Nightmare Fuel / Changes

• A case of this trope happening secondhand - Susan and Martin, finding the dismembered bodies of Maggie's foster family, three of them young children. And then having to re-assemble them like a jigsaw puzzle just to determine if Maggie is among them, their Horror Hunger urging them to gorge on the blood that's been spewed everywhere and is seeping from their mangled body parts.
  • Oh and the kicker? Before the vampires abducted her, Maggie returns to her foster family's home from outside to find the insides of the building painted with the blood and body parts of her foster family. And she is at best 8 years old. Break the Cutie to the extreme. Made worse by The Reveal in Zoo Days that the vampires attacked after she came in, thus she was Forced to Watch.
• The Red Court attack on the FBI building. Made especially disturbing by Susan's explanation of their methodology: start from the ground floor and kill their way up, taking out anyone they find, solely to "send a message."
  • It's also pretty chilling that Tilly states that the human drug cartels use this tactic too.
    • Moreso in that Jim Butcher didn't make that part up.
• Thomas is only just staying in control after a nasty fight, mentioning explicitly that he's "barely sane"...and Molly accidentally soulgazes him, forcing him to lose his grip on his Hunger. If it hadn't been for Mouse's intervention, he would have killed her.
• Lloyd Slate's fate, again.
  Mab: To be sure, the White Christ never suffered so long or terribly as did this traitor. Three days on a tree. Hardly enough time for a prelude. When it came to visiting agony, the Romans were hobbyists.
• Mab's "rite" to initiate Harry as the new Winter Knight. It's not the most traditional example of this trope but Harry's description of it is disturbing in the extreme.
  • Oh and it was broadcast across all of Fae. Blue-and-Orange Morality indeed.
• Ebenezar McCoy casually ripping the life from 200 men with two waves of the Blackstaff. This is why we have the Laws of Magic, folks. You know it's bad when even Harry is appalled at the sheer cold-bloodedness of it.
  "You took the wrong contract, boys."
  • Worse, according to the rules of magic as Ebenezar and Harry believe them to be, magic can only be cast if you truly believe that it should happen.
• The heart-ripper curse was powerful enough to take down every Red Court vampire on the planet. All of that power was garnered by Human Sacrifice. Harry may have saved the particular lives he'd been fighting for, but a hell of a lot of innocent people were butchered before he even got to Chichen Itza.
• This was mentioned on the Fridge Horror page, but it deserves to be put down here for how terrifying it is: Remember during Summer Knight when the vampires said they would cease-fire if they were given Harry? Odds are, they would have held him captive (possibly for years) while they prepared the spell and sacrificed him at Chichen Itza to get rid of Ebenezar!
• While on the run from several dozen vampires and their supernatural killing machine, Harry and Susan leap blindly into the Nevernever in a desperate bid to escape their pursuers. They promptly realize it would have been better to hold their ground. Apparently, there are few things more dangerous or terrifying than being the "honored guest" of the Erlking... not the least because you can go from "guest" to "entertainment" in the blink of an eye. Should that happen, don't expect to leave (or die) any time soon.
• When Harry is discussing with Marcone where one would go looking for a missing eight-year-old girl in Mexico, the gangster casually mentions brothels and organ harvesters as potential destinations. Once again, Jim Butcher got this inspiration from the real world.
  • It's doubly worse for Harry, whose little girl really did go missing in that country more than a day ago. The fear is so palpable that Marcone picks up on it immediately and expresses his contempt for such businesses with uncharacteristic bitterness.
• When Harry finally finds Maggie, he notes with disgust that the shackles she's wearing were made for children. Fridge Horror endures with the knowledge that such items were apparently on hand at a place of mass sacrifice.
• During his brief conversation with "The Eebs", they blithely offer Harry several dozen people of his choosing as a peace offering. Not as hired help or as employees, but as slaves. They would even (quite generously) allow him pick out whichever stranger caught his eye, and then mentally break and deliver them free of charge. Even worse is the implication that they've done this all before, to the point where they can't understand why someone would find this abhorrent.
• The Red King isn't just powerful enough to vindicate the worship of earlier cultures, he's also cruel and callous enough to murder a helpless woman just to lick the blood from his fingers. And it's implied that the blood gives him a "high" much like a recreational drug. He's a literal demigod with all the restraint and emotional stability of a modern junkie, and it's every bit as bad as it sounds.
• Harry himself. While done for good reasons against a group composed of mostly Asshole Victims his first true intentional usage of Black Magic as an adult is to commit total genocide of an entire species. Now we understand why the White Council are terrified of him going to The Dark Side.

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