Wicked Soul

Chapter 22

TWENTY-TWO

LIV

I drove back to the supermarket after work the next day.

The same old man who’d served me the previous day was minding the butcher’s counter again. He lit up in a smile of recognition when I stopped in front of him, shopping basket over one arm.

“Ah, how was the sausage-making, dear?”

“Not good, I’m afraid.” I leaned on the counter and gave a dramatic sigh. “It tasted off. I was wondering if there might have been something off with the blood? Grandma always made it with very fresh ingredients, and this was just not up to par.”

“Oh dear, that’s a shame. I can assure you there’s nothing wrong with the blood, but…” He looked thoughtful for a moment. “I suppose it’s possible our new suppliers treat it slightly different before they package it for shipping.”

“Oh, you have a new supplier?” I perked up. “Could I get the name and address for them? To give them customer feedback, I mean.”

The butcher hesitated for a moment, but then nodded. “Yes, I suppose that would be all right. You’re certainly no vampire.”

I snorted. “No, can’t say that I am. What, are the undead trying to infiltrate pig’s blood suppliers?”

“You would be surprised,” he said, face grave. Leaning over the counter, he whispered, “I’ve had five colleagues across the city have their storerooms raided just this past month. The only thing missing was blood. Now, I might not know much about the undead plague, but I do know the city hasn’t been overrun by thieving sausage makers.”

“Oh, goodness me,” I said, not having problems getting my face to display a sufficient amount of shock at this news. Why on Earth were vampires raiding butchers? Chicago’s murder rate certainly hadn’t dropped, and vampires certainly were accountable for a percentage of it. Maybe they were like Warin and didn’t drink directly from humans? If someone had truly contaminated the animal blood supply, they were targeting peaceful vampires, rather than the ones who hunted humans. That seemed… unusually cruel. And counterintuitive.

The butcher nodding knowingly at my shocked expression. “Mmhm. Those filthy monsters are everywhere. The general population likes to try and forget they exist, but they’re out there. Just waiting for a moment’s inattentiveness to pounce.”

Waiting to pounce on a butcher’s supply of pig’s blood so they could eat without hurting humans, it seemed. I nodded empathetically nonetheless.

“Let me get you that address for your letter,” he said, nodding as if he saw in me a Friend of the Cause. “It ain’t right that we can’t make a good blood sausage because of those monsters.”

I got home in time to call Bolton & Son, the slaughterhouse supplying my local supermarket, before they closed. Much to my surprise, the address was in the southwestern part of the city—I’d definitely thought it would be located somewhere in the countryside, but apparently not.

“Mjello?” I rough voice greeted me, on the second ring.

“Hi, is this Bolton & Son? The slaughterhouse?”

“Affirmative,” the man on the other end said. “What can I do you for, lady?”

“I wanted to talk to someone about the recent changes to the blood you supply. I was making my grandma’s old recipe for blood sausage, and the taste was off. When I talked to my local butcher, he said the change might come from their new supplier—which would be you. To stop vampires, or something like that?” I was pretty impressed with how much I managed to sound like someone who didn’t live off microwave meals and takeout.

There was silence on the other end of the line for a little while. “Well, yes, we have implemented some changes. They were never intended to harm good people like yourself, just looking to make some home-cooked food. Tell you what, why don’t you come by the office? I’d love to have you sit down with some of the people in charge of this change—they might listen to a consumer more than they do us. We have a few of the old school butchers here who ain’t too keen on messing with the food, if you know what I mean. How about noon tomorrow?”

“Er…” I blinked. I hadn’t exactly been planning to make an excursion out of this, but on the other hand… if I did go, I’d get to snoop around more. So long as I could continue faking a keen interest in the proper preparation of blood sausage, it was undoubtedly a one-time chance at getting closer to the core of whatever network had deemed me expendable enough to kidnap this summer.

“How about Friday around noon? I’m off work then,” I suggested cheerfully.

“It’s a date. Just ask for Billy when you arrive,” he said.

“All right, see you then, Billy!” I hung up, feeling mightily proud of my sleuthing skills.

