Somewhat off-topic but relating to a link in the last post: RIP Andrew Vachss (October 19, 1942-December 27, 2021). He was best known for the Burke series and was a lawyer advocating for children and youth. In memoriam, here’s a favorite singer of his, Judy Henske, doing “Wade in the Water.”
This book is shaping up to be worse than the first. I wouldn’t have thought that possible, but here we are.
We’re back in Azrael’s POV at the beginning of the chapter and we discover the writer’s fourth-favorite word for this book.
4. Dreary/dreariness
Which the shadows are described as being. It’s a little bit of a stretch to describe shadows that way, but it gets in under the second definition, so I’ll allow it.
We find out that Azrael stopped writing Chilling Adventures of Azrael the Demon Slayer after she thought Morty had died. Since he was the one who published her “popular graphic novels” and she has no other contacts, she decided it was “too risky” to keep creating them.
This does go directly against what we saw in Awakening, when Azrael was driven to create them, almost by something outside herself. It was not presented as something she could stop doing whenever she felt like it. And if she was never driven to create these comic books, why did she do it in the first place? She later says it was “an outlet for her pain and despair,” but it was always too risky to depict her murders in comic book form. It’s evidence against her for murder! She just didn’t care until after it wouldn’t be easy to publish them and get money from them anymore, so it was all about vanity and arrogance (her signature sin).
And apparently she never worried about her income stream in the weeks since Morty died, even though the comic books were her only way of earning money and we’re never told that she had a bank account or hidden money anywhere. Must be nice.
But, now that she knows Morty’s alive and she won’t have to make any real-world effort to find a new publisher who’s malleable enough to take chances with the IRS and tax fraud, she suddenly wants to start creating again and starts imagining stories. From what we were given in the last book, the only thing she ever did comic books about were her demon-killing missions. The last one we saw her create was about the murders of KY Lady and the child abuse victim, so the only thing she would have left to write about is the hospital massacre, if she hasn’t done any demon-slaying since she moved out of Morty’s apartment building, and it doesn’t seem like she has. So what stories is she now creating in her head? Does this mean she’s back on the God-approved demon-slaying track?
AS she’s walking there—what happened to her rusty Ford Falcon? Down the memory hole just like KY Lady and the child abuse victim, I guess—she sees a fat woman yelling at her ten-year-old son for following her somewhere. Azrael decides she’s a “whore” who doesn’t care about her child. Maybe she doesn’t want her child to see her doing sex work to get food for them? Azrael originally thinks food and survival might be a motivator, but it’s so much more comfortable to call another woman a whore; that reinforces that she’s Not Like Other Girls.
The whole thing upsets her to the point where she’s either leaning back against or sitting against a wall—“sank back” isn’t clear—and this sends her into a flashback about the first time she met Father Acute-Interest-in-Teenagers, and it’s a doozy. Fasten your seat belts, it’s going to be a bumpy ride.
This next part made me so mad it held up writing this post. The first thing you need to know is that the story presented here about the origin of Azrael’s relationship with Father Acute-Interest-in-Teenagers isn’t the same story provided through memory in the first book. The writer’s retconning in the same book is small potatoes compared to what she does when she thinks the readers of this book haven’t read the first book. I will be quoting and comparing the passages between books to show the full glory of her No Edit Clause failure, because there is no way an editor wouldn’t have told her, “This isn’t the same story you gave us in the first book.”
To be fair to Lori Foster, I may have misinterpreted facts about the relationship as depicted in Awakening. On the other hand, when you’re writing about facts relating to a character, your writing should be both clear and specific enough so that misinterpretation isn’t possible.
In Awakening, the relationship is introduced by Azrael remembering her movie-Buffy monster cramps that plagued her all her life, from when she was “a child.” Doctors couldn’t diagnose it and her foster families thought she was malingering, so her whole childhood was sleeping in a fireplace and working like a scullery maid and being called Ashputtel and not going to the ball.
