by Jim Butcher
“Okay,” I said. “Why did you guys let Michael get so screwed up?”
“We didn’t let him do anything,” Jake replied calmly. “He chose to hazard himself in battle against the enemy. The enemy chose to shoot him, and where to point the gun and when to pull the trigger. He survived the experience.”
“So in other words, God was doing nothing to help.”
Jake smiled. “Wouldn’t say that. But you got to understand, son. God isn’t about making good things happen to you, or bad things happen to you. He’s all about you making choices—exercising the gift of free will. God wants you to have good things and a good life, but He won’t gift wrap them for you. You have to choose the actions that lead you to that life.”
“Free will, huh?”
“Yes. For example, your free will on that island.”
I eyed him and sipped more Scotch.
“You saw the Valkyrie staring at Michael. You thought he was in danger. So even though it was your turn, you sent him up to the helicopter in your place.”
“No good deed goes unpunished,” I said, with one too many sh sounds. “That’s where he got hurt.”
Jake shrugged. “But if you hadn’t, you’d have died in that harness, and he’d have died on that island.”
I scowled. “What?”
Jake waved a hand. “I won’t bore you with details, but suffice to say that your choice in that moment changed everything.”
“But you lost a Knight,” I said. “A warrior.”
Jake smiled. “Did we?”
“He can barely walk without that cane. Sure, he handled Douglas, but that’s a far cry from dealing with a Denarian.”
“Ah,” Jake said, “you mean warrior in the literal sense.”
“What other kind of warrior is there?” I asked.
“The important kind.”
I frowned again.
“Harry,” Jake said, sighing. “The conflict between light and darkness rages on so many levels that you literally could not understand it all. Not yet, anyway. Sometimes that battlefield is a literal one. Sometimes it’s a great deal more nebulous and metaphorical.”
“But Michael and I are literal guys,” I said.
Jake actually laughed. “Yeah? Do you think we angled to have you brought into this situation because we needed you to beat someone up?”
“Well. Generally speaking. Yeah.” I gestured with the flask. “Pretty much all we did was beat up this guy who had good intentions and who was desperate to do something to help.”
Jake shook his head. “The real war happened when you weren’t looking.”
“Huh?”
“Courtney,” Jake said. “The little girl who almost got hit by a car.”
“What about her?” I asked.
“You saved her life,” he said. “Moreover, you noted the bruise on her cheek—one she acquired from her abusive father. Your presence heightened her mother’s response to the realization that her daughter was being abused. She moved out the next morning.” He spread his hands. “In that moment, you saved the child’s life, prevented her mother from alcohol addiction in response to the loss, and shattered a generational cycle of abuse more than three hundred years old.”
“I ... um.”
“Chuck the electrician,” Jake continued. “He was drunk because he’d been fighting with his wife. Two months from now, their four-year-old daughter is going to be diagnosed with cancer and require a marrow transplant. Her father is the only viable donor. You saved his life with what you did—and his daughter’s life, too. And the struggle that family is going to face together is going to leave them stronger and happier than they’ve ever been.”
I grunted. “That smells an awful lot like predestination to me. What if those people choose something different?”
“It’s a complex issue,” Jake admitted. “But think of the course of the future as, oh, flowing water. If you know the lay of the land, you can make a good guess where it’s going. Now, someone can always come along and dig a ditch and change that flow of water—but honestly, you’d be shocked how seldom people truly choose to exercise their will within their lives.”
I grunted. “What about second baseperson Kelly? I saved her life, too?”
“No. But you made a young woman feel better in a moment where she felt as though she didn’t have anyone she could talk to. Just a few kind words. But it’s going to make her think about the difference those words made. She’s got a good chance of winding up as a counselor to her fellow man. The five minutes of kindness you showed her is going to help thousands of others.” He spread his hands. “And that only takes into account the past day. Despair and pain were averted, loss and tragedy thwarted. Do you think you haven’t struck a blow for the light, Warrior?”
“Um . . .”
“And last but not least, let’s not forget Michael,” he said. “He’s a good man, but where his children are involved, he can be completely irrational. He was a hairbreadth from losing control when he stood over Douglas on the beach. Your words, your presence, your will helped him to choose mercy over vengeance.”
I just stared at him for a moment. “But . . . I didn’t actually mean to do any of that.”
He smiled. “But you chose the actions that led to it. No one forced you to do it. And to those people, what you did saved them from danger as real as any creature of the night.” He turned to look down at the church below and pursed his lips. “People have far more power than they realize, if they would only choose to use it. Michael might not be cutting demons with a sword anymore, Harry. But don’t think for a second that he isn’t still fighting the good fight. It’s just harder for you to see the results from down here.”
I swigged more Scotch, thinking about that.
“He’s happier now,” I said. “His family, too.”
“Funny how making good choices leads to that.”
“What about Father Douglas?” I asked. “What’s going to happen?”
“For the most part,” Jake said, “that will be up to him. Hopefully, he’ll choose to accept his errors and change his life for the better.”
I nodded slowly. Then I said, “Let’s talk about my bill.”
Jake’s eyebrows shot up. “What?”
“My bill,” I said, enunciating. “You dragged me into this mess. You can pay me, same as any other client. Where do I send the invoice?”
“You’re . . . you’re trying to bill the Lord God Almighty?” Jake said, as if he couldn’t quite believe it.
“Hel—uh, heck no,” I said. “I’m billing you.”
“That isn’t really how we work.”
“It is if you want to work with me,” I told him, thrusting out my jaw. “Cough up. Otherwise, maybe next time I’ll just stand around whistling when you want me to help you out.”
Jake’s face broadened into a wide, merry grin, and laughter filled his voice. “No, you won’t,” he said, and vanished.
I scowled ferociously at the empty space where he’d been a moment before. “Cheapskate,” I muttered.
But I was pretty sure he was right.
LAST CALL
—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 profe
ssional 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, m
y 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?”
