(CW: violence, kink-shaming)
We start the chapter out in Azrael’s POV, and she’s writing another issue of Chilling Adventures of Azrael the Demon-Slayer. It’s going as quickly and easily as it always does, with a total lack of effort on her part, bearing no resemblance to actual real-world creation. Her only problem is that she doesn’t have an ending because this book hasn’t ended. For someone who knows perfectly well these comic books will be the prosecution’s Exhibit A against her if she’s ever captured, and someone who used to at least try to disguise the events from her life, she’s remarkably unconcerned about that now.
She’d already depicted herself as a haphazard hooker who, as the graphic novel progressed, dealt harsh commination with grisly precision.
Hmmm. In a post for chapter 8 of the first book, I did point out that commination means “threatening with divine punishment.” So she is God. Gotcha.
She’s checking out one of the panels in the comic book and perceives Wesley in the background.
His usually compassionate eyes watched her with nocent intent.
I don’t have the patience for another episode of Ultrasonic Carousel’s Word Inquisition with Merriam-Webster, so I’ll just tell you that nocent means “harmful,” according to that dictionary. And there’s no way you pick that up from context. Plus, Wesley’s eyes have never been compassionate. We’ve been explicitly told they’re calculating.
Azrael’s unsettled because she didn’t put him in and goes back over the rest of the comic book and he’s all over it. She’s seeing portents in this, but a better explanation would be that she put him in the comic book subconsciously, because she’s spending a lot of mental energy on him lately. She’s also mad and sad because he shouldn’t be in her deathless fiction or in her life, boohoo thirteen-year-old angst.
So she decides to take a break and look out the window. At least she has clothes on this time.
Night had fallen with atramentous gravity, enshrouding the moon and stars, smothering the weak illumination of streetlamps and blinking neon bar signs.
Fine, Miss Billion-Dollar Words!
Ultrasonic Carousel: Welcome to our latest episode of Ultrasonic Carousel’s Word Inquisition, everyone! We’ve got Merriam-Webster back for a special appearance! (Applause)
Merriam-Webster (emerging from behind red velvet curtain): Hello, Carousel. It’s a pleasure to be here.
UC: The words are coming at us fast and furious tonight, so we’re just going to jump right in with atramentous.
MW: Atramentous means “black as ink.”
UC: Merriam-Webster, ladies and gentlemen!
Then there’s about a page and a half of Azrael mooning over Wesley and lamenting that they will never be together because cruel fate yada yada. Then there’s a description of her personal hygiene routine before she goes out. It’s as uninteresting as it sounds.
A gaggle of sex workers is out front of the phase-shifting motel/whorehouse and Azrael tells them she’s going on the stroll tonight. They don’t like the idea and think Jimbo Kern will be against it, for what reason I don’t know, unless it’s because he won’t get a cut. One would think he’d let her do whatever she wants since he almost got castrated by her last time. During this conversation we get names for some of the glorified extras, which include Posy and Opal. We’ve already been introduced to Red Betty. None of these names ring with realism to me, even as street names.
Azrael agrees to clear this with Jimbo Kern and we get the interesting detail that he isn’t just a pimp.
Jimbo did a lot of business: drugs, stolen goods, arms.
If this is true, Jimbo Kern has access to muscle. If nothing else, he could pull some of his dealers off the street and have them watch the women. Azrael’s fine, but there’s only one of her so she can only be in one place at a time. I guess it just depends whether he thinks he would make more money by keeping the dealers on the street. The book makes a mistake in presenting him as primarily a pimp in this case; that may be where he got his start, but he’s diversified and the arms business is a lot more lucrative than running a string of sex workers. And notice that Jimbo Kern has no men working for him in this capacity and no one who’s seriously underage, like eleven or twelve. I guess he doesn’t care about those market segments.
There’s more conversation between Azrael and the three sex workers (why are there always only three?) until Posy tells her that a john “roughed up” one of their coworkers but clarifies this was something he paid for. There are sex workers who specialize in BDSM, you know. And this is why street sex workers have pimps—for the purpose of dealing with a trick that takes things too far, either by being close enough to intercede during the incident or take revenge after it happens. Jimbo Kern doesn’t seem interested in doing either one, which will give him a reputation as a weakling on the street and will cost him money if the woman’s hurt badly enough not to be able to work.
Azrael asks after the woman’s condition—her name is Marie—and it doesn’t actually sound that bad. The trick knocked out a tooth and apparently left some “welts” (from what we’re never told) and cigarette burns. Marie is run down in the narrative for being old and fat (the cardinal sin in this universe) and not as pretty as the other girls, and “ridiculed” by Jimbo Kern for these qualities and not making as much money, so she takes the more demanding tricks. Not sure this is right, because tricks who patronize street sex workers don’t expect to get a young Julia Roberts every time, but whatever.
