Chapter 46 of 78 · Book 5, The Butcher's Masquerade

Chapter 46 — Sierra

Book: The Butcher's Masquerade · Part: The Unhinged Child · Previous: Chapter 45 — The sorting yard · Next: Chapter 47 — My beautiful boy · Floor: Floor 6 — The Hunting Grounds · Series: the series

Opening

» Donut: CARL, MONGO IS REALLY MAD AT YOU.

Summary

Donut draws the litre in the rain with wet monkeys holding the flask and a funeral bell as an umbrella, the dryad mayor offering her 5,000 gold to tie Carl up; Mongo is cut and healed three times. Prudence's cubs watch a Land Before Time sequel with Bomo and the Sledge while Todd corrects its anatomy. Leaving, Donut fireballs the mayor in the back — a Fourth of July sparkler — and half the town burns in the rain: 'I did it! It's my town now!' At Prepotente Number Seven the charm potion is ready and the cubs have ice cream. Miriam's sparks are two kilometres south, off any path; Carl levitates above the trees to see them and sees the forest glowing behind him — Donut, he thinks, has set the whole forest aflame — when something hits him from the side. Boss music, EDM with bongos and monkey screams, and Carl frozen face-up, waterboarded by the rain: Sierra, Northropi Vampire, Level 65 Neighborhood Boss, a bereft minion of Viscount Fog — the mount of a vampire hunter who set out to exterminate 'a vicious and powerful, ruthless and deranged bloodsucker by the name of Miriam Dom', and was killed; Sierra, wounded, turned in a day. A flesh Quetzalcoatlus, a flying giraffe with a lance for a beak. Her talons try to pull him apart like a mozzarella stick; a Holy Gooper sizzles on one foot; Donut's Torch rises from the canopy like a new sun and the boss's head bursts into flames; she flings him straight up, lands on her back in the treetops like a fly in a web, and he drops face-first onto a half-splat potion, gauntlet formed, and punches through her chest 'like Superman breaking through a wall', crashing to the forest floor with broken legs while her entrails pour down on him like a magician's ribbon. She hangs impaled between two trees, burning, health red and stuck. Her heart lies on the ground beating in time with the music; a jagged branch through it ends her. 'You punched that vampire pterodactyl in the dick!' 'It was female.' 'Then you punched her in her lady garden!' Torch is level 14. Mongo may not eat the remains.

Characters

• Carl — Kills a vampire pterosaur by falling through it and staking its loose heart.
• Princess Donut — A litre without thumbs; a mayor fireballed; a sun over the canopy; 'lady garden.'
• Mongo — Bled, healed, forbidden the corpse.
• Miriam Dom — The 'deranged bloodsucker' a vampire hunter died fighting; her sparks.
• Prudence — Her cubs in the guildhall eating ice cream.
• Sierra — A vampire hunter's mount, turned and freed.
• Mordecai — One knockout potion, one charm potion.

Locations

• The Selva — A forest fire in a downpour; a boss in the canopy; the river bend to the south.
• Prepotente Number Seven — A town whose guards are Prepotente's, so not Carl's enemies.

Motifs

• The vampire outbreak — Viscount Fog's story; how a mount turns.
• The gods — Holy water from the shrine; light as fire.
• 'Goddamnit, Donut' — A town set alight to take it.
• The mongoliensis — A litre of Mongo, three cuts.