I have never believed this, because, at least as far as what the doctors could tell, after her mother got hit by lightning and Azrael was delivered after her death, she was a perfect white baby. Adoptive parents wait on lists for years for the chance at a perfect white baby. That she would not have been adopted immediately is pure fantasy.
There’s a passing reference to her “grow[ing] strong” and the pain “plaguing” her. Then she introduces the good Father, which I’m quoting in its entirety. This is on page 14.
As a teen, she’d met Father Mullond, and he’d taken acute interest in her, as if through her appearance alone, he could see the difference in her. There’d been no one else in her miserable life, only foster homes and dispassionate strangers, so to her, Father became her family: brother, parent, uncle, confidant—he’d filled every role.
That is a textbook description of what grooming looks like. And, if I were a foster parent, I’d be both insulted and offended by the negative view of people who volunteer to be foster parents. Most of them are good people who want to help children, but you’d never know that from this series. Also, the phrasing implies the “foster parents and dispassionate strangers” are still in her life.
In the above passage, the writer refers to Azrael as “a teen” when she met Father Acute-Interest-in-Teenagers. That covers ages thirteen to nineteen, and for the level of attachment to occur that Azrael makes clear is in place, and her level of training (as Wesley sees it; we can see she’s not a very competent fighter), that bespeaks a relationship that’s lasted several years at least, so I interpreted that as her having met him when she was around thirteen. There’s also a later passage regarding her level of education, which we’ll get to.
Note the level of non-specificity employed here as cover when the flashback diverges from this basic template in the second book. When writing is this non-specific, readers must draw inferences from what’s on the page, so when you’re non-specific to this degree and then become specific, it may not match what the reader inferred, and therein lie issues.
Then we get the one bit of dialogue in this book where he speaks for himself.
Through guidance and care, he’d taught her to cope. To this day, Gaby could still hear his voice coming to her in the darkest moments of her life. “Smile, Gabrielle. He has named you a paragon of chivalry. A heroic champion. It’s a gift that comes with great responsibility. You and you alone have the ability to protect the innocent.”
This shoots down any possibility that Azrael is bound to Sunnydale and that’s why she can’t leave when Wesley starts harassing her. If she’s the only demon slayer, she could go anywhere. Or is Foster saying Sunnydale is the only place in the world where demons exist, so she can’t leave? I don’t think anything but the romance was planned more than a chapter ahead.
Plus, it sounds like Father Acute-Interest-in-Teenagers was blowing smoke up her ass to condition her to kill people. So does this next bit.
To reinforce that her ability was right and good, he’d taken the confessions of sinners too evil to inhabit the earth. Together they’d waged a war, and in the process Gaby had learned how to sharpen her skill, to understand the summons, to follow an urge to its rightful conclusion.
Notice how carefully nonspecific the writer is regarding Azrael’s training. But she does make it sound like it was the good Father who pushed the narrative on her and pressured her into becoming a serial killer.
In Acceptance, we’re told that Azrael was seventeen when she met Father Acute-Interest-in-Teenagers, which makes me think someone clued her in to the child predation undertones of the first book and she tried to course-correct by making her heroine over the age of consent, although (at least as of page 44 in the second book) she hasn’t had sex with the priest. Regardless, it doesn’t work.
Here’s their first exchange of dialogue in a flashback.
“What’s in your mind, child?”
The voice came from far away, biting into her agony. “Death. Death”
“For yourself?”
The torment twisted her, bowed her body like a soul possessed. “No,” she whimpered. “For another.”
Hey, Lori Foster, I thought you said at the bottom of page 178 of Awakening that demons don’t possess people but are people. Paging back—oh yeah, you did. Glad I hung onto the first book.
And isn’t that a weird thing to ask someone on the ground who’s having what look like seizures? Not if she’s all right or what’s wrong with her, but what’s in her mind. Then again, Father Acute-Interest-in-Teenagers seems like a pretty weird guy. I still picture Christopher Lee as the defrocked priest in To the Devil a Daughter.
