(TW: sexual violence)
Just as a reminder for anyone who didn’t read the concluding post for the previous book, Servant: the Awakening, Azrael had vanished from her apartment after murdering NINE people (nine in the entire book, but six at the abandoned hospital’s mass murder/explosion climax)
Azrael Murder Count (to date): 9
and Wesley sat around twiddling his thumbs until the author dropped Azrael’s whereabouts into his lap because it’s his birthday or some shit (we can’t have him demonstrating anything like ingenuity or deductive logic or a work ethic), then took off out the door in a cloud of domestic violence jokes and sexual assault on a coworker, swearing that Azrael wouldn’t escape him a second time, like a common supervillain. Yet somehow he is the hero of the series.
Readers might expect Wesley to search for Azrael, to have near-misses before finding her, increasingly desperate in his efforts both due to his romantic interest as well as to keep her from killing anyone else—oh, who are we kidding? He’s in complete denial that she’s killed anybody at all, despite the fact of her all-but-confession to him that she was the murderer in the case he was working that someone else wound up getting blamed for and his suspicions about who killed the six cancer people at the abandoned hospital. Also, he’s a terrible detective. If readers do expect some suspense before he finds her, they will be sadly disappointed (and I’m sure they were, since the author never wrote urban fantasy again after this series) because he finds her in the first paragraph of chapter one. Sigh.
The chapter begins in Wesley’s POV. He’s hiding in shadows and watching Azrael from about thirty feet away. Pop quiz: on seeing Azrael for the first time in weeks, knowing (or at least strongly suspecting) that she’s committed multiple murders of defenseless people, which of the following emotions does he display?
- Relief that she’s all right?
- Fear for his own physical safety if he’s discovered?
- Fury that she fled before he could finish forcing her into a romantic/sexual relationship with him?
If you guessed C, congratulations! You have read at least some of the posts from the previous book. Wesley can’t feel fear because he’s an alpha male and fear is for betas. He can’t feel relief because that’s about her and everything is about Wesley, always. Plus, anger is Wesley’s signature emotion. He has never had an interaction with Azrael during which he didn’t feel some level of anger at least once. As he specifically thinks at one point in the first book, he wants her because she’s a challenge to him. No other reason is ever given.
So he watches her from the shadows like a creeper and has the following internal monologue.
Gabrielle Cody.
The bane of his existence.
The source of nightmares—and scorching-hot erotic dreams.
Her long thin legs, sleek and toned with muscles, showed beneath a denim miniskirt. Black leather ankle boots replaced her familiar flip-flop sandals, and a loose tank top revealed the outline of the sheath at her back.
Her short dark hair now had purple streaks throughout.
When he says thin, he means anorexic. The author established in Awakening that Azrael is six feet tall and weighs 120 pounds. Wesley thinks she weighs 100 pounds tops. There is no way he’s seeing all that muscle in her legs.
And no stupid flip-flops! O happy day! Although she’s not being as covert as she thinks if an observer can see a knife sheath on her back at ten yards. I guess it goes without saying that she doesn’t have the gun from the first book because she could keep her distance and it wouldn’t be so bloody when she kills, and we know how much she enjoys killing with her hands.
Wesley describes her outfit as “her idea of a whore’s garb” (and here comes Lori Foster’s seventh-favorite word, but I think it’ll be moving up the charts as her heroine’s protecting sex workers in this one). However, Azrael would have a good idea what street sex workers wear, since her previous residence was located on the main hooker drag in town.
It turns out we do have another description of a sex worker’s clothing, from when Azrael met Bliss outside the revival theater. Cast your minds back…back…back…to page 237 of Awakening.
(Bliss) wore a super-short denim skirt and a pale pink T-shirt that hugged her body too closely, showing off details better left undiscovered.
See what I mean when I say Azrael sounds like a middle-aged woman? Bliss seems to have less skin showing than Azrael, the only difference being that Azrael’s tank top is loose and Bliss’s T-shirt is tight.
Wesley has a brief flashback to the weeks he’d spent looking for her and specifically checks “raged” as something he’d done. Twice on two pages he’s furious. This guy is a bad boyfriend risk, but when you’re a pure untouched flower of a girl you don’t know any better.
