by Butcher, Jim
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.