Narcissus in Chains chapter 40

I goofed off yesterday. I did nothing but play video games and go to my day job. It was fun.

This? will not be fun.

The snake men are holding Caleb hostage. I cannot, for the life of me, remember who Caleb is or be arsed to care. Anita seems to agree with me:

I didn't much like him, but I couldn’t let the bad guys blow his head off, could I?

Also, she somehow magically intuits that there is silver shot in the gun, right before the bad guy says there is silver shot in the gun. Look, it's reasonable to intuit the presence of were-killing ammo when you are dealing with weres. but don't have both characters spend a page talking about it. Jesus.

Claudia, on the other hand, gets to be bad-ass:

“The second after he dies, so do you.” Claudia said it, her voice as quiet and steady as the arm that held the gun that was pointed at the snake man’s head.

And is it just me, or is that last sentence constructed like "the House that Jack Built?" This is the maiden all forlorn that milked the cow with the crumpled horn that kicked the dog that worried the rat that (ect. ect. ect) Laurel, is there a reason we've regressed to nursery rhymes here?

Meanwhile, her house is being surrounded by more snakes with guns. (...werebadgers. Can we have were badgers? We've already got "SNAAAKE! A SNAAAKE! so can we have werebadgers too?) Anita shouts a warning to everybody else. So now the bad guys know that the good guys know that the bad guys are trying to surround the house.

Anita would suck at poker.

And then the guns begin to fire. And it is, for a little while, the book we came to dance with. Claudia and Anita fire at the same time, evaporating the killer snake's head. Caleb escapes. The snakes release the fucking fury and turn the kitchen into, basically, a House of the Dead shooter special.

There is a lion man. Anita takes out the lion man, Claudia gets hit by a shotgun. She's out of the game. Damn, I thought LKH would kill her for being awesomer than Anita. Can Claudia have her own book, too? No, she's not out, she just switches hands. Ambidextrous theranthrope FTW. Nathanial has also grabbed a gun. You go, dude.

And then the fight is over, Micah arrives, and things go downhill fast.

First we have the purple of his were-form description, which actually isn't that bad. This is why you save purple for special occasions. But then LKH, via Anita, has to point out that even in Wereleopard form, Micah has a huge penis.

They check the dead and break out the first aid kit for Claudia, who is all "I'm fine, I'm fine, don't worry. Also, don't slip in the blood puddle, that's mine, I'm just leaving it there so the bad guys can slip in it."

Because, you know, when you're bad-ass you don't care if you bleed to death.

And then the police arrive.

I am not a fan of hiding shit from the cops, kids. So I read the words "We don't have time to hide the bodies" and I was all like fucking YES this is gonna be good. And it is...and it isn't.

Micah can, apparently, shape-shift at will and make it look pretty. Because it'd be bad for the plot if the police shot him. Because NATURALLY nobody on the force has to take a shape-shifter education class or run a gauntlet where sometimes the werewolves are snarling ugly monsters and sometimes they're in a pink dress holding a baby. (...seriously? If shapeshifting is this prevelant and EVERY. FUCKING. ANIMAL is included, shouldn't there be some kind of "how to recognize a human" class hunters have to take before they get their deer hunting license?)

And then we get the next to last sentence in the chapter:

How do you explain five bodies in your kitchen, some of which even in death didn’t look very human?

You tell the truth: They broke into your home, held a gun to the head of one of your people, threatened you, surrounded you, and you turned them into swiss cheese because that is how you roll. Given that several of your people are wounded and/or dead? I think the cops will buy it.

Next chapter: LKH ruins everything.