(CW: fat-shaming, transphobia, ableism)
Following the structure of the previous book, this chapter is the dramatic climax and the one after will be the falling action. Wesley realizes he’s fucked up again and apologizes, although at this point nothing he says sounds sincere to me, including this.
“Will you forgive me for losing my temper and saying things I didn’t mean?”
That apology sounds more realistic than the one he gave her after he’d felt her up against her will. It also sounds disturbingly like the apologies abuse victims get after an incident. He continues forcing physical contact on her by taking hold of her chin and making her look at him, which she doesn’t want to do.
Azrael wants some confirmation that he didn’t mean it when he called her stupid and clarification of his real feelings, so he spews bullshit like the pathological liar that he is.
“I think you’re one of the most intelligent women I’ve ever met.”
She isn’t pacified, so he continues.
“You’re smart, sharp, perceptive, and savvy. And for all your lack of formal schooling, you have something better. You have street smarts.”
Well, he learned the lesson about getting on her good side with unstinting praise, although he has private thoughts about her not having the social skills–read maturity–to understand what’s involved emotionally in a romantic relationship. Then why are you pursuing her for one? Oh yeah, she’s a challenge.
In his words, Azrael starts “pushing him” about whether he accepts she can kick his ass, and he thinks he isn’t “infuriated,” but “exasperated.” So a lesser form of anger, then. Guess we’re making progress. Maybe in fifty years it will be down to simple irritation.
We finally get a sort-of answer as to who trained her to fight. She says she never was trained and just knows how to do stuff. So it was my Nebuchadnezzar-chair-download by God that I theorized in posts for the first book and she’s a Barbie doll with God moving her arms and legs. That’s kind of a disappointment but I do enjoy being right.
Now he thinks she’s had just a lifetime of abuse and pushes her on the gotcha question that ended the last chapter. He expands on her being in the foster care system and she tells him he just answered his own question. If I were a foster parent I’d never read another one of her books because of all the shit she talks about foster parents, who are mostly good people and don’t deserve to be defamed so your Jerk Sue can have a cliched “tragic” backstory.
And then the plot comes a-calling again with Azrael getting one of her premonitions. She starts getting vamp face, Wesley gets worried, and then:
…a bedraggled boy appeared. He limped, crying, coming toward them.
Thank you, Oren! Thank you for saving us from another sex scene! I know you’re going to die because you’re the main villain of the book, but thank you anyway.
Wesley doesn’t know why Azrael’s getting ready to fight and tries to stop her by telling her that he’s just a kid. She replies, “No, she’s not.”
Oh shit, here we go. I haven’t read ahead so can’t prove it, but I’m sure we’re going to get some terrible, untrue explanation of why Oren isn’t really trans that does nothing but support transphobia. I hope I’m wrong, but I doubt it.
Wesley’s still trying to stop her when he gets nailed in the neck with a syringe by Myer. Wesley really doesn’t have much in the way of situational awareness. He berates himself mentally for not trusting her, which he didn’t have any reason to do before this, and passes out, but hears her “whispering” his name. That was a bad verb choice for the situation.
Since he’s now unconscious, we get a section break and are back in Azrael’s POV. She kicks Myer and thinks she’s broken a rib or two—guess the “omnipotent strength” isn’t “surging through her muscles” anymore. In a truly incomprehensible piece of fight choreography, she turns back to Oren and Dory hits her in the back with a syringe. So somehow she couldn’t see Dory even though Dory was in front of her, which she must have been or she wouldn’t be behind Azrael now, and turned her back?
So she breaks Dory’s nose (her favorite fighting move) and everybody just stands back to let the drug kick in. It doesn’t work fast enough, so Oren tells her to cooperate or he’ll kill Wesley. She can’t stand up to that threat, even though she planned to kill him herself in chapter 6 of the first book, and gives up. Dory takes the opportunity to jab her with another syringe and keep stabbing, but she’s still on her feet.
Oren tells Dory to stop for fear of killing her, because he doesn’t know that God won’t let Azrael die, so he could torture her for the rest of his life and she would never die. Then they put her in the back of their car, toss Wesley in on top of her, and drive off. Then she passes out when it’s convenient, as no further information needs conveying from her POV at this point.
This plan would not have worked in real life. If he wanted to go for the “tranquilize them and take them back to a safe place for torturing,” he should have gotten a tranquilizer gun like zookeepers use for big cats and attacked them from a distance. But that wouldn’t have given Wesley his big moment of vindicating Azrael by thinking he should have trusted her, so that would never do.