Azrael pities Marie for all this and decides to inflict some divine whup-ass on this guy. Opal is dubious as it may bring trouble. Azrael knows this isn’t Oren, but decides “…for now, he’d do.” Just like she thought with Oren the first time she saw him. So it’s just an excuse to let off steam for her and sate her bloodlust.
The sex workers scatter and Azrael spots Marie. She’s with Jimbo Kern and Cigarette-Burning Man, and how did word get around this quick, if he’s still with her and talking to her pimp? Fuck you, that’s how.
Jimbo Kern’s bitching about how Marie’s not going to be able to work for “two days.” Where did she get burned, anyway? No answer. Cigarette-Burning Man pleads his extra payment and that she wasn’t worth it because old fat not Julia Roberts. Did she not charge enough to make up the difference for the days she wouldn’t be able to work? Jimbo Kern’s still bitching about the cost to him when Azrael steps in to back him up.
We get a description of Marie’s injuries which don’t match what we were told. It looks like he punched her in the nose too, her hair is “matted tangles,” and her clothes are torn. No word on why that would be necessary, since this was a business deal and presumably she was cooperating, but every time in this series we’ve met a woman who’s been assaulted, her clothes have been torn. The two things don’t need to go together.
Azrael insists Marie expose her injuries, which is pretty insensitive as they’re in public and one of the injuries is near her breast, but I guess no sex worker minds baring her body in the street in this universe because none of them deserve respect, amirite? Also, where did the injuries happen? Were they in an alley, his car, or a room in the phase-shifting morel/whorehouse?
Marie is said to be “cringing” before she lifts up her shirt to show her injuries. Although she looked at Jimbo Kern and Cigarette-Burning Man, she cringes from Azrael as she says, “Show me now.” She can see this is nothing she’s doing out of sympathy or sisterly feeling, but bloodlust. I’d like to see a short story about how the sex workers talk about Azrael behind her back.
Fierce rage fulgurated.
I have a problem here that doesn’t involve billion-dollar words, but we’ll get there too. From context we can tell Azrael feels this fierce rage, but the phrasing also puts her at a remove from it, like the rage feels itself. Given the worldview in this series, I would guess it’s because no proper demure woman feels rage. Regarding “fulgurated,” according to Merriam-Webster it means “the act or process of flashing like lightning.” What was wrong with “Azrael’s fierce rage flashed like lightning?” That sounds a lot better than what we have. Every time I run into one of these billion-dollar words, it stops me dead because I feel the need to look it up, but most readers would just guess from context and move on. In this instance, it actually stops the writer from using a vivid image.
Cigarette-Burning Man is described as six feet five, with longish dark hair and bright green eyes that “twinkled with mirth.” Why? You’re in a dispute with a pimp who could knife you in a second if he felt like it. Are you just stupid? He questions why she cares as Marie is the dregs of society. No, sorry, that was Wesley. This guy just calls her a whore.
Jimbo Kern anticipates what’s going to happen and tries to say something to Azrael to ward it off, and she hits him in the nose with her elbow. She’s so arrogant she ignores his cursing and threats because no one and nothing can lay a fist on her, letting him know she thinks this is his fault and Cigarette-Burning Man could have killed Dead Tortured Lucy. Have you discussed any of your suspicions with Jimbo Kern so he’d be better able to protect his stable? No? Then shut the fuck up, Little Miss Arrogance.
There’s some uninteresting dialogue about how Cigarette-Burning Man denies murdering anybody and Azrael confirms he hasn’t but still blames Jimbo Kern for not knowing this through sheer psychic perception, I guess. They get into a dispute about how money won’t resolve this. Of course not, since Azrael has her murder boner on. She tells Jimbo Kern to back off and he does, wisely.
Cigarette-Burning Man starts laughing at him because he’s afraid of her, rather than taking a lesson from this that this arrogant bitch could be a psychopathic killer. And why would he laugh? He watched Azrael bloody Jimbo Kern’s nose! It’s not like she crooked a finger at him and said, “Pretty please with sugar on top let me give this trick a slap on the wrist, Daddy.”
He mouths off again and she punches him in the throat (the larynx is mentioned, so if she’d hit him hard enough it could have been a one-hit kill) and kicks him in the head. Okay, that’s two moves, and he never managed to get an attack off, so technically the fight should be over, but we’re breaking the pattern, as we’ll soon see. The only difference I can see is that Azrael knows what an orgasm is now and wants to see if she can have one by beating this guy senseless, which is an unexpectedly sensible thought on her part.
He manages to get to his feet and goes for her. She does a roll and kicks him, and then we get a line that I had not looked far enough down the page to see before I wrote the last sentence in the paragraph above. It knocked my socks off, I can tell you.
It never even dawned on her to draw her knife. She needed physical release, and this was as close as she’d get.
