Side Jobs

—from Strange Brew, edited by P. N. Elrod

Takes place between Small Favor and Turn Coat

Having already written a mead-themed short story, I wasn’t quite sure what to do with this one. But hey, it was Pat Elrod asking me, and I’ve never been good at saying no, and I decided to tread upon what is very nearly holy ground, in the Dresden Files—the forces of darkness were going to violate Mac’s beer.

Naturally, Harry gets to respond just as many readers would: Oh, snap!

This was a fairly lighthearted piece, for me, anyway, and I tried to carry the same sense of energy and pace through this story that you get from the really good “Monster of the Week” episodes of the X-Files. I’ll have to make it up to Mac sometime. . . .

All I wanted was a quiet beer. That isn’t too much to ask, is it—one contemplative drink at the end of a hard day of professional wizarding? Maybe a steak sandwich to go with it? You wouldn’t think so. But somebody (or maybe Somebody) disagreed with me.

McAnally’s Pub is a quiet little hole in the wall, like a hundred others in Chicago, in the basement of a large office building. You have to go down a few stairs to get to the door. When you get inside, you’re at eye level with the creaky old ceiling fans in the rest of the place, and you have to take a couple of more steps down from the entryway to get to the pub’s floor. It’s lit mostly by candles. The finish work is all hand-carved, richly polished wood, stained a deeper brown than most would use, and combined with the candles, it feels cozily cavelike.

I opened the door to the place and got hit in the face with something I’d never smelled in Mac’s pub before—the odor of food being burned.

It should say something about Mac’s cooking that my first instinct was to make sure the shield bracelet on my left arm was ready to go as I drew the blasting rod from inside my coat. I took careful steps forward into the pub, blasting rod held up and ready. The usual lighting was dimmed, and only a handful of candles still glimmered.

The regular crowd at Mac’s, members of the supernatural community of Chicago, were strewn about like broken dolls. Half a dozen people lay on the floor, limbs sprawled oddly, as if they’d dropped unconscious in the middle of calisthenics. A pair of older guys who were always playing chess at a table in the corner lay slumped across the table. Pieces were spread everywhere around them, some of them broken, and the old chess clock they used had been smashed to bits. Three young women who had watched too many episodes of Charmed, and who always showed up at Mac’s together, were unconscious in a pile in the corner, as if they’d been huddled there in terror before they collapsed—but they were spattered with droplets of what looked like blood.

I could see several of the fallen breathing, at least. I waited for a long moment, but nothing jumped at me from the darkness, and I felt no sudden desire to start breaking things and then take a nap.

“Mac?” I called quietly.

Someone grunted.

I hurried over to the bar and found Mac on the floor beside it. He’d been badly beaten. His lips were split and puffy. His nose had been broken. Both his hands were swollen and purple—defensive wounds, probably. The baseball bat he kept behind the bar was lying next to him, smeared with blood—probably his own.

“Stars and stones,” I breathed. “Mac.”

I knelt down next to him, examining him for injuries as best I could. I didn’t have any formal medical training, but several years’ service in the Wardens in a war with the vampires of the Red Court had shown me more than my fair share of injuries. I didn’t like the look of one of the bruises on his head, and he’d broken several fingers, but I didn’t think it was anything he wouldn’t recover from.

“What happened?” I asked him.

“Went nuts,” he slurred. One of his cut lips reopened, and fresh blood appeared. “Violent.”

I winced. “No kidding.” I grabbed a clean cloth from the stack on the shelf behind the bar and ran cold water over it. I tried to clean some of the mess off his face. “They’re all down,” I told him as I did. “Alive. It’s your place. How do you want to play it?”

Even through as much pain as he was in, Mac took a moment to consider before answering. “Murphy,” he said finally.

I’d figured. Calling in the authorities would mean a lot of questions and attention, but it also meant everyone would get medical treatment sooner. Mac tended to put the customer first. But if he’d wanted to keep it under the radar, I would have understood that, too.

“I’ll make the call,” I told him.

THE AUTHORITIES SWOOPED down on the place with vigor. It was early in the evening, and we were evidently the first customers for the night shift EMTs.

“Jesus,” Sergeant Karrin Murphy said from the doorway, looking around the interior of Mac’s place. “What a mess.”

“Tell me about it,” I said glumly. My stomach was rumbling, and I was thirsty besides, but it just didn’t seem right to help myself to any of Mac’s stuff while he was busy getting patched up by the ambulance guys.

Murphy blew out a breath. “Well, brawls in bars aren’t exactly uncommon.” She came down into the room, removed a flashlight from her jacket pocket, and shone it around. “But maybe you’ll tell me what really happened.”

“Mac said his customers went nuts. They started acting erratic and then became violent.”

“What, all of them? At the same time?”

“That was the impression he gave me. He wasn’t overly coherent.”

Murphy frowned and slowly paced the room, sweeping the light back and forth methodically. “You get a look at the customers?”

“There wasn’t anything actively affecting them when I got here,” I said. “I’m sure of that. They were all unconscious. Minor wounds, looked like they were mostly self-inflicted. I think those girls were the ones to beat Mac.”

Murphy winced. “You think he wouldn’t defend himself against them?”

“He could have pulled a gun. Instead, he had his bat out. He was probably trying to stop someone from doing something stupid, and it went bad.”

“You know what I’m thinking?” Murphy asked. “When something odd happens to everyone in a pub?”

She had stopped at the back corner. Among the remnants of broken chessmen and scattered chairs, the circle of illumination cast by her flashlight had come to rest on a pair of dark brown beer bottles.

“Ugly thought,” I said. “Mac’s beer, in the service of darkness.”

She gave me a level look. Well. As level a look as you can give when you’re a five-foot blonde with a perky nose, glaring at a gangly wizard most of seven feet tall. “I’m serious, Harry. Could it have been something in the beer? Drugs? A poison? Something from your end of things?”

I leaned on the bar and chewed that thought over for a moment. Oh, sure, technically it could have been any of those. A number of drugs could cause psychotic behavior, though admittedly it might be hard to get that reaction in everyone in the bar at more or less the same time. Poisons were just drugs that happened to kill you, or the reverse. And if those people had been poisoned, they might still be in a lot of danger.

