(CW: violence, eating disorders)
We start off the chapter in Wesley’s POV and he wants to know about Carver. Dude, you already got the low-down from Jimbo Kern. What do you need from her, other than have her bend to your will to demonstrate to yourself that you are an alpha male? Any man who needs to force a woman to do things to prove to themselves that they are dominant alphas are nothing of the sort.
She walks over to some nameless building and sits down while Wesley watches her. Quick note: the hero and heroine of this book are named Luther Cross (founder of Protestantism and the symbol of Christianity) and Gabrielle Cody (archangel, not sure what Buffalo Bill has to do with anything so ignoring that). It’s a pet peeve of mine when writers give their characters pseudo-clever symbolic names, so I’ve taken it to the next level by calling them Azrael (the Angel of Death) and Wesley Crucifix (founder of Methodism and another symbol of Christianity).
Even in the dim light, Luther could see the crotch of her plain white panties, her long legs, her pale thighs. Salacious heat set his blood to boiling. His dick twitched, but then, around Gaby, twitchy was a way of life.
There is a very childish element to Azrael’s sitting down without realizing or caring if she does that her underwear is on view, and the panties themselves being plain white cotton. There was a bench nearby that they were just sitting on—why didn’t she go back to it? If she was smart enough to use this to distract him from questions, I’d cut her a break, but this is just part and parcel of her infantilization. Don’t tell me no one in the twenty-one years that this girl has been alive ever told her, “Don’t sit with your legs open while you’re wearing a skirt because people can see your panties.” If she spent any time in a Catholic orphanage, she heard that more than once from the nuns and got the painful side of a ruler for it. This element of their romance (the daddy/daughter overtones I called out in my post on chapter 15 of Awakening) is pretty troubling to me, along with the persistent infantilization of Azrael.
It’s also akin to the position that Red Betty was in at the phase-shifting motel/whorehouse when Wesley threatened to arrest her for indecent exposure. Hey, here’s another time when Wesley lets her skate on something he could have arrested her for.
And I was right in the last post when I said lust was a default state for him. What is going on in Wesley’s psyche that he relentlessly, obsessively pursues a very young woman who’s his inferior in many ways (eleven years younger although experientially it’s more like twenty, ignorant of the world to a ridiculous degree, no career or even job to speak of if you ignore the implausibly successful comic book, which Wesley hasn’t made any deductions regarding)? Oh yeah, the writer already told us in the first book; he’s a male chauvinist and thinks all women are inferior because that’s the beating heart of male chauvinism.
Stupidly, Azrael admits to the attack on Carver, excusing it by saying he’d hurt one of his women—he has no evidence that she had done this despite what he’s told her. She’s believing in the false basis of trust she thinks she has with him. She needs to watch this video.
Cops Are Liars | Renegade Cut – YouTube
I honestly don’t know how she’s managed to survive as long as she has, let alone running around killing people willy-nilly if she has this little in the way of brains and/or street smarts, other than her being Jerk Sue, which is probably enough reason.
While we’re on this, I have a question. Is Wesley supposed to be a good cop? Azrael thinks he is—she can’t stop raving about his kindness and righteousness and angelic nature. Wesley never expresses any qualms, either aloud or in his mind, about what he’s done in the course of his relationship with her. This includes sexual assault (of Azrael herself and Ann Kennedy) and a pervasive campaign of sexual harassment and stalking against Azrael in the first book, and now he’s resumed the stalking and added assault and battery of Jimbo Kern and breaking and entering. Before he broke into her apartment, he has no qualms about breaking the law. He isn’t being explicitly presented to us as Vic Mackey, so what conclusions are we supposed to draw about him? In the universe of this series, is this what a good cop is?
I mean, objectively, if one of your criteria for a good cop is “does not knowingly break the law,” then Wesley’s a bad cop. It’s just that, here, I can’t tell if his behavior is approved of or at least tolerated. Is the Sunnydale Police Department corrupt in whole or in part? We don’t have enough information to determine that, and we haven’t seen any other cops operating. We’re told how Ann Kennedy single-handedly figured out Dr. Chiles was the killer, but we never saw her acting as a police officer first-hand, other than when she fell down on the way to the abandoned hospital and called for backup. And they are the only two named cops in the series so far (Gary Webb was an intern). The only other cops we know about are the “multiple detectives” that questioned Wesley after Dr. Chiles hit him in the head, but none of them had names and vanished when they weren’t needed anymore.
Wesley takes issue with the way she tells him this, characterizing it as “flippant” and has the following thought.
He wanted to see her care. About something. About him.
She cares enough about the sex workers to protect them, even if it is in a half-assed way. WE know it’s just about you.
