Before I go ahead and snark Azrael and Wesley’s dinner date (which is all that happens in this chapter), I’d like to talk a little bit about Steven Seagal. This is not as off-topic as it seems.
For those of you not in the know, Steven Seagal was a martial arts action star in the late 1980s and early 1990s who had a career downturn after the failure of his vanity project, On Deadly Ground, and now stars mostly in direct-to-video movies shot in Eastern Europe. The last movie with a theatrical release that he appeared in was Machete with Danny Trejo.
In his professional life, he allegedly attacked actor John Leguizamo on the set of Executive Decision for laughing at something he said (he’d thought it was a joke) and is rumored to have a habit of kicking stuntmen in the crotch to see if they’re wearing cups. But the thing about him that has a bearing on the Servant series is that his characters very rarely take any physical damage onscreen, although this is more prevalent in the movies he made after going into direct-to-video films. And that’s what he has in common with Azrael: there is no sense of danger to either of them.
Azrael has never taken a single hit in a fight during this series. The closest thing she’s ever had to a competent opponent, other than Wesley, and he doesn’t count as he’s the Romantic Hero that the heroine cannot surpass at anything, was Ghostface in chapter 3. This is one reason the cancer people in the first book were such a misstep. How can we be expected to take her seriously as a fighter against people whose only offensive move is falling forward?
But there will be no fights—at least physical ones—in this chapter, in which Azrael eats the only meal she’s had in the week and a half or so that is the timeline of this book. It’s okay for her to eat it since Wesley provided it for her. I don’t know what time of day it is and so can’t prove this meal is dinner, but the children in the playground were out of school, so closer to dinner than lunch. And why were they playing at the abandoned elementary school? There was another playground within her sightline from Morty’s building in chapter 1 of Awakening.
We start out in Wesley’s POV. He seems to have taken her to a nice restaurant that has tables with linen tablecloths. Azrael’s wearing a “sleeveless shirt and short skirt,” so we know she’s still in her hooker drag. That makes me wonder if the sex workers gave her the clothes she wears or if she bought them. What happened to her other clothes from Mugatu‘s Derelicte Collection?
He’s got some paragraphs of checking her out and slavering all over her in his mind about how super-sexy she is. Wesley even acknowledges that he’s obsessed with her. Well, knowing you have a problem is the first step. They have a short conversation about Morty and Ann and then Wesley’s thinking about watching her orgasm and protecting her. At least he has a two-track mind now.
While he’s thinking about this, we get a stunning admission that the author may not have realized was significant.
She accepted sexual interaction with him—under duress.
Duress means force. Wesley has just admitted that he forces sexual contact on her, and this admission just gets bypassed by the narrative in favor of him musing about how mature she is. If you normally date twelve-year-olds, then you might think so. (Future Me: this is in direct contradiction to the next book, where early on he’s wondering if she has the social skills–meaning maturity–to handle a romantic relationship.)
He introduces the subject of her burning building save and she scoffs at the idea that she might be shaken up. And Wesley’s heart palpitates here, rather than palpates. This happened in the first book too, when a word was used incorrectly on its first appearance and correctly on its second.
Azrael isn’t hungry, I guess, since she’s “barely eating the burger and fries he’d gotten her.” Wait a minute, I thought this was a nice restaurant. Why would she get a burger and fries when she can get those at any fast-food chain restaurant in town? But what am I saying, her filth phobia prohibits her from eating at fast-food or chain places. The only reason for this I can think of is that it continues the childish presentation of Azrael. A lot of kids won’t try new foods and stick to the burger and fries they’re used to. And she has a fork in her hand for no reason unless she’s eating fries with a fork. That would be a conversation piece.
Wesley calls out her lack of scars while he’s busy appraising her neck that he has wanted to close his hands around and squeeze at least three times, when he’s not choking the breath out of her with a bearhug. Earlier in this book she thought about how she heals faster than the usual, but no scars just bears out her Seagalian reluctance to take a hit in a fight, no matter how unrealistic this is. Then we get some Komedy when he says something that shocks her and she spits out the mouthful of food she was chewing. Hey, that happened in the first book too, only then it was unwanted chin-chucking that made her spit out food. This is all so boring, I can’t even tell you.
She wants to leave because everybody saw her spit out food and he thinks it’s funny and refuses. He’s also calling her “honey” now. That started after the bomb. He starts in with the sex talk to distract her from leaving and she reaches for the fork to stab him and he stops her. She gets mad and “sulks.” Then she calls him out on his manners, which I find hilarious. I would never come to this restaurant again if they were at the table next to me.
Wesley then takes the opportunity to shit on chain restaurants and advise us that this place is casual but upscale and has “good, home-cooked food.” By definition, if it’s cooked anywhere other than at someone’s home, it’s not home-cooked. And this place is not casual if it has linen tablecloths.
So she tries ignoring him and he tells her she’s “like other women after all” because he’s bright enough to figure out how Not Like Other Girls she prides herself on being. And Azrael isn’t smart enough to see deliberate provocation and ignore it, because it sounds like she jumps the table but I know she couldn’t have because people would have noticed and:
…hissed low, “I am nothing like other women and you damn well know it.”
Internalized misogyny is a hell of a drug.
Then he grabs her wrists—curious as to what this would look like, since I think she has her hands flat on the table and is leaning on them–and starts off on another mental tangent about how much she turns him on and how much he wants to fuck her and they start “trading insults” and it’s utterly boring, so moving on.
