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 Page A

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 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 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