Will turned around. Laina had turned an odd shade of red-purple and seemed to be speaking loudly in his direction. He could almost make out the words through the force-dome. Mark Nerrow was behind her, also shouting it seemed, though primarily at his daughter. Tabitha stood a good distance away, apparently enjoying the show. Oddly, Will felt jealous of them all. He and his mother had never really argued. What would it have been like to grow up in a raucous household with siblings?
He looked back at Blake. “How about the pig?”
“Already tied up out back. I’ll miss her. She’s been taking care of all the scraps since yesterday.”
Will winced. “You shouldn’t have gotten attached. You know the plan for him.”
“Some would say the same about you,” Blake pointed out.
“I feel like a lamb being led to slaughter most days,” he agreed. “Get ready for noise.” Will dismissed the force-dome.
Strangely, everything was quiet. The baron had left, presumably to get his things together for the evening. Tiny and Janice were in the parlor, talking with one another, and only Laina was left in the hall with him. “You’re getting help whether you want it or not,” she announced.
“Fine. Can you bleed a pig?”
“Excuse me?”
“Have you ever bled a pig?” asked Will. “I need to feed a vampire, but I’m not sure whether I should bleed the pig first or just toss them in together.”
“What are you talking about?”
“The pig out back,” said Will. “The basement renovations. Do you want to help me feed a vampire so I can harvest alchemical ingredients from it?”
She rolled her eyes. “Talk to me when you’re serious, but if you try to leave, I’ll be right behind you.” She turned and walked away, projecting the body language of someone who had just won an argument.
Will shrugged. I guess she told me. Heading outside with Blake, Will went to the former cellar while Blake fetched the pig.
The entrance had been widened considerably to allow the cage to be moved in, but otherwise the cellar wasn’t much changed. The cage itself was eight feet in length, and four feet wide and tall. Long, heavy chains led from each corner to the center, where they were piled up. There were eight chains in total.
Thinking about what he intended to do made him feel queasy, but Will had done worse in the past. The vision of Arlen Arenata rose unbidden in his mind, followed by the inevitable cold revulsion that always accompanied her memory. He had bled her much as he intended to do with the pig. He shook his head to clear it. It’s a pig, not a human. That didn’t help much, though. She was a pretty shitty human, whereas this pig is probably a pretty decent pig.
Pushing those thoughts aside, he opened the cage and organized the chains, separating them and moving them out of the center. Then he summoned the vampire jar from the limnthal and carefully tipped it over. The monster inside was just as feeble and helpless as before. A trickle of sunlight was falling on the cellar steps, and enough of it reached the desiccated form that smoke began to rise from one of the bloodsucker’s arms.
Will moved to shelter the vampire with his shadow. He would have shouted for Blake to shut the cellar door above, but by the sound of things the man was bringing the pig down. Will waited.
Eventually the pig was there, and Blake lit an oil lamp that sat on a shelf across the room. Then he went upstairs to shut the outer door. Once he had, Will began shackling his corpselike vampire subject. The monster was little more than a skeleton clad in skin, which made its limbs too skinny for the shackles.
Will was forced to wrap the chains tightly around the respective limbs, the neck, the torso, and then affix the shackle to the chain itself. He imagined the vampire swelling up with blood, its flesh growing around the metal links like a tree grows around a metal fence. Hopefully it’s painful.
Once he was sure he had the vampire secure, he dumped it back into the jar and stood it up again. The thing was too weak to feed, so he figured he could use to jar to marinate the monster in pig blood. He shuddered. I shouldn’t have thought of marinating, now I’ll remember this when I’m cooking.
“How long will this take?” asked Blake.
“For the vampire, I’m not sure,” said Will. “The potions I want to make are fairly simple. I can produce a few in a couple of hours; it’s just a single-stage process.”
Even in the warm lamplight, the old Special Services veteran looked pale. “Do you want me to stay down here with you?”
Will decided to take it easy on him. “Go up the stairs and wait at the cellar door. If things go badly for some reason and I yell for help, open the doors. The sunlight should solve whatever problem I’m having.” He began arranging jars on one side of the room, then put a large metal pan in the center of the floor to catch the blood.
Blake evacuated.
Chapter 40
Will tried a sleep spell, which worked, but as soon as he began cutting, the pig woke again. He was forced to use a source-link to paralyze the poor animal, and he watched its eyes rolling wildly as he bled it from the main carotid arteries. It was pretty much the same thing that would have happened at the slaughterhouse, but Will still felt a strong sense of guilt.
He did his best to catch as much of the vital red fluid as possible, though some splashed out from the force of its panicked heartbeat. The animal’s consciousness faded away, and Will released the source-link. He almost lost his blood as well, when the pig fell sideways and almost knocked his catch pan into the dirt. He was forced to hug the three-hundred-pound gilt against himself as he dragged her back in the other direction.
Once again, he was liberally smeared with blood and dirt. Why do I even bother cleaning myself off? he wondered. Clearly, this is meant to be my natural state.
Another thought came to him then, and Will carefully moved the blood pan off to one side so he wouldn’t knock it over. Then he went up the stairs to where Blake waited. “Can you get Tiny for me?”
“You need his help?”
“We can’t waste the meat, but I’m going to be too busy with the rest of this to butcher it.”
“This is what you get for rushing. You should have planned for this,” Blake remonstrated.
Will frowned. “Too bad. It isn’t as though I’ve had a lot of time to plan things.”
Blake left and returned a few minutes later. Together the two men dragged the heavy pig’s body out of the cellar and up aboveground where they could cut her up. Will went back down below. He made sure he had Ethelgren’s Illumination prepared before he poured the pig’s blood into the jar.
Nothing happened at first, so he moved back and locked the cage door. He’d been afraid the vampire might instantly spring to life and rush at him, but that wasn’t the case. Several minutes passed, and then a wet, slurping sound found his ears, and he could see the jar moving slightly as the thing inside shifted from side to side.