And once you got to the magical side of things, any one of a dozen methods could have been used to get to the people through the beer they’d imbibed—but all of them would require someone with access to the beer to pull it off, and Mac made his own brew.

In fact, he bottled it himself.

“It wasn’t necessarily the beer,” I said.

“You think they all got the same steak sandwich? The same batch of curly fries?” She shook her head. “Come on, Dresden. The food here is good, but that isn’t what gets them in the door.”

“Mac wouldn’t hurt anybody,” I said quietly.

“Really?” Murph asked, her voice quiet and steady. “You’re sure about that? How well do you really know the man?”

I glanced around the bar, slowly.

“What’s his first name, Harry?”

“Dammit, Murph.” I sighed. “You can’t go around being suspicious of everyone all the time.”

“Sure I can.” She gave me a faint smile. “It’s my job, Harry. I have to look at things dispassionately. It’s nothing personal. You know that.”

“Yeah,” I muttered. “I know that. But I also know what it’s like to be dispassionately suspected of something you didn’t do. It sucks.”

She held up her hands. “Then let’s figure out what did happen. I’ll go talk to the principals, see if anyone remembers anything. You take a look at the beer.”

“Yeah,” I said. “Okay.”

AFTER BOTTLING IT, Mac transports his beer in wooden boxes like old apple crates, only more heavy-duty. They aren’t magical or anything. They’re just sturdy as hell, and they stack up neatly. I came through the door of my apartment with a box of samples and braced myself against the impact of Mister, my tomcat, who generally declares a suicide charge on my shins the minute I come through the door. Mister is huge and most of his mass is muscle. I rocked at the impact, and the bottles rattled, but I took it in stride. Mouse, my big shaggy dogosaurus, was lying full on his side by the fireplace, napping. He looked up and thumped his tail on the ground once, then went back to sleep.

No work ethic around here at all. But then, he hadn’t been cheated out of his well-earned beer. I took the box straight down the stepladder to my lab, calling, “Hi, Molly,” as I went down.

Molly, my apprentice, sat at her little desk, working on a pair of potions. She had maybe five square feet of space to work with in my cluttered lab, but she managed to keep the potions clean and neat, and still had room left over for her Latin textbook, her notebook, and a can of Pepsi, the heathen. Molly’s hair was kryptonite green today, with silver tips, and she was wearing cutoff jeans and a tight blue T-shirt with a Superman logo on the front. She was a knockout.

“Hiya, Harry,” she said absently.

“Outfit’s a little cold for March, isn’t it?”

“If it were, you’d be staring at my chest a lot harder,” she said, smirking a little. She glanced up, and it bloomed into a full smile. “Hey, beer!”

“You’re young and innocent,” I said firmly, setting the box down on a shelf. “No beer for you.”

“You’re living in denial,” she replied, and rose to pick up a bottle.

Of course she did. I’d told her not to. I watched her carefully.

The kid’s my apprentice, but she’s got a knack for the finer aspects of magic. She’d be in real trouble if she had to blast her way out of a situation, but when it comes to the cobweb-fine enchantments, she’s a couple of lengths ahead of me and pulling away fast—and I figured this had to be subtle work.

She frowned almost the second she touched the bottle. “That’s . . . odd.” She gave me a questioning look, and I gestured at the box. She ran her fingertips over each bottle in turn. “There’s energy there. What is it, Harry?”

I had a good idea of what the beer had done to its drinkers—but it just didn’t make sense. I wasn’t about to tell her that, though. It would be very anti-Obi-Wan of me. “You tell me,” I said, smiling slightly.

She narrowed her eyes at me and turned back to her potions, muttering over them for a few moments, and then easing them down to a low simmer. She came back to the bottles and opened one, sniffing at it and frowning some more.

“No taste testing,” I told her. “It isn’t pretty.”

“I wouldn’t think so,” she replied in the same tone she’d used while working on her Latin. “It’s laced with . . . some kind of contagion focus, I think.”

I nodded. She was talking about magical contagion, not the medical kind. A contagion focus was something that formed a link between a smaller amount of its mass after it had been separated from the main body. A practitioner could use it to send magic into the main body, and by extension into all the smaller foci, even if they weren’t in the same physical place. It was sort of like planting a transmitter on someone’s car so that you could send a missile at it later.

“Can you tell what kind of working it’s been set up to support?” I asked her.

She frowned. She had a pretty frown. “Give me a minute.”

“Ticktock,” I said.

She waved a hand at me without looking up. I folded my arms and waited. I gave her tests like this one all the time—and there was always a time limit. In my experience, the solutions you need the most badly are always time-critical. I’m trying to train the grasshopper for the real world.

Here was one of her first real-world problems, but she didn’t have to know that. So long as she thought it was just one more test, she’d tear into it without hesitation. I saw no reason to rattle her confidence.

She muttered to herself. She poured some of the beer out into the beaker and held it up to the light from a specially prepared candle. She scrawled power calculations on a notebook. And twenty minutes later, she said, “Hah. Tricky, but not tricky enough.”

“Oh?” I said.

“No need to be coy, boss,” she said. “The contagion looks like a simple compulsion meant to make the victim drink more, but it’s really a psychic conduit.”

I leaned forward. “Seriously?”

Molly stared blankly at me for a moment. Then she blinked and said, “You didn’t know?”

“I found the compulsion, but it was masking anything else that had been laid on the beer.” I picked up the half-empty bottle and shook my head. “I brought it here because you’ve got a better touch for this kind of thing than I do. It would have taken me hours to puzzle it out. Good work.”

“But . . . you didn’t tell me this was for real.” She shook her head dazedly. “Harry, what if I hadn’t found it? What if I’d been wrong?”

“Don’t get ahead of yourself, grasshopper,” I said, turning for the stairs. “You still might be wrong.”

THEY’D TAKEN MAC to Stroger, and he looked like hell. I had to lie to the nurse to get in to talk to him, flashing my consultant’s ID badge and making like I was working with the Chicago cops on the case.

“Mac,” I said, coming to sit down on the chair next to his bed, “how are you feeling?”

He looked at me with the eye that wasn’t swollen shut. “Yeah. They said you wouldn’t accept any painkillers.”

He moved his head in a slight nod.

I laid out what I’d found. “It was elegant work, Mac. More intricate than anything I’ve done.”

His teeth made noise as they ground together. He understood what two complex, interwoven enchantments meant as well as I did—a serious player was involved.

