Ok, here's my promised assessment of PG after this reread.
I'm not sure how much of this will be a direct response to the OP, but I have several things to point out, and one WAG.
#1Sandra Marling is usually pointed to as the main orchestrator for all things nasty that happened at Splattercon since she motivated Molly to use fear, and people point out that she didn't touch Harry. However, if she were powerful enough to knock out the lights and set up the cold wards around the Fetch attacks, she might have trouble using a cell phone:
"How did you know where I was"
"Sandra." he [BF Nelson] said."I called her cell. She told me you'd checked in."
This doesn't definitively show that she wasn't the one throwing around magic but. It's a strike against her, and indicates there was another player in the background, that might have been using her as a cutout.
#2If Glau was another cutout for who set Madrigal Raith up to take the fall for the Fetch attacks, and the Scarecrow took him out to silence him, then that implies that Mab was involved in that setup.
#3Someone directed Harry's wammy reversal to detect Molly from within his web on the Theater.
Up to this point, the phages showed up either in close proximity to Nelson (same bathroom as him), or next to Rosanna from her GF's makeup mirror. This time Rosanna, was in the hospital, Nelson was on his way to St. Marry's with a paranoiagasim, and Molly was at her Mom's. So in the last Fetch attack on the Theater, Harry had his web up to detect the entrance of the phages, and to detect their summoner under the assumption that the summoner was within the hotel.
"Their summoner is going to draw them in," I finished, following the line of reasoning. "It's like... I could blanket the surrounding area in fog, but if they have someone on this end, the phages will have a beacon they can use to home in on the hotel."
I'm projecting here, but if someone is on this end of the NN veil throwing up wards and hexing lights and stuff, and this person anticipates Harry setting up a classic White Council doctrine response to a summoner of bad juju, and yet the bad juju is actually being sent, not summoned, maybe they put up a "single, quiet, quivering pulse" thaumatalogically (did I spell it right that time?) linked to Molly within the bounds of the Hotel for Harry to latch onto knowing he would be looking for it.
Here's the description of what happened from Harry's PoV
...Streamers from the lure whipped out along the lines of power that constituted my detection web, brushing lightly at the entities, attracting their attention, giving them a whiff of rich sustenance.
And somewhere in the middle of all that, I felt a single, quiet, quivering pulse- A living presence that could only be the phages' summoner and beacon.
This scenario seems likely to me because
Molly wasn't inside his web, she was at her parent's home. Maybe Mab couldn't send the Fetches to "fetch" Molly, but if another mortal sent them after her that would get the trick done.
WAGThis is a stab in the dark. I don't think it is necessarily true, but it kinda tickled my intuition a little so I'm sharing.
I think it's possible that Rawlings is involved with the Black Council. I was paying close attention to the sequence of events leading up to the last phage attack on the theater, and noticed that right before the attack Rawlings checked in on Harry and saw how he had things set up. This tied in with the idea that someone had set up their own spell to direct Harry's "lure" to Molly makes me think that Rawlings might have been checking up on Harry as a form of recon for this other spell slinger. Another thing that makes me wonder about Rawlings, is his ties to Jack Murphy. He is the only one living other than Karrin that interacted with "Jack" Murphy, and maybe he's actually a tie to the bad things that happened to him.
Edit: Reworked #3 a little.
