(CW: violence, ableism)
This is the longest chapter in the series so far at 23 pages. In fact, I went through all the books to count pages in chapters and it is the longest one in the entire series. I was worried that meant this was the chapter where the fucking is, but we managed to dodge that bullet this time. The bullet we didn’t dodge is Wesley’s persistent violence and manipulation, which is what makes this chapter an especial slog.
We start out in Azrael’s POV and she spends about a page thinking about her feelings for Bliss, and then Wesley shows up, and he’s furious as usual. We have not one damn clue at this point where they are. Somewhere in the street, I guess, since Azrael had to stop walking when he spoke to her. They exist in the void of setting that is this series.
Turning sideways and indicating a hallway, Luther said, “This way.”
Fuck, they’re inside the hospital? There is nothing in the previous page and a half to convey that they’re anywhere other than outside. At the end of the last chapter she was walking in the street, and at the start of this one she’s still walking. If she got to her destination, we should have been advised of that. This is another example of the failure of descriptive writing in this series.
In case it needed saying, in the next half-page, Wesley is furious twice and hot-under-the-collar twice. Other things indicating his mental state are flaring nostrils, a searing gaze, a scorching hot aura, hands on hips, chest expanding, and he’s working his jaw. In response to this, Azrael observes that she’s never been afraid of Luther. Well, that’s a lie. You may not have been afraid of him physically but you were very much afraid of him arresting you so you couldn’t kill people anymore and would be in everlasting, ceaseless pain while you spent the rest of your life in prison. But memory of a goldfish, right.
Azrael walks past him, telling him not to “get his boxers in a bunch,” and that triggers an episode on his part. In the next line she thinks her “sarcasm” did it, but that’s wrong. It’s the disrespect. Wesley is a male chauvinist (as explicitly stated by the author in Awakening) and Azrael is not acting like he is superior to her the way he thinks every woman should, and that can’t be tolerated. It’s an affront to his alpha male status, which his temper and his violence seem to be integral parts of. It’s also stated that Wesley “imploded,” which is incorrect on its face because his anger and action are directed outward toward Azrael, rather than inward at himself, but No Edit Clause.
Snatching up her arm,
Wesley Arm Grab Counter: 17
he lifted her to the tips of her toes and propelled her forward before she could even think to object. When they reached a private room, he practically slammed her inside.
A lot of the verbs used for situations when Wesley’s forcing Azrael to do something are the kind you’d use for moving furniture (such as propelled and slammed here). Whether he thinks of her as an object or not, the narrative seems to.
Also, despite what we’re told, Wesley is in control of himself here. He’s clear-headed enough to remember his police training and grip her arm in such a way that she’s forced onto tiptoe so she can’t get leverage to break free or escape. There’s more language later that underlines the level of violence he’s holding back, like closing the door to the room with “theatric temper” and releasing her as though “touching her would inspire mayhem.” Isn’t that romantic?
Let’s check out the word mayhem, shall we? According to Merriam-Webster, meaning 1 is “needless or willful damage or violence; meaning 2a is “willful and permanent deprivation of a bodily member resulting in the impairment of a person’s fighting ability; meaning 2b is “willful and permanent crippling, mutilation, or disfigurement of any part of the body.”
Meaning 2a—wow, that’s exactly what Wesley wants to do. Then Azrael wouldn’t be able to fight and could only be a proper demure female that he could protect, which is code for confinement and control her life. And we know how much Wesley loves being in control.
Azrael’s worried about him and it gives her cardiac trouble, then wants to know if Bliss is all right. It seems unmotivated, because the way he brought her into the room and his demeanor before that didn’t seem like someone who was about to give her bad news. And he responds by mocking her with a question about whether she cares.
He’s being a toddler here because she’s showing more caring for Bliss than she ever has for him and he’s jealous. He knows she cares about Bliss—this is referenced several times in the previous chapter when we’re in his POV. He’s throwing a tantrum to hurt her for not caring more about him because it’s all about HIM HIM HIM. #relationshipgoals! Isn’t he just soooooo hot?