“Find him,” Mac growled, the words slurring a little.

“Any idea where I could start?” I asked him.

He was quiet for a moment, then shook his head. “Caine?”

I lifted my eyebrows. “That thug from Night of the Living Brews? He’s been around?”

He grunted. “Last night. Closing.” He closed his eyes. “Loudmouth.”

I stood up and put a hand on his shoulder. “Rest. I’ll chat him up.”

Mac exhaled slowly, maybe unconscious before I’d gotten done speaking.

I found Murphy down the hall.

“Three of them are awake,” she said. “None of them remember anything for several hours before they presumably went to the bar.”

I grimaced. “I was afraid of that.” I told her what I’d learned.

“A psychic conduit?” Murphy asked. “What’s that?”

“It’s like any electrical power line,” I said. “Except it plugs into your mind—and whoever is on the other end gets to decide what goes in.”

Murphy went a little pale. She’d been on the receiving end of a couple of different kinds of psychic assault, and it had left some marks. “So do what you do. Put the whammy on them, and let’s track them down.”

I grimaced and shook my head. “I don’t dare,” I told her. “All I’ve got to track with is the beer itself. If I try to use it in a spell, it’ll open me up to the conduit. It’ll be as if I drank the stuff.”

Murphy folded her arms. “And if that happens, you won’t remember anything you learn, anyway.”

“Like I said,” I told her, “it’s high-quality work. But I’ve got a name.”

“A perp?”

“I’m sure he’s guilty of something. His name’s Caine. He’s a con. Big, dumb, violent, and thinks he’s a brewer.”

She arched an eyebrow. “You got a history with this guy?”

“Ran over him during a case maybe a year ago,” I said. “It got ugly. More for him than me. He doesn’t like Mac much.”

“He’s a wizard?”

“Hell’s bells, no,” I said.

“Then how does he figure in?”

“Let’s ask him.”

MURPHY MADE SHORT work of running down an address for Herbert Orson Caine, mugger, rapist, and extortionist—a cheap apartment building on the south end of Bucktown.

Murphy knocked at the door, but we didn’t get an answer.

“It’s a good thing he’s a con,” she said, reaching for her cell phone. “I can probably get a warrant without too much trouble.”

“With what?” I asked her. “Suggestive evidence of the use of black magic?”

“Tampering with drinks at a bar doesn’t require the use of magic,” Murphy said. “He’s a rapist, and he isn’t part of the outfit, so he doesn’t have an expensive lawyer to raise a stink.”

“Howsabout we save the good people of Chicago time and money and just take a look around?”

“Breaking and entering.”

“I won’t break anything,” I promised. “I’ll do all the entering, too.”

“No,” she said.

“But—”

She looked up at me, her jaw set stubbornly. “No, Harry.”

I sighed. “These guys aren’t playing by the rules.”

“We don’t know he’s involved yet. I’m not cutting corners for someone who might not even be connected.”

I was partway into a snarky reply when Caine opened the door from the stairwell and entered the hallway. He spotted us and froze. Then he turned and started walking away.

“Caine!” Murphy called. “Chicago PD!”

He bolted.

Murph and I had both been expecting that, evidently. We both rushed him. He slammed the door open, but I’d been waiting for that, too. I sent out a burst of my will, drawing my right hand in toward my chest as I shouted, “Forzare!”

Invisible force slammed the door shut as Caine began to go through it. It hit him hard enough to bounce him all the way back across the hall, into the wall opposite.

Murphy had better acceleration than I did. She caught up to Caine in time for him to swing one paw at her in a looping punch.

I almost felt sorry for the slob.

Murphy ducked the punch, then came up with all of her weight and the muscle of her legs and body behind her response. She struck the tip of his chin with the heel of her hand, snapping his face straight up.

Caine was brawny, big, and tough. He came back from the blow with a dazed snarl and swatted at Murphy again. Murph caught his arm, tugged him a little one way, a little the other, and using his own arm as a fulcrum, sent him flipping forward and down hard onto the floor. He landed hard enough to make the floorboards shake, and Murphy promptly shifted her grip, twisting one hand into a painful angle, holding his arm out straight, using her leg to pin it into position.

“That would be assault,” Murphy said in a sweet voice. “And on a police officer in the course of an investigation, no less.”

“Bitch,” Caine said. “I’m gonna break your—”

We didn’t get to find out what he was going to break, because Murphy shifted her body weight maybe a couple of inches, and he screamed instead.

“Whaddayou want?” Caine demanded. “Lemme go! I didn’t do nothin’!”

“Sure you did,” I said cheerfully. “You assaulted Sergeant Murphy, here. I saw it with my own eyes.”

“You’re a two-time loser, Caine,” Murphy said. “This will make it number three. By the time you get out, the first thing you’ll need to buy will be a new set of teeth.”

Caine said a lot of impolite words.

“Wow,” I said, coming to stand over him. “That sucks. If only there were some way he could be of help to the community. You know, prove how he isn’t a waste of space some other person could be using.”

“Screw you,” Caine said. “I ain’t helping you with nothing.”

Murphy leaned into his arm a little again to shut him up. “What happened to the beer at McAnally’s?” she asked in a polite tone.

Caine said even more impolite words.

“I’m pretty sure that wasn’t it,” Murphy said. “I’m pretty sure you can do better.”

“Bite me, cop bitch,” Caine muttered.

“Sergeant Bitch,” Murphy said. “Have it your way, bonehead. Bet you’ve got all kinds of fans back at Stateville.” But she was frowning when she said it. Thugs like Caine rolled over when they were facing hard time. They didn’t risk losing the rest of their adult lives out of simple contrariness—unless they were terrified of the alternative.

Someone or, dare I say it, something had Caine scared.

Well, that table could seat more than one player.

The thug had a little blood coming from the corner of his mouth. He must have bitten his tongue when Murphy hit him.

I pulled a white handkerchief out of my pocket and, in a single swooping motion, stooped down and smeared some blood from Caine’s mouth onto it.

“What the hell?” he said, or something close to it. “What are you doing?”

“Don’t worry about it, Caine,” I told him. “It isn’t going to be a long-term problem for you.”

I took the cloth and walked a few feet away. Then I hunkered down and used a piece of chalk from another pocket to draw a circle around me on the floor.