Since Azrael’s unconscious, it’s Oren’s turn to be the POV character. He’s gloating over how easy it was to get both of them, and he’s right, but he’s been infected by that Victorian-melodrama speech virus that tormented Dr. Chiles all through the previous book.
“It takes superior cunning and great planning—something you both lack—to gain such great rewards. Maybe now, as my cohorts, you’ll recognize my superiority.”
Dory whines over her nose getting broken, Oren blames her for being too slow, and Myer stands up for his wife by reminding him that Azrael has unholy speed, but not in those words. It’s a rare positive characteristic that the author is willing to give a villain—he’s consistent in trying to protect his wife from Oren.
Oren turns around to have a look at Azrael and Wesley—so all three of the fam are sitting in the front seat? That must be uncomfortable. Wesley’s out cold like a regular human—so I guess he didn’t get Midazolam—but Azrael’s sitting straight up with a clear blue zombie stare that creeps him out. Hey, she’d been thrown into the back seat with Wesley on top of her and they were both unconscious. She was not sitting up like a creepy ventriloquist’s dummy. If she’d moved to shove Wesley off her and sit up, at least one of them would have seen it.
He does the hand-waving thing to try to get her to blink and she doesn’t. Good job drying out your corneas, sweetie! He does some fellating of her awesomeness about how he thinks she’s still aware.
Dory has the most sensible reaction she’s ever had in this book.
“She’s a demon, Oren. That’s why she’s so fast. Please, let’s just cut her throat and dump her here. Right now.”
And if Oren had paid attention to her, he would have been free to torture and kill for countless years, knowing the quality of the detectives on the Sunnydale Police Department (excepting Ann Kennedy). But his ego and contempt for his aunt—and really, women in general—prevent him from doing the sensible thing. The Victorian-melodrama speech continues.
“Because of your pusillanimity, you want me to leave that much evidence behind? Must you always prove your stupidity?”
It’s a lot less evidence that you left behind with either Dead Tortured Lucy or Cigarette-Burning Man. Dumping Lucy in the river would wash away a lot of evidence, but you didn’t do that with Cigarette-Burning Man and there’s no indication either body was washed to remove those “secretions” and “fluids” left on them. You’d be up shit creek if DNA or forensics existed in this universe, Oren.
Anyway, Dory doesn’t understand the word “pusillanimity” and Oren thinks she’s an “ignorant fool.” No, Dory just doesn’t use billion-dollar words. Most people don’t. By the way, “pusillanimity” means cowardice, which was a perfectly good word to use that wouldn’t make Oren sound like a villain on a Saturday-morning cartoon.
Oren goes back to contemplating Azrael. We now get the old chestnut about the villain thinking he’s “invincible,” and wanting a worthy adversary. No real villain worth his salt wants a good adversary; in fact, he wants stupid people he can overcome easily, because he wants to carry out his goal. Only insecure villains need to prove themselves and that’s why they get killed.
Then he gives us some more Victorian-melodrama villain verbiage. See, I can do alliteration too!
“My indomitable intelligence and keen understanding surpass the feeble effort of law enforcement. I can do just as I please—even to a demon whore.”
Then Myer freaks right the fuck out because he made the rookie horror-movie mistake of looking in the rearview mirror and Azrael was smiling at him. Dory starts screaming, but when Oren looks at her, Azrael has the same expression she had before. This might be funny if we could see it, but we can’t, so it’s not.
Oren smacks Myer for saying that and disregards his “bad feeling about this.” Not a Han Solo fan, I suppose. Then we get more Victorian villain talk.
“You’re both gutless recreants. If she frightens you so, then fine, she’ll be my treat, and mine alone.”
This unnatural speech style just makes Oren seem less threatening. Prosaic and chilling speech are always the way to go for a villain. An example of this would be any of Elliot Rodger‘s videos. And, according to Merriam-Webster, “recreant” means coward, with a secondary meaning of being “unfaithful to duty or allegiance.”
He also refuses to let them have Wesley because he has a plan to use him to break her (Future Me: we never get told any details of this and he never gets within a country mile of carrying it out), which they don’t say anything about, probably due to his worsening mental state, and he watches her the rest of the way back to Stately Cleaver Manor. The bit about Wesley hints that Azrael will continue her Seagalian state of never taking physical damage.
Now that Oren’s through ranting, a section break takes us back into Azrael’s POV.
Thanks to her omniscient replenishment, she’d never lost consciousness, only the ability to move or react.
Well, that’s a fucking lie. Here’s the end of her section before we went into Oren’s POV:
And then, as the car drove away, a great black void swallowed her whole.
