The needle punctured the skin of the corpse's wrists as the vampire pushed it clean through the flesh and out the other side, then pulling taut the thread following it. Lavi was very glad at this point that he had gotten sewing needles made specifically for sewing leather. A less expensive and tough needle would have bent long before this point.

Initially when he was making his plans, he had put some serious thought into undoing the rigor mortis that the body parts had gone through before sewing them together. However, when he did more research on that line of thinking, he realized he would have to go through the time and trouble of creating the right solution, then applying it to each of the body part separately and - he decided to explore other options.

Ultimately, he decided that the easiest and most efficient option, the one that made the most overall sense, was to just sew the parts together while they were still stiffened. For a regular human, this route would have been impossible with how tough the skin was.

A human just wouldn't have the physical strength to get through the whole process. Even Lavi, with his special strength, found himself grunting and straining in some areas, barely working the needle through.

Lavi considered himself to be a good, competent minion for his dark demon master, but he would admit to not having been very good at sewing on the onset of this. He had never found himself in the position to sew anything before this and memorizing instructions from a book could only get one so far.

However, he was pleased to notice that he got better as he proceeded through his task and when he finally did the last bit of sewing required of him, attaching the new hands to the body's wrists, he actually considered himself much more proficient at it. He was quite proud of that.

Nonetheless his first several, several stitches were truly atrocious and he was glad that none of the stitches should be visible by the end of the procedure. If he did it right. Just because the boy Lavi was making was stitched together, it didn't mean that Yu would be at all pleased if he looked stitched together.

And if Yu wasn't pleased, the bottom line was that Lavi wouldn't end up being pleased (or healthy . . .), either. So, after he'd tied off the last stitch and placed his sewing kit to the side, he started work on the lotion that was supposed to "disappear" the stitches and heal the tears in the body.

It was for things like this lotion that he realized how well-suited to each other he and Yu were. Lavi, with his strong need to know everything, and Yu, with his equally strong desire to have everything. The result of this was a truly large "medicine cabinet" of ingredients.

He even had some of the pretty rare stuff, so he could make just about anything. The lotion he was making for his creation had some of those rare ingredients, such as powdered unicorn horn and the skin of a boggart.

Since boggarts had the innate ability to shape shift and become invisible, the skin would be the main ingredient that would rid his creation of the stitches and cuts, while the advanced healing ability brought by the unicorn horn will make sure it heals and stays that way.

There was also some goat's milk, which was really better for the skin. After carefully mixing these and the other ingredients together, thereby producing his lotion, he checked that the body had set up long enough while he'd been working.

It had, so he spent an hour carefully applying and massaging into the attached areas and then used the rest on the joints. At this point, his left hand reached over to the side and paged through the other book he'd brought with him.

He was more familiar with necromancy than he was with sewing, but he'd still never reanimated a body with a soul before. He'd made zombies; soulless husks that had a spotty reputation for following the orders of the one that created them.

This was different. This was supposed to be a person, who could do more than eat and move. Who could direct themself.

After finding the right page that promised both a reanimated body and a soul recalled from the dead, Lavi got to redrawing the images from the pages of the book to the flesh of his subject. Soon, the skin was littered with darkly inked circles containing different runes and figures.

He never quite understood how these were supposed to work, but he did know what the symbols were supposed to mean. Each ring of symbols called on an ancient god or force (the translations of older, unknown, texts were never quite clear on which it was and the importance of the difference between the two) to return life to the being.

The demon supposed, although it pained him to think it, that he didn't strictly need to know how it worked, in this case. All that truly mattered now was that it did work and that there was no structural flaws in the system. At least, no flaws that Yu would smack him around for.

According to the texts, it would take around eighteen hours for the body and brain to heal enough for them to finally wake up. Only then could Lavi see his creation in their entirety; mind, body, and soul. As eager as Lavi was to see all his work up until this point come to fruition, the wait time gave him plenty of time to rest before checking on his creation. Time to eat, sleep . . . and also . . .

This was the part Lavi had been putting off and truly looking forward to doing the least. Back when he had first taken out those gravediggers for their body, he knew he would need to check the body for any significant supernatural injuries.

The last, the absolute last, thing he needed was for foreign DNA leftover from a creature attack to mess around with the resurrection procedure. Or for his creation to actually change into a supernatural creature on the operating table.