He puts his hand on her forehead and she interprets this as an act of comfort, instead of him trying to judge if she’s running a fever. Then he asks whose death she means and she tells him she doesn’t know but he’s in a nearby alley and that she “needs to destroy him (my note: emphasis in the original).”
How does he respond to this?
After a thoughtful pause, he said, “Wait here.”
What else can she do when she’s having seizures, dumbass? Dance a ballet?
The priest left her, as was right and proper. (my note: Whiskey Tango Foxtrot?) But within minutes, he returned.
There’s a lot of talk about how awful and dirty and filled with “refuse” the alley is, and that Azrael thinks she is garbage. They sit there without talking for a while, then Father Acute-Interest-in-Teenagers asks her if she would actually kill the guy in the alley. She gives him a heartfelt, unqualified yes.
“I don’t see how.” He lifted her hair back, put his hand around her upper arm. “You’re so young, a small child…”
Most girls get their full growth by the age of fifteen, so if she’s seventeen, she’d be six feet tall. So Father Acute-Interest-in-Teenagers thinks she’s a child when she’s six feet tall and in her late teens? Did you forget to make a change here to upgrade her age to seventeen? Because if she was thirteen, this whole bit of dialogue would make sense. And again with the unrestrained touching by a man she doesn’t know.
Azrael doesn’t do Foster’s arguments about demons not possessing people any good by coming out with this.
“I would rip him to shreds with my bare hands!” The demonic voice sounded like someone else, but just saying it sent a fire raging through her, making the pain wan (my note: I think she means wane, or shrink, rather than wan as in sickly, here) beneath a surge of pernicious strength.
Yeah, Mercedes McCambridge stopped by to do a guest voice-over. And I don’t think the writer meant pernicious (Merriam-Webster defines it as causing great harm in a way that is not easily seen or noticed) but prodigious (meaning extraordinary in bulk, quantity, or degree). I should not be forced to look up words in the dictionary to see if the author is using them correctly.
How does he react to Pazuzu’s voice coming out of a thirteen-year-old seventeen-year-old who is also small and six feet tall?
She panted hard, looked at the priest and saw his shock, his fear, and his curiosity, perhaps even understanding.
“Looks like we got us a serial killer here! Wonder how I can use that to benefit the church, and of course myself.”
He held her face. ”Look at me.”
And when she did, he said, “Do it.”
Permission energized her. The strength amassed, so powerful she felt inhuman. Superhuman.
“If you can destroy him,” Father said with a calm that soothed her, “then you should, because, my dear no one else will.” He smiled, patted her cheek, and said without judgment, “I’ll wait here.”
Blink. Blink. What the fuck?
This is the good, stainless, lily-pure bastion of holiness that you’ve been trying to sell us for the last book? Someone who has no problem with unprovoked murder of someone who has done absolutely nothing to either Azrael or Father Acute-Interest-in-Teenagers? I’m sure the writer will try to justify the good, good Father in this, but so far he’s a bigger villain than any one of the cancer people in the last book.
Before we leave the flashback, I want to go back to Azrael’s age when she met the stainless Father. On page 204 of Awakening, Wesley asks Azrael how far she got in school.
“About eighth grade. Why?”
…”How come?”
“Father homeschooled me.” And then under her breath she added, “But only in things he felt were important.”
“Like?”
I love that “under her breath” means “whispered,” but he still hears her perfectly. The author also slips in some player knowledge that Wesley would have no reason to know about Father being a priest. Also love that he won’t answer a simple question but demands all the information from her.
The important information here is that she apparently left school in the eighth grade, which usually means you’re thirteen or thereabouts, and then says that Father Acute-Interest-in-Teenagers homeschooled her in a substandard fashion, although she doesn’t say the last part.
Please be aware that the author has never told us the name of the city or the state where the story is occurring, so I picked Phoenix, Arizona. Under the laws in Arizona, students can drop out of school on their sixteenth birthdays, although they must attend school up until then. Ohio requires schooling until age 18, but since the author hasn’t confirmed we’re in Ohio, I can ignore that with total impunity.
