Oh, joy, we’re back in Matthew’s POV for a while.  He’s sticking around with Diana until she calms down and goes to sleep.  Wasn’t he all eager to get her out to the countryside, ‘for her protection’?  And now that she’s got a pretty clear death threat sent to her in the mail, he’s content to let her stay?  I mean, she doesn’t want to go so I guess it’s good he’s not forcing, but he was all willing to force her before, so what changed?  Or did the author just get bored?

He felt other emotions as well, that he was reluctant to acknowledge or name.

Why is it that, in so many books like this, they have something against just admitting to lust?  They’ve no problem displaying extended make-outs, lustful looks, touching, sometimes even the sex, but they can’t just have people actually realize that they want to bone.  Why?  Do they think that calling it ‘some mysterious feeling’ makes it…I don’t know, deeper or more significant?  Because it doesn’t.  It just makes the characters seem particularly sheltered and/or stupid.

For that matter, it doesn’t really make a thing better if you can’t explain it.  I say the same thing to people who get mad when love is described as a series of chemical reactions.  So what?  So we can name the hormones that are currently soaking your brain, who cares?  It’s still awesome and fun and heartbreaking and nervewracking and mindblowing and all the rest.  So you can put a name to it, does that really make it any less great?  Because if you can get rid of the wonder in a relationship just by calling it love and/or lust, then you probably didn’t have much there besides obsession and metaphors. 

Oh, joy, more POV switching.  Matthew calls Marcus, and for some reason we switch over to Marcus’s brain and a brief flash-back, but then we switch right back to Matthew.  I’m serious, this author is so blatantly amateur. 

Marcus is all flustered over Diana’s test results, and brings them over to Matthew.

[Marcus] wasn’t about to enter the witch’s rooms without Matthew’s permission

Yes, now Matthew is the one granting or withholding permission to Diana’s apartment.  And Marcus sees this as normal.  He doesn’t ask where Diana is or wonder if she would allow him in if she were conscious, or wonder what Matthew is doing in an unconscious near-stranger’s apartment.  Nope, Matthew likes this girl, and he’s a man, so he’s now in charge.

Oh, look, a completely pointless flashback to when Matthew turned Marcus into a vampire and also acted smart and awesome the whole time.  It drags on for pages and pages, comes out of nowhere, and has absolutely no bearing on anything that’s going on.  GET THE FUCK ON WITH THINGS.

When we finally get to the point of the DNA test, it’s to find out that Diana has, literally, every single witchy power that genetics can possibly give her.  To the point where even Matthew, overpowered as he is, thinks it’s ridiculous.

“No. Diana doesn’t have the knowledge or control to do anything that intricate. Her power is completely undisciplined.

This…is pissing me off.  So here we have two overpowered characters, one male and one female.  But the male is in control, he can use his power to effect change on the world.  Furthermore, his power is largely intellectual.  Even though he can use physical force, he relies on his control and his brain.  He completely owns his powers and his ability.  The female, on the other hand, has no such control.  Her powers don’t help her at all, in and fact put her in danger.  Her powers are the opposite of useful.  They are wild, uncontrolled, and burn holes in the carpet. 

The same as the male-civilized/female-uncivilized, or the male-science/female-nature dicotomy that we see so often in fiction.  The idea that women are supposed to be ‘closer to nature’ or have ‘woman’s intuition’ or some such bullshit like that.  It boils down to a simple, misogynist idea: that if women have power, it’s not in their control, so they still need men to control them.  It’s the idea that men are the origin of order and control and civility, and women are just wild things to be tamed (by men). 

Well fuck that.  Seriously, fuck it to hell.  I don’t know how many times I can repeat the phrase “we’re all people, god damnit, there is no ‘male power’ and ‘female power,’” but I’ll keep yelling it until I run out of fucks to give.

Matthew is mad about the picture/threat that Diana got, and he wants to look into her parents’ deaths.

“But Peter Knox is a member of the Congregation!”

HALLELUJAH, WE FINALLY GOT A HINT OF SOME SORT OF ORGANIZATION!  Apparently it’s a “nine-member council of daemons, witches, and vampires [whose] job was to ensure every creature’s safety by seeing to it that no one caught the attention of humans.”  …really?  Nine people manage all that?  Or are they just the ‘officers’ of the group, and it’s got all the associated peons and such to carry out this mission?  I mean, if 10% of the population is creature, that’s 6 hundred million.  600,000,000 creatures to keep track of, and there’s 9 people doing it.  Furthermore, they’re doing it without any sort of visible bureaucracy.  As far as we’ve seen, they just let creatures do whatever they want…and then somehow also keep an eye on them?  What?

Even though we got six fucking pages of backstory on Marcus, then an additional three more on Matthew, all we get on the Congregation is that one paragraph.  It’s pretty clear where the author’s priorities lie.  She basically wants to be an RPer.  She wants to make up detailed, angst histories about characters and then rhapsodize on their appearance.  Give her a nice urban fantasy game to play in, one with a detailed application process, and spare us this dreadful attempt at ‘writing.’

And it seems that the Congregation is also who’s enforcing that whole ‘no mixed dating’ policy, but still no reason on why that’s a policy in the first place, and…Matthew thinks they won’t enforce it?  I guess.  It’s unclear, since this book has a habit of never talking clearly about plot/world issues, just about pointless descriptions and backstories. 

Matthew is going out of town and Marcus promises to keep an eye on Diana.  You know, since she’s just a poor widdle womenz who can’t control her powers, is endangered by everything including herself, and must always have a keeper to be sure she doesn’t get in trouble.  Like she’s a small child or something.

Second, [Matthew’s] scent was all over her. He’d done it deliberately, to mark Diana so that every vampire would know to whom she belonged.

I…cannot even articulate how disgusting that is.  Apparently Diana is now an object to be owned.

Then Matthew and Marcus sit around and talk about how they’re not going to tell Diana a bunch of stuff, because she “can’t handle it.”  Continuing the theme of Diana being both child-like and disempowered.  Now her ‘boyfriend’ is controlling what information she’s ‘allowed’ to get, based on what he thinks is right, rather than letting Diana be the supposedly-brilliant adult that we’re told she is.

Oh, more backstory that has nothing to do with anything.  Apparently Matthew is still a big deal, and just absolutely everyone knows it.

Now they talk about taking Diana to go stay with Matthew’s vampire-mother, as if she’s some piece of baggage that needs to be dropped off for safe-keeping.

On a related note, the vampires use familial titles based on who turned you, so since Matthew turned Marcus into a vampire, Matthew is his ‘father’, and the people Marcus has turned are Matthew’s ‘grandchildren.’  Fine, I’m on board.  But how does Matthew have both a vampire father and a vampire mother?  Surely they didn’t both turn him.

Uhg, Diana even has a bad dream and Matthew rushes over to comfort her.  It’s seriously like she’s some helpless little kid, not an adult.  And that image isn’t made any better by the fact that Matthew is like 1470 years older that her.  He’s treating her like an infant, and at the same time he’s sexually attracted to her.  And as if that wasn’t bad enough, he’s further infantilizing her by controlling all her actions and sheltering her without her consent, like he’s her parent or guardian.  It will never not be creepy.