McAnally's was a haven in a town where no one believed in magic. ) I looked around the room for a moment, with its annoying combination of low ceilings and lazily spinning fans, its thirteen carved wooden columns and its thirteen windows, plus thirteen tables arranged haphazardly to defray and scatter the residual magical effects that sometimes surrounded hungry (in other words, angry) wizards. According to Mac, if you can't get up and walk over to pick up your own order, you don't need to be there at all. (In McAnally's pub and grill, there aren't any service people. I knew she didn't have much money, and I had even less.ĭespite my rumbling stomach, I didn't rise immediately to pick up the food. A steak dinner was less than my usual rate, but she was pleasant company, and a sometime apprentice of mine. I would never have been able to afford dinner tonight, except that Kim had offered to buy, if I'd talk to her about something during the meal. He added a couple of bottles of his homemade brown ale, and my mouth started watering. Mac caught my attention from behind the bar by waving a hand at me, and slid a couple of plates of steaming food onto the polished surface of the crooked oak bar. You're better off forgetting this circle and concentrating on something else. I just want to know what these others are. You're the only real wizard I've ever even heard of, much less know. No one in local circles recognizes them either. 'I can't find the references for all of these symbols. ' She leaned across the table toward me, her eyes intent.

'You're Chicago's only practicing professional wizard, and you're the only one who can help me.

She was a tall woman, buxom and lovely in an old-world way, with pale, pretty skin and round cheeks well used to smiling. Kim Delaney frowned at me, and brushed some of her dark, shining hair back from her forehead. ' I folded the piece of paper, with its drawings of three concentric rings of spidery symbols, and slid it back over the polished oak-wood table.

So I didn't know that it was one night shy of being full when a young woman sat down across from me in McAnally's pub and asked me to tell her all about something that could get her killed. I never used to keep close track of the phases of the moon.

Fool Moon by Jim Butcher