This does hurt her, rather than making her angry, which seems out of character. She swears at him and tries to leave, with predictable results.
Luther wrenched her back around. “Don’t.”
Wrenched her—that must mean he grabbed her. And what does he like to grab, besides her breast against her will?
Wesley Arm Grab Counter: 18
She’s beaten down and won’t fight because of what’s happened to Bliss. Wesley’s conditioning is working; at this rate, she’ll be a proper demure female by the end of the next book. There’s special note made of the fact that Azrael won’t raise her head to look at Wesley. That sounds a lot like an abused wife who’s trying to avoid a domestic violence incident. There’s a little lip service about how she’d have cleaned his clock under normal circumstances, although I don’t know how since she’s never beaten him in a fight unless she wasn’t thinking about it.
The reason he gives for saying this is because Azrael left before the ambulance took Bliss to the hospital she told Wesley she didn’t want to go to. She advises that she wanted to find the person who hurt Bliss, then Wesley asserts his authority by telling her, “That’s my job.” Until you get fired for being a lazy, do-nothing, goldbricking layabout of a cop, that is, but do continue.
Azrael lets him and us know that if she can’t protect the sex workers, she has no purpose—serving God’s will by killing demons just doesn’t cut it anymore, I guess. Interesting that Wesley’s trying to destroy the one shred of agency she’s found for herself.
Something else—we haven’t heard her use any supernatural language so far. There’s no indication that Oren Paige is supposed to be a demon, even though she got vamp face around him and vamp face = holy kill order = demon. What that means I’m sure we’ll find out later, unless it falls down the same Memory Hole as KY Lady and the child abuse victim.
So he senses his attack is hitting because she isn’t fighting back in any real way. With “rage” and “contempt,” he continues lacerating her psyche for not comforting Bliss like a friend would, and she tells him she doesn’t know how. In other words, he tells her she wasn’t a proper demure female, but a freak that he somehow still wants to fuck, and she accepts his assessment of her behavior meekly, proving she’s on the road to becoming what he wants.
Now he grabs her by the hair in a manner that “smarted a little,” and proceeds to curse her. Damn, that’s romantic, isn’t it? For once she doesn’t rebuke him for cursing, but replies,
“I was damned long before I met you, cop.”
Ooh, Miss Edgelord in the house! That does seem to indicate that she thinks she’s going to Hell due to all the God-forced murder she’s been doing since she was a teenager. Even though she knows all she has to do is sit tight until the moment for killing passes and God will take the pain away, she just must kill because it’s the only thing in her life she seems to enjoy. It also strengthens my suspicion that Azrael does not love God.
He doesn’t like that and does some more cursing, then deigns to give her physical contact because she’s shown meekness and bent to his will. This makes Azrael think that Bliss has died of a drug reaction.
She starts to pass out (that’s what I’m getting from how it’s described, which is “collapsed”) and then he decides to tell her that Bliss is all right. This is a running theme with him now, withholding the status of her friends from her until she gives in to him. He is such a manipulator.
Rather than being comforted, Azrael gets the fury (must be contagious from Wesley) and “slugged him in the ribs” for withholding the information. Because he’s the hero, he hardly even feels the impact of her tiny, girly fist and starts trying to blame her for the fact that he wasn’t with Bliss the whole way to the hospital. Which, I must mention, she specifically told him she didn’t want to go to. Since the hospital hasn’t been named up until this point, I’m forced to assume this is the same hospital where Dr. Chiles worked while stealing patients who weren’t dead as subjects for her cancer experiments. Is that a hospital you would want to go to, even if you did have insurance? Why is there only one nameless hospital in this nameless town? It seems like it’s big enough for at least two. Just FYI, both Phoenix and Cincinnati have more than 30 hospitals each.