So, since we’re in Phoenix, Azrael could have dropped out of school on her sixteenth birthday, so if she was seventeen when she met Father Acute-Interest-in-Teenagers, the question of homeschooling would never have come up. Hence her age for the first meeting in Acceptance is bullshit.
There’s a section break when the flashback ends, due to someone saying Azrael’s name. Of course, she attacks on instinct like a rabid Rottweiler and it turns out to be Morty. He’s used to being physically attacked by her at this point, so tells her how much he’s missed her while he’s in the chokehold.
Azrael shoves him away and engages in some verbal abuse about him sneaking up on her. He denies sneaking and grabs her in a hug and is a lot stronger than she remembers. Here’s how she describes the person who, in the last book, she thought of as her only friend, even though her friendship looked exactly like her hostility.
Mort Vance, landlord and wannabe friend, had always been just shy of a complete wimp and a spineless worm.
Since he killed a woman at the end of the last book, he’s developed muscle and confidence and is hardly a soyboy beta cuck incel at all anymore. The misogyny is strong in both of these.
She’s actually wondering if this is actually him and he confirms it by “swip[ing] away a tear,” which according to her is the same as “weeping like an infant,” which he isn’t embarrassed about anymore. Probably because one tear doesn’t equal a crying fit that needs a pacifier to stop.
He tells her Wesley called him to tell him she was coming over, which she questions, and he ignores in favor of “holding her at arm’s length” and “gawk[ing].” She’s still wearing the pseudo-hooker clothes and Morty takes note of it, observing that she has “nice legs.” Azrael takes this as one might expect.
…Gaby surged up nose to nose with him, oozing menace and prickly beyond all measure. “Do you want me to demolish you?”
Since Morty is now a confirmed woman-murderer, his response to this threat display is to kiss her nose and hug her again. Now this is WAY out of character for him, based on the first book. He respected her physical boundaries in Awakening, up until the point where he saw her kill an old woman by shoving a knife between her legs and twisting it before killing a child abuse victim to break the cycle of abuse. Then it was all taking her arm without permission and kissing her after she’s massacred six helpless cancer victims at the abandoned hospital. I guess now that Ann Kennedy has the hots for him, he embodies beta-Wesley, which is a shame, because before the incident I described above, he was my favorite character in the previous book.
In response to this, she stands there and “suffered his excess of affection.” Azrael’s stiff as a board for this, too, but he doesn’t take the hint.
Morty lets go of her and immediately takes hold of her hand. Why, no, he didn’t have permission for any of this. Would Wesley need permission? Enough said.
When he asks her back to the apartment building “to catch up,” she tells him she’s going to kill him but doesn’t refuse to go.
This is a threat he doesn’t take seriously at all, despite the fact that he’s watched her commit eight murders by this point, all of them involving people who were physically helpless and mostly unarmed. He does apologize for showing her affection and wants to know why she took off.
Isn’t it obvious? She’s committed NINE murders and was afraid of being arrested for them. In fact, on page 278 of Awakening, you told her she needed to take off because Wesley was on the way and would arrest her. Unless you got hit in the head with a pipe by Dr. Chiles, there is no reason for you not to remember this.
Then there’s a little half-assed recapping of their emotional relationship that leaves out all the psychological and physical abuse of him by her and she feels guilty that he thinks she abandoned him, even though he’s the one that told her to go. Does the author think people who are reading this book haven’t read the first one? That’s the most benign explanation for the backstory fails I can think of.
Then we get a comparison between Father Acute-Interest-in-Teenagers and Morty that’s, oddly enough, in Morty’s favor. Azrael follows this up by saying:
Damn him for doing this to her.
Whether she’s damning Morty or Father Acute-Interest-in-Teenagers isn’t clear. Then she tells Morty she thought he was dead, which comes as a surprise to him as Wesley didn’t bother to clue him in during their phone call because he was too eager to get his rocks off threatening and beating on Jimbo Kern.