A cliched metaphor for losing consciousness is falling into or being swallowed by darkness. So you did too lose consciousness in spite of your asspull powers, you arrogant lying bitch. Bliss handled her drugging better than you, because she was able to escape Oren’s car and run. And “omniscient replenishment?” According to Merriam-Webster, “omniscient” means “having infinite awareness, understanding, and insight,” with a secondary meaning of “possessed of universal or complete knowledge.” “Replenishment” means “the act of filling up or building again.” What is being built up or filled up—replenished—here? And how is it omniscient? Because that isn’t mentioned, this phrase means nothing and I’m getting tired of being struck by a Word-a-Day calendar this regularly. Words like this get in the way of what you want to say—they don’t enhance it.
And Azrael’s not even scared. She has never been scared during any fight or bad situation in this series and is even thinking that it’ll be easier to kill Oren because he’s threatening Wesley. This by itself makes her an unbelievable character.
Also, there’s never the faintest hint that Oren is some kind of supernatural presence. The strongest words in Azrael’s thoughts for him are “asshole” and “evil’s little minion.” Because Oren was born female (apparently), he doesn’t present any serious threat, just like Dr. Chiles. I wonder how the writer’s going to handle the threat of a biological cisgender man in the last book. Differently, I’m sure.
So she’s tied to a wooden chair with ropes around her wrists, throat, and waist, but nothing on her feet or legs through sheer authorial intervention to make sure Azrael survives. These people are experienced torturers who would not have made this mistake. Why don’t you let them be competent and she still wins? That would make her something other than a Barbie doll who wins fights because God/the author says she does.
All our villains are in the room, but Azrael recognizes that Dory and Myer know this was a mistake. It won’t save them, but she knows it. I have a problem thinking this is the extra storage room where we first met Dead Tortured Lucy because Oren’s discovery of her corpse made it sound like she was in suspension restraints. If they have the ability to do that, at least one of the people they’re torturing—preferably Azrael—should be in suspension as it’s a lot harder to escape from suspension bondage than it is to get free from a chair.
Oren’s standing at a wooden table getting his torture toys ready and, of course, Azrael’s knife and Wesley’s gun are also on the table. Might as well make it even easier for her, right? No need to make Azrael break a nail here.
Anyway, she lets them know she’s conscious and decides Oren’s a coward. Even though she called him “she” at Wesley’s house, she’s gone back to using male pronouns for no particular reason.
Dory starts screaming, Azrael tells her to shut up, and she and Oren have a brief disagreement about whether she’s allowed to tell Dory to shut up. Azrael says this.
“I’m going to kill your aunt, Oren. I’m going to slice open her fat throat and watch her blood spill out. Then I’m going to get your uncle too.”
“Shut up!”
“Just as you cut off that abusive jerk’s jewels, I’ll remove your uncle’s. The skin there is thin, easily separated. I won’t even have to—”
Oren slapped her. “Shut up!
Gaby’s head barely moved. Conjuring the deepest necromancy into her appearance, she stared up at Oren, and made a promise. “You I’ll kill last, and by then, you’ll be pleading with me like the pathetic little boy you pretend to be.”
I’m not even going to deal with necromancy being something that can appear in your face. It isn’t and it can’t.
Plus, BDSM is not abuse. It’s all about safety and consent. I’ll repeat: what Cigarette-Burning Man did was pay Marie for a consensual act, and the narrative did not tell us that he did things they hadn’t agreed on or refused to stop when Marie asked him to. Calling what he did abusive is Azrael being ignorant and/or disingenuous.
Number one, Oren, if you don’t want to hear her talking shit, gag her. That should have been done at the same time you were tying her to the chair. Number two, if you’re worried about her getting loose, you should have made sure every limb was restrained and their weapons were under lock and key. Azrael should be glad it’s not me in there.
And number three, all aboard the transphobia express, with a brief stop at fat-shaming with Dory’s “fat throat”!
Oren doesn’t respond to this verbally but slaps her twice. Looks like he should have had a more extreme response to that. Does he not know of the potential of a closed fist? If he’s really as impulse-driven as we’ve been led to believe, he should have killed her right there. Then the series would be over. Why didn’t you kill her right there, Oren?
Azrael thinks he looks “insane and irrational,” a redundancy if ever I’ve heard one. She continues her threats thusly.
“You will beg, Oren. You will cry and beg and whimper. But it won’t do you a bit of good.”
Because Oren’s a biological female, you see. In extremis, he will exhibit proper female characteristics. Azrael will force him to be a proper female.