Caine struggled feebly against Murphy, but she put him down again. “Sit still,” she snapped. “I’ll pull your shoulder right out of its socket.”

“Feel free,” I told Murphy. “He isn’t going to be around long enough to worry about it.” I squinted up at Caine and said, “Beefy, little bit of a gut. Bet you eat a lot of greasy food, huh, Caine?”

“Wh-what?” he said. “What are you doing?”

“Heart attack should look pretty natural,” I said. “Murph, get ready to back off once he starts thrashing.” I closed the circle and let it sparkle a little as I did. It was a waste of energy—special effects like that almost always are—but it made an impression on Caine.

“Jesus Christ!” Caine said. “Wait!”

“Can’t wait,” I told him. “Gotta make this go before the blood dries out. Quit being such a baby, Caine. She gave you a chance.” I raised my hand over the fresh blood on the cloth. “Let’s see now—”

“I can’t talk!” Caine yelped. “If I talk, she’ll know!”

Murphy gave his arm a little twist. “Who?” she demanded.

“I can’t! Jesus, I swear! Dresden, don’t—it isn’t my fault. They needed bloodstone, and I had the only stuff in town that was pure enough! I just wanted to wipe that smile off that bastard’s face!”

I looked up at Caine with a gimlet eye, my teeth bared. “You ain’t saying anything that makes me want you to keep on breathing.”

“I can’t,” Caine wailed. “She’ll know!”

I fixed my stare on Caine and raised my hand in a slow, heavily overdramatized gesture. “Intimidatus dorkus maximus!” I intoned, making my voice intentionally hollow and harsh, and stressing the long vowels.

“Decker!” Caine screamed. “Decker, he set up the deal!”

I lowered my hand and let my head rock back. “Decker,” I said. “That twit.”

Murphy watched me and didn’t let go of Caine, though I could tell she didn’t want to keep holding him.

I shook my head at Murphy and said, “Let him scamper, Murph.”

She let him go, and Caine fled for the stairs on his hands and knees, sobbing. He staggered out, falling down the first flight, from the sound of it.

I wrinkled up my nose as the smell of urine hit me. “Ah. The aroma of truth.”

Murphy rubbed her hands on her jeans as if trying to wipe off something greasy. “Jesus, Harry.”

“What?” I said. “You didn’t want to break into his place.”

“I didn’t want you to put a gun to his head, either.” She shook her head. “You couldn’t really have . . .”

“Killed him?” I asked. I broke the circle and rose. “Yeah. With him right here in sight, yeah. I probably could have.”

She shivered. “Jesus Christ.”

“I wouldn’t,” I said. I went to her and put a hand on her arm. “I wouldn’t, Karrin. You know that.”

She looked up at me, her expression impossible to read. “You put on a really good act, Harry. It would have fooled a lot of people. It looked . . .”

“Natural on me,” I said. “Yeah.”

She touched my hand briefly with hers. “So, I guess we got something?”

I shook off dark thoughts and nodded. “We’ve got a name.”

BURT DECKER RAN what was arguably the sleaziest of the half-dozen establishments that catered to the magical crowd in Chicago. Left Hand Goods prided itself on providing props and ingredients to the black magic crowd.

Oh, that wasn’t so sinister as it sounded. Most of the trendy, self-appointed Death Eater wannabes in Chicago—or any other city, for that matter—didn’t have enough talent to strike two rocks together and make sparks, much less hurt anybody. The really dangerous black wizards don’t shop at places like Left Hand Goods. You could get everything you needed for most black magic at the freaking grocery store.

But, all the same, plenty of losers with bad intentions thought Left Hand Goods had everything you needed to create your own evil empire—and Burt Decker was happy to make them pay for their illusions.

Me and Murphy stepped in, between the display of socially maladjusted fungi on our right, a tank of newts (PLUCK YOUR OWN *#%$ING EYES, the sign said) on the left, and stepped around the big shelf of quasi-legal drug paraphernalia in front of us.

Decker was a shriveled little toad of a man. He wasn’t overweight, but his skin looked too loose from a plump youth combined with a lifetime of too many naps in tanning beds. He was immaculately groomed, and his hair was a gorgeous black streaked with a dignified silver that was like a Rolls hood ornament on a VW Rabbit. He had beady black eyes with nothing warm behind them, and when he saw me, he licked his lips nervously.

“Hiya, Burt,” I said.

There were a few shoppers, none of whom looked terribly appealing. Murphy held up her badge so everyone could see it and said, “We have some questions.”

She might as well have shouted, “Fire!” The store emptied.

Murphy swaggered past a rack of discount porn DVDs, her coat open just enough to reveal the shoulder holster she wore. She picked one up, gave it a look, and tossed it on the floor. “Christ, I hate scum vendors like this.”

“Hey!” Burt said. “You break it, you bought it.”

“Yeah, right,” Murphy said.

I showed him my teeth as I walked up and leaned both my arms on the counter he stood behind. It crowded into his personal space. His cologne was thick enough to stop bullets.

“Burt,” I said, “make this simple, okay? Tell me everything you know about Caine.”

Decker’s eyes went flat, and his entire body became perfectly still. It was reptilian. “Caine?”

I smiled wider. “Big guy, shaggy hair, kind of a slob, with piss running down his leg. He made a deal with a woman for some bloodstone, and you helped.”

Murphy had paused at a display of what appeared to be small, smoky quartz geodes. The crystals were nearly black, with purple veins running through them, and they were priced a couple of hundred dollars too high.

“I don’t talk about my customers,” Decker said. “It isn’t good for business.”

I glanced at Murphy. “Burt. We know you’re connected.”

She stared at me for a second, and sighed. Then she knocked a geode off the shelf. It shattered on the floor.

Decker winced and started to protest, but the words died on his lips.

“You know what isn’t good for business, Decker?” I asked. “Having a big guy in a grey cloak hang out in your little Bad Juju Mart. Your customers start thinking that the Council is paying attention, how much business do you think you’ll get?”

Decker stared at me with toad eyes, nothing on his face.

“Oops,” Murphy said, and knocked another geode to the floor.

“People are in the hospital, Burt,” I said. “Mac’s one of them—and he was beaten on ground held neutral by the Unseelie Accords.”

Burt bared his teeth. It was a gesture of surprise.