So he starts over toward her and Vlasic Dill Guy appears and proves that we did not need the prologue at all, other than to drive home Azrael is protecting sex workers and pining for her sex-offender cop stalker. We even get better description from Wesley that we’ve ever gotten from her.
Turns out Vlasic Dill Guy is actually Vlasic Dill Boy, because Wesley estimates his age at twelve or thirteen. He’s wearing a ball cap (I assume Foster means a baseball cap), clean clothes that seem preppy-style, and has a backpack. All I can see is Beaver Cleaver. Foster takes a second to begin the overture for some classist poverty porn about how unlike everyone else in the area he is. Yeah, it’s all hookers and desperation and filth down here in the slums, she can tell you.
Wait a minute—where are we? Are we still in the slums? I guess so, but we aren’t near Morty’s building anymore so we’re completely unmoored in this universe.
So Vlasic Dill Beaver Cleaver’s checking out the building Azrael’s standing in front of, being suspiciously not scared, and she locks onto her next victim. Wesley does some inadvertently funny description of how Azrael locks on.
She went rigid, her long bones gathering in defense as she straightened away from the building, then immediately relaxed in the deceptive way appropriate to natural-born combatants.
At least Wesley admits she’s bony now, but what he doesn’t know about fighting would fill the Superdome. Plus, your bones don’t gather—your muscles do.
He’s bright enough to know he needs to protect Vlasic Dill Beaver Cleaver and starts moving faster, but the boy spots him and takes off. Like a dog (Wesley uses the simile of “an animal of prey”), Azrael sees a human running and decides to give chase, leaving Wesley in the dust.
Wesley chases her and draws his weapon for the first time in the series. And it’s for Azrael. To undercut this apparent threat, the author gives him the following thoughts.
He wouldn’t shoot Gaby.
Then why did you pull your damn gun if you aren’t prepared to use it? That will get you killed in the real world. The first rule of gun safety is, don’t draw your gun if you aren’t prepared to use it.
But then again, he wouldn’t walk into a trap either.
How do you think this could be a trap? She hasn’t seen you and doesn’t know you’re there. Or do you think Azrael and Vlasic Dill Beaver Cleaver are friends and she paid him to help her set you up? How would she get a trap into place, seeing that I have to assume the end of the last book was immediately before the beginning of this one, so you only figured out where she was a few hours ago at most? You suck as a detective, Wesley.
He wanted her, but he didn’t trust her. Not anymore.
Maybe he never had.
No maybe about it, Wesley; you never trusted her and for good reason. Hell, the back cover copy on the first book explicitly told us that you mistrusted her.
In a better-written book, the reader would not be in any doubt as to what Wesley knows or suspects about Azrael at this point, but the author likes to play keep away with this information, depending on what the plot requires him to think/suspect at any given moment. This sure makes it seem like he thinks she’s dangerous enough to be a threat to him, though. Earlier, he had some thoughts about how she attacks without quarter, has “lethal skill,” and he doesn’t have a clue about her motives for doing anything, as he doesn’t know about the whole God’s paladin thing yet. What’s not to trust?
There’s a passing mention of how the alley he’s in stinks because slum, and he sees her with her knife out, about to start searching a room. I don’t think they leave alley doors unlocked in the slums, but you do you, Ms. Foster.
Wesley “steadied his hands,” which implies he’s taken aim at her, and he seems to be in a high state of agitation and tells her to freeze. Really, he thinks she’s about to try to kill him. There’s no other reason for his heart rate to be elevated and for him to be in the middle of an adrenalin rush, as he never had these symptoms in the first book when they had physical fights with each other.
Other than a reference to her “tender neck” tensing up, she stays focused on the door, a rare display of competence. He notices she has vamp face and is still wearing the dog collar he got her, and he almost pops a boner because this means she still acknowledges that she’s WESLEY’S PROPERTY. He resolves he won’t get romantic/sexual with her again until he’s “in control.” This is a running theme, as he is nothing if not a control freak.
Azrael’s doing her dissociative trance thing that he’s seen before when Dr. Chiles was around and he gets jealous that she isn’t focused on him emotionally, which is very Wesley. He has to make his voice “harder” and “deeper” before she pays attention and finally tells him it isn’t a good time, so we know we’re about to get into some really stupid attempted Komedic dialogue.