Without provocation she “lashed out, thwacking him on the shoulder,” and gives the reader a little more backstory about the dramatic climax of the previous book, when the hospital blew up but there was no fire of any kind mentioned as being visible once she was outside. She feels bad about the whole situation and decides it’s his fault, like she did throughout the last book, and takes off.
Morty chases after her and keeps her from leaving. He refuses to get out of her way when asked, and, even though we’ve been told he has all these new muscles and strength, his chest is still “scrawny” because beta cuck incel and any man who isn’t a toxic, violent mess is unworthy of respect.
He tries to talk her into moving back into his apartment building/phase-shifting duplex and she refuses. When she tells him where she lives, even though his building is apparently located on the main hooker drag in town, Fifth and Elm is worse. If you remember the last chapter of Awakening, that’s where Beatdown Dude reported, well, getting a beatdown, so she must have attacked this guy right outside her current residence, knowing that her very own cop stalker was hunting her like a deer in season. That’s galaxy-brain strategery right there, ladies and gentlemen.
Morty assumes, based on her clothing, hair, and residence, that she’s now a hooker, although he denies it. She punches him in the shoulder for it and tells him she isn’t hooking. He tries to hug her again after being reassured she’s still a pure untouched flower of a girl and she stops him with a look that would have done nothing to put Wesley off physical contact.
She then calls him a dork and gives him “a fond look.” Immediately after striking him and giving him a look that kept him from touching her. She needs to take prescribed medication.
Azrael fills Morty in on her between-books backstory about her new mission helping sex workers, which is boring and doesn’t really do anything except put on display Morty’s contempt for sex workers and explain how the rent on her room got paid (the sex workers paid it in return for protection).
She ‘s polite enough to ask how the comic book store is doing and of course business is slow since he hasn’t had any new issues of Servant come in in the past few weeks. Dude, you got a new copy while you were in the hospital. How fast did you print it that it’s completely forgotten now?
Under the guise of chit-chat, she gives Morty an opening to tell her he has a girlfriend now and that this said girlfriend is Ann Kennedy, a detective in the Sunnydale Police Department whom Azrael has been jealous of in the past for the rampantly unprofessional conduct both she and Wesley displayed after the hospital massacre. Then Azrael has this gem of a thought.
If this woman had an interest in Mort, then obviously an earth-bound seraph like Luther wasn’t her speed.
Maybe sexual harassment and assault aren’t her speed, Azrael. Not everybody’s been groomed for it the way you have. And here’s another reference to Wesley’s “angelic” nature. Maybe the kind of angel who had a great fall, but Azrael’s lady boner will never let her see that.
I hope Wesley doesn’t become an actual angel, but since that’s the worst thing I can think of to happen, I have to presume it will. After all, if by the cobbled-together, half-assed theology of this series, demons are just people, then angels are just people too, since Revelation indicates that demons are fallen angels. This is why you should think out your theology before you start writing.
And then Morty tells us Ann Kennedy has the mark of Cain in urban fantasy—she’s a blonde. So I fully expect her to turn into a villain either in this book or the next, as there can be only one (worthy female) or the heroine won’t be special and Not Like Other Girls.
There’s a little perfunctory banter about his new relationship and them double-dating with Azrael and Wesley, which shocks and horrifies her. This makes it clear that Morty has no idea of the nature of Azrael’s relationship with Wesley, and she doesn’t tell him about the sexual harassment and the assault because she’s too inexperienced to recognize it as such.
Anyway, she tries to leave, he stops her by standing close to her, then goes into detail about how intensely Wesley was searching for his lost stalking victim, although we didn’t see any of that at the end of the last book. All we saw was Azrael’s location being dropped into Wesley’s lap like a birthday present because God forbid the hero should do some work.
A shadow moves in an untrustworthy way, but Azrael doesn’t have the movie-Buffy monster cramps so doesn’t see it as a real threat. She phrases not having the movie-Buffy monster cramps as “…she had no divine warnings raping her body.”
