Motif · Book 5, The Butcher's Masquerade

The vampire outbreak

Miriam Dom lands as a vampire, drinking only what Pony has just killed, and the floor's dead start reanimating two sunsets after her bite — pieces seeking their bodies, seventy per cent reunited becoming something deadly — until Big Tina's army of Ursine parts fills the streets. A vampire hunter and his mount, Holy Goopers 'like napalm to vampires', a world quest called The Creeping Apocalypse, thousands cured by her death, and an undead army that was never vampire and is not cured.

Segment appearances

Chapter 6 — Miriam, Pony and Bianca
Chapter 8 — The Night Wyrm's web
Chapter 14 — Were-castors
Chapter 39 — Prepotente Town Number Four
Chapter 43 — The Midnight Epicure
Chapter 44 — The Recital
Chapter 45 — The sorting yard
Chapter 46 — Sierra
Chapter 47 — My beautiful boy
Chapter 48 — The Creeping Apocalypse
Chapter 49 — Kiwi
Chapter 50 — Uncle Morty's Insta Lawn-Kill
Chapter 51 — The howdah
Chapter 52 — Gehenna Bramble
Chapter 76 — Cage Fight Extreme

Progression

A vampire healer (ch. 6); a claw that walks home (ch. 44); fragments summing their levels (ch. 45); a hunter's mount turned (ch. 46); the prime dies at dawn (ch. 47); the leftovers become Creepers (ch. 48); a herbicide (ch. 49); Creepers as city bosses (ch. 50); poisoned rocks and the north-plains problem (ch. 51).