The author notes that having a gun in his hands makes Wesley feel in control and he tells her to drop the knife and put her hands in the air like she just don’t care, but he doesn’t say that last part.
It looks like she’s about to bend to his godlike masculinity, you know, being a woman and all, but then there’s a big noise from inside the building that the author tells us means Vlasic Dill Beaver Cleaver managed to get out some other way.
Despite not having any proof of this other than the author’s word, Azrael gets ragey because now she can’t go a-killing for God and curses out Wesley because it’s his fault Vlasic Dill Beaver Cleaver escaped. Honestly, they are Rage Twins but he’s better at it than she is.
Wesley ruminates on the vamp face she’s still manifesting for a couple of paragraphs. I call it vamp face because it amuses me to picture Angel/Spike/Nick Knight vamp face, but it’s actually some subtle changes in her face when she gets the killing urge from God.
Azrael starts bitching at him that now she’s not going to find out who the boy was and he tries to assert cop dominance by telling her to keep her distance, which she doesn’t, getting right up against him so he can feel her breath, which is definitely not something you do with a man when you want him to know you aren’t interested. In this chapter so far he’s called her “cocky” and “ballsy.” She’s Not Like Other Girls because other girls are weak and submissive and unworthy, amirite? Internalized misogyny, how we’ve missed you.
Wesley goes straight into another couple of paragraphs about how much he wants her—while acknowledging it’s inappropriate, so I guess someone also mentioned his abuse of his power as a police officer to harass her as something the audience might find offensive–and we get a little bit of recap of the first book’s plot. He refers to “sick slaughter of human beings” here, which is quite a switch since nobody in that book seemed to be able to visually identify a human being if they had cancerous tumors and persistently called them “it.” The author dehumanized them to the point where they didn’t even have names, which was a sloppy way to make sure nobody found out where they’d come from and prolong the book.
Also, he admits here that all he had were suspicions and no real evidence against her, which didn’t stop him from threatening to arrest her and harassing her ceaselessly. And he wouldn’t try finding evidence because he’s a layabout, do-nothing cop.
They have a little bit of dialogue and she does wind up sheathing her knife, which served the purpose of showing that she’s braless and her nipples are hard. At this sight, all the blood in his brain slaloms straight into his dick. The dominant emotion of this chapter so far is anger, and that doesn’t stop once Azrael tells him she won’t hurt him, unless he gives her a reason. In fact, he responds as follows.
Since seeing her, Luther rode the edge of fury, and now that the knife didn’t represent a threat, he grabbed both her wrists and slammed her up against the brick wall. The gun he still held pressed into her tender flesh, but he couldn’t temper himself, couldn’t rein in his rage or take the time to holster the weapon, couldn’t reason with her or…anything.
Wesley Arm Grab Counter: 13
As soon as a threat to him was removed, he assaulted her physically. What wonderful boyfriend material!
By the way, the gun is pressed into her “bony sternum” here, so right over her heart. Second rule of gun safety is never point a gun at anything you don’t intend to destroy. We don’t know if he has a pistol or a revolver, so he could kill her very easily without meaning to but compared to the power of the boner her life doesn’t really matter.
In six and a half pages, Wesley has been/felt:
Fury/furious: 3 times
Rage: 2 times
Anger: 3 times
Disgruntlement: 1 time
Azrael apparently doesn’t notice that she’s being physically assaulted, because all she does is ask how he found her while being sexually provocative by licking her lips and saying some things that could be double entrendres, which is out of character since she didn’t know what sexual chemistry meant in Awakening. Guess she’s a quick study.
Then she takes a big breath that presses her braless, hard-nippled breasts into his chest and continues speaking to him seductively.
Drawling the words, she said, “Big. Tall. Strong Luther. That golden orange glow around you shows great self-control.”
You need glasses for your aura reading, sweetie, because the only self-control he’s displayed in this series is not assaulting you in front of other cops. He only has self-control when he’s afraid of punishment.
