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 B

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.
    She frowned. She had a pretty frown. “Give me a minute.”
    “Tick tock,” I said.
    She waved a hand at me without looking up. I folded my arms and waited. I gave her tests like this one all the time—and there was always a time limit. In my experience, the solutions you need the most badly are always time-critical. I’m trying to train the grasshopper for the real world.
    Here was one of her first real-world problems, but she didn’t have to know that. So long as she thought it was just one more test, she’d tear into it without hesitation. I saw no reason to rattle her confidence.
    She muttered to herself. She poured some of the beer out into the beaker and held it up to the light from a specially prepared candle. She scrawled power calculations on a notebook.
    And twenty minutes later, she said, “Hah. Tricky, but not tricky enough.”
    “Oh?” I said.
    “No need to be coy, boss,” she said. “The contagion looks like a simple compulsion meant to make the victim drink more, but it’s really a psychic conduit.”
    I leaned forward. “Seriously?”
    Molly stared blankly at me for a moment. Then she blinked and said, “You didn’t know ?”
    “I found the compulsion, but it was masking anything else that had been laid on the beer.” I picked up the half-empty bottle and shook my head. “I brought it here because you’ve got a better touch for this kind of thing than I do. It would have taken me hours to puzzle it out. Good work.”
    “But… you didn’t tell me this was for real.” She shook her head dazedly. “Harry, what if I hadn’t found it? What if I’d been wrong?”
    “Don’t get ahead of yourself, grasshopper,” I said, turning for the stairs. “You still might be wrong.”
     
    They’d taken Mac to Stroger, and he looked like hell. I had to lie to the nurse to get in to talk to him, flashing my consultant’s ID badge and making like I was working with the Chicago cops on the case.
    “Mac,” I said, coming to sit down on the chair next to his bed. “How are you feeling?”
    He looked at me with the eye that wasn’t swollen shut.
    “Yeah. They said you wouldn’t accept any painkillers.”
    He moved his head in a slight nod.
    I laid out what I’d found. “It was elegant work, Mac. More intricate than anything I’ve done.”
    His teeth made noise as they ground together. He understood what two complex interwoven enchantments meant as well as I did—a serious player was involved.
    “Find him,” Mac growled, the words slurred a little.
    “Any idea where I could start?” I asked him.
    He was quiet for a moment, then shook his head. “Caine?”
    I lifted my eyebrows. “That thug from Night of the Living Brews? He’s been around?”
    He grunted. “Last night. Closing.” He