Narcissus in Chains chapter 60

So Anita heads back to Narcissus in Chains and is lead in by a nervious looking Ulysses. The other guards look nervious and scared too. Ulysses explains that their master has punished them.

Anita looks down on this. She treats it as a self-inflicted thing. Nobody who didn't want to be punished would stick around for it, after all. Because abuse is a thing you just leave cold turkey and have no other hang-ups with all the time, right?

Ulysses gets even more nervous and asks for Anita to leave her guns behind.

Anita says no.

Ulysses says please.

Anita says no.

Ulysses says Anita has no idea what will happen to them if they let her go inside with her guns.

Anita decides that Narcissus is being a really bad dom.

The readers, however, have picked up that Ulysses has said "my master" every time, and knows that something else is going on, and super-uber perceptive Anita, who can read subtle nuances into the mearest glance of most weres, is being written as EXCEPTIONALLY thick and insensative right now, and that means somebody else is in charge.

Ulysses begins to beg on his knees, saying that his master will kill the guard's lovers if Anita and Co. don't surrender their guns. And I just realized that other than Asher and Narcissus, these are the first gay dudes in the book. Asher was a prima donna, Narcissus was a psychotic sadist, and these guys are sniveling murderous cowards--or at least, they're being written that way.

Hey, you know what the difference between a gay guy and a normal guy is IRL? Absolutely nothing. They're the same person. They don't dress like June Cleaver (unless they want to) they don't flame on, and like everyone else on the planet, some of them can be VERY bad ass. Some of them can even manage to be bad ass while kicking no ass at all.  (No one else IRL has managed the sheer awesome badassery of Bayard Russtin. There were no truely awesome human beings before Bayard Rustin. There have been none since. Bayard Rustin handed Chuck Norris another fist, and Chuck threw them all down in disgust. Yes. I just said it. Bayard Rustin was more badass than Chuck Norris.)

But I guess in this universe if you are hardwired not to want to screw Anita, because you're a straight woman or a gay man, you must be evil. Or a coward.

I hate this book.

Anita decides all these poor abused men are broken little puppies and she must take them all and give them all sanctuary. Do not ask me how you can both demonize, cutisfy, dehumanize and rescue somebody all at the same time, but this book just managed it.

And then somebody shoots one of Anita's bodyguards, and she responds by putting her gun to Ulysses's head and threatening to pull the trigger. Because it's totally his fault.


So now they're all being held under gunpoint. Anita and the remaining bodyguard time a couple volleys of fire and kill a couple guards before the return fire pins them back behind cover again. (...just how fucking big is this club? And why do I keep imagining an medeval castle instead of a nightclub when I read this scene?) and then the wereheyenas rush Anita.

The text strongly implies that it's all of them. All five hundred plus.

HOW BIG IS THIS CLUB?

They escape the club being chased by a horde of half-shifted heyena men.

Boys and girls, we just spent two thirds of this book reading about disgusting, humiliating, probably-not-consensual sex, and the fallout from said disgusting, humiliating non-con sex. This has been lightly peppered with so much ugliness Westboro Babtist Church would say "Fuck. Even we can't top this shit" and go home.

 We could have been reading about silver gun battles and pissed off were-heyena car chases the entire time. 

You may rage incoherantly now. I'll wait.

The heyenas swarm the car. There is much firing of weapon and much exploding body parts, because Anita only packs the kind of rounds that explode when they go into a body. At one point she runs out of ammo and half decapitates a person (most of the head is still there, just...not the important parts). It's gross and brutal and totally the book we wanted, but sadly the slog it took to get here just wasn't worth it.

Anita pulls a random Uzi out of the floorboards of the car. It has a big clip, too. Triple ammo capacity, so it takes twelve seconds to empty at full auto instead of just four. (Mythbusters did it. Look it up)

At one point the bodyguard tells Nathanial to slow down, they don't want to be pulled over with bodies in the car. I think they should be more worried about the bodies on the car (one of them is dangling through the brand new sunroof) but that might just be me.

Then Anita realizes one of the bodies isn't dead, so she questions it. Finally she catches up to the rest of us and realizes that Narcissus isn't in charge of the gang anymore. Oh, dear, who is?

We find out later, because that's the end of the chapter.