Side Jobs Part 34

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 G.o.d with her, Wizard."

"I was going to kick your a.s.s 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 good now. ..." Smoldering blue eyes found me. "Harry. Come sit down with us." 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 G.o.ddess of wine," I said instead. "And the ba.s.sarids were another name for the handmaidens of Dionysus." I nodded at the beer in her hand and said, "I thought maenads were wine sn.o.bs."

Her mouth spread in a wide, genuine-looking smile, and her teeth were very white. "Any spirit is the spirit of the G.o.d, mortal."

"That's what the psychic conduit links them to," I said. "To Dionysus. To the G.o.d of revels and ecstatic violence."

"Of course," the maenad said. "Mortals have forgotten the true power of the G.o.d. 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 sn.o.b."

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 ma.s.s-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 ma.s.s-produced beer had nothing she could sink her magical teeth into, no foundation upon which to lay her complex compulsion.

Mac's beer certainly qualified as being produced with pride-real, personal pride, I mean, not official corporate spokesperson pride.

"Why?" I asked her. "Why do this at all?"

"I am hardly alone in my actions, Wizard," she responded. "And it is who I am."

I frowned and tilted my head at her.

"Mortals have forgotten the G.o.ds," she said, hints of anger creeping into her tone. "They think the White G.o.d drove out the many G.o.ds. But they are here. We are here. I, too, was wors.h.i.+pped in my day, mortal man."

"Maybe you didn't know this," I said, "but most of us couldn't give a rat's a.s.s. Raining down thunderbolts from on high isn't exclusive territory anymore."

She snarled, her eyes growing even brighter. "Indeed. We withdrew and gave the world into your keeping-and what has become of it? In two thousand years, you've poisoned and raped Mother Earth, who gave you life. You've cut down the forests, fouled the air, and darkened Apollo's chariot itself with the stench of your smithies."

"And touching off a riot at the Bulls game is going to make some kind of point?" I demanded.

She smiled, showing sharp canines. "My sisters have been doing football matches on the continent for years. We're expanding the franchise." She drank from the bottle, wrapping her lips around it and making sure I noticed. "Moderation. It's disgusting. We should have strangled Aristotle in his crib. Alcoholism-calling the G.o.d a disease disease!" She bared her teeth at me. "A lesson must be taught."

Murphy s.h.i.+vered, and then her expression turned ugly, her blue eyes focusing on me.

"Show your respect to the G.o.d, Wizard," the maenad spat. "Drink. Or I will introduce you to Pentheus and Orpheus."

Greek guys. Both of whom were torn to pieces by maenads and their mortal female companions in orgies of ecstatic violence.

Murphy was breathing heavily now, sweating, her cheeks flushed, her eyes burning with l.u.s.t and rage. And she was staring right at me.

Hooboy.

"Make you a counteroffer," I said quietly. "Break off the enchantment on the beer and get out of my town, now, and I won't FedEx you back to the Aegean in a dozen pieces."

"If you will not honor the G.o.d in life," Meditrina said, "then you will honor him in death death." She flung out a hand, and Murphy flew at me with a howl of primal fury.

I ran away.

Don't get me wrong. I've faced a lot of screaming, charging monsters in my day. Granted, not one of them was small and blond and pretty from making out with what might have been a literal G.o.ddess. All the same, my options were limited. Murphy obviously wasn't in her right mind. I had my blasting rod ready to go, but I didn't want to kill her. I didn't want to go hand to hand with her, either. Murphy was a dedicated martial artist, especially good at grappling, and if it came to a clinch, I wouldn't fare any better than Caine had.

I flung myself back out of the room and into the corridor beyond before Murphy could catch me and twist my arm into some kind of Escher portrait. I heard gla.s.s breaking somewhere behind me.

Murphy came out hard on my heels and I brought my s.h.i.+eld bracelet up as I turned, trying to angle it so that it wouldn't hurt her. My s.h.i.+eld flashed to blue-silver life as she closed on me, and she bounced off it as if it had been solid steel, stumbling to one side. Meditrina followed her, clutching a broken bottle, the whites of her eyes visible all the way around the bright green, an ecstatic and entirely creepy expression of joy lighting her face. She slashed at me, three quick, graceful motions, and I got out of the way of only one of them. Hot pain seared my chin and my right hand, and my blasting rod went flying off down the corridor, bouncing off people's legs.

I'm not an expert like Murphy, but I've taken some cla.s.ses, too, and more important, I've been in a bunch of sc.r.a.pes in my life. In the literal school of hard knocks, you learn the ropes fast, and the lessons go bone-deep. As I reeled from the blow, I turned my momentum into a spin and swept my leg through Meditrina's. G.o.ddess or not, the maenad didn't weigh half what I did, and her legs went out from under her.

Murphy blindsided me with a kick that lit up my whole rib cage with pain, and she had seized an arm before I could fight through it. If it had been my right arm, I'm not sure what might have happened- but she grabbed my left, and I activated my s.h.i.+eld bracelet, sheathing it in sheer, kinetic power and forcing her hands away.