He tells her he knows she’s been beating up tricks, but the author calls this “flesh-peddling clientele.” Flesh-peddlers are usually pimps because the term isn’t normally used for sex workers. Beatdown Dude was a trick, not a pimp. Why does the author use words she doesn’t really know? At least this confirms she really did dump Azrael’s whereabouts into his lap as a gift because she knows he couldn’t find his own ass with both hands, a flashlight, and a map.
She decides to rub her groin into his and he bemoans his “loss of discipline.” Boy, the writer sure does hope nobody read the first book. And—scene!
Now we get a POV shift to Vlasic Dill Beaver Cleaver, whose name we now find out is Oren Paige. A twelve-year-old named Oren. Your name picker is still broken, Ms. Foster. No parents in either 1995 or 1996 would name their son this, any more than parents in 1981 would give their son an old Jewish comedy writer’s name like Morty. What in the world is wrong with age-appropriate names for male characters you don’t like?
So Oren takes shelter in a lot behind a convenience store and notices that either he has a nail in his arm or he just got poked by a nail. The writing isn’t clear, which I will be writing a lot. He exclaims, “Blood!” for no good reason other than to attract Azrael’s attention if she’s still pursuing or to prove that he can indeed talk, unlike the cancer people in Awakening. Apparently it’s news to him that a nail puncture hurts and he won’t cry because that’s what girls do. OK, so he’s Azrael’s secret son, right? He inherited her woman-hatred but applied it to all women, not just the ones who Are Like Other Girls.
He also alludes to the fact that he’s wearing a disguise, but we don’t get specifics.
Then we move on to some standard serial killer motivational backstory. He only targets whores because his mother was one and they’re disgusting and foul and he’s doing the world a favor by getting rid of them. Standard Jack the Ripper, nothing too original here. Apparently his aunt and uncle are raising him and taking part in the murders. There’s the implication that they’re new to it and he’s keeping them under control with threats to their money and drug supply. He calls them Uncle Myer and Aunt Dory, and Foster is fond of the name Dory. She’s used it twice in two books with spelling changes for unrelated characters: Dorie was the brain cancer patient in the hospital in the last book. That’s something you shouldn’t do as it confuses readers. You don’t even really want to use too many names starting with the same first letter, but I digress.
Anyway, he does a little thinking about Azrael tied to the torture bed and calls her a tramp in his mind. He’s also referred to by the author twice as soft and pale. These seem to be womanly qualities to her, but I doubt if she’ll pull the “killer’s really a woman” switch again. So then he strolls off and we’re back in the nauseating violence-tinged sexual tension scene with Azrael and Wesley.
Azrael again proves we didn’t need the prologue, because she goes into how much it hurt her to leave Wesley and she has no purpose without him and Strong Female Character, y’all! Then she tells him she left because she wanted him, which totally isn’t true. She left because she thought he was going to arrest her for the NINE murders she committed and evil would run hog-wild if she went to prison. That’s what we’re explicitly told by the writer, so if we’re still retconning, at least it isn’t in the same book anymore.
She goes on to say that after Morty died, she felt guilt that impelled her to vanish. So we have yet another reason that’s being retconned for why she took off, which, as in the above paragraph, was because she was afraid he’d arrest her and she couldn’t kill people anymore.
What’s Wesley’s reaction to that? He says her name but she cuts him off and tells him that nothing will ever happen between them (romantically/sexually, I assume). He laughs at her and says “Bullshit,” and then goes on for several paragraphs about how they’ll be together. And he doesn’t tell her for almost an entire page that Morty’s actually alive.
The piece of shit that is Wesley, everyone! He knows that Morty is the only emotional support Azrael has other than Wesley, and he tried to split them apart in the last book by suborning Morty to spy on her and report back to him, in a bid to force her to depend on him, Wesley, only. This is a common tactic of abusers, to cut off victims from friends and family. The fact that he does not tell her immediately is of a piece with behavior in Awakening where he deliberately caused her emotional pain and enjoyed doing it.
Where to start? One, Azrael has no reason to think Morty is dead. She did leave before the paramedics brought Morty out on a stretcher because Wesley and Ann Kennedy were engaging in manifestly unprofessional behavior with each other and that got Azrael upset, but she knew he and Wesley were in the same room, and Wesley came out and was just fine. That does bring up the question of whether Wesley deliberately left Morty to die in the factory to get rid of his only competition for Azrael. If so, it worked out as well as any of his other plans.
