Wesley’s trying to do some policework for once and is getting frustrated because the weather’s against him and Azrael’s dissociating and won’t respond to anyone except him (including Ann Kennedy, who in the last book was simultaneously a huge Azrael cheerleader and believed she was the person committing the murders they were investigating). It’s a shame Cigarette-Burning Man who got murdered in the last book didn’t get this kind of service because Wesley felt like blowing off work to run errands and go home.
So he finishes with the crime scene in two hours and puts her in the car and tells her they’re going home, by which he means his house. Are they living together now? I didn’t get that impression in the last chapter. If not, is Azrael still living in the hot-sheet motel or did she move back to Morty’s phase-shifting apartment building?
Azrael isn’t talking to him but doesn’t seem to be dissociating anymore, so he does a whole bunch of fellating about her bravery and courageousness and I just realized they’re processing the live guy’s scene and haven’t said a word about Dry Cleaner Dead Woman. Since Chained-Up Guy isn’t dead, they’d keep the scene intact for the detective who would take charge of it and turn it over to them when they got there. Wesley and Ann, being homicide detectives, would not be in charge of a case where nobody’s dead. If he dies later, the case would be turned over to Homicide. Plus, is this even their jurisdiction? I’m not sure the author knows that detectives have jurisdictions and don’t handle cases everywhere inside and outside the city.
Poor Dry Cleaner Dead Woman. In Sunnydale, the police don’t give a fart in a high wind if you’re old and dead.
Wesley tries to make it better by telling her Chained-Up Guy was an addict and didn’t look like he’d been on tap for vampires and she tells him she believes him, then starts bitching about her storm phobia and fucking around with the dog collar that was his most important gift to her, the one which she knew was easily identifiable and suspected he’d given to her for that reason. You know, the one that marks her as WESLEY’S PROPERTY.
Her grumbling delighted him; her acceptance of his gift thrilled him more. The choker was the only jewelry she ever wore.
This makes it sound like she just took the gift, when that was way back in chapter 15 of the first book. I wonder if the author expects us not to have read either of the first two books.
Azrael starts dissociating again when they get to his house because the storm’s gotten worse and he has to help her and says the phrase, “Come here, Gaby,” for what feels like the millionth time. I haven’t thrown the other books out yet, so I may just go through them and count how many times he says this. It’s always a command, like he’s talking to a dog or a stupid child.
And now it’s time for the sexing since she’s dissociating and is in a vulnerable state. Wesley likes that almost as much as he likes public sexual encounters. But hey, I think something’s happened in the narrative a maximum of three hours ago that you seem to have forgotten, Wesley.
AZRAEL TOLD YOU THAT VAMPIRES ARE A REAL THING AND THEY ARE RUNNING AROUND THE CITY WHERE YOU LIVE AND SLEEP!
I can understand you putting that to one side long enough to process the crime scenes (if I’m generous and assume that they processed Dry Cleaner Dead Woman at the same time, which I doubt), but now that you’re alone with Azrael, why aren’t you questioning her about it? If it were me, I’d want immediate answers to three questions—later there would be more, but the three most important to start.
- How do you recognize vampires?
- How do you repel vampires?
- How do you kill vampires if repelling them doesn’t work?
But as Wesley has a two-track mind (fuck Azrael and protect Azrael), he doesn’t have as strong a reaction to the fact of vampires as he would if he were an actual human person. This response undoes any belief in these characters as realistic human beings.
In fact, every character in this series with a speaking role is deeply incurious about the world around them, which is most evident in Wesley and Ann, as they are detectives and should have a certain level of curiosity. We have two plots occurring in this book, the vampire plot and the romance plot, and there are no subplots; although the romance has had much more time devoted to it in the series, so that could make the paranormal plots the subplots. I wouldn’t have a huge problem with this if the romance weren’t so toxic and ill-conceived. Nobody has any dialogue that isn’t related to the plot/romance and nothing happens that isn’t related to the plot/romance. Really, if you aren’t into the romance the writer created, this whole series will be a miss for you because the paranormal part is handled in a very haphazard way.
Here’s his reaction to making out with her when she’s dissociating.
It appalled Luther that he was turned on while she stood paralyzed by terror. Maybe it was seeing her quiescent for a change instead of defiant, maybe it was that for once she didn’t scald him with her acerbic disdain.