“Yeah,” I said. I drew my blasting rod out of my coat and slipped enough of my will into it to make the runes and sigils carved along its length glitter with faint orange light. The smell of wood smoke curled up from it. “You don’t want the heat this is gonna bring down, Burt.”

Murphy knocked another geode down and said, “I’m the good cop.”

“All right,” Burt said. “Jesus, will you lay off? I’ll talk, but you ain’t gonna like it.”

“I don’t handle disappointment well, Burt.” I tapped the glowing ember tip of the blasting rod down on his countertop for emphasis. “I really don’t.”

Burt grimaced at the black spots it left on the countertop. “Skirt comes in asking for bloodstone. But all I got is this crap from South Asscrack. Says she wants the real deal, and she’s a bitch about it. I tell her I sold the end of my last shipment to Caine.”

“Woman pisses you off,” Murphy said, “and you send her to do business with a convicted rapist.”

Burt looked at her with toad eyes.

“How’d you know where to find Caine?” I asked.

“He’s got a discount card here. Filled out an application.”

I glanced from the porn to the drug gear. “Uh-huh. What’s he doing with bloodstone?”

“Why should I give a crap?” Burt said. “It’s just business.”

“How’d she pay?”

“What do I look like, a fucking video camera?”

“You look like an accomplice to black magic, Burt,” I said.

“Crap,” Burt said, smiling slightly. “I haven’t had my hands on anything. I haven’t done anything. You can’t prove anything.”

Murphy stared hard at Decker. Then, quite deliberately, she walked out of the store.

I gave him my sunniest smile. “That’s the upside of working with the grey cloaks now, Burt,” I said. “I don’t need proof. I just need an excuse.”

Burt stared hard at me. Then he swallowed, toadlike.

“SHE PAID WITH a Visa,” I told Murphy when I came out of the store. “Meditrina Bassarid.”

Murphy frowned up at my troubled expression. “What’s wrong?”

“You ever see me pay with a credit card?”

“No. I figured no credit company would have you.”

“Come on, Murph,” I said. “That’s just un-American. I don’t bother with the things, because that magnetic strip goes bad in a couple of hours around me.”

She frowned. “Like everything electronic does. So?”

“So if Ms. Bassarid has Caine scared out of his mind on magic . . .” I said.

Murphy got it. “Why is she using a credit card?”

“Because she probably isn’t human,” I said. “Nonhumans can sling power all over the place and not screw up anything if they don’t want to. It also explains why she got sent to Caine to get taught a lesson and wound up scaring him to death instead.”

Murphy said an impolite word. “But if she’s got a credit card, she’s in the system.”

“To some degree,” I said. “How long for you to find something?”

She shrugged. “We’ll see. You get a description?”

“Blue-black hair, green eyes, long legs, and great tits,” I said.

She eyed me.

“Quoting,” I said righteously.

I’m sure she was fighting off a smile. “What are you going to do?”

“Go back to Mac’s,” I said. “He loaned me his key.”

Murphy looked sideways at me. “Did he know he was doing that?”

I put my hand to my chest as if wounded. “Murphy,” I said. “He’s a friend.”

I LIT A bunch of candles with a mutter and a wave of my hand, and I stared around Mac’s place. Out in the dining area, chaos reigned. Chairs were overturned. Salt from a broken shaker had spread over the floor. None of the chairs were broken, but the framed sign that read ACCORDED NEUTRAL TERRITORY was smashed and lay on the ground near the door.

An interesting detail, that.

Behind the bar, where Mac kept his iceboxes and his wood-burning stove, everything was as tidy as a surgical theater, with the exception of the uncleaned stove and some dishes in the sink. Nothing looked like a clue.

I shook my head and went to the sink. I stared at the dishes. I turned and stared at the empty storage cabinets under the bar, where a couple of boxes of beer still waited. I opened the icebox and stared at the food, and my stomach rumbled. There were some cold cuts. I made a sandwich and stood there munching it, looking around the place and thinking.

I didn’t think of anything productive.

I washed the dishes in the sink, scowling and thinking up a veritable thunderstorm. I didn’t get much further than a light sprinkle, though, before a thought struck me.

There really wasn’t very much beer under the bar.

I finished the dishes, pondering that. Had there been a ton earlier? No. I’d picked up the half-used box and taken it home. The other two boxes were where I’d left them. But Mac usually kept a legion of beer bottles down there.

So why only two now?

I walked down to the far end of the counter, a nagging thought dancing around the back of my mind, where I couldn’t see it. Mac kept a small office in the back corner, consisting of a table for his desk, a wooden chair, and a couple of filing cabinets. His food service and liquor permits were on display on the wall above it.

I sat down at the desk and opened the filing cabinets. I started going through Mac’s records and books. Intrusive as hell, I know, but I had to figure out what was going on before matters got worse.

And that was when it hit me—matters getting worse. I could see a mortal wizard, motivated by petty spite, greed, or some other mundane motivation, wrecking Mac’s bar. People can be amazingly petty. But nonhumans, now—that was a different story.

The fact that this Bassarid chick had a credit card meant she was methodical. I mean, you can’t just conjure one out of thin air. She’d taken the time to create an identity for herself. That kind of forethought indicated a scheme, a plan, a goal. Untidying a Chicago bar, neutral ground or not, was not by any means the kind of goal that things from the Nevernever set for themselves when they went undercover into mortal society.

Something bigger was going on, then. Mac’s place must have been a side item for Bassarid.

Or maybe a stepping-stone.

Mac was no wizard, but he was savvy. It would take more than cheap tricks to get to his beer with him here, and I was betting he had worked out more than one way to realize it if someone had intruded on his place when he was gone. So, if someone wanted to get to the beer, they’d need a distraction.

Like maybe Caine.

Caine made a deal with Bassarid, evidently—I assumed he gave her the bloodstone in exchange for being a pain to Mac. So, she ruins Mac’s day, gets the bloodstone in exchange, end of story—nice and neat.

Except that it didn’t make a lot of sense. Bloodstone isn’t exactly impossible to come by. Why would someone with serious magical juice do a favor for Caine to get some?

Because maybe Caine was a stooge, a distraction for anyone trying to follow Bassarid’s trail. What if Bassarid had picked someone who had a history with Mac, so that I could chase after him while she . . . did whatever she planned to do with the rest of Mac’s beer?

