My eyes latched onto his black ones, his desiccated lips moving. Shock thrummed through me like the single tone of a large bell, recently struck, vibrating, a pounding pulse of surprise. As the vibrations hit me, I realized that the pulse wasn’t just shock, but was part of the word I’d been hearing. Joses Bar-Judas was speaking that word. That wyrd. A spell of darkness encoded into a single word, the power released when it was spoken.

And so we’re introduced to a really old big bad.

It’s interesting in books like these when you have relatively ’normal’ points of view mixed in with characters that are literally centuries/millennia old.

Dark Heir does that well enough, by mostly completely ignoring the problem. For the most part, Joses is a monster. He doesn’t talk (much? at all?). He wantonly murders humans, vampires, and anything else he can get hold of. And just about everyone wants him contained–albeit in various ways and numbers of pieces.

So of course this is where Jane gets involved.

Of course things have to go badly and explode in a number of spectacular ways.

Upside: so much action. And a clear bad guy makes that much more straight forward than often, even if politics are want to get in the way.

Downside: Jane seems to feel responsible for everyone. Seriously, it’s okay to depend on people. Really.

Upside: The Younger brothers. I’m glad to have a constant presence in these books that’s human, (more than) competent, and not a love interest for Jane. It’s grounding–and the books need that.

Downside: We continue to get more and more off the rails with powerscaling Jane. I don’t really know where in the world that’s going–and I actually like that part. But screwing with time is a powerful ability, no matter how (little) you try to tone it down. We shall see.

Upside:

I’m so glad that Bruiser is working out.

Bruiser was my . . . something. Boyfriend was too high school, lover was too sex-specific, significant other seemed more long-term and stable than what we might be starting to have. So my something was the best I could do.

The love tangle was a mess. I’m okay with weird confusion, so long as it seems to be going somewhere.

Downside: Less beast.

I am Beast. Beast is not prey.

You tell ’em, baby.

Am not kit.

I meant— Never mind.

Still a delight what we get. 😄

Overall, an excellent book and I’m ready for the next one! Onward!