They have a conversation about abuse and sex work in which Azrael doesn’t think anyone has a right to hurt a woman (except her angelic Wesley, but she won’t follow her logic to its natural conclusion) and Wesley thinks that “Abuse of any kind enraged him.” Except when it’s him abusing Azrael, lying to and gaslighting Morty about the two of them being friends, assaulting Jimbo Kern, and forcing a kiss on Ann Kennedy. All of that is just fine.
During this conversation, Azrael shows some emotions about Bliss, demonstrating that caring that Wesley wants to see, and he sits down next to her. He questions her about Carver and she doesn’t put any importance on whether Carver knows it was her that attacked him, which triggers Wesley’s anger again. He’s obsessed with protecting her, despite thinking that she’s a world-class fighter who can protect herself, because that’s his place as a man and she’s a useless vagina-haver anyway. The emphasis placed on his need to protect her, and how often it’s mentioned despite what he knows about her, pushes it into the level of delusion on his part.
There’s about two pages where they keep going back and forth over how to handle Carver, with Wesley taking the position that she needs to let him deal with it like a proper female and Azrael advocating for handling it herself. There’s no suspense here because we know it doesn’t matter, since she’ll give in. She has to—she’s the woman. Wesley’s trying to control himself and has the thought,
Throttle her or kiss her—it was a toss-up which one Luther wanted to do the most.
This has happened often enough that it now gets its own counter.
Wesley Keeps Azrael from Breathing (or Wants To) Counter: 6
He tells her she’s admitted to him that she’s planning violence against Carver, we think preparatory to arresting her (which I don’t believe for an instant). She demurs and starts showing some anger and defiance. Her skirt’s hiked up to an unladylike height, which Wesley takes advantage of by
[c]urving his hand around her slender upper thigh…
If he can get his hand around her entire upper thigh, it’s not slender, it’s emaciated. She needs to be hospitalized and put on an intravenous feeding tube. And that reminds me—she hasn’t eaten in this entire book (or six chapters now). She isn’t even allowed to drink Cokes the way she could in the last book. How thin is thin enough? But this does extend the theme of Wesley using physical contact with Azrael to assert control of her and/or the situation.
It goes without saying that he doesn’t arrest her for making threats against Carver, which I don’t even think is a chargeable offense. She’s said nothing specific like “I’m going to kill him at the corner of Fifth and Elm with a knife in one hour.” She admitted to the previous attack, but we know he doesn’t have a witness to it and she can claim he made up the confession when she gets to the station house. Even if he did have a witness, I don’t think he’d arrest her because them he’d lose his best weapon against her. Once he uses it, she’d be in contact with other cops and could reveal his corrupt past behavior, which he would never allow. So I don’t think he will ever arrest her for anything in this series, no matter what evidence he has.
She covers his hand with hers and gets a jolt of the movie-Buffy monster cramps. This is either when Oren lures Bliss away or attacks Bliss. The timeline isn’t clear, but I’m sure they’ll find her after the attack. I can’t imagine he even made it out of the neighborhood before Bliss escaped.
Wesley uses previously unmentioned psychic powers to determine she isn’t responding to his godlike masculinity and we learn that Azrael has pale blue eyes. Maybe the heroine’s eye color could have been established sooner than a quarter of the way into the second book in the series of which she is the heroine. She gets to her feet, he grabs her arms,
Wesley Arm Grab Counter: 16
but she manages to shake him off. Of course he’s offended and calls her by her complete name while cursing. She screams like a banshee, which manages to get his mind off his hard-on, and then she takes off running. He runs after her but can’t catch her because of her unholy speed, which he never had a problem with before this. During this run, they pass numerous local color slum inhabitants, including drug dealers, three drunks, and a shopping cart lady. Because normal people don’t live in slums.
Just had a thought: she’s still wearing her pseudo-hooker ankle boots. They probably have high heels, so why is he having a hard time catching up to her, when he could catch up to her when she wore her stupid flip-flops?
So Azrael stops running and Wesley spots Bliss. The description here is somehow both overwritten and nonspecific. It’s actually an interesting trick how both can be true.
There in the middle of the road, clothes torn, neck bleeding, staggering with her eyes closed and her arms out, was poor, young, too helpless Bliss.
Condescending much? She rescued herself from a killer while she was drugged and isn’t even God’s paladin. Chew on that for a while.
And when did her clothes get torn? I understand the bleeding neck is most likely from the syringe Oren used to shoot her up with Rohypnol, but he’s never mentioned as having torn her clothing since she didn’t put up a fight. I guess it was jumping out the window and hitting the street. We had to make her seem as pathetic as possible in the eyes of our two so-superior leads, so Bliss falls into Azrael’s arms and passes out (it seems like) or at least goes limp. Wesley surveys the street and notices “a group of thugs hanging out” and acknowledges mentally the necessity of questioning them at some point.