I think you’re okay with her not being able to defend herself from you, Wesley, especially since the next thing you start doing after this is stripping the clothes off her, so you must not be “appalled” enough to stop. The way he speaks to her while he’s taking off her clothes strikes me as almost paternal, like a father getting a child ready for a bath, and the daddy-daughter vibe makes my skin crawl. This was present in both previous books, so I should have known it wouldn’t go away. I’m not shaming kink here, but the book doesn’t acknowledge that this is happening.
The writer supplies the ancient fig leaf of getting her warm because her clothes are wet and she’s cold, which is one of the most basic cliches for getting the heroine naked that there is. He also starts bitching mentally about her not having season-appropriate clothing. He then goes on to note,
She lacked any real grasp of her sexual appeal.
Frankly, so do I. I think everybody fails to grasp that. As far as her qualities go, she’s plain except when she’s murdering people because then she’s “ethereally beautiful.” She’s thin as a rail with no curves, so no bangin’ bod. She’s pretty stupid unless the plot requires her to be smart, despite all that fellating of her intelligence Wesley had to do in the last book to get himself out of the doghouse when she caught him calling her a halfwit. She has no charm, no manners, no interesting conversation, and no talents other than murder and graphic noveling. She’s not kind or funny or sweet and does not have a good heart. There is nothing here that would cause anyone to be sexually attracted to her. The things that attract Wesley are her virginity and her reluctance to submit to him. Morty is attracted because she was the only woman he saw on a regular basis, apparently. If she did have all this sexual appeal that he keeps talking about, we’d see more than two men being hot for her. Wesley and Morty are both blinded by their boners.
Two paragraphs later we get Wesley being self-revealing and not knowing it, after a one-sentence paragraph about controlling his voice so she won’t notice how much he wants to fuck her.
For most women, what he was about to do would be unethical in the extreme, even illegal. But for Gaby, it was the only way he knew to help her.
If her condition is that bad, call an ambulance, but I doubt it is. From what we’re told, she was dissociating and she’s gotten soaked to the skin. If she’s not that bad off, just draw a warm bath for her and let her take her own clothes off. Apparently she hasn’t told you that because of her asspull powers, as mentioned in both the previous books, heat and cold don’t bother her. She should not be displaying symptoms of—I guess hypothermia, although she wasn’t in the cold long enough to develop it. But since it’s romance-plot-convenient now, sure, she’s cold enough to be in danger of her life although God won’t let her die, as mentioned in the first book, and he won’t call an ambulance. This also puts the lie to his earlier remark about being “a man of the law” because he’s broken any number of laws to get close to her and feels no guilt or shame, just like a real psychopath.
This is also the flip side of being Not Like Other Girls—you aren’t entitled to the protection of the law from your sexual harasser the way they would be because you’re just so special and magical.
But we finally do answer a question that has vexed me since the first book. She wears a knife in a sheath on her back, but the setup for the sheath always puzzled me. Here, we find out that the sheath is around her waist and the sheathed knife hangs down her asscrack, which I just find hilarious. That cannot be comfortable. And it clashes with the description of it from the start of the second book, where Wesley could see the outline under her shirt, which sounds like it’s set higher up her back.
Another thing: Awakening established that she wears this sheath while she’s asleep and when she’s awake. The only time she takes it off is when she’s taking a shower. If that sheath is leather, it must stink to high heaven.
Anyway, instead of the reader getting potentially interesting and plot-advancing information about the vampires that are running loose in our nameless city that I’ve dubbed Sunnydale, we get another troubling sex scene where Wesley can only get excited when Azrael’s in some sort of diminished emotional condition. Remember that the sex scene in the hospital parking lot in Acceptance was the end of a sequence where Wesley had psychologically and physically abused Azrael and a woman she considered “like a younger sister” was hospitalized after an attack/kidnap attempt.
This scene is also a callback to a scene in Awakening when Wesley makes sexual advances to Azrael when she’s dissociating as a result of her phobic response to thunderstorms, but that time we didn’t see it from his POV. If one thing’s been made clear in the text about Wesley, he is very good at taking advantage of weakness.
And now we find out that they are living together. At this point, other than anything that’s happened off-page, they’ve been on three dates (including the double date with Morty and Ann and Bliss as the fifth wheel that she accepted at the end of the second book), had a handful of public makeout sessions, and he’s fingered her in a hospital parking lot. They’ve also known each other for three months maximum. We also don’t know who first brought up the idea, although I would think Wesley because he doesn’t want the future mother of his children living in a hot-sheet motel amongst harlots like in Acceptance, so Jimbo Kern’s sex workers can fend for themselves now.