This is a shock. She sees God as raping her? I questioned whether she thought God loved her in the last book, but here I have to question if she loves God. How could she, if she sees him as causing her to be raped, or even raping her himself with the pain he inflicts? She must hate God with every ounce of strength she has. That is a phrasing I think the author didn’t think through to its logical conclusion.
So she gets a lady boner over the upcoming fight and tells Morty to stay back before “collecting her sui generis abilities around her” and seeing somebody in a parked car. In one of the reviews on Amazon I read for the first book, a reviewer mentioned Foster’s “billion dollar words,” like minacious, teratoid, and commination (among many others). Sui generis is Latin for “of its own kind” and means unique. Why is unique an unacceptable word to use in this context? Why use one word when two will do? Moving on.
Azrael pulls her knife and gets excited about possible future bloodshed. She tells Morty to take off, which he refuses to do, so she compromises by telling him to stay out of the way and moves into the street just in time for the “cretin” to move on her.
…the nigrescent apparition charg[ed] toward her. A macabre mask of sunken eyes and distorted, gaping mouth concealed the attacker’s face. Dark clothing obscured the body type.
A stray beam of moonlight reflected off a long, heavy pipe swinging from one substantial arm.
Hey, I was just talking about billion dollar words! “Nigrescent” according to Merriam-Webster, means blackness. Why does the writer insist on using obscure words like this, so obscure my laptop refused to recognize it as a word, and misusing relatively common words like emaciated and wane? And motel, for that matter?
Plus, the writer has contradicted herself between one paragraph and the next. She’s stated that the attacker’s clothing hides his body type, but Azrael can see enough of it to determine in the next paragraph that he has “substantial” arms. And she can see that this is a man, regardless of the fact that no personal pronouns are used in the description.
Also, what is the boner that bad guys in this series have for pipes? This is the second time a pipe’s been used as a weapon against one of our lead characters.
The next full paragraph—wow. Just wow.
Satisfaction aggrandized, sending a flow of torrid anticipation through Gaby. She braced her booted feet apart, flexed her rock-steady knees, and whispered, “God, I needed this. Thank you.”
Did the author intend this to sound as sexual as it does? This language wouldn’t be out of place in a sex scene. Way to make the connection between sex and violence for Azrael as clear as a mountain stream. And you can’t flex knees, just muscles.
And let’s rumble!
Ghostface Killer is a lot more nimble than the cancer people from the last book, which is why the writer should have had more serious threats to the heroine, even though on page 15 of Awakening, we’re told that God will not allow Azrael to die, which drains every bit of suspense out of the entire series, as we never have to worry about her being killed and most likely never even badly injured.
So let’s keep track of Azrael’s moves here, as prior to this she could not win a fight if it requires more than two close-quarters moves on her part. She dodges the pipe and breaks Ghostface’s nose with an elbow strike. That’s move number one.
He swings again and misses, then she kicks him in the knee. That’s move number two. She’s in trouble now because he isn’t out of commission yet and swings the pipe yet again. This time it’s at her head, but somehow the pipe winds up hitting the road. Did he raise the pipe over his head and strike straight down? It’s a choice, if not a smart one.
She’s had her knife out since before Ghostface charged her, but hasn’t deigned to use it up until now, I guess because she wanted to stretch out the foreplay before the orgasm. Interestingly enough, there is no indication of where in the body she stabbed Ghostface. And check out how sexual the imagery and language is here too.
Gaby brought her blade straight up—and felt it burst through vessels, fat, and muscle.
She joined her hands together, pushed hard and deep, and experienced the satisfying sensation of deflecting off a bone.
An agonized scream rang out, this one from the man pierced by her blade.
Also, every paragraph in this fight scene is one sentence. If you don’t overuse one sentence paragraphs, they can convey a sense of things moving fast and they’ll have more impact, but once you overuse them, as occurs here, it just indicates the writer doesn’t trust a reader to concentrate on a paragraph longer than one sentence.
Tugging out the knife against the natural resistance, the suck and drag of wet, fibrous flesh, Gaby stepped to the side and, for only a heartbeat, waited.