Wesley and Oren both call these bystanders “thugs,” so I’m forced to conclude the hanging-around guys are black. I feel like this word wouldn’t be used for white men. Oren’s car is still in the process of pedal-to-metal and Wesley tries to get the license plate but fails, as he does with most things related to police work and doesn’t even think about shooting out the tires. I don’t think he remembers he has a gun half the time.
Anyway, Wesley takes Bliss away from Azrael because he’s the man and uses his out-of-place radio to call for assistance. Bliss doesn’t want to go to a hospital and it’s specifically pointed out that she has vomit in her hair and on her mouth. I’d think you’d notice it on her clothes first, but whatever. It reminds me that Oren called her vomit “loamy” in the last chapter and I didn’t pick up on it, but I don’t think Azrael and Bliss both eat dirt. She’s still drugged up and not paying attention to him, so he wants Azrael to help him with her. He phrases the request like this.
“Come over here, Gaby. I need your help.”
If it weren’t Wesley saying it, this would be a pretty innocuous thing. The thing that makes it offensive to me is that it’s a command. Everything he says to her, if it isn’t a proposition/sexual innuendo or a question, is a flat-out command. He could have said, “Please come here, I need your help” or “Could you come over here? I need your help.” But he can’t ask or show politeness. He’s the alpha male and she must obey, or “God help you.”
When Azrael doesn’t respond and he thinks she’s about to pop vamp face,
More sternly, Luther repeated, “Come here, Gaby.”
Like calling a dog. Nooooo, that dog collar wasn’t at all symbolic, Wesley, because you think she’s your bitch. Fuckface.
So Wesley puts Bliss down on a bench at a bus stop and noticed “a raised, circular welt” that’s “bright red” on her neck. That makes it sound like it’s a metric fuckton bigger than a needle mark from a syringe would be, but I guess it had to be that big to attract his attention, because we all know that Wesley’s dumber than a bag full of hammers. He also considers the possibility that she injected herself, then dismisses it. Junkies mostly inject into their arms, Wesley, until they collapse veins and have to find other sites.
Eventually Azrael gets over to Bliss. Wesley expects her to do the girly nurturing thing with Bliss, but instead she tries to get information about her attacker. Wesley tries to make her stop, but she does get the information that it was a boy that attacked her before Bliss passes out. Wesley tries to stop her again—how dare she interrogate an assault victim? What does she think she is, a cop? Being a cop in Sunnydale means avoiding work at all costs.
Bliss comes to again and moves the plot forward with her knowledge. Wesley does make a stab at questioning her and gets the information that her attacker was a man and a woman at the same time. Yikes.
Oren’s going to be trans. I can feel this approaching like a train headed for a car stalled on the railroad tracks. I can’t imagine that this will be handled well, but I’ll wait to judge until the trigger is pulled, then my head will explode and I’ll rant like it’s chapter 10 of the first book and an old lady gets raped to death with a knife by Azrael because the writer had no editor to tell her what the perineum is.
Anyway, Wesley’s all kinds of mad and wants to kill whoever attacked Bliss. They really don’t have a relationship that would warrant that level of emotion, but he’s in a constant state of rage and is probably grateful to have found a socially acceptable reason for it. Azrael puts her hand on Bliss’s cheek and he thinks she has no idea how to comfort someone.
“Come here, Gaby.”
This is the third fucking command phrased almost exactly the same way in—maybe five minutes? Not more than ten. But maybe it’s less dog-bitch and master than father and child, which is something I don’t want to think about, so moving on.
So the ambulance arrives, Wesley goes to talk to the paramedics and tell the uniformed cops to question the bystanders—way to get out of doing it yourself like a real cop—watches Bliss put in the ambulance, and when he turns around Azrael’s gone. He’s all kinds of mad for the second time in ten minutes but decides she’s going after Carver (don’t know why since she has no evidence he’s behind this and both of them saw the kid she chased in chapter 1) and that he just needs to get there first. Which doesn’t seem likely, since he doesn’t know where Carver hangs out and Azrael, presumably, does, but I’m sure he will because he’s the hero and it will be gifted to him by the author.
Say, didn’t Bliss tell him she didn’t want to go to the hospital? Flipping back three pages, Bliss does indeed make it clear she doesn’t want the hospital. So it isn’t just Azrael’s wishes that Wesley ignores, it’s every woman’s. He doesn’t even think about the fact that Bliss most certainly does not have any health insurance (the Affordable Care Act wouldn’t be in effect for two years yet) and is going to be saddled with a hefty hospital bill because there is no single-payer healthcare in America.
Section break, and we’re into Azrael’s POV. She’s boiling with rage and threatens nameless street denizens until she finds out where Carver’s hanging out. She knows he’ll know she’s on the way and is happy about that for no stated reason. From what’s on the page, it seems like she also thinks Carver attacked Bliss or at least had it done? I’m not sure why she would think this, since the one attack Carver ordered that she knows about was directed at her. There’s no reason for her to think he started attacking people she cares about.