So the author admits Azrael’s trying to have an orgasm by beating this guy senseless!
Anyway, she shatters this guy’s elbow and he calls it a broken arm, but he’ll probably never use that arm right again. That’s a bunch of expensive surgery just waiting to happen. Azrael forces him to get up, then she kicks him in the thigh and then in the knee. No word on whether she shattered it the same way she did his elbow. Then she tells him to get up again and he makes the reasonable observation that he can’t fight her. Then she “stomps” his ankle (no word on whether she shattered it like his elbow) and tells him again to get up, “or I’ll break your jaw.”
Azrael has more in common with Steven Seagal than just the inability of an opponent to land a hit. There’s a scene in a bar in On Deadly Ground (which Seagal directed), where a racist oil rig worker (played by character actor Mike Starr) is harassing a Native American man. The Native American man is played by Jules Desjarlais, whom fans of the original run of Mystery Science Theater 3000 will recognize from the Joe Estevez film Werewolf. Anyway, Seagal is the hero and objects to the harassment, deciding to teach Mike Starr a lesson. There’s a three-minute scene where Seagal basically tortures Mike Starr to the cheers of the surrounding crowd, and Mike Starr has some kind of deep spiritual awakening as a result of this, so the narrative implies it was okay to torture Mike Starr for three minutes (who isn’t even trying to defend himself here) because it was for the best in the end. This book doesn’t even give Cigarette-Burning Man the spiritual awakening, just a metric fuckton of sky-high hospital bills.
He tries to get up to avoid having his jaw broken but is too badly injured to stand. The narrative elides that the reason he can’t get up is because she has injured him to the point where he needs to be hospitalized. She tells him that if he doesn’t “I’ll destroy you where you are.” Awww, Azrael’s got all the blue balls from his premature ejaculation, huh? Poor poor baby.
Anyway, she finally recognizes that he physically can’t comply with her demands and kicks him in the face and the testicles. She seems pretty mad that she didn’t get her screaming full-body orgasm out of beating this guy to death.
Jimbo Kern manages to stop her from killing Cigarette-Burning Man, so she instantly turns on him because she has all that sexual frustration to work off and says,
“And you fucking care? After what he did to Marie?”
And Jimbo fires back, “Except for that lost tooth, every injury she has will heal without her even needing to see a doctor. That guy’s going to need surgery to fix what you did to him.”
Okay, that was actually me, but it’s still true. Marie even tries to get Azrael calmed down because she can see the other woman is a rabid dog at this point. Azrael even proves this by howling “like a wild animal until her lungs hurt and her throat felt raw.” Yeah, that’s not going to draw any attention, just like this brutal beatdown didn’t. The vanishing-as-needed witnesses strike again!
Azrael excuses her behavior, not by attributing it to her newly acknowledged sadism, but by lamenting that God won’t lead her to Oren. I guess we aren’t supposed to remember that this is not a God-approved mission but something she did on her own. You know, I cut her slack for the entire first book and most of this one because I know it’s the main conceit of the book, but I absolutely don’t believe she’s God’s paladin. Or Satan’s, for that matter. I just think she’s mentally ill and no one will help her because she’s such a hateful person in general. All the scenes of the other characters telling her how wonderful she is are just visual and auditory hallucinations. She’s probably wandering around the streets in a daze, hallucinating, like Nicolas Cage in Vampire’s Kiss.
Next she moves on Jimbo, who “withdrew” a knife. That verb doesn’t express any particular urgency, which it should. Azrael kicks it out of his hand and threatens him if he tries to defend himself from her again. He’s still defiant, so she
…bumped her chest into his, so close that she breathed in his foul air, and smelled his acidic fear. “There will be no corrupt deviants who take pleasure in causing pain. You got that?”
I have to think that the connection between violence and sex on Azrael’s part must be a conscious decision on the writer’s part because I can’t see any way she could have done this unconsciously. And the juxtaposition of her sexual frustration-centered beating of Cigarette-Burning Man and the statement she just made about deviants who get pleasure from causing pain is jaw-dropping if the author isn’t consciously showing us this irony.
Is there any chance that this series is a big troll, making the romantic hero a toxic abuser and the heroine a hateful, entitled child so as to expose the toxic tropes at the center of a lot of romance novels? If it is, I must say, “Well done, Lori Foster, well done.”
And bumping chests with a man is not a physical domination move from a woman. Moving on.
I stopped reading after the supremely ironic statement to write and can now tell you that Jimbo Kern in fact does call her on her enjoyment of inflicting pain.
His eyes narrowed. “Does that include you?”
Yay, Jimbo Kern! You tell her!
She tries to shut him up, but he knows he’s right and tells her it’s the only time he’s ever seen her smile. Here’s her response.
