by Jim Butcher
“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 privat
e 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 kissi
ng. 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.”
