Harry is also making new allies and might one day be able to become a recognized power in his own right. Harry would only need two signatures from representatives of two supernatural powers.  Lara and Mab would be the two mostly likely members of Mab’s Accords to sign such a petition.

The other signatories might object to Mab and Lara elevating their Knight / political husband to freeholding lord - teaming up to declare someone who's tied to both their nations is also going to be micronation unto himself seems like it might ruffle more feathers than it's worth, even if the others ultimately have to accept it under Accords procedure.

Easy enough to find sponsors from the other powers he's not quite as close to, though.

It is possible that five Nemesis puppets are dead and two have or are on the way to becoming to being cured.  That would leave six left, at a minimum.

The fraction of it that was in hosts who were killed could presumably return to circulation, though.  Just a guess, but death of the host might return the possessing fragment to the outside, necessitating either being summoned back by mortal cultists or sneaking through the gates ... depending on turnaround time, a given fragment might have been responsible for multiple of the known infections.

Vitto Malvora is another possible candidate, although I tend to think his arrangement was with Before and his body ended up as the foundation of Sharkface.  Madrigal and/or Madeline Raith might also be possibilities ... Madrigal in particular, since changing to a fear-eater against his House' usual predilection as lust-eaters could be Nemesis changing his nature.

So 12M made a point of mentioning that the castle had a strong threshold on account of how many neighbor families Harry had welcomed in while their homes were uninhabitable.  Including the roof, per the gargoyles.

Previously, we've got WoJ about vampires and thresholds that the White Court could cross a threshold uninvited but they'd be barely able to use any supernatural mojo, the Red would be nearly disabled by doing so, and the Black just couldn't.

So ... what the hell?

I say maybe in Mirror Mirror, a short story, or some other future book, the above was a real clue.  Cowl and the Denarians are very much connected somehow, stay tuned.

The Mouse short stories both already had Cowl as an antagonist.  He was behind the disruptions in Zoo Day trying to interfere with Harry from bonding with his daughter via the one of Mouse's litter-mates he'd taken and corrupted.  Fugitive was about him causing Mister to be possessed by the Nemean Lion (his choice of hosts for the spirit he was calling up was supposed to hurt Harry by making his cat kill innocents).

It struck me at the time that those are both pretty indirect schemes for someone who could take Harry in a straight fight any time he chose to pick one to be bothering with.  Maybe it makes a degree more sense to be targeting spiritual injury instead of physical if he's Denarian-adjacent, though.

It's not even necessarily a shock twist if his alliance is with the nemfected Denarian(s), either, since Cowl seems to be on Team Outside.

Might have been edited out.  He'd also said during the writing period for Cold Days that there would be a Cowl appearance or clue coming up there.

Either that was edited out, or he was under a pretty obscure cover as some other character, or Jim had in mind that he was in the background somewhere but not noticed by Harry.

And, since JB was looking for new beta readers, I imagine a lot of the "old guard" are unable to help these days, which is a shame, I thought there were things in the book that didn't exactly fit and they would have caught maybe.

Wait, where did you see that?  I might throw my hat into that particular ring...

There's a lot of confusion based on various statements about Dracula, Drakul, blampires, and the Black Court. The best harmonization of all the info, imo, is that Drakul created blampires and Dracula created the Court. I think the most likely answer to the confusion is that Jim changed his mind.

That was my understanding too.  Drakul had been creating a few blampires as a sort of elite praetorian guard, and been rolling that entourage for a long time.  So long as there were very few of them, it was easier to keep their weaknesses under wraps.

Dracula basically said "these are awesome, let's make a whole court of them!" ... leading to the stokerlypse because those are too OP a unit for other nations to tolerate them also growing their population like mad.

Granted it's been through a couple of revisions - I think Jim did change his mind at least once on it.

  I think it's souls that work with Uriel, not shades or ghosts if they are souless..  It all gets very confusing.

I'm not properly sure whether Murphy pere or Carmichael were full souls or just shades, but Uriel certainly seemed to think he could use Sir Stuart.  Wasn't he a shade?  Mort said his retinue were shades, and almost any entity he encountered who thought it was the real person was just in denial.