The truth of that pierced Gaby, hurting her and leaving her sickened. She never had much reason for smiling—but taking on a sadist…yeah, that gave her pleasure.
Way to ignore your own sadism there, Azrael, while at the same time begging for the reader’s pity due to your miserable hellscape of a childhood for which you have very little supporting proof and failing to recognize any kinship with the man you just tried to kill. But hey, whatever keeps you thinking you’re pure and holy. She tells Jimbo Kern he should be careful about telling her the truth. He doesn’t take this seriously and “shoved” past her to deal with the aftermath of Cigarette-Burning Man’s beatdown.
Jimbo Kern gets some of his women to handle it, then there’s a sequence suggesting Jimbo Kern’s not a total unfeeling bastard, which I never thought he was, but whatever. It’s the standard emotional manipulation that lets pimps keep control of their stable because they tend to be good practical psychologists. Jimbo has a cell phone and calls someone to handle it. Azrael asks if it’s an ambulance and has some unwarranted (and frankly unbelievable) concern about whether Cigarette-Burning Man’s going to get whacked.
She had no real concerns for the man, but hell, if she’d wanted him dead, she’d have killed him herself.
You tried, bitch! Jimbo Kern distracted you and you lost your murder boner. Don’t try to make us think you have one ounce of human compassion for anyone except yourself if they balk or cross you in any way.
Anyway, he tells her he’s just calling a friend of his to get him out of the neighborhood so he can’t be connected to them, proving he’s quite a bit smarter than Azrael. He says he isn’t in the murder business, but the narrative has told us he’s also into drugs and arms, which indicate he’s probably lying to her.
Cigarette-Burning Man is still conscious and tells them he needs a doctor, which he most certainly does. Jimbo Kern says his friend will take him to the hospital if he wants and this seems to calm him. So Azrael decides to undo that.
…Gaby strode over to the wracked body. Seeing the wounds she’d so easily inflicted left her cold and indifferent.
Which puts the lie to her previous concern about whether Jimbo Kern was calling for a cleaner, unless it’s only okay for Cigarette-Burning Man to be killed if Azrael does it. Then she puts “her knee almost on his throat.”
Really getting Derek Chauvin vibes here.
Azrael continues threatening his life and tells him she still might do it and he wouldn’t be any loss to the world. He’s all placating now since he’s seen the extent of her bloodlust and says he just wants medical treatment and won’t make trouble.
And here she finally “knotted her fingers in his thick, cool hair.” So somebody mentioned to the writer the day this was written that fingers are knotted in hair and not the whole hand? Then she extra-strength threatens to torture him to death if he hurts anyone else for sexual pleasure again. The irony, it burns!
…I’ll hunt you down, and I’ll make you suffer a long time before killing you. I won’t leave a single bone unbroken, and just before you die, I’ll chop off your balls and carve out your black heart.”
So what’s the difference between Azrael and Oren again? Somehow I don’t seem to see it at first glance. Plus, the human body has 206 bones, some of them in the inner ear, so it’s a little harder to break them all than she seems to think.
Naturally, Cigarette-Burning Man is horrified. Jimbo Kern again tries to distract her and succeeds, but then she decides to threaten him if he blames any of the other women for the beatdown and he says he won’t. She wants reassurance that he isn’t going to kill Cigarette-Burning Man. He gives it and she takes his word for it for no reason other than this is almost the end of the chapter and it’s time for her to have an existential crisis that seems like the narrative thinks we can’t form short-term memories.
It was an awful thing to know she possesses the capacity to maim, to murder—to behave exactly as the wholly evil did.
There’s more that I don’t feel like quoting, but she thinks that, in God making her a paladin, she’s become an “abomination” and
Sometimes, she didn’t even trust herself.
And—chapter! Wow. Just fucking wow. I might not have such a problem with this series if it wasn’t so afraid of acknowledging the truth of the actions the characters take and dealing honestly with the consequences of those actions. The crisis she’s having over Cigarette-Burning Man and the anxiety over whether Jimbo Kern’s going to kill him is in marked contrast to the treatment of Ghostface Killer in chapter 3. Since she can use self-defense and his being armed as a fig leaf for her actions there, she can ignore the sexual overtones of her violence and hasn’t given him or his fate a second thought. We don’t know whether the ambulance she summoned got there in time, or if he bled out from the stab wounds she inflicted before medical assistance could reach him. Technically, if she killed him in self-defense that would be justifiable homicide, which means you had a reason the court found acceptable for committing homicide. So why is she just now realizing she’s capable of murder? Because she thought one of the cancer people was a demon, that wasn’t murder? Demons are people, remember. The philosophy and theology of this series are a hot mess.
Next time, chapter 13, where Oren and his fam capture Cigarette-Burning Man and frame Azrael for his murder. Smart.
Ultrasonic Carousel 