When Friday rolled around, I drove my beat-up Fiesta to the address given to me by my supermarket butcher. The slaughterhouse was located at the edge of an industrial estate, surrounded by busy roads, and the stench rolling out from its open gates when I pulled up spoke its clear language that I’d gotten to the right place.

I parked up by what looked like the office-part of the building and got out, shielding my nose with one hand. It wasn’t so much the smell of animals—I’d spent some time in the countryside before—but the overwhelming smell of… death. It was the only description I had for the pungent stench that hung over the building.

Before I could start walking to the nearest steel staircase leading up to a door I assumed hosted the office, that same door swung open and a portly man in a vest and with face stubbles squinted out into the dull November light.

“Hi! I’m Olivia Green—here to meet Billy. We spoke on the phone earlier this week,” I said, lowering my hand from my nose to not be rude. The slaughterhouse’s smell immediately overwhelmed my senses once more, and I forced myself not to gag.

The guy cracked a lopsided smile. “Ah, yes, the sausage specialist. Come on up, sugar. We’re all ready for you.”

The way he said it made something at the back of my brain perk up, a small bolt of adrenaline sparking in my blood. I hadn’t been too worried about my amateur spying, because there was no way in hell they’d ever be able to guess my ulterior motives. I’d even made sure to come during daytime hours, to ensure they didn’t mistake me for a vampire. But now, as Billy the butcher waved me up the stairs and into the gaping maw of the slaughterhouse, I suddenly found it hard to make my feet move up the steps.

Why? Why were my fight or flight instincts on high alert, just from one sentence from this guy?

I hesitated, reconsidering whether this was such a good idea and if perhaps I should just hightail it out of there, when the middle-aged man let his eyes roam over my winter coat-covered body, his smile turning distinctly lecherous.

Ah. And there was the reason for my reluctance to get any closer.

Sausage specialist, my a*s.

I pushed my uncomfortableness aside and ascended the stairs with a forced smile. I wasn’t going to back down from investigating this slaughterhouse and the people behind it just because its entry was guarded by a horny dude with wandering eyes and a creepy vibe.

“Great, can’t wait. So, who am I meeting?” I asked as he stepped just enough aside that I had to brush past him to get in. Yup, he was a full-on creep. No wonder my immediate instincts had been to turn tail and run.

“Just Elliot from, ah, PR,” Billy said as he led me down a short corridor that looked like it could use a renovation. The beige paint was peeling off parts of the walls, and the linoleum floor was worn with brown patches from old spillage that hadn’t been cleaned up in time. And over it all the smell of death still hung like a depressing cloud, even if it was milder than outside.

“You have a PR department?” I asked, not managing to banish the surprise from my voice as he opened a door into what turned out to be a small office in as desperate need of TLC as the hallway. The beige paint on the walls was the same, but the floor had been upgraded to a worn, orangey-brown carpet. A desk overflowing with paperwork took up about a third of the room, and three chairs had been squeezed into the remaining space. In one of them sat a lanky, black-haired man who looked to be about thirty.

“Yeah, ‘course,” Billy said. “After that incident with the lamb, we had to. Nobody was in the mood for mutton for weeks. This is Elliot—our PR guy. Elliot, this is Olivia Green—the girl who called about our blood supply.”

I wasn’t even close to asking about what “lamb incident” had made Chicago stop buying lamb chops for two weeks, so instead I put on my best dim homemaker smile and stretched out my hand toward the guy who’d won “slaughterhouse PR dude” in the job lottery. “Pleased to meet ya!”

“I’ll leave you two to it, then,” Billy said, giving me another once-over before he shut the door behind me, leaving me alone in the small office with Elliot.

“Likewise.” Elliot gave me a thin smile and reached for my hand for a brief handshake. His hand fell cool and clammy against mine, with no strength. A bit like I imagined holding a lukewarm dead fish would be like.

I masked my grimace with another smile.

“So, you make blood sausages?” he said as he motioned for me to take the chair next to his.

I obeyed. “Yeah. Grandma’s recipe.”

“And this is the first time you notice any difference?”

