Part 31 (1/2)

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 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?” 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 dispa.s.sionately. It's nothing personal. You know that.”

”Yeah,” I muttered. ”I know that. But I also know what it's like to be dispa.s.sionately 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 princ.i.p.als, 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 st.u.r.dy as h.e.l.l, 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 s.h.i.+ns the minute I come through the door. Mister is huge and most of his ma.s.s is muscle. I rocked at the impact, and the bottles rattled, but I took it in stride. Mouse, my big s.h.a.ggy 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 s.p.a.ce 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-s.h.i.+rt 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 ma.s.s after it had been separated from the main body. A pract.i.tioner 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 gra.s.shopper 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 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 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?” 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, gra.s.shopper,” I said, turning for the stairs. ”You still still might be wrong.” might be wrong.”

THEY'D TAKEN MAC to Stroger, and he looked like h.e.l.l. I had to lie to the nurse to get in to talk to him, flas.h.i.+ng 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.”