Page 10 of Mane Brew

“Ingredients don’t have preferences.”

“Mine do.” She pops the lid and holds the jar up to the light. The dried roots inside seem to shift, orienting toward her palm. “See? She’s happy to see me.”

I have no response to this. It’s not in any documentation I’ve ever compiled.

My lion, unhelpfully, finds it fascinating.

“The contamination was limited to the moonflower,” I say, forcing the conversation back to professional territory. “Which suggests targeted knowledge of your brewing process. The saboteur knew which ingredient would be used in your experimental batch.”

“How?”

“That’s what we need to determine.” I make another note on my clipboard. “Who has access to your brewing schedule? Who knew you were developing Revelation Red specifically?”

“I don’t exactly keep my experiments secret.” She replaces the black cohosh jar and moves to the next shelf. “I complain about them constantly. Anyone at The Den on a given night probably heard me mention it.”

“The Den.” I think about the shifter bar, the crowd that gathers there. “That’s where the incident occurred. Could the contamination have been introduced there rather than here?”

“The bottles were sealed when I delivered them. Fresh from the tanks.” She pauses, a thought clearly forming. “Which means whatever happened, happened before they ever left my brewery.”

The implication settles between us.

“I need to examine the entry points.” I move toward the back door, the one that leads to the beer garden. “Rule out a breach before we look anywhere else.”

She follows, her footsteps quicker now. “I have wards. Basic protection spells on all the doors and windows.”

“Basic protection spells can be circumvented by someone with sufficient skill.” I examine the doorframe, running my fingers along the wood. The wards are there—intact, humming steadily, undisturbed. No residue. No breach signature. Nothing.

“Well?”

“Your wards haven’t been touched.” I straighten, turning the implication over. “Which means the contamination didn’t happen here. It happened before the moonflower ever reached your brewery.”

“So we’re dealing with my supplier.”

“We’re dealing with someone further up the chain. Patient enough to plan it, resourced enough to pull it off without leaving a trace.” I make a note, already reordering the investigation in my head. “The same profile as the previous Preserver operations.”

She’s silent for a long moment. When I glance at her, she’s staring at the doorframe with an expression that might be anger if it weren’t so carefully controlled.

“Someone poisoned my ingredients before they ever got to me.” Her voice is low, vibrating with tension that makes her magic spark around her fingers. “They touched my magic before I even knew to protect it. They used my own brewery to⁠—”

“They tried to use your magic.” I don’t know why I interrupt, why it feels important to correct her. “The hallucinations weren’t the intended effect. Whatever they were actually trying to accomplish, your magic resisted. Transformed it.”

She looks at me. Really looks, in a way that stills something in my chest.

“You think my chaos saved people.”

“I think your unpredictability made their precise plan imprecise.” I hold her gaze. “Those are very different things.”

“You keep making distinctions.”

“Because precision matters.”

An almost soft expression crosses her face. It’s gone before I can categorize it, replaced by her usual sharp amusement.

I look away first. Force my attention back to the clipboard. There is no file category for whatever that expression was.

The symbol is hidden beneath a loose floorboard near the fermentation tanks.

I find it while examining the area where the contaminated moonflower was stored. A slight irregularity in the wood grain, a board that doesn’t quite sit flush. When I pry it up, the symbol stares back at me—carved into the foundation stone itself, filled with a dark, oily residue that makes my skin crawl.