“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 form the fluorescent lights above us out 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 bloody carcass hang 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, noise power-tools.
It wasn’t that I was unfamiliar with what went on in a slaughterhouse, but one thing was to have a theoretic 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.