Azrael denies it being her fault that he’s so obsessively protective that he feels the need to follow her everywhere and Wesley responds by “grabbing her shoulders and rattling her witless.” It’s not specifically an arm grab, but since it is a grab that’s part of an act of violence,
Wesley Arm Grab Counter: 19
And I bet you aren’t smirking about his violence now, Azrael, since you’re the target of it. Not like when you smirked about Wesley doing the same damn thing to Trick Dude in the last book because he committed the cardinal sins of yelling at you, walking toward you, and being the victim of the Class 5 Felony of voyeurism when you decided to watch him get a blowjob in his car without his knowledge or permission. Karma’s as much of a bitch as you are.
So this makes her mad. Telling him to let go and struggling don’t do any good because she’s a helpless vagina-haver, and then he tells her he’s up for a fight if she wants it. How is any of this romantic in the least? Please tell me how this is anything but the normalization and romanticization of abuse.
I used to work with a woman in her mid-twenties (let’s call her Emma) who was living with and later married to a guy around her age (let’s call him Noah) who sort of reminds me of Wesley, with the hair-trigger temper and the violent tendencies. Noah once got fired from a job for reasons Emma didn’t specify, other than that he had gotten comfortable enough at the job to show some of that temper and violence. He didn’t exempt her from these qualities either and the police were called on more than one occasion, but she would match him blow for blow and then start crying, “I love him! I love him!” when the police arrested him. If this series had any grounding in reality, that would be Azrael and Wesley’s future.
Luther’s pointing finger nearly poked her in the nose. “We’re coming to an agreement, you and I, one you’ll abide by.”
This guy is spoiling for a fight.
He blusters some more and she makes a dismissive reference to his constant empty threats to arrest her, which he does repurpose.
“I’ll arrest you,” Luther confirmed, “and you won’t get a chance to visit with Bliss.” He stared her in the eyes, unrelenting, firm in his purpose. “How do you think that’ll make Bliss feel? Or do you even care how she feels?”
This is straight-up manipulation, because we were told explicitly in the last chapter that it’s obvious to Wesley that Azrael cares about Bliss. Him taking this tactic, when he’s already played on it earlier, just makes it clear he knows this is a winning attack.
This whole section is personally upsetting to me, with the violence that isn’t even called out that a lot of people in the olden days would have called “home correction” and thought it was perfectly okay for husbands to do to their wives. In fact, they probably would have thought Wesley was going way too easy on Azrael, since he wasn’t using a stick no wider than his thumb.
I was going to summarize the rest of this section for the sake of finishing this post, since it goes on for another three pages, but then I ran into a passage that exemplifies how the narrative jerks itself off over qualities that Wesley has only in the telling, not in the showing. He’s made it clear he doesn’t care what Azrael thinks about what he’s doing, and she gets the urge to hit him, which she naturally doesn’t act upon because he’s the hero.
And the writer makes sure to tell us she wants to hit him in his “handsome face.” Well, handsome is as handsome does, and Wesley looks like your average forest monster killing teenagers in a backwoods cabin to me.
But no, she couldn’t, wouldn’t, do that. Even now with his fury boiling over and red-hot anger tingeing the outer perimeter of his aura, shades of pure altruism encompassed him.
Luther epitomized all that was good and pure.
Two words: bull and shit. Altruism means caring about other people and wanting to help them. Wesley doesn’t give a shit about Bliss. He doesn’t give a shit about Morty. He doesn’t give a shit about Ann Kennedy. The only reason he gives a shit about Azrael is because she’s a challenge and he hasn’t fucked her yet.
Good and pure? We can put this off onto Azrael’s thirteen-year-old crush and her lack of female friends to clue her in to the fact that she’s in a toxic relationship, as well as the fact that she’s never known any men well other than Father Acute-Interest-in-Teenagers and Morty, and neither of them were romantic interests. One was a father figure and the other was a punching bag.
