by Jim Butcher
“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 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?”