So Oren decides to get started on Wesley. She tells him that everybody here will get worse than what they did if Wesley’s ridiculous handsomeness is diminished. Okay, not in those words. There’s some back and forth between Azrael and Oren about who’s in charge here and who’s going to come out on top that doesn’t really come to anything, then we get back to the transphobia. I was going to quote it in full, but that’s a page and a half of sheer prejudiced venom—please remember there have not been any gay men, any lesbians (the sex workers offered sex to Azrael for protection but this was presented as just business and not from any preference), and Oren is the only trans person we’ve seen in this series—and I just can’t justify to myself putting all that in my post. I’ll just quote a few choice examples.
Oren picks up Azrael’s knife and she says, “Careful. That’s a real weapon, for a real woman.” (Italics in the original text)
He’s surprised that Azrael didn’t believe he was male—which she did, at least for the first couple of chapters—and she says,
“You thought you fooled people?” She laughed, further riling him. “Now put down that knife. It’s not meant for a fucked-up mental case who can’t decide on their own sexuality.”
I realize that in the book, this is presented as Azrael trying to anger Oren to the point where he loses control and goes for her, so she can attack him. That doesn’t excuse this level of invective when you don’t have any positive non-cisgender characters in your entire series so far. And she isn’t taking the opportunity to take him to task over the murders he’s committed, just his trans-ness. And it’s not about sexuality, it’s about gender, and if you weren’t so pig-ignorant you didn’t know what a blowjob was in the last book, you might know that.
Some of the adjectives used in this section also cover mental illness: sick, perverted, fucked-up in your head, psychopath, “personality disorder—manifested in aggression,” amoral, antisocial, depraved, and “The mental ward would have a field day with a specimen like you.”
So Oren’s not even human. Then again, we already knew people Azrael wants to kill aren’t human to her. Thanks, God’s paladin! You’re a paragon of virginity—whoops, I mean morality!
Oren finally gets mad enough to charge her and she kicks him in the jaw when he gets close enough and calls him a maniac in her mind. And then we get some more transphobic shit.
Like the frail female she was, Oren pitched to the side and landed on the floor with a moan.
Then,
Gaby stood the best she could,
Since she’s tied to a chair, this means she’s walking crouched over with a chair tied to her torso.
walked over to Oren, and with all the strength in her body, she stomped her wrist. The blow was hard enough to break all the delicate bones.
So now Azrael’s misgendering Oren, who must be frail and delicate as he is biologically female. But then the narrative goes back to male pronouns in the next paragraph, so I’m not sure whether that’s misgendering or only the author’s usual carelessness. She also shatters his elbow.
Oren’s screaming enough from the pain of his shattered wrist and elbow that Wesley starts to regain consciousness, and Azrael can’t have him see how much physical pleasure she derives from murder or he might not want to finger her again, although I don’t know why she’d think this because he’s already covered for her committing multiple murders that he knows of, so he must be A-OK with her killing people.
She frees herself by breaking the chair against the wall and uses the legs to knock Myer and Dory cold, but she isn’t content with that. And this next part shoots the God’s paladin conceit right in the center of its forehead.
None of them could leave here. Not ever. She wouldn’t trust the faulty judicial system to keep them away from gentler, more innocent society.
That’s what happens when you think you’re specially empowered by God–anything you do is righteous. So then she frees herself again from the chair again by breaking it against the wall again. The author probably meant she was trying to break the rest of the chair that hadn’t broken the first time but can’t be bothered to be clear. Oren’s conscious again and Azrael gets her knife from the floor and we have another wave of transphobia from our judgy little bitch heroine. This whole section is actually making me sick and as ragey as Wesley because this can’t be hand-waved away as her trying to provoke him into attacking. This is what she actually believes.
“And you’re too stupid to accept that you’re a young lady, not a boy. What is it, Oren? A mean mommy? An abusive daddy? What happened to fuck you up so bad?”
“I was meant to be a man, that’s all. Women are only useless whores, all of them.”
She shook her head. “You’re wrong, Oren.”
Fuck you, Azrael, we know you don’t believe that. You spent the entire first book looking down on the sex workers on your street because they sold sex and were “lewd,” and now, even though you’re doing a below-average job of protecting them, you still don’t think they’re worthy human beings, except maybe Bliss a very little bit. You protect them for the chance to fight and hurt people and make them bleed and scream so you can get your rocks off from their pain and couch it as taking on sadists. You are a raging hypocrite.
Plus, that “young lady” line? Azrael is too young at twenty-one for this to sound natural. And how old is Oren? Since he could pass for a twelve-year-old boy, I’d guess mid- to late teens? Not older than Azrael, anyway. There aren’t enough years between them for Azrael to speak to him like this.