Wherever the hell that was.

It took me an hour and a half to find anything in Mac’s files—the first thing was a book. A really old book, bound in undyed leather. It was a journal, apparently, and written in some kind of cipher.

Also interesting, but probably not germane.

The second thing I found was a receipt, for a whole hell of a lot of money, along with an itemized list of what had been sold—beer, representing all of Mac’s various heavenly brews. Someone at Worldclass Limited had paid him an awful lot of money for his current stock.

I got on the phone and called Murphy.

“Who bought the evil beer?” Murphy asked.

“The beer isn’t evil. It’s a victim. And I don’t recognize the name of the company. Worldclass Limited.”

Keys clicked in the background as Murphy hit the Internet. “Caterers,” Murphy said a moment later. “High end.”

I thought of the havoc that might be about to ensue at some wedding or bar mitzvah and shuddered. “Hell’s bells,” I breathed. “We’ve got to find out where they went.”

“Egad, Holmes,” Murphy said in the same tone I would have said, “Duh.”

“Yeah. Sorry. What did you get on Bassarid?”

“Next to nothing,” Murphy said. “It’ll take me a few more hours to get the information behind her credit card.”

“No time,” I said. “She isn’t worried about the cops. Whoever she is, she planned this whole thing to keep her tracks covered from the likes of me.”

“Aren’t we full of ourselves?” Murphy grumped. “Call you right back.”

She did.

“The caterers aren’t available,” she said. “They’re working the private boxes at the Bulls game.”

I RUSHED TO the United Center.

Murphy could have blown the whistle and called in the artillery, but she hadn’t. Uniformed cops already at the arena would have been the first to intervene, and if they did, they were likely to cross Bassarid. Whatever she was, she would be more than they could handle.

She’d scamper or, worse, one of the cops could get killed. So Murphy and I both rushed to get there and find the bad guy before she could pull the trigger, so to speak, on the Chicago PD.

It was half an hour before the game, and the streets were packed. I parked in front of a hydrant and ran half a mile to the United Center, where thousands of people were packing themselves into the building for the game. I picked up a ticket from a scalper for a ridiculous amount of money on the way, emptying my pockets, and earned about a million glares from Bulls fans as I juked and ducked through the crowd to get through the entrances as quickly as I possibly could.

Once inside, I ran for the lowest level, the bottommost ring of concession stands and restrooms circling entrances to the arena—the most crowded level, currently—where the entrances to the most expensive ring of private boxes were. I started at the first box I came to, knocking on the locked doors. No one answered at the first several, and at the next, the door was opened by a blonde who, in an expensive business outfit showing a lot of décolletage, had clearly been expecting someone else.

“Who are you?” she stammered.

I flashed her my laminated consultant’s ID, too quickly to be seen. “Department of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms, ma’am,” I said in my official’s voice, which is like my voice only deeper and more pompous. I’ve heard it from all kinds of government types. “We’ve had a report of tainted beer. I need to check your bar, see if the bad batch is in there.”

“Oh,” she said, backing up, her body language immediately cooperative. I pegged her as somebody’s receptionist, maybe. “Of course.”

I padded into the room and went to the bar, rifling bottles and opening cabinets until I found eleven dark brown bottles with a simple cap with an M stamped into the metal—Mac’s mark.

I turned to find the blonde holding out the half-empty bottle number twelve in a shaking hand. Her eyes were a little wide. “Um. Am I in trouble?”

I might be. I took the beer bottle from her, moving gingerly, and set it down with the others. “Have you been feeling, uh, sick or anything?” I asked as I edged toward the door, just in case she came at me with a baseball bat.

She shook her head, breathing more heavily. Her manicured fingernails trailed along the V-neck of her blouse. “I . . . I mean, you know.” Her face flushed. “Just looking forward to . . . the game.”

“Uh-huh,” I said warily.

Her eyes suddenly became warmer and very direct. I don’t know what it was exactly, but she was suddenly filled with that energy women have that has nothing to do with magic and everything to do with creating it. The temperature in the room felt as if it went up about ten degrees. “Maybe you should examine me, sir.”

I suddenly had a very different idea of what Mac had been defending himself from with that baseball bat.

And it had turned ugly on him.

Hell’s bells, I thought I knew what we were dealing with.

“Fantastic idea,” I told her. “You stay right here and get comfortable. I’m going to grab something sweet. I’ll be back in two shakes.”

“All right,” she cooed. Her suit jacket slid off her shoulders to the floor. “Don’t be long.”

I smiled at her in what I hoped was a suitably sultry fashion and backed out. Then I shut the door, checked its frame, and focused my will into the palm of my right hand. I directed my attention to one edge of the door and whispered, “Forzare.”

Metal squealed as the door bent in its frame. With any luck, it would take a couple of guys with crowbars an hour or two to get it open again—and hopefully Bubbles would pitch over into a stupor before she did herself any harm.

It took me three more doors to find one of the staff of Worldclass Limited—a young man in dark slacks, a white shirt, and a black bow tie, who asked if he could help me.

I flashed the ID again. “We’ve received a report that a custom microbrew your company purchased for this event has been tainted. Chicago PD is on the way, but meanwhile I need your company to round up the bottles before anyone else gets poisoned drinking them.”

The young man frowned. “Isn’t it the Bureau?”

“Excuse me?”

“You said Department of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms. It’s a bureau.”

Hell’s bells, why did I get someone who could think now?

“Can I see that ID again?” he asked.

“Look, buddy,” I said. “You’ve gotten a bad batch of beer. If you don’t round it up, people are going to get sick. Okay? The cops are on the way, but if people start guzzling it now, it isn’t going to do anybody any good.”

He frowned at me.

“Better safe than sorry, right?” I asked him.

Evidently, his ability to think did not extend to areas beyond asking stupid questions of well-meaning wizards. “Look, uh, really you should take this up with my boss.”

“Then get me to him,” I said. “Now.”

The caterer might have been uncertain, but he wasn’t slow. We hurried through the growing crowds to one of the workrooms that his company was using as a staging area. A lot of people in white shirts were hurrying all over the place with carts and armloads of everything from crackers to cheese to bottles of wine—and a dozen of Mac’s empty wooden boxes were stacked up to one side of the room.

