Strange Brew

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 that 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 that 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 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 it 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.

My apprentice, Molly, 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 i

"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 that 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's sort of like planting a transmitter on someone's car so that you can send a missile at it later.

"Can you tell what kind of working it's been set up to support?" I asked her.