So Ghostface has been fucked to death by Azrael’s Walmart sheath knife. No, wait, she only tried to fuck him to death, because he’s still alive. She’s bitching about him not being worth the effort and “Gigging this son of a bitch had done little to alleviate her burgeoning belligerence.” Awesome alliteration.
Morty and Azrael do some minor interrogation, while Ghostface bleeds out in the mysteriously deserted street—are we sure we aren’t at Morty’s building already since it had the vanishing-as-needed crowds—and he says Carver sent him, like we couldn’t see that coming straight up Broadway at us.
Then Morty wants to know why anybody would want Azrael dead. I don’t know, they met her? Azrael then says she doesn’t know and asks Ghostface why Carver sent him. Are you stupid? You know perfectly well that you carved up Carver, as we’ve already been told by you and Jimbo Kern, and left him alive, in your arrogance thinking he would never have the nerve to try settling the score.
Ghostface says Carver’s going to kill him now and Azrael lets him know he’ll be dead way before Carver can do it, then he passes out. With anybody else she’s ever stabbed in the past, they’ve been instant kills. God/the author is keeping him alive to Basil Exposition until it suits them to let him die.
At least this time the villain who attacked her put up an actual fight and didn’t just fall on her to be raped to death by a knife.
Morty’s made a little uncomfortable by the bold display of his one-sided best friend’s psychopathy before she asks him to call for help before Ghostface dies. He shows a little Wesley-ness of his own by not doing it immediately and fussing over Ghostface trying “to cleave your head open with that pipe.” No, Morty, if he was trying to cleave her head he’d use a cleaver. He tried to bludgeon her head open with that pipe. Do your vocabulary homework.
Then she “jerked off” Ghostface’s mask. Once you start up with the sexual language, everything’s going to read that way. She doesn’t know the guy and neither does Morty.
Eventually Morty does call for help and must have a cell phone now, although only cops and criminals were allowed to have those in Awakening. He’s pretty cool and collected through it, and Azrael marvels at this.
The Mort she used to know would have been a nervous wreck after witnessing an altercation that resulted in a limp, bleeding body.
This proves the writer can’t be bothered to remember what happened in the first book or even go back to look it up. Morty witnessed Azrael murdering KY Lady and the child abuse victim, which would be two limp, bleeding, DEAD bodies, along with six cancer people at the abandoned hospital, and absolutely was not a “nervous wreck” on either occasion. Why should he get upset about an unconscious, dying man when he’s already seen you make multiple corpses?
She’s impressed by him not falling apart and thinks that “…for the very first time since meeting him, Gaby thought he might not be such a slimy-looking little guy.” What a good friend. Then he starts talking about her “burden,” and what he means I don’t know since she’s never told him about the paladin crap Father Acute-Interest-in-Teenagers fed her. Azrael reacts as usual, by “rear[ing] back, threatening him,” to which he responds by laughing at her and putting his hands up. This is a person you have seen commit multiple murders of helpless, unarmed people, and who has assaulted you physically and verbally nonstop since you met her, including four physical attacks during this encounter alone. You should not be reacting like this. She is a valid physical threat regardless of you treating her like a helpless vagina-haver.
He tells her to get the knife cleaned and wants to know why Carver wants her dead, but she fails to tell him that she strapped Carver to a bed and gave him a metric fuckton of shallow knife slashes, including on his dick, which would answer the question.
Since he’s tried to assert himself, she does the Wesley “stay out of my policework” maneuver, which doesn’t work as well with Morty since he’s a man and not trained to obey. He’s smart enough to figure out Azrael knows why Carver sent Ghostface, but she avoids any more questions.
Finally we have some Komedy when she remarks that friends are a pain and Morty tells her he loves her, to which she almost falls down and thinks she’s afraid of his affection.
Well, this chapter felt longer than Battlefield Earth. Next time, chapter 4, where Vlasic Dill Beaver Cleaver makes an appearance, Azrael writes another ridiculously long graphic novel in what seems like seconds, and Bliss returns.
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