I’m just going to do this in a hurry because I’m tired of wasting time quoting all this transphobic bullshit. Oren tells Azrael his mother was a whore and his father brought home an endless parade of whores after her death. Then the author makes Azrael jerk off about how much she cares which isn’t true at all and insults the hell out of the reader who’s stuck with the book to this point. Oren tells her that he killed his father years ago and decided to be a man then because he’s omnipotent, proving he doesn’t understand that word any more than the writer does. Azrael tells him again he didn’t fool her, which is a lie because she did think he was a boy when she chased him at the start of the book. At least she’s consistent with her lying.
She’s still calling him Oren, which he takes as a triumph and she stops long enough to cut him down by calling this “a concession to your insanity.” Then she gets in some more transphobia before murdering him.
“I feel a little bit sorry for the criminally deranged.” Picking up Luther’s gun, Gaby took aim. “Unfortunately, you were too cruel to satisfy your sick yearnings with harmless fantasy, and that makes you too evil…to live.”
FUCKYOUFUCKYOUFUCKYOU. That’s all I can say anymore.
Oren says, “Please, no,” and our arrogant bitch says, “Told you that you’d beg.” Please is pretty poor begging according to Gogo Yubari, but I guess Azrael has low standards for that. So Oren starts crying because biological female and Azrael shoots him in the heart, so he won’t die as quickly as he would with one in the head because she’s just the absolute worst.
Azrael Murder Count: 10
She cuts Wesley’s ropes and the marks on his wrists convince her that she’s doing the right thing by murdering all these people, and the author uses the oblique phrasing I’ve called out before to get emotion in through the back door that Azrael doesn’t feel.
The tight bindings had chafed his skin, leaving behind angry red welts—and destroying any regrets Gaby might have felt with her decision.
So Wesley has some rope marks; sure, that justifies three cold-blooded murders which Azrael doesn’t have the emotional depth to regret, despite the author’s attempts to convince us she might have regrets but stopped feeling them because Azrael is always right.
And, like I said before, this proves she is not God’s paladin. She has decided on her own, based on her secondhand beliefs about the American judicial system (to our knowledge she doesn’t have firsthand experience, but I’m sure we’ll get some retcon in the next book), that she has the right to be judge, jury, and executioner for three non-demonic human beings. God did not send her on the sex-worker-protecting mission and at first she was nervous about that.
There is no indication anywhere in this book that Oren is anything other than a garden-variety serial killer, and not a prolific one since he only killed one person with his bare hands, the old drunk in the alley whose death took second place to Wesley’s need to waste a chapter in dining with Azrael and we never got any information about what they found. Dory and Myer killed Dead Tortured Lucy and Cigarette-Burning Man, and Oren did leave tainted drugs at the crack house and killed three people but that left it up to the addicts whether they used it. In other words, none of the people she’s killing here fall under her demon-slayer exception and this is not murder endorsed by her God. This is the kind of murder than made her think KY Lady was a demon and rape her to death with a knife. The author does throw in a fig leaf about “rage-fueled intuition” in a bit to try to cover up her heroine’s fall from grace but it’s too little too late.
Then she puts the knife in Wesley’s hand (no idea why as none of the victims have knife wounds) and shoots Dory and Myer from behind him.
Azrael Murder Count: 11 and 12
So DNA isn’t a thing in this universe but bullet trajectories are? That’s a field of forensics, you know, which you have done nothing but deny for this entire series. To make a long story short, she’s going to convince Wesley that he killed them, not her. The gunfire starts to wake him up and she sits down next to him and keeps still, “ready to play her part.”
Ready to do whatever necessary to insulate Luther from the ugliness of her purpose in life.
That’s not an error on my part. It’s on the page as “whatever necessary” instead of “whatever is necessary” or “whatever was necessary.” It’s just the hot fudge sauce on the shit scoop of this chapter.
Azrael Murder Count: 12
And—chapter! This series gets worse with each book. This book displays the deepest, most naked contempt for the reader that I do believe I’ve ever encountered in a book. Even the first book didn’t show this much outright contempt.
The transphobia—well, I don’t believe there will be any pushback to this in the last chapter (Future Me: don’t worry, there isn’t), so we’re meant to believe Azrael is right in her bigotry and prejudice, as we’re supposed to believe her correct in everything. I wouldn’t believe this murdering future queen of Hell if she told me the time of day.
Next time, chapter 16, the blessed last chapter of this garbage book, where things get mopped up and Bliss tells us that Azrael and Wesley are destined to be together. Good–that way they keep themselves off the market and don’t ruin the lives of two innocent people.
Ultrasonic Carousel 