Jonas, I’d be very interested to hear your WOJ on mortals losing their souls due to hideous acts yet continuing to live without souls. In fact, I’d actually like to challenge you on that, because it’s book-canon that all mortals have them, and anything that appears mortal but doesn’t trigger the soul gaze must be inhuman.
"Why should I?" I snarled, and for once I didn't avert my eyes. I stared into her gleaming amber eyes and braced myself for the impact of looking into her soul, and for her to peer into mine.
Instead, nothing happened.
That, in itself, was enough to make my jaw drop incredulously. I continued the stare, and she didn't blink, didn't turn away - and didn't fall into soulgaze with me. I shuddered in reaction. What was going on? Why didn't the 'gaze begin? There were only two kinds of people whose eyes I could meet for more than a second or two: the people who had already met my eyes in a soulgaze were one kind; inhuman beings from the Nevernever were the other.
I had never looked upon Tera West's soul before. I remembered a soulgaze, every time it happened. The experience wasn't the sort of thing you could forget. That only left one conclusion.
Whoever she was - whatever she was, Tera West wasn't human.
I mean, it’s always possible that Harry’s wrong. But I'm certain that either Justin or Ebenezer would have taught him the information he's stating about soul gazes, and I can't think of a good reason why either would be mistaken or intentionally misleading him. Furthermore, nothing in the Dresden Files ever seems to support that horrible people who have caused pain, death, and suffering on an exponential scale lose their souls. Laura Raith and John Marcone, for example, but have souls. Hell, even Rasmussen has a soul, and at that point he was slaughtering people as Ursiel for generations.
By the way, Corpsetaker’s an interesting case. It (and I’m referring to the Corpsetaker as It because she/he has identified as both, and has no fixed sex)
doesn’t trigger a soulgaze when Harry stares at it in Ghost Story – possibly due to Harry being an emaciated soul and the Corpsetaker also being in spirit form – but then when it possesses Butters, it
does soul gaze Molly.
I see two different possibilities. The first, and probably less likely, is that the Corpsetaker was a true ghost in Ghost Story – just an impression of the original person, but not them at all – and that it somehow
created a soul by eating the spooks. The second, and more likely, is that its ability to swap its soul back and forth between person and person allowed it to ‘jump ship’ when Harry killed Luccio’s body, so Corpsetaker has been running around as a naked soul since Dead Beat. In this case, Dresden didn't trigger a soul gaze because
he didn't have enough of a soul to do so, not the other way around.
But yeah, Corpsetaker soul gazes Molly. There’s no question about it. Corpsetaker has a soul, too.