I don't care how many aikido lessons you've had-they don't train you for force fields.

I reached out with my will and screamed, "Forzare!" Then I seized a large plastic waste bin with my power. With a flick of my hand, I flung it at Murphy. It struck her hard and knocked her off me; I backpedaled. Meditrina had regained her feet and was coming for me, bottle flickering.

She drove me back into the beer-stand counter across the hall, and I brought up my s.h.i.+eld again just as her makes.h.i.+ft weapon came forward. Gla.s.s shattered against it, cutting her own hand-always a risk with a bottle. But the force of the blow was sufficient to carry through the s.h.i.+eld and slam my back against the counter. I bounced off some guy trying to carry beer in plastic cups and went down soaked in brew.

Murphy jumped on me then, pinning my left arm down as Meditrina started raking at my face with her nails, both of them screaming like banshees.

I had to shut one eye when a sharp fingernail grazed it, but I saw my chance as Meditrina's hands-hot, horribly strong hands-closed over my throat.

I choked out a gasped, "Forzare!" and reached out my right hand, snapping a slender chain that held up one end of a sign suspended above the beer stand behind me.

A heavy wooden sign that read, in large cheerful letters, PLEASE DRINK RESPONSIBLY, swung down in a ponderous, scything arc and struck Meditrina on the side of the head, hitting her like a giant's fist. Her nails left scarlet lines on my throat as she was torn off me.

Murphy looked up, shocked, and I hauled with all my strength. I had to position her before she took up where Meditrina left off. I felt something wrench and give way as my thumb left its socket, and I howled in pain as the sign swung back, albeit with a lot less momentum now, and clouted Murphy on the noggin, too.

Then a bunch of people jumped on us, and the cops came running.

WHILE THEY WERE arresting me, I managed to convince the cops that there was something bad in Mac's beer. They got with the caterers and rounded up the whole batch, apparently before more than a handful of people could drink any. There was some wild behavior, but no one else got hurt.

None of which did me any good. After all, I was soaked in Budweiser and had a.s.saulted two attractive women. I went to the drunk tank, which angered me mainly because I'd never gotten my freaking beer. And to add insult to injury, after paying exorbitant rates for a ticket, I hadn't gotten to see the game, either.

There's no freaking justice in this world.

Murphy turned up in the morning to let me out. She had a black eye and a sign-shaped bruise across one cheekbone.

"So let me get this straight," Murphy said. "After we went to Left Hand Goods, we followed the trail to the Bulls game. Then we confronted this maenad character, there was a struggle, and I got knocked out."

"Yep," I said.

There was really no point in telling it any other way. The nefarious hooch would have destroyed her memory of the evening. The truth would just bother her.

h.e.l.l, it bothered me-on more levels than I wanted to think about.

"Well, Ba.s.sarid vanished from the hospital," Murphy said. "So she's not around to press charges. And, given that you were working with me on an investigation, and because several people have reported side effects that sound a lot like they were drugged with Rohypnol or something-and because it was you who got the cops to pull the rest of the bottles-I managed to get the felony charges dropped. You're still being cited for drunk and disorderly."

"Yay," I said without enthusiasm.

"Could have been worse," Murphy said. She paused and studied me for a moment. "You look like h.e.l.l."

"Thanks," I said.

She looked at me seriously. Then she smiled, stood up on her tiptoes, and kissed my cheek. "You're a good man, Harry. Come on. I'll give you a ride home."

I smiled all the way to her car.

LOVE HURTS.

-from Songs of Love and Death, Songs of Love and Death, edited by George R. R. Martin and Gardner Dozois edited by George R. R. Martin and Gardner Dozois Takes place between Turn Coat Turn Coat and and Changes Changes Gardner Dozois has a bunch of awards for his anthologies because he's good good at them, and I leapt at his invitation to contribute to the anthology he was working on with George R. R. Martin, originally t.i.tled at them, and I leapt at his invitation to contribute to the anthology he was working on with George R. R. Martin, originally t.i.tled Star-Crossed Lovers Star-Crossed Lovers. Despite my enthusiasm, finding a starting point for a Dresden story was sort of a puzzler for me, since Harry Dresden might be in the top three Star-Influence-Free lovers in the whole contemporary-fantasy genre. How was I going to bring him into a story with a theme like that?

Answer: Get him into the thick of things next to Murphy when seemingly random love spells are running amok through the city. After that, all I had to do was apply his usual streak of luck and cackle madly to myself while typing.

The t.i.tle of the anthology changed to Songs of Love and Death Songs of Love and Death after I had written the story, which is probably a good thing. Otherwise, I may have tried to find a way to fit a death-metal battle of the bands into the margins somewhere. No one deserves that. after I had written the story, which is probably a good thing. Otherwise, I may have tried to find a way to fit a death-metal battle of the bands into the margins somewhere. No one deserves that.

