There was a powerful taste of cloves in my mouth,

So, the next morning, Diana wakes up to find Matthew is in bed with her.  Literally.  And she tastes cloves, while Matthew has repeatedly been said to smell like cloves.  This does not strike me as a warm, fluffy, romantic way to wake up.  This makes me think “oh, god, he did something to her while she was alseep.”  And then stuck around after.  That’s creepy.  That’s so incredibly creepy.

It makes me sad that I have to say this, but: sleeping people, by definition, can’t consent to anything.  If you kiss them, or do god-knows-what that got that taste in her mouth, hell, even if you just sleep wrapped around them, that’s contact that they did not agree to.  (You know, unless they agreed before going to sleep, but that would require talking about consent issues and even then is a little risky.)  A lot of people are very, very creeped out by having stuff happen to their body while they’re unable to react and unaware.  And waking up in bed with someone when you didn’t expect to would be enough to make many people scream in fear.

But Matthew has no fucks to give about that.  He wants Diana because she smells nummy, so he’s going to sleep with her, and her wishes be damned.

“You gave me drugs.” I pushed against the duvet, trying to work my hands free. “I don’t like taking drugs, Matthew.”

In fact, he’s going to drug her against her will so that he can sleep with her, because he’s an ass times infinity.

“Next time you go into shock, I’ll let you suffer needlessly.”

No.  Fuck you.  Fuck you to hell and back, Matthew.  You do not get to decide the appropriate level of suffering for another person.  You do not get to decide that person’s values, nor do you get to decide if ‘shock’ is worse than ‘drugs’ for them.  Diana has feelz about taking medication, and you are not allowed to waltz in and declare that her feelings and morals and values are meaningless.

In fact, ‘feelings and morals and values’?  Large part of a person’s personality.  He’s basically saying that her personality is null-and-void, and he can dismiss it whenever he wants.  Wow, that’s a romance for the ages.

And Diana just drops the whole thing.  Which doesn’t so much feel like she’s agree with him, but rather it feels like the author just got bored with that, or thought we were getting to close to overtly calling Matthew ‘wrong’ about something, since Matthew is her Gary Stu fapping material, and therefore he’s not ever allowed to be wrong about anything.

So we go on to talking about that death threat she got.

The witches did, too. I’ll be killed for my magic, like my parents were killed.”

No, they’ve been threatening to kill you for your actions, you moron.

Why is your brain so broken?

Then Diana gets angry and a wind starts blowing through the apartment, but then she calms down so that Matthew can explain her powers to her, because she’s just a silly little womenz and needs a man to explain things to her.

“I shouldn’t have cornered you last night.”

Oh, is that what you call your physical assault and kidnapping?  How unbelievably mild.

She not only forgives him, but promises not to be such a bother in the future, because clearly the problem here is that she’s just goading him into restraining her, right?

No, book.  You are disgusting.

They sit around once again wondering how Diana’s magic works and how she opened the magic book, which is I think the third or fourth time they’ve done nothing but sit and talk about the very thin plot so far.  We know what’s happened.  Do something new.

Wait, no, not that.

“There is a pattern, you know,” he said. “You use your magic when you’re not thinking.”

Anything but that.

“Ah, but then you were feeling a powerful emotion,” […]“That always keeps the intellect at bay.

Uhg, no, we’re really doing this.  We’re really being presented with the idea that not thinking is a woman’s greatest power.  That she’s in her ‘natural’ state when she’s emotional and wild, and intellect is just so hard for her that she literally has to let it go in order to be ‘complete.’

This book is actually trying to tell us that it’s unnatural for a woman to use her brain.  That she should just give up on thinking and not even try, because she’s more powerful as some thoughtless, emotion-controlled, instinct-driven force of nature, instead of a rational human adult.  I’m sure this whole ‘women shouldn’t think’ feeds into the rage-inducing assumption that Matthew should make all her cerebral decisions for her, too.

Fuck.  That. 

Women are people.  Just like men, some are smart and some are stupid.  Our brains are not tied to our junk.  Anyone who actively tries to get women to suppress their intellect should be ashamed of themselves.

Matthew wants to take her to his house in France, and this time he patiently asks her if she’ll go, which is at least a step up from the previous chapter where he didn’t give her a choice.

The Nigerian Hausa believe that the source of a witch’s power is contained in stones in the stomach.

Okay, I’ve heard that too, and they also believe that the stones disintegrate after death so that if you cut open a body to look for it, you won’t find anything.  So saying that Diana’s father was killed by someone looking for his stones makes no sense, even within that belief.  But more to the point.  This is a world in which magic really exists and has measurable, tangible, identifiable effects.  If you tell me that the Hausa ‘believe’ in these stones, I’m going to ask you if any of the witches have done exploratory surgeries or MRIs or, heck, even magical procedures to try and find them.  If this is a world in which magic exists, then this is a world where magic exists and you need to remember that fact.  Don’t continue treating it like some vague, unprovable belief while also running DNA tests on it.  Are the stones real or not?

Diana’s aunts call, and Matthew takes the phone away from her.

When I reached to take the receiver from him, Matthew gripped my wrist and shook his head, once, in warning.

Because, despite brief flashes of him acting like a reasonable person, he’s always going to default to treating her like a small child.  In fact, when the aunts find out that she’s going to France (when was that decided?  Oh, it wasn’t.) he gives them the phone number over there and tells them to call any time.  Just like he’s taking a small child on a vacation and leaving emergency numbers for her parents.

Wow, it’s just amazing how empowering this book is for women.  It tells them to be stupid and treats them like children and implies at every turn that, even if they have powers, they have no control over said powers.

To sweeten the pot in regard to the ‘going to France’ thing (even though she already agreed, didn’t she?) Matthew tells her about this impossibly old manuscript he has with all the bells and whistles and stuff in it that no historian has ever seen before.  Gee, Matthew, how nice of you to hide this incredible find from history for all these centuries.  What else have you got in your cellar that you’re not bothering to share with anyone?

Then we get a run-down of exactly what Diana is packing in her bag, because it’s really, really important that we know she remember her toothpaste. No, I’m not exaggerating, we even get a list of toiletries.  Then they head immediately off to an airport with Matthew’s private plan (no really), and even though she sleeps in the cab ride over, she’s suddenly afraid of sleep in plane because she can’t stop seeing the picture of her dead parents.

Really.  The two lines are not even half a page apart.  First a nap, then afraid to close her eyes. 

What is wrong with you, book?

So Matthew snuggles with her and she goes to sleep and oh my god, will the travelogue never end?  After the fascinating account of how she packed and rode in a cab, we then get the thrilling details of driving through the French countryside.  They arrive at a castle (which is at least a proper fortress-type castle and not a palace) and prepare to meet his mother.  I’m sure this will also be just fascinating.