wizard ghost now yet is still fine, which really casts doubt on the death curse thing being real at all.)

The Merlin goes on to say wizards are fucked for reasons other than the ones I’ve already established! See, though vampires are by all appearances are more supernatural than wizards, they don’t have the techbane effect.

Modern technology so often disagrees with us that it makes travel difficult under the best of circumstances and unreliable in a time of conflict.

That’s right: wizards are so fucked on the modern front that they don’t even know their inability to use cellphones is screwing them over even more than their inability to use cars.

The proposed solution to this is to use paths through the Nevernever instead of moving in the mundane world.

To that end, we have dispatched missives to both Queens of the Sidhe.

That’s right, it turns out the wizards do not have any existing treaties on the subject! They have only opened negotiations just now because they are about to be wiped out. Remember in the first book how Harry talked like the WC was the biggest bad on the block? Apparently that’s just what they tell baby wizards to get them to obey. The WC does not appear to have any existing ties with any other supernatural group. And neither do they possess their own claim to Nevernever territories. EVEN THOUGH the Merlin just pointed out they actually function worse in mundane society than other supernatural groups.

How the fuck did this happen? Is it a herding cats thing? Because we’ve just seen that the closest the group got to unified was backing a guy saying FUCK YOU FOR TRYING FOR UNITY, GROUP LEADER. Maybe everyone’s been making their own private deals for personal Nevernever use so none of them ever cared about negotiating as a group.

Or maybe they’ve been sticking to regular humans. I mean, look at what happened at the vampire party last book, look how badly Harry took every reminder he didn’t have the biggest dick in the room. Maybe wizards, given the choice between dealing with other supernatural creatures as equals and lording over ordinary people, decided to be the biggest fish in the ordinary human pond instead.

Anyway we haven’t divesitied it up in a bit, so, uh.

Ancient Mai
…
She was a tiny woman of Oriental extraction, her skin fine and pale, her granite-colored hair worn in a long braid curled up at the back of her head and held with a pair of jade combs. She had delicate features only lightly touched by the passage of years

It does not go on to mention she knows kung-fu. Yet.

Back to the fae! Mai reports that Summer responded with “holy fuck I could not care less go away”. Winter, in contrast, presumably just ate the courier, which I feel is actually exactly what I want out of Winter: the same message as Summer, but succinct. Unfortunately, Mai is good at divining meaning in a lack of response and says: Upon consulting records of former conflicts, we may confidently assume that Queen Mab will involve herself, if at all, in a time and manner of her own choosing.” and the Merlin goes on to say that okay, so they haven’t ordered us to stop begging or threatened to ally against us for the audacity of bothering them, that’s great! Let’s continue begging because holy shit we are fucked right now.

Then the Merlin brings up that actually there is a way of resolving this, which is completely at odds with what he was just saying about how getting Winter to let them cower in the Nevernever must be accomplished At all costs but let’s admit it, nobody here is a character, they are just a vehicle for things to happen to Harry.

“Wizard Liberty, there is no need for this dispute to devolve into an even more destructive conflict. If there exists even a small chance that an armistice can be attained—”
The black woman’s voice lashed out at the Merlin, harsh and cold. “Ask Simon Pietrovich how interested the vampires are in reaching a peaceable settlement.”

I mean, if he was here, would he have opposed a peaceable settlement? Because if so that actually kind of argues for the vampires being willing to accept one.

Part of the problem is we have no clue what Pietrovich’s death means anymore. When it’s first brought up, it seems obvious – opening strike to cripple the wizards. Then Morgan casually says that there’s been tons and tons of other attacks that’ve failed. I guess we don’t know if the wizards actually “won” those conflicts or if it’s a matter of almost no vampire casualties either, but still, the vampires don’t seem capable of repeating anything half as effective as what they did against Pietrovich.

And…it’s worth considering if perhaps the vampires might’ve had a personal grudge against the guy, in the same way one had a personal grudge against Harry. If what they wanted out of this was a vampire hunter’s head, then yeah, maybe it wasn’t an opening salvo against the rest of them.

I’d like to assume people actually existing within the world would have a better grasp of it, which would mean I should defer to Liberty’s judgement:

“Simon knew them, Merlin,” Martha said, her tone flat. “He knew them better than any of us, and they killed him. Do you really think that they will be inclined to seek a reasonable peace with us, when they have already destroyed the wizard best able to protect himself against them? Why should they seek a peace, Merlin? They’re winning.”

