beer compulsion

“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 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 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 was sort of like planting a transmitter on someone’s car so that you could 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.”
“Ticktock,” 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 timecritical. 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 halfempty 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.”


Side Jobs, Last Call, Page 275-277