My guide led me to a harried-looking woman in catering wear, who listened to him impatiently and cut him off halfway through. “I know, I know,” she snapped. “Look, I’ll tell you what I told Sergeant Murphy. A city health inspector is already here, and they’re already checking things out, and I am not losing my contract with the arena over some pointless scare.”

“You already talked to Murphy?” I said.

“Maybe five minutes ago. Sent her to the woman from the city, over at midcourt.”

“Tall woman?” I asked, feeling my stomach drop. “Blue-black hair? Uh, sort of busty?”

“Know her, do you?” The head caterer shook her head. “Look, I’m busy.”

“Yeah,” I said. “Thanks.”

I ran back into the corridor and sprinted for the boxes at midcourt, drawing out my blasting rod as I went and hoping I would be in time to do Murphy any good.

A FEW YEARS ago, I’d given Murphy a key to my apartment, in a sense. It was a small amulet that would let her past the magical wards that defend the place. I hadn’t bothered to tell her the thing had a second purpose—I’d wanted her to have one of my personal possessions, something I could, if necessary, use to find her if I needed to. She would have been insulted at the very idea.

A quick stop into the men’s room, a chalk circle on the floor, a muttered spell, and I was on her trail. I actually ran past the suite she was in before the spell let me know I had passed her, and I had to backtrack to the door. I debated blowing it off the hinges. There was something to be said for a shock-and-awe entrance.

Of course, most of those things couldn’t be said for doing it in the middle of a crowded arena that was growing more crowded by the second. I’d probably shatter the windows at the front of the suite, and that could be dangerous for the people sitting in the stands beneath them. I tried the door, just for the hell of it and—

It opened.

Well, dammit. I much prefer making a dramatic entrance.

I came in and found a plush-looking room, complete with dark, thick carpeting, leather sofas, a buffet bar, a wet bar, and two women making out on a leather love seat.

They looked up as I shut the door behind me. Murphy’s expression was, at best, vague, her eyes hazy, unfocused, the pupils dilated until you could hardly see any blue, and her lips were a little swollen with kissing. She saw me, and a slow and utterly sensuous smile spread over her mouth. “Harry. There you are.”

The other woman gave me the same smile with a much more predatory edge. She had shoulder-length hair, so black, it was highlighted with dark, shining blue. Her green-gold eyes were bright and intense, her mouth full. She was dressed in a grey business skirt-suit, with the jacket off and her shirt mostly unbuttoned, if not quite indecent. She was, otherwise, as Burt Decker had described her—statuesque and beautiful.

“So,” she said in a throaty, rich voice, “this is Harry Dresden.”

“Yes,” Murphy said, slurring the word drunkenly. “Harry. And his rod.” She let out a giggle.

I mean, my God. She giggled.

“I like his looks,” the brunette said. “Strong. Intelligent.”

“Yeah,” Murphy said. “I’ve wanted him for the longest time.” She tittered. “Him and his rod.”

I pointed said blasting rod at Meditrina Bassarid. “What have you done to her?”

“I?” the woman said. “Nothing.”

Murphy’s face flushed. “Yet.”

The woman let out a smoky laugh, toying with Murphy’s hair. “We’re getting to that. I only shared the embrace of the god with her, Wizard.”

“I was going to kick your ass for that,” Murphy said. She looked around, and I noticed that a broken lamp lay on the floor, and the end table it had sat on had been knocked over, evidence of a struggle. “But I feel so good now. ...” Smoldering blue eyes found me. “Harry. Come sit down with us.”

“You should,” the woman murmured. “We’ll have a good time.” She produced a bottle of Mac’s ale from somewhere. “Come on. Have a drink with us.”

All I’d wanted was a beer, for Pete’s sake.

But this wasn’t what I had in mind. It was just wrong. I told myself very firmly that it was wrong. Even if Karrin managed, somehow, to make her gun’s shoulder rig look like lingerie.

Or maybe that was me.

“Meditrina was a Roman goddess of wine,” I said instead. “And the bassarids were another name for the handmaidens of Dionysus.” I nodded at the beer in her hand and said, “I thought maenads were wine snobs.”

Her mouth spread in a wide, genuine-looking smile, and her teeth were very white. “Any spirit is the spirit of the god, mortal.”

“That’s what the psychic conduit links them to,” I said. “To Dionysus. To the god of revels and ecstatic violence.”

“Of course,” the maenad said. “Mortals have forgotten the true power of the god. The time has come to begin reminding them.”

“If you’re going to muck with the drinks, why not start with the big beer dispensary in the arena? You’d get it to a lot more people that way.”

She sneered at me. “Beer, brewed in cauldrons the size of houses by machines and then served cold. It has no soul. It isn’t worthy of the name.”

“Got it,” I said. “You’re a beer snob.”

She smiled, her gorgeous green eyes on mine. “I needed something real. Something a craftsman took loving pride in creating.”

This actually made sense, from a technical perspective. Magic is about a lot of things, and one of them is emotion. Once you begin to mass-manufacture anything, by the very nature of the process, you lose the sense of personal attachment you might have to something made by hand. For the maenad’s purposes, it would have meant that the mass-produced beer had nothing she could sink her magical teeth into, no foundation upon which to lay her complex compulsion.

Mac’s beer certainly qualified as being produced with pride—real, personal pride, I mean, not official corporate spokesperson pride.

“Why?” I asked her. “Why do this at all?”

“I am hardly alone in my actions, Wizard,” she responded. “And it is who I am.”

I frowned and tilted my head at her.

“Mortals have forgotten the gods,” she said, hints of anger creeping into her tone. “They think the White God drove out the many gods. But they are here. We are here. I, too, was worshipped in my day, mortal man.”

“Maybe you didn’t know this,” I said, “but most of us couldn’t give a rat’s ass. Raining down thunderbolts from on high isn’t exclusive territory anymore.”

She snarled, her eyes growing even brighter. “Indeed. We withdrew and gave the world into your keeping—and what has become of it? In two thousand years, you’ve poisoned and raped Mother Earth, who gave you life. You’ve cut down the forests, fouled the air, and darkened Apollo’s chariot itself with the stench of your smithies.”

“And touching off a riot at the Bulls game is going to make some kind of point?” I demanded.