But remember, she thought the Merlin got a say in who ended up on the Council, that an American wasn’t in the cards, and also by all appearances had no idea that Ebenezar and the Merlin also hated each other’s guts because that’d presumably be a much bigger factor in why the Merlin wouldn’t want Ebenezar working with him.

So, does this sound reasonable? Sure. Does it sound cool? Yeah, absolutely! Is it true? Eh.

Mind you, the Merlin hasn’t got any better arguments on his side. He’s claiming that vampire victory would somehow be Pyrrhic for them, even though the events of the last book made it clear vampires – or at least, Red ones – can get new vampires out of humans far faster than the WC can get new wizards out of humans.

We then get another guy here to tell us about the vampire’s request for peace.

LaFortier was an emaciated man of medium height and build. His cheekbones stood out grotesquely from his sunken face, and his bulging eyes looked a couple of sizes too large. He had no hair at all, not even eyebrows, and on the whole it gave him a skeletal look. When he spoke, his voice came out in a resonant basso, deep and warm and smooth.

So he’s hideous, presumably because he’s evil by passing on the vampire message/being part of the Merlin’s side of things. Not sure why emaciated bulging-eye skeletal has a warm voice.

The guy says that the Red’s leader has even issued a temporary ceasefire for the day so that the WC can make their decision in peace. Harry shouts in outrage because he totally got attacked today, to which LaFortier responds with yeah, but in this respect I stand with the Red Court in saying fuck you in particular, plus you’re probably lying, did I mention fuck you. And he recounts the actual events of last book: Harry smashed his way through Bianca’s house in order to kill her and her babies. He also brings up the fire, that one Harry set, and how sure were a lot of bodies that burned up in it.

And then Harry decides to take a shovel to the plothole and explains that he totally murdered Justin by fire and was put on trial for it, and how even he doesn’t know if the bodies burned in the fire had been killed by vampires or died to him, yet somehow he didn’t end up back on trial for that.

And then we get:
I still have nightmares about it. I’m a lot of things, but I’m not a willing murderer.
To my shock, I felt myself gathering in power, getting ready to unleash it at LaFortier, with his skeletal smirk. Ebenezar caught my eye, his own a little wide, and shook his head quickly. I clenched my hands into tight fists instead of blasting anybody with magic

I’M NOT A MURDERER AND I WILL FUCKING MURDER ANYONE WHO SAYS OTHERWISE, screams local hero.

Having been gently reminded that it might undermine his argument that he doesn’t kill people with magic if he publicly heartsplodes anyone who mentions it, he bites back his actual desires for the sake of self-preservation and instead says that he gave his report and anything to the contrary is a lie, which is actually quite interesting given nothing LaFortier said is contrary to what happened last book.

LaFortier, not interested in he said she said, points out it really doesn’t matter:
we are not counting the cost of your actions in coins or hours wasted—we are counting it in blood. Wizards are dying because of what you did while acting in this Council’s name.”

Harry is, of course, utterly unconcerned by other people paying for his actions unless they’re hot and ideally underaged. This is why the only remorse for bystanders we’ve seen from him is about the “kids” at the party. He mocks the idea of agreeing to whatever the Red Court wants and proceeds to list examples of what he thinks are absurd demands they must be asking for.

“A pint of blood a month from each of us? Rights to hunt freely wherever they choose? Amulets to shield them from the light of the sun?”

And…that would be…terrible…?

Like, I’m sure you personally hate the idea of giving blood, but as LaFortier literally just said, Wizards are dying. And if they’re getting fed from you guys that means they’re going after other targets less.

I’ve seen zero evidence they can’t already hunt completely freely. Bianca ate people on Harry’s territory and Bianca ate people who were Harry’s property. The WC is explicitly not policing vampires.

There’s also been zero evidence that the sunlight thing is meaningfully affecting their ability to harm others. I bet they would love to have them, but it’d be largely a quality of life thing. That’s quite possibly an actual valid bargaining chip, something that somewhat improves their position in a fight but would be mostly appealing for letting them experience the daytime.

Ultimately, what Harry’s really saying here seems to come back to his issues about alpha dominance. Donating blood is disgusting because it’s something the vampires take by force, so giving it to them is saying they’re stronger. “Rights” to hunt means giving up the apparent belief that it’s a wizard’s right instead. And an amulet would protect them from the main way Harry hurts them.

Of course, the vampires just want Harry.