Jim Butcher - Side Jobs

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.