Murphy gestured at the bodies and said, "Love hurts." I ducked under the crime scene tape and entered the Wrigleyville apartment. The smell of blood and death was thick. It made gallows humor inevitable.

Murphy stood there looking at me. She wasn't offering explanations. That meant she wanted an unbiased opinion from CPD's Special Investigations consultant-who is me, Harry Dresden. As far as I know, I am the only wizard on the planet earning a significant portion of his income working for a law enforcement agency.

I stopped and looked around, taking inventory.

Two bodies, naked, male and female, still intertwined in the act. One little pistol, illegal in Chicago, lying upon the limp fingers of the woman. Two gunshot wounds to the temples, one each. There were two overlapping fan-shaped splatters of blood, and more had soaked into the carpet. The bodies stank like h.e.l.l. Some very unromantic things had happened to them after death.

I walked a little farther into the room and looked around. Somewhere in the apartment, an old vinyl was playing Queen. Freddie wondered who wanted to live forever. As I listened, the song ended and began again a few seconds later, popping and scratching nostalgically.

The walls were covered in photographs.

I don't mean there were a lot of pictures on the wall, like at Greatgrandma's house. I mean covered in photographs. Entirely. Completely papered.

I glanced up. So was the ceiling.

I took a moment to walk slowly around, looking at pictures. All of them, every single one of them, featured the two dead people together, posed somewhere and looking deliriously happy. I walked and peered. Plenty of the pictures were near-duplicates in most details, except that the subjects wore different sets of clothing-generally cutesy matching T-s.h.i.+rts. Most of the sites were tourist spots within Chicago.

It was as if the couple had gone on the same vacation tour every day, over and over again, collecting the same general batch of pictures each time.

"Matching T-s.h.i.+rts," I said. "Creepy."

Murphy's smile was unpleasant. She was a tiny, compactly muscular woman with blond hair and a b.u.t.ton nose. I'd say she was so cute, I just wanted to put her in my pocket, but if I tried to do it, she'd break my arm. Murph knows martial arts.

She waited and said nothing.

"Another suicide pact. That's the third one this month." I gestured at the pictures. "Though the others weren't quite so cuckoo for Cocoa Puffs. Or, ah, in medias res." I shrugged and gestured at the obsessive photographs. "This is just crazy."

Murphy lifted one pale eyebrow ever so slightly. "Remind me-how much do we pay you to give us advice, Sherlock?"

I grimaced. "Yeah, yeah. I know." I was quiet for a while and then said, "What were their names?"

"Greg and Cindy Bardalacki," Murphy said.

"Seemingly unconnected dead people, but they share similar patterns of death. Now we're upgrading to irrational and obsessive behavior as a precursor. ..." I frowned. I checked several of the pictures and went over to eye the bodies. "Oh," I said. "Oh, h.e.l.l's bells."

Murphy arched an eyebrow.

"No wedding rings any where," I said. "No wedding pictures. And ..." I finally found a framed family picture, which looked to have been there for a while, among all the snapshots. Greg and Cindy were both in it, along with an older couple and a younger man.

"Jesus, Murph," I said. "They weren't a married couple. They were brother and sister."

Murphy eyed the intertwined bodies. There were no signs of struggle. Clothes, champagne flutes, and an empty bubbly bottle lay scattered. "Married, no," she said. "Couple, yes." She was unruffled. She'd already worked that out for herself.

"Ick," I said. "But that explains it."

"Explains what?"

"These two. They were together-and they went insane doing it. This has the earmarks of someone tampering with their minds."

Murphy squinted at me. "Why?"

I spread my hands. "Let's say Greg and Cindy b.u.mp into Bad Guy X. Bad Guy X gets into their heads and makes them fall wildly in love and l.u.s.t with each other. There's nothing they can do about the feelings-which seem perfectly natural-but on some level they're aware that what they're doing is not what they want, and dementedly wrong besides. Their compromised conscious minds clash with their subconscious"-I gestured at the pictures-"and it escalates until they can't handle it anymore, and bang." I shot Murphy with my thumb and forefinger.

"If you're right, they aren't the deceased," Murphy said. "They're the victims. Big difference. Which is it?"

"Wish I could say," I said. "But the only evidence that could prove it one way or another is leaking out onto the floor. If we get a survivor, maybe I could take a peek and see, but barring that, we're stuck with legwork."

Murphy sighed and looked down. "Two suicide pacts could-technically-be a coincidence. Three of them, no way it's natural. This feels more like something's MO. Could it be another one of those Skavis vampires?"

"They gun for loners," I said, shaking my head. "These deaths don't fit their profile."

"So you're telling me we need to turn up a common denominator to link the victims? Gosh, I wish I could have thought of that on my own."

I winced. "Yeah." I glanced over at a couple of other SI detectives in the room, taking pictures of the bodies and doc.u.menting the walls and so on. Forensics wasn't on-site. They don't like to waste their time on the suicides of the emotionally disturbed, regardless of how bizarre they might be. That was c.r.a.p work, and as such had been dutifully pa.s.sed to SI.