“Yes, well it’s the first time I’ve made it since moving to Chicago. It was such a disappointment,” I said, faking a saddened frown. “Disappointment” wouldn’t quite be the term I’d have used to describe Warin’s violent retching.

“Uh-huh, I can imagine. Naturally, we feel terrible if our new blood procedures have had an impact on your grandma’s recipe. I know my own nan would never forgive if one of her recipes went haywire.” He gave me a sympathetic smile that somehow didn’t reach his eyes. Not that I was surprised a PR guy had to fake sympathy for my equally fake sausage story. I probably wouldn’t have had a whole lot of empathy left over for picky consumers if my job consisted of making a slaughterhouse appealing to the masses.

“Say, why don’t you take a look at some of the formulas involved in our new process?” he asked.

I blinked. “Er… I doubt I’d understand much.”

“Let’s have a look at them, anyway. I’d like for you to see what we’re doing that’s different. I find that understanding a problem always helps when trying to find a solution.”

I highly doubted any formulas would help the whole “corpse blood” situation, but I nodded nonetheless. “Sure, I guess it couldn’t hurt.”

Elliot reached into the briefcase by his feet and pulled out a thick piece of parchment. “Here you go,” he said, holding it underneath my nose.

I took it from him and scanned the page. Chemistry had never been my strong suit, so most of the scribbled formulas on the side just looked like mishmash to me. But one of them made me blink. It was located at the dead center of the page, and looked more like some of the amulets we sold at Dark Dreams than it did a chemistry formula. When I blinked, it began to glow with a sickly green light.

I nearly dropped it. “Who—what’s that?” I asked, snapping my head to the side to see if Elliot saw what I did.”

“Keep looking at the page, Olivia,” he said, and this time there was a weird sort of command to his voice. It made my neck turn without my conscious will, so I was once again staring at the oddly glowing circle.

“Who is your master?” Elliot’s voice seemed to come from inside my head. I shook it, certain I’d heard wrong, and felt… something tighten around my mind. Almost like an iron blanket clamping down around my own will.

“W-what?” I asked, blinking rapidly to regain my focus. I struggled against the iron band that seemed to fog up my brain.

“Who sent you here today?”

“No one,” I croaked. “I’m not with PETA, if that’s what you think. I just…” The words seemed hard to get out. I put the page in my lap and rubbed at my eyes. The instant I no longer looked at the paper, the fog began to clear. “I really am just here because… because I wanted to know if there was a way of getting uncontaminated blood for my sausages.”

He didn’t reply for a long moment, so I turned my head to look at him. “Is… everything all right?”

He looked startled, his pale green eyes wider than they’d been when he handed me the page, dark eyebrows drawn into a frown.

Then he slowly nodded. “Of course. I understand.” Abruptly, he got to his feet. “Come. I would like to show you where we harvest the blood, to explain the process and why it’s necessary.”

“Uh…” I really didn’t want to. I had no idea what had just happened, if a migraine was coming on or what, but something about the change in Elliot’s demeanor put me on edge. He looked guarded, despite his clearly fake smile. Withdrawn. And that same something that had niggled at me at Billy’s first words to me was very much present again.

Once might have been nothing more than an instinctive reaction to a lecherous old man, but twice within the span of fifteen minutes? No. It was time for me to leave.

“I really appreciate it, but I need to get going. I think I’m feeling a migraine coming on, and my husband will be expecting me home soon.” I was pretty sure my smile looked as fake as his as I got to my feet.

“Oh, it will only take a minute,” Elliot said. He put his hand lightly on my arm, and despite my coat being between his fingers and my skin, every hair on my body stood on end in response. Something similar to the fog from before edged in at my consciousness, but this time my mind remained clear as the sensation of iron locked around it. “I insist.”

I briefly considered shoving him out of the way and running for the door, but pushed the urge aside. As much as I didn’t want to be here, they weren’t gonna up and murder me. For all they knew, I did have a husband waiting for me at home, with knowledge of exactly where I’d gone.

And really, straight-up killing a complaining customer was going a bit far, even for these two creeps.

That same something that’d niggled at the back of my skull about danger seemed to agree—the safest option here was to not let on that I thought something was off.