To accomplish his plan of getting closer to her, he’d gladly given her the spare room.
That makes it sound like she asked, but she’s so arrogant and stiff-necked that it seems out of character.
Sex here amounts to more predatory third base with Wesley fingering Azrael to orgasm on his living room couch and refusing intercourse with her. I noticed that the only sex or sex-adjacent scenes shown from Azrael’s point of view are the alley make-out sessions, along with the one in the hospital hallway, with are pretty much just kissing. The scenes with actual genital contact have only been shown from Wesley’s point of view. I may be reading too much into this, but it seems like for the “serious” sex, Wesley has to be the viewpoint character because he is the active participant and Azrael is passive. The one time she’s tried to initiate sex she was cock-blocked by God because proper demure women don’t initiate sex.
At one point Azrael asks him if he’s going to have sex with her (note he’s the active party) and he tells her he hasn’t decided yet, underlining that he’s the one who makes the sex decisions. Earlier there’s a bit where he thinks she’s “willowy,” and contrasts that with himself and he apparently weighs about 220 pounds. She’s not willowy; she’s anorexic as has already been established in the first book, where she ate two and a half meals, and in the second, where she ate one meal. She’s six feet tall and weighs 120 pounds, which makes her medically underweight.
It also worries him when she does any thinking. Hey, you guys, I think this relationship may not be 100% healthy!
After she’s gotten off and he’s thinking about his boner, she’s still talking about how he filters God’s holy kill orders, which much be pretty weak if hormones can screw up reception. Then there’s talk about her “duty” and her “calling,” none of which have been explained to Wesley but he swallows it like a starving wolf.
And he still hasn’t asked about the vampires. Azrael does bring up the vampire infestation as follows.
“He’s out there, Luther. A monster in our midst. A sickness of humanity. He’ll torture, bleed, and kill innocent people, again and again. He won’t care how they scream or beg. He enjoys that. Catching him won’t be easy.”
You mean like you, Azrael? Remember how you forced Oren to beg and enjoyed it? Remember how much you liked hurting Cigarette-Burning Man, Ghostface Killer, and KY Lady? This guy must be your father and you’re a chip off the old block.
Father Acute-Interest-in-Teenagers would have been a more interesting antagonist, though, based on the preexisting parental relationship and how much she idolizes him, and what it would do to her if he came back as a vampire and she had to kill him, which is why I’ve pretty much dismissed that as a possibility.
Wesley does some internal monologuing about her duty (which involves “heinous, bloody deaths”) and that her “justice would never fly in a court of law.”
She didn’t apprehend evildoers; she eradicated them.
Using that awesome blade, and miraculous speed, agility, and cunning, she wasted the boogeyman.
That knife is nothing special and you called her speed “unholy” in the first book. Pepperidge Farm remembers.
I can’t figure out what Wesley thinks he knows. He’s fully on board with multiple extrajudicial executions because he’s seen a few weird things and has a boner. He’s also had multiple thoughts in both previous books about Azrael being mentally ill but denied the possibility because of a bunch of outdated, prejudiced attitudes about mental illness. I keep thinking he must have been told that she’s God’s paladin and I just missed it, but one would think that would be a big enough moment that a reader couldn’t miss it.
“I don’t want to get in your way, Gaby. I only want to help you.” And protect you, as much from yourself as from a society that would condemn you.
And here are the twin pillars of Wesley’s relationship with Azrael: fuck her and protect her (from everyone except him). There’s definitely no intellectual or emotional compatibility here, even if we ignore the constant sexual harassment and manipulation.
There’s some more uninteresting, overwritten monologuing about Azrael and sex and gloating that he’s the first for everything, and he does almost breach her maidenhead like a proper Romantic Hero, but then—then—
There’s a knock on the door. I will be amazed if this is anybody other than Morty, Ann Kennedy, or Bliss, as they are the only regular supporting characters in the series.
And—chapter! This was a fairly short post for this series because almost the entire chapter was the sex scene, which to me is both unsexy and uninteresting so I didn’t go into more detail with it than I could avoid. And we still don’t know any more about the vampires.
Next time, chapter 3, in which Azrael and Wesley have an argument that he gets out of through manipulating her with sex and we meet our Big Bad for this book.
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