Anway, to make a three-page-long noxious story short, he proposes that they work together as partners and she agrees to it. There’s a line about her “[h]ating her own weakness,” so props to the writer for letting Azrael understand that this is a weakness that Wesley will exploit. There’s also the acknowledgement that the God’s paladin business will come out before long.
Section break and we meet Bliss’s doctor, Dr. Bolton, who is a “plump, gray-haired” man, therefore according to the narrative a good and trustworthy doctor, not like Dr. Chiles, that deceitful, sick little female. He tells us that Bliss was drugged with Midazolam, which I looked up because I wasn’t sure if this was a real drug or something made up.
Turns out it is real and is used to relax patients before surgery. It can have the side effect of slowing or stopping the breathing and patients shouldn’t drink alcohol for a day or two after it’s been used. The notable side effect, in terms of the plot, is that it can cause “extreme memory loss that may last for several hours after the injection.”
At first I thought Dr. Bolton discussing Bliss with Wesley was a HIPAA violation, but there’s an exception if the patient if a crime victim and is incapable of revealing information themselves.
Wesley calls this a date rape drug and the doctor confirms the memory loss side effect. However, he attributes the effect on her breathing to an adverse reaction which caused her to throw up, when the breathing thing is a known side effect. I wouldn’t call that wrong but it’s not right either.
Dr. Bolton tells Luther that Bliss is stable but confused and refers to her as “your young lady.” How very patronizing of you, doctor. And Azrael hasn’t said a word to Bolton at this point, which the narrative explicitly calls out, but states that this is what she wants. Isn’t it interesting that Azrael can now be a demure, proper female when it suits her, when in the first book she had no clue how to do that?
Then the writer takes about another page to flex on her research about Midazolam, which nobody finds especially interesting other than her. Then Azrael finally speaks up. The doctor reacts by “studying her” before saying anything. Maybe he wants to ask if she got permission from her lord and master to open her mouth, then reconsidered.
He gives them permission to visit Bliss, then we go into a four-paragraph recap of how much and why Azrael hates hospitals before she goes into the room. It’s because Father Acute-Interest-in-Teenagers died of cancer, and it’s a lot. You’re welcome.
Bliss gets compared to “a small, defenseless child,” and damn it makes me uncomfortable how often women are infantilized in this series. Usually it’s Azrael, but it bled through to Ann Kennedy after the hospital massacre, and now it’s Bliss. I’m not going back to check it, but I think there was even a moment when Dr. Chiles was referred to as having a childish frame or something like that.
Bliss is panicky about Wesley being there and begs Azrael to help her leave. Azrael shits on this by telling her that Wesley already knows she’s a jailbait runaway and that “he’s the heroic sort.” Only in the romance novel sense, sweetie. Otherwise, he’s a power-abusing sex offender.
Wesley makes some snarky remarks that Azrael rebukes him for. Instead of putting her firmly in her womanly place, “[h]e touched Bliss’s small foot tenting the sheets at the end of the bed.” And no, he didn’t have permission to do this, even though the woman he’s touching was seriously assaulted a few hours ago. Alpha males don’t need no stinking permission.
Azrael talks to her for a while and gets the information that Bliss remembers talking to a boy but there was a woman’s voice saying bad things, but she can’t remember specifics. The witnesses—remember them? The ones that Oren and Wesley both called “thugs”—remembered the woman but not the boy, so they were willing to speak to the police. I guess not everybody in the slums is awful like the book keeps saying, huh?
Bliss is also calling Wesley by his first name, which I don’t think she would do, considering what their relationship has been up until this point, but there are bigger fish to fry a-coming. Because this is where Bliss reveals that she has psychic powers.
Specifically, she can see the extra storage room in Stately Cleaver Manor and gives a lot more detail about it than she could about Oren, along with the fact that “a lot of people have died there.” That doesn’t make sense with what we’ve been shown up until this point, with Dory and Myer not knowing how to dispose of a corpse, so unless Oren’s been killing on his own for years, which doesn’t seem likely, again based on the text, but whatever. Moving on.