She smiled, showing sharp canines. “My sisters have been doing football matches on the continent for years. We’re expanding the franchise.” She drank from the bottle, wrapping her lips around it and making sure I noticed. “Moderation. It’s disgusting. We should have strangled Aristotle in his crib. Alcoholism—calling the god a disease!” She bared her teeth at me. “A lesson must be taught.”

Murphy shivered, and then her expression turned ugly, her blue eyes focusing on me.

“Show your respect to the god, Wizard,” the maenad spat. “Drink. Or I will introduce you to Pentheus and Orpheus.”

Greek guys. Both of whom were torn to pieces by maenads and their mortal female companions in orgies of ecstatic violence.

Murphy was breathing heavily now, sweating, her cheeks flushed, her eyes burning with lust and rage. And she was staring right at me.

Hooboy.

“Make you a counteroffer,” I said quietly. “Break off the enchantment on the beer and get out of my town, now, and I won’t FedEx you back to the Aegean in a dozen pieces.”

“If you will not honor the god in life,” Meditrina said, “then you will honor him in death.” She flung out a hand, and Murphy flew at me with a howl of primal fury.

I ran away.

Don’t get me wrong. I’ve faced a lot of screaming, charging monsters in my day. Granted, not one of them was small and blond and pretty from making out with what might have been a literal goddess. All the same, my options were limited. Murphy obviously wasn’t in her right mind. I had my blasting rod ready to go, but I didn’t want to kill her. I didn’t want to go hand to hand with her, either. Murphy was a dedicated martial artist, especially good at grappling, and if it came to a clinch, I wouldn’t fare any better than Caine had.

I flung myself back out of the room and into the corridor beyond before Murphy could catch me and twist my arm into some kind of Escher portrait. I heard glass breaking somewhere behind me.

Murphy came out hard on my heels and I brought my shield bracelet up as I turned, trying to angle it so that it wouldn’t hurt her. My shield flashed to blue-silver life as she closed on me, and she bounced off it as if it had been solid steel, stumbling to one side. Meditrina followed her, clutching a broken bottle, the whites of her eyes visible all the way around the bright green, an ecstatic and entirely creepy expression of joy lighting her face. She slashed at me, three quick, graceful motions, and I got out of the way of only one of them. Hot pain seared my chin and my right hand, and my blasting rod went flying off down the corridor, bouncing off people’s legs.

I’m not an expert like Murphy, but I’ve taken some classes, too, and more important, I’ve been in a bunch of scrapes in my life. In the literal school of hard knocks, you learn the ropes fast, and the lessons go bone-deep. As I reeled from the blow, I turned my momentum into a spin and swept my leg through Meditrina’s. Goddess or not, the maenad didn’t weigh half what I did, and her legs went out from under her.

Murphy blindsided me with a kick that lit up my whole rib cage with pain, and she had seized an arm before I could fight through it. If it had been my right arm, I’m not sure what might have happened— but she grabbed my left, and I activated my shield bracelet, sheathing it in sheer, kinetic power and forcing her hands away.

I don’t care how many aikido lessons you’ve had—they don’t train you for force fields.

I reached out with my will and screamed, “Forzare!” Then I seized a large plastic waste bin with my power. With a flick of my hand, I flung it at Murphy. It struck her hard and knocked her off me; I backpedaled. Meditrina had regained her feet and was coming for me, bottle flickering.

She drove me back into the beer-stand counter across the hall, and I brought up my shield again just as her makeshift weapon came forward. Glass shattered against it, cutting her own hand—always a risk with a bottle. But the force of the blow was sufficient to carry through the shield and slam my back against the counter. I bounced off some guy trying to carry beer in plastic cups and went down soaked in brew.

Murphy jumped on me then, pinning my left arm down as Meditrina started raking at my face with her nails, both of them screaming like banshees.

I had to shut one eye when a sharp fingernail grazed it, but I saw my chance as Meditrina’s hands—hot, horribly strong hands—closed over my throat.

I choked out a gasped, “Forzare!” and reached out my right hand, snapping a slender chain that held up one end of a sign suspended above the beer stand behind me.

A heavy wooden sign that read, in large cheerful letters, PLEASE DRINK RESPONSIBLY, swung down in a ponderous, scything arc and struck Meditrina on the side of the head, hitting her like a giant’s fist. Her nails left scarlet lines on my throat as she was torn off me.

Murphy looked up, shocked, and I hauled with all my strength. I had to position her before she took up where Meditrina left off. I felt something wrench and give way as my thumb left its socket, and I howled in pain as the sign swung back, albeit with a lot less momentum now, and clouted Murphy on the noggin, too.

Then a bunch of people jumped on us, and the cops came running.

WHILE THEY WERE arresting me, I managed to convince the cops that there was something bad in Mac’s beer. They got with the caterers and rounded up the whole batch, apparently before more than a handful of people could drink any. There was some wild behavior, but no one else got hurt.

None of which did me any good. After all, I was soaked in Budweiser and had assaulted two attractive women. I went to the drunk tank, which angered me mainly because I’d never gotten my freaking beer. And to add insult to injury, after paying exorbitant rates for a ticket, I hadn’t gotten to see the game, either.

There’s no freaking justice in this world.

Murphy turned up in the morning to let me out. She had a black eye and a sign-shaped bruise across one cheekbone.

“So let me get this straight,” Murphy said. “After we went to Left Hand Goods, we followed the trail to the Bulls game. Then we confronted this maenad character, there was a struggle, and I got knocked out.”

“Yep,” I said.

There was really no point in telling it any other way. The nefarious hooch would have destroyed her memory of the evening. The truth would just bother her.

Hell, it bothered me—on more levels than I wanted to think about.

“Well, Bassarid vanished from the hospital,” Murphy said. “So she’s not around to press charges. And, given that you were working with me on an investigation, and because several people have reported side effects that sound a lot like they were drugged with Rohypnol or something—and because it was you who got the cops to pull the rest of the bottles—I managed to get the felony charges dropped. You’re still being cited for drunk and disorderly.”

“Yay,” I said without enthusiasm.

“Could have been worse,” Murphy said. She paused and studied me for a moment. “You look like hell.”

“Thanks,” I said.

She looked at me seriously. Then she smiled, stood up on her tiptoes, and kissed my cheek. “You’re a good man, Harry. Come on. I’ll give you a ride home.”

I smiled all the way to her car.