Like computers and DNA, I guess newspapers must not exist here either. An explosion at an abandoned hospital in the area would be a story for at least one day. We know Azrael doesn’t watch television, so newspapers would be her only way of gathering information. And, if nothing else, she should keep an eye on the papers for Morty’s obituary. Even if he didn’t have family, there’d be at least a brief obit. That’s not even taking into account that she could call the hospital, since there’s only one in Sunnydale, and pose as a family member to get information. Even if newspapers aren’t a thing, she could go to the county courthouse and check death certificates, which are accessible to the public.
Azrael goes into shock and starts flashing back to the end of the previous book, which Lori Foster apparently can’t be bothered to open up and refer to. And now the cancer people are zombielike! So they’ve been demons, discarnate, ghouls, specters, and now zombies. And she gave Morty a speech about how they were people. So sloppy. It does prove to my satisfaction that Lori Foster has a No Edit clause in her contracts, though.
She lets something slip about what she saw and Wesley ups his anger count to four. She’s the one that should be mad here, asshole, since you’re the one that didn’t instantly ease her mind about her only emotional connection in this world being alive. She doesn’t say anything because she doesn’t want him to know how much she loves butchering people, but he’s figured out she was at the hospital, which he was already 98% sure about the night it happened, so he shouldn’t need her to confirm anything. And then we get this load of bullshit from Azrael.
Luther didn’t approach her, didn’t touch her. He just waited, watching her, judging her reaction the way he always judged her—with suspicion and cynicism.
He was a good man.
Auras of strength and purpose always surrounded him, a protective halo to remind her of all the ways they contrasted.
Bitch, what? In the next paragraph she goes on to call Wesley a “do-gooder seraph.” This hammers home the angel imagery that Foster is at pains to use in regard to him. She’s called him an angel multiple times, shown him having auras that suggest haloes to Azrael, and now he’s a do-gooder seraph. Not just an ordinary working-class angel, mind you, but the highest rank in Heaven now. Also, Wesley is no do-gooder. He couldn’t even be bothered to find out who actually killed Murdered Mutilated Grandpa, KY Lady and the child abuse victim who fell down a memory hole as soon as they were murdered, and the six helpless people at the hospital. The murderer was Azrael, just in case anyone forgot.
The cardiac problems from Awakening reassert themselves, as she now has a “palpating heart.” No edit clause fail: palpating means “to examine by touch especially medically.” What Foster presumably meant was palpitating, meaning ”to beat rapidly or strongly; throb.”
Wesley tries to grab her but misses and she gets him in a chokehold but has no idea how to choke a person out. The idea behind this is that you apply pressure to both carotid arteries at once, which shuts off oxygen flow to the brain, and will cause someone to lose consciousness very quickly indeed. Who trained her to fight again? If she’d been properly trained, Wesley would have been unconscious in three seconds, and she could get on with her business.
Of course Wesley uses his godlike masculinity to get the upper hand in the fight, because he’s the hero and the heroine can never be allowed to do one thing better than he can, no matter how trivial. So she’s back up against the brick wall, a position he seems to like for her as she’s been forced into it by him three times in this series so far.
Azrael’s over-the-moon happy about Morty being alive. She’s decided that Wesley wouldn’t lie about that, based on what we don’t know, as the last thing she said to Wesley was to ask him if this was true. She’s so happy Morty’s alive she calls him a “little weasel” in her mind and says she’ll “give him hell for sure.” You’re such a bitch! How was he supposed to let you know he’s alive? You don’t read newspapers and don’t have a cell phone where he could call you! I’m already getting mad on Morty’s behalf.
Just an aside–no twenty-one-year-old in 2008 would be without a cell phone. Just saying.
Now—oh God. Wesley’s got her by the throat. In the last book, he cut off her oxygen to the point where she almost passed out by squeezing her in what amounted to a bearhug. Then he had multiple thoughts about wanting to “choke,” “throttle,” and “strangle” her. And now he’s gripping her by the throat with one hand. Did you know that restriction of breathing is a major indicator of future homicide in domestic abuse cases?