Is there anything that has to do with the plot in this useless chapter? I still haven’t seen Wesley do one bit of work to try to find out who killed Dead Tortured Lucy. And what about the old dead man in the alley? It was implied at the end of the last chapter that they went there before having dinner. Why don’t we find out what happened with that? Or Carver? Or Jimbo Kern? Did anybody bother checking on Bliss? So many plot threads blowing in the wind.
Maybe this wouldn’t piss me off so much if I’d known from the start that this is a romance, and nothing else matters but whether the lead two get together (as if that’s ever in any question, let alone serious question). The action and the mystery parts here are like the non-porn scenes in porn movies; they’re just what the reader has to put up with in order to get to the good parts.
And now Wesley implies that Azrael’s told him “tales of Father Mullond.” When did that happen? Why is shit happening off-page that, if not interesting, is at least not as boring as your toxic little romance? I guess the author realized how little she’s put on the page to explain how everybody knows all this about Father Acute-Interest-in-Teenagers and has defaulted to her favorite move: retconning. In his opinion, based on player knowledge, the priest was “a strict guide, not a doting friend given to praise.” He was a paternal figure, not a friend. I am so tired of all the laziness in this writing.
Wesley goes on to fellate Azrael for multiple paragraphs about how heroic she is. He’s finally figured out what she responds to is unreserved praise, so his tactics change accordingly. And she’s too witless to figure it out. He even tells her the kids on the Playground of Innocent Children were watching her “with starstruck awe.” Did anybody ever read this dialogue out loud to see how terrible it is? I would think not.
There’s then some would-be Komedy where Azrael calls her vagina her “moneymaker” and Wesley thinks that’s hilarious and condescends to tell her there are other names for it. It’s a small mercy that he doesn’t go on to list them.
And finally finally finally we get to some plot-related talk about her being able to sense evil and him messing that up. She lets him in on the fact that evil people look different to her, which is something that was very briefly mentioned in the first book and not followed up. In the actual text, other than being able to see bad shit in their auras, evil people look like people to her. We’ve never been given any description as to how their faces or bodies are different, so I don’t accept this. The narrative clearly wants to expand on what Gary Webb the intern said in the first book about morphing villains in the Servant comic book series, but it just doesn’t have a solid base in the series itself.
He decides to humor her and asks her some questions that aren’t open-ended enough to get her to elaborate properly, but we already know he’s lousy at interrogations and the author will drop any needed information into his lap because every day’s his birthday. She questions his ability to keep Bliss safe and he gets “annoyed.” Batting a thousand on never having a single interaction with her where he doesn’t get mad at some point.
She tells him she trusts herself more than anybody else and he loses his temper, although not to the point of violence since there are witnesses. For no reason other than because the plot needs it to happen, she tells him she has a plan to catch the killer and refuses to tell him about it. He responds about the way we’d expect.
Putting both elbows on the table, Luther closed the space between them. Voice low, he issued a warning. “You will tell me your plans, Gabrielle Cody, right now, or so help me I’ll—”
There is no reason to say that he issued a warning. The words themselves should be sufficient. Is there a word count the author’s trying to hit? It occurs to me now that Awakening and Acceptance are both exactly 292 pages long. Hang on a sec—no, the third book is 285 pages. I thought I was onto something there.
Once again he threatens her with arrest. She doesn’t take it seriously because he’s gone to that well too often and now it’s dry. She says something about her anonymity and at long last he rubs enough brain cells together to ask her if she’s on the run from the law. Other than him, he means. Azrael doesn’t deflect well enough to ease his suspicions and, when he presses her, tells him that if she’s fingerprinted, she’ll run and establish a new identity, although she doesn’t know how to do that. If she did, she’d already have a couple of sets of false ID for emergencies. She doesn’t even have real ID, so we should take this as a threat as empty as Wesley arresting her.
Wesley is distracted from her threat to flee by her admission that she’ll miss him. He offers to buy her dessert and she is disgusted by the idea.
The offer made her shudder. “I ate the meal for you, but I don’t want to stay here any longer than necessary.”
She’s definitely anorexic. No numbers in this book, but in the last one she was six feet tall and 120 pounds. And she “constantly” forgot to eat, and never felt hungry without visual or olfactory stimuli because she was so out of touch with her own body. Earlier in the boredom she asked if she was too skinny and Wesley said he liked her like that. Sigh.
Wesley acquiesces because he’s going to change her. They have a brief, unenlightening exchange about believing in angels and proceed to get in the car. Yes, drive out of this chapter and out of the book altogether. Please!
He tries to get her to tell him about her plans again and she refuses, which makes him furious as usual, but we’re shown this by “his muscles contract[ing] and his teeth [coming] together” and he calls her “a spiteful little irritant,” which is the truest thing he’s ever said and for just a moment I like him.
Azrael gets around to asking him for three days to work out the details of her plan, and then she’ll think about sharing with him. No, Azrael, you ask for 24 hours! That’s the standard! He doesn’t like it but agrees verbally. Of course he has no intention of abiding by this and makes plans to visit Morty and Ann to get them to help surveil Azrael, because that’s what you do with friends—watch them every fucking second for their own good.
And—chapter! This post is shorter because most of this chapter was repetitive claptrap that has little bearing on the plot. The next chapter isn’t much better but at least there’s some action that continues to establish that Azrael’s a bloodthirsty freak (in her words).
Next time, chapter 12, where a sex worker gets tortured and Azrael beats the holy hell out of an abusive trick. I guess the old dead man in the alley fell down the same memory hole as KY Lady and the child abuse victim. (Future Me: yeah, he did)
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