Still with absolutely no idea why my instincts were going haywire, I nodded at Elliot. “All right then, if it’s only for a minute.”

He moved his hand from my arm, giving me another thin smile as he herded me out the door. “Excellent. Come this way.”

We walked down the hallway and through two sets of doors before Elliot stopped me by a white room. “We’ll need hygiene covers before we go any further,” he said.

“Uh-huh,” I agreed, wanting to just get this over with as quickly as humanly possible. My nerves were so frayed, I kept jumping every time I caught a flicker from the fluorescent lights above us out of the corner of my eyes. And what had I gotten out of my little excursion? Nothing, except a nervous twitch.

So much for moonlighting as an amateur sleuth.

Once suited up in white plastic covering from head to toe, we continued through a set of double doors followed by a thick plastic fringe.

Once through, the temperature immediately dropped. I’d had to leave my coat behind in the room with the hygiene covers, and the sudden change made me shiver. But the second my eyes adjusted to the much sharper light within the warehouse we now stood in, all thoughts of being cold faded to the background at the sudden lurch of horror.

Bloody carcass after b****y carcass hung on meathooks as far my startled gaze could see, and at the far end a couple of men dressed in white were sawing up body parts with huge, noisy power-tools.

It wasn’t that I was unfamiliar with what went on in a slaughterhouse, but one thing was to have a theoretical idea where your burger came from—it was something else entirely to step into the set for a slasher movie, with the stench of freshly slaughtered animals assaulting your nostrils.

“It’s this way,” Elliot said as he began walking down a path lined by rows of animal carcasses.

I did my best to keep my eyes on his back as I followed him, thankful I’d caught an early lunch before coming here. I was pretty sure I wouldn’t be able to eat for a while after this visit.

Elliot led me around a corner and into another section of the warehouse, and I’m not too proud to admit I nearly fainted at the sight that met us there.

This section also had dead animals on hooks, but they were in various states of getting skinned and, as it turned out, bled.

Elliot stopped us in front of a lamb that hung upside down above a bucket, blood dripping from its slit throat and into the pool of red liquid in the container.

“I’m sure you’re aware that, when we get a call about someone complaining about the freshness of our blood supply, we get a bit antsy these days,” Elliot said as he looked emotionlessly at the hapless animal in front of us. “Let me demonstrate what we are doing, and explain why.”

He pointed at the dead lamb. “Previously, due to religious sensitivities and improved texture of the meat, we would take a bolt g*n to the forehead of each animal before we slit their throat and let them bleed to death. The bolt g*n technically left them brain dead, but their hearts still beat. These days, we kill the animal dead before we drain their blood, and the reason is quite simple: vampires can sustain themselves on animal blood—but only fresh animal blood taken while the heart still beats. When we found this out, we changed our procedure, so we would no longer be feeding the filthy monsters.”

I stared at the dead lamb, trying to gather my thoughts enough to get through this without raising his suspicion of me further than it was becoming obvious it already was. “But… won’t that just… make them attack humans more? And what about the religious people? And my sausage? It seems to me you’re punishing your human customers and potentially making the streets even more unsafe in one swoop.”

Elliot snorted. “The vampires who break into butcher shops to steal their blood supply are weak. Desperate. They won’t survive long with their supply cut off. Any vampire who would have a chance at going undetected while preying on humans would never stoop so low as to feed on animal blood—least of all pre-bottled. No, our new policy ensures the monsters don’t grow stronger and increase their numbers—and I’m afraid both religion and grandma’s recipe has to take a secondary seat to the protection of human life. I’m sure you agree?”

“Uh… huh,” I mumbled, as images of Warin’s reaction to my dinner offering flashed before my mind’s eye. By supplying butchers with dead blood, they weren’t just starving vampires unwilling or unable to feed on humans… they were actively killing them.

“Now, seeing as this is in the middle of the day, I am comforted in the fact that you are no vampire,” Elliot said. When I lifted my gaze to his, he gave me that same thin smile as before. “But I know there are certain… sympathizers out there. Servants to the undead. You seem like a smart girl, Olivia. Can I count on your support for Bolton & Son’s new policy? You do wish to make the streets safer, don’t you?”