He’s also got both her wrists in his hand and is holding them over her head while demanding that she stop smiling. In case you’re wondering where his gun went, he holstered it before he took an entire page to tell her Morty was alive.
Wesley Arm Grab Counter: 14
I was looking around the internet a couple of weeks ago and I think I found Wesley’s arm-grabbing kink! It’s called toucherism, which is related to frotteurism.
And then she kisses him. Because there’s nothing more tender and romantic than being strangled while having your arms jerked out of their sockets.
He pulls away, but she goes after him (not sure how that works when he’s got a hand around her throat and is holding her arms over her head, but whatever) and kisses him again, and this time he’s into it. Until she bites him and tells him she likes kissing him.
Then he tries to be all business and wants to know why she was chasing Vlasic Dill Beaver Cleaver. She gets offended by the “rejection” and they get into one of those “let me go/not until you answer me” conversational cul-de-sacs. Eventually she tells him she doesn’t know and he’s nonplussed, to say the least.
He takes her calling him cop as an insult—well, it’s an insult to cops that you are one—and she tells him that she wanted to fuck. Then he lets go of her like she just grew snakes for hair. Then she thinks about what “a good, kind, beautiful man” he is. Pull the other one, Lori Foster.
Wesley’s actions make sense here. Foster’s specifically mentioned his need to feel in control twice in this chapter, and her taking the offensive on the sex front would take that away from him. He spends another few paragraphs talking about how it needs to be special when they have sex, which basically means they’ll do it when he says so and not one second before that.
And then she goes flashing back to Father Mullond, otherwise known in these posts as Father Acute-Interest-in-Teenagers. We get background about how she was always in pain from God’s kill orders since she was a child because her God must not be omniscient enough to know a child can’t kill demons. Doctors couldn’t diagnose it and—the writing is not clear here—authorities (no clue who they are) decided her ailment wasn’t real. I assume authorities were the higher-ups at the orphanage who figured her for a malingerer. And then she has the following “As you know, Bob,” monologue about the good priest. I’m quoting this in full because I’m not sure it gives the impression of the priest that she wants us to have.
And that good man encouraged her, coached her, helped her gain direction to her purpose and deception to cover her tracks.
As a man of God, he understood her duty more than she ever could have. He made it crystal clear that if anyone found out, she’d be labeled a murderer, and the rest of her days would be spent in prison, or an asylum—where the pain would gnaw on her all the rest of her days.
And so they’d worked together, Father Mullond and her, an odd pair matched by God. Gaby told Father of her auras, (my note: auras are actually not a Christian thing at all, but New Age, and the priest should have shut that down the second he heard it) shared with him the first niggling of discomfort, and he, through the confessions of a priest, learned the truths behind her visions.
And ultimately, he gave his blessing to each and every slaughter.
Am I wrong, or is this priest evil? It sounds like he figured out he had a military-grade weapon and decided to start killing people he didn’t like. One of the things we learned about him before is that the first people she killed were parishioners making confessions to him that he thought were evil.
Other things we know about him: he started showing interest in her when she was thirteen. He somehow managed to get control of her from the orphanage, either by adoption or by appointment as her legal guardian—Foster doesn’t specify which. He took her out of school once he had control and made sure she had no further formal education. Somehow she learned the little she knows about fighting—Foster doesn’t specify how that happened either. He never got her a birthday present or a Christmas present in however many years he had control over her—let’s say five years until Foster tells us differently. He also never allowed her to watch television, go to the movies, or listen to music, just like she condemned her foster families for doing. He never did anything to make sure she could perform basic survival functions like cooking for herself or caring for her own clothes. It doesn’t sound like he gave a damn about her as anything other than his personal attack dog.
Maybe Foster’s getting us ready for a reveal that he was actually the big bad of the piece. Or maybe she had no plan for the series at all, since she doesn’t seem to have enjoyed writing it from the evidence on the page. In the third book, there’s a killer with a connection to Azrael, so I’m guessing it’s either her biological father, who’s never been mentioned yet, or Father Acute-Interest-in-Teenagers, who isn’t really dead. I might get a kick out of that.
Next time, chapter 2, where Wesley disapproves of Azrael protecting sex workers and beats up pimps for information, and Morty makes a cameo.
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