Carver lives next door to an arcade and pool hall (pool hall just sounds really old-fashioned to me) and Azrael gets propositioned and repeats her defeat of Lead Drunk Dude by making another guy hit his head on the pavement and breaking the second drunk’s jaw, for the crime of “accosting” her. Did they ask her for change or something? “Accosted” sounds very Bridgerton.
She decides to go up the fire escape of the building—this one has some, unlike Morty’s one-doored apartment building/two-family structure—and uses pipes to get there. We get six paragraphs of her deciding to go up the building, figuring out how it can be done, and doing it. It’s not interesting, so I’m skipping it.
So she comes through an open window into some stranger’s apartment. It’s the usual slum cliché with multiple crying babies, too-loud television, and drunk people laughing it up in another room. Of course nobody sees her because it isn’t time yet, so she goes down to Carver’s apartment and knocks on the door.
Well, that’s as stealthy as walking up to the side of a trick’s car, standing about a foot away, and watching him get a blowjob. For such a supposedly impressive fighter, she doesn’t sneak very well.
Some bruiser with bad teeth opens the door (without even asking who’s there, which non-criminals usually do) and she knocks him out by hitting him in the head with the knife hilt. Not sure a knife hilt is heavy enough for that. Carver’s standing right behind him and apparently didn’t bother getting a gun out for an unexpected visitor when he knows there’s someone out looking to kill him.
She tells him not to try getting away or she’ll castrate him, but uses her nonspecific phrase, “make you a choirboy.” Not everybody knows choirboys used to be castrato, so from that he might think you’re going to make him an eleven-year-old boy dressed in robes. I think, “You run and I’ll cut your dick off and shove it down your throat” would have more impact than the way she phrases it.
And now we find out that Carver has scars all over his visible skin from when Azrael tied him to the bed and cut him up. Hey, you said those were shallow cuts, nothing deep enough to scar! For this, she doesn’t even have the veil of “God told me to.” This is just her enjoying hurting people. And this is our heroine. Not only do I not find her likable or relatable, I don’t even find her tolerable. Who would?
And now the interrogation starts. Azrael begins with asking if he killed Lucy, to which Carver seems not to know she’s dead. Why should he? She isn’t in his stable, so what would he care? Azrael lies and says she was diced and thrown in the river, and he doesn’t have the mental power to ask how she knew it was Lucy if she was diced, which means cut into cubes. He pleads innocence and she believes him.
Then she asks about Bliss, which he takes to mean that she’s dead. Azrael explains and he pleads innocent to that too. She believes him.
Then Azrael gets to whether he’s trying to kill her. He says no, and she manifests her seventeenth superpower by now having the ability to detect when someone’s lying. She must have the buggy beta version because she has no idea when Wesley’s lying.
He swears he isn’t by saying, “I swear,” and she tells him to stop swearing. Is that a joke? I honestly can’t tell. Then he attacks her and that goes the way you’d expect, with her winning in two moves. The fight scenes are so repetitive, if I had any desire to read any of the author’s other books, it wouldn’t be the SBC Fighters series if this is the level of quality in the fight scenes.
She breaks his nose and puts some more cuts on him. He reacts in kind of an understated way by questioning why she won’t leave him alone and she tells him she wants to be left alone. They don’t come to any resolution of this because all of a sudden Wesley’s at the door. This impresses Azrael because lady boner. It’s a bigger joke to me than swearing, thinking Wesley knows how to do enough police work to find out where Carver lives.
Carver tells her he won’t tell Wesley anything and the author proceeds to misspell “titty” as “tittie,” according to dictionary.com. He agrees not to tell Wesley she was there and she takes off out the window while Carver’s turned away and this is treated like a magical disappearance. From what she can hear as she’s Spidermanning down the wall, Wesley broke down Carver’s door. The image she has to Wesley here is “[his] red face, his hot temper.” Then she gets all the feels because Wesley held Bliss “like a delicate child.” Hey, like her daddy, so the overtones persist!
There weren’t many men like Detective Luther Cross, and it sure made him hard to resist.
There are more than you’d think, Azrael, which is why 40% of police families experience domestic abuse. But she decides she should stay away from him until after she gets to the bottom of what happened to Bliss, which is a good decision. We know she won’t stick to it and won’t be smart enough to find another place to live and stay away from the phase-shifting whorehouse, but at least we know she can make a sensible decision. The chapter ends with her thinking about how her life sucks. And it’s a result of decisions you make, but you’ll never see that.
And—chapter! The daddy/daughter overtones in this series make my skin crawl. Maybe if this had been advertised as a daddy/daughter thing—no, I wouldn’t even have picked it up off the shelf in that case.
Next time, chapter 7, in which Azrael and Wesley visit the hospital and Bliss manifests some apparent psychic powers.
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