Azrael refers to “special sight,” which Wesley repeats, but she ignores it and Bliss alludes to the fact that she just knew Azrael would save her. Which she didn’t, by the way. Bliss saved herself, but that doesn’t fit into the narrative that women must depend on others, preferably men. Then Azrael wonders if this might be the same boy she saw earlier.
You don’t say! The only boy in the book, other than the ten-year-old whose mother was looked down upon by Azrael for sex work to support the family and presented as an abuser for yelling at him, might be the boy who attacked Bliss—what are the odds?
Azrael tells Wesley she thinks he was “up to something,” and Wesley “scoffs,” as he’s the Dana Scully of this series, although not attractive or appealing or science-based. The phrase “psychogenic phenomenon” is mentioned as something he dislikes. Psychogenic is defined by Merriam-Webster as “originating in the mind or in mental or emotional conflict,” which does not make it a synonym for supernatural or paranormal. Plus, phenomenon is singular and phenomena is plural, but I guess we’re only talking about precognition here, so I’ll give it a pass. It’s mentioned that Azrael doesn’t like Wesley’s “lack of faith,” but I don’t know what else she expected.
Then they have a discussion about why Azrael chased Oren. You already had this discussion in chapter 2, right after it happened! You remember, when I was still calling Oren Vlasic Dill Beaver Cleaver. The only new information we get is that Azrael tells Wesley that she only planned to talk to him, which is a straight-up lie as we were in her head in the prologue and talking was not in the cards.
When they leave Bliss’s room (that she can’t pay for, by the way, as she almost certainly doesn’t have health insurance, so I’m guessing at least ten thousand dollars for the ambulance, the ER visit, the hospital room, and whatever treatment she’s been given. There’s no indication that there are any other patients in the room, so it could be a private room, which costs even more), Azrael tells Wesley that she wants to kill whoever did this. Instead of threatening her with arrest again, he admits he does too, which I don’t believe, despite anything he’s said about how bad it made him feel to see Bliss in that condition. I’m firmly convinced that Wesley is a psychopath and he will say anything he needs to say to get what he wants.
He’s toying with her hair, now that she’s given in to him and accepted him as a partner, then puts his hand around her neck. That gave me flashbacks to the six times he’s cut off her oxygen or wanted to, but this time it excites her and inspires “extraordinary need.” Vomit.
She’s thinking about killing Oren and all of a sudden Wesley now has both hands around her neck, inspiring another flashback, and is stroking her jaw with his thumb and we’re getting all into the “carnal” thing and I am about to puke until Wesley mercifully pulls the emergency brake to stop the sex train by telling her he wants to understand what’s going on, so I guess we’re about to get the God’s paladin revelation.
She makes sure to get all up against him and press her groin into his—truly, a spoonful of sugar makes the medicine go down. Then she tells him she can sense evil and he wants her to define evil. Whuh? Maybe he’s trying to figure out if she’s mentally ill, which he’s had several thoughts about in the previous book but went into denial over the implications and never got help for her.
Azrael tells him about the demons but wisely enough doesn’t use the word. Here’s how she describes them, which also covers the helpless cancer people she murdered in Awakening.
“There are bad people, and there are true corruptions passing themselves off as humans. They don’t deserve to breathe the same air as others. They don’t merit rehabilitation, or a life in prison, or even an easy death.”
Whoa. She decides who deserves what? Azrael had better be glad I’m not in charge of deciding what she deserves. Even more troubling, Wesley agrees with her.
“Yeah, I’ve known evil like that. It’s a sad hazard of my profession.”
Awww, he thinks she’s speaking figuratively, but she’s being literal. Credit where credit is due: I think “sad hazard” is a nice turn of phrase.
