Strange Brew by Charlaine Harris, Patricia Briggs, Jim Butcher, Karen Chance, P. N. Elrod, Rachel Caine, Faith Hunter, Caitlin Kittredge, Jenna Maclane, Jennifer van Dyck, Christian Rummel, Gayle Hendrix, Dina Pearlman, Marc Vietor, Therese Plummer, Karen Chapman Read Free Book Online

puffy. His nose had been broken. Both his hands were swollen up 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 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