There were few creatures that could turn a human into one of them, instead of just killing them, but it was still a very present risk. Besides, this kid may have been young when he died, but he was far, far from the infant and toddler stages where mortality was higher and expected. Likewise, he was not old enough to commonly die due to work-related hazards.

Not to say that young people just entering the workforce didn't ever do work that was dangerous with a high chance of maiming or death; it was just rare, even among the poorest classes. Few humans wanted to hire young humans for harsh tasks that they had no experience in, just for the new hire to die on them almost immediately.

Realistically speaking, with supernatural creatures of numerous varieties constantly picking off humans, there was not exactly an excess of humans to choose from, should one of their workers die unexpectedly. All this noted, the boy was in the exact wrong age group to normally die of disease or work-related incidents.

However, he was close to the right age to traipse off into the night, full of youthful arrogance, to test his mettle against the monsters that plagued humanity, making the chances of a creature-related death rather high.

Sometimes he hated to be right.

The two cauterized puncture marks on the boy's neck confirmed the worst. Okay, perhaps "the worst" was a bit over dramatic. There were, of course, worse things than finding that the child had been attacked by a vampire. It was still irritating, though and would take a bit of work to make sure the boy didn't turn and ruin everything.

If Yu came in expecting a "partner" that was up to his standards and encountered one of Lavi's own kind- would not be pleased, nope.

The main reason that Lavi had been putting off this particular series of tasks was because of the mouth. Every place chose to handle its problems its own way and there were many ways to handle the problem of someone turning into a creature that preys on humans.

To kill a vampire, you could hack (and with the dullness of the most common weapons, it would be a hacking) off their head, stake them in the heard with a cedar branch, or tie them down in direct sunlight to watch them burn. Yet, they seemed to have caught this boy after he'd died of his attack but before he'd started the change, which opened up another option.

Strictly speaking, all vampires were allergic to garlic.

One of the many strange situations Lavi had found himself in was running through a field of garlic crop, where he ended up tripping and falling onto some of the produce. Just the skin of his hands making physical contact with the harmless looking stuff was enough to make Lavi feel like his blood was itching a few seconds later.

The humans had proven, through their ingenuity as well as trial and error, that stuffing garlic into the mouth of a recently deceased suspected of being infected by a vampire's bite would stop them from turning, but only so long as they hadn't already started turning and the garlic remained in their mouth.

Should the garlic be removed, the change would eventually start again. This prompted the humans to bury their dead after placing the garlic, so that the body would remain undisturbed.

Slipping on a thickly padded glove and working the jaw open to remove the cloves of garlic, Lavi felt his lips twitch into a wry grin as he thought that if someone had done that for himself after he'd been bitten, he probably wouldn't be around to be doing this today.

Lavi wrinkled his nose at the smell of the garlic after he'd managed to get it out. He headed over to the side to toss the offensive article into the trash before stepping back before the body.

Since the mouth had successfully been garlicked before the bite infection spread, Lavi could skillfully remove the - for lack of a better term, venom - if he acted quickly. This was because the infection was still localized around the bite and had not been allowed to travel throughout the body, where assassination would then be the only option available to stop the change.

This removal wasn't an act most thought possible and it would only work for a short time longer since Lavi had removed the garlic stopping it in its tracks. Lavi pulled the syringe he needed out of the sanitizer jar it had been sitting in. With practiced ease, he flicked the needle around and punctured one of the holes in the neck.

First blood and then a black, tar-like liquid poured into the syringe. Since Lavi needed to get it all out, he kept loading the syringe until only blood started coming out again. His long fingers twirled the needle around and depressed the plunger, squirting the mixture of blood and vampire venom into a nearby metal bowl.

He quickly sanitized the needle and then inserted it into the second puncture mark, repeating the same process. Then, to make sure the marks both healed quickly and didn't get infected later on, he covered the neck in a special healing salve. It was ridiculously quick-acting, but did leave the skin oily for a time. He then wrapped the skin in gauze and leaned back with a sigh.

Okay, he was exhausted. And . . . yep, all of his work seemed to be done. There was no way his creation would even wake up until more than half a day had passed, so . . . looked like it was time for a nap. A long one and then a snack.

Lavi groaned appreciatively as he stretched his arms over his head, feeling his muscles pull deliciously and hearing his back crack. Lavi was going to enjoy doing nothing but sleeping the day away, he'd definitely earned it.

And although he didn't see it - it truly was only for a split second - his creation's eyelids twitched. Like the boy was having a dream.