They have a few words about whether evil deceives him, he admits it has in the past, then she kisses him and says she never has been. Then we get told his boner’s starting to deflate (that’s the gist of it, anyway) and he expresses the question he should have been having from the moment the subject came up: what she does about the evil once she’s recognized it. But this shouldn’t be anything he needs to ask. She all-but-confessed to killing Murdered Mutilated Grandpa to the point where Wesley was threatening to arrest her for it. What does he THINK she does about it?
She tells him she’s just a woman and wants to know what she can do.
He doesn’t like this sass and kisses her, and she really gets into it. Naturally, when he stops kissing her, he backs off completely, as it’s only a control/manipulation tactic. Rather than pushing the issue on the possible murdering, which I would think would be pretty important, he wants to know what Bliss meant about Azrael coming to rescue her. I’d think that was obvious, Wesley, but Azrael is unusually sensible and tells him he needs to ask Bliss. Then he tries to find out what Azrael thinks she meant, and she thinks, “It was time to get out from under Luther’s spell.” It was time to do that in chapter 4 of the previous book, so I won’t hold my breath that she’ll actually do it.
During her thoughts she calls her life “an abomination.” That’s in addition to multiple uses of “her miserable life” and at least one use of “her hell of a life.” There has been no physical abuse that we’ve been told about, no sexual abuse, and the worst things we’ve been told about her foster parents are that they didn’t get her birthday or Christmas presents and made her do chores when she was having her movie-Buffy monster cramps. Her life is not one-tenth as bad as she thinks it is, especially if just sitting tight and ignoring the cramps would make them go away after a while. And she’s never expressed a single worry about money or surviving any of her demon battles. She’s the quintessential first world problems person.
Anyway, she decides to shove Bliss’s visions off onto her being scared and drugged and fantasizing it all, and calls Oren a “deranged bitch.” Takes one to know one. Azrael lets him know she believes in mind reading, which isn’t what this is, but whatever. She also tells him she can see and read auras. His is muddy violet, which in her opinion means erotic imagination. According to this website it’s actually about spirituality and higher consciousness. The fact that the violet is muddy has a connotation that sex is dirty. Plus auras are not a Christian thing but New Age and I really don’t think Father Acute-Interest-in-Teenagers would have let that pass without a mention.
They talk a little more about how Bliss might have seen the room and he says he can “buy it, I suppose,” but she treats that like he’s being flip. That’s a lot more than Mulder could have gotten out of Scully at the start. She tells him not to make fun of her and he says the following.
“Actually I was thinking there are many depths to you. Some of them are a little loony, but somehow you make it all sound reasonable, and believable.”
Okay, so he admits he thinks she’s mentally ill sometimes, but she talks a good game and he can deny it because he’s ruled by his boner and his need for control. So then he starts the third degree about how she knew Bliss was in trouble.
Please keep in mind they’re having this talk in a hospital hallway where anyone could overhear it. I guess this hospital is filled with the same vanishing-as-needed crowds that hang out around Morty’s apartment building.
Azrael walks off, but Wesley follows, as expected, and keeps pressing her on it. She keeps denying and he grabs her arm to stop her.
Wesley Arm Grab Counter: 20
Then he asks if she knew evil had Bliss, like it’s some kind of gotcha question.
And—chapter! Wow, this was a bad one to get through. I never would have finished it if I hadn’t cut down what I was responding to in the deserted-hospital-room fight scene. Good news; like I said, this was the longest chapter in the series, and I don’t expect to have such a hard time with any of the others.
On the character side, I don’t think Wesley responded in character to any of the paranormal subjects Azrael talked about. I get that this may have been him using the cop-interrogation technique of agreeing with the suspect to keep them talking, but I don’t think so. And him not following up the question about how she deals with evil when she finds it? If he has one working brain cell, he already knows the answer to that.
Next time, chapter 8. I was flipping through it to get an idea what would go on and—gulp. I would have liked to protect you from this for a longer time, but we’re at the halfway point of the series, so it had to happen here. The next chapter is the one where the fucking is. Abandon hope, all ye who enter here.
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