Fangs and Fur

Chapter 10

Chapter 10

            The mixture of silver and lead in the air was sickening. I had to hold my breath for as long as I could to keep from smelling it as often as possible. Faye had no problems with walking through this vile place although I noticed how her hands tensed and relaxed over and over again by her sides. If I had had any choice I would have remained outside but I refused to let her enter this place on her own. Intoxicating as this experience was, I trudged along feeling sicker and sicker by the minute.

            ‘Mr. Hudson is just in the next room on the right,’ explained the weedy, thin teenager who had led us into the metal factory.

            ‘I don’t like the feeling of this,’ I told Faye as the boy stepped out of earshot.

            Her eyes blinked quickly and she looked into mine. ‘I know you’re not enjoying this but we have to get to the bottom of this bullet problem. We might even stumble on something else. Ready?’ she asked. I nodded and pushed the door open firmly.

            The man we had come here to see, Mr. Hudson, was a stout man with very little hair left on his domed head. He had a beige, pinstripe shirt on with its sleeves rolled up above the elbows. The stench in the air was added to by the smoke billowing out from the cigar he clutched in his right hand. In his other he held a wireless telephone. ‘I told you, the order won’t be done on time,’ he spoke into the mouthpiece. He was facing away from us, running a finger down some sort of chart on the wall opposite the door. ‘Right.’ And he hung up. ‘What can I do for…’ His voice cut out as he noticed what Faye and I were.

            ‘We’ve come to see you about some bullets you’ve been making here, Mr. Hudson.’ It was best for me to let Faye do the talking, I was too busy taking in the things around me. ‘And it’s not going to be a good ending for you unless you co-operate.’ The subtle threats Faye could summon into her words always amused me; it showed the darker, demonic side that I had been told all vampires had in them. With Faye, it was more of an art.

            Hudson put the phone into its hub and stepped around his desk to sit in a high-backed, leather swivel chair. ‘How may I help you?’ he asked as though this were an everyday occurrence, now he’d become accustomed to a vampire and a werewolf stood in his office.

            Faye stepped forward; as she did so, I pushed the door shut and stood in the corner to her left. ‘Why have you been making these silver ammos?’ She dropped the pellet and one of the new bullets from the ammo shop back in our home town (I had picked one up and given it to her on the journey up here).

            The balding man picked up the more up-to-date version and twirled it in his fingers as he placed the cigar in an ashtray. ‘Business. Some fellas came to me with a new metallic mixture and asked if I could make bullets out of them.’ He gave a wheezy snigger and put the bullet back on the desk. ‘Why do you ask?’

            Faye took the ammo back. ‘Do you know what they’ve been used for?’ She kept the sharpness to her words without any falter. Hudson didn’t reply. ‘One man with a rifle loaded with these attempted to kill me, along with a companion. Turns out there are not just two of them either.’ Her words hung in the thick air between them.

            ‘Is that so?’ He bobbed his head and reminded me of those nodding head dogs that humans found so amusing. ‘I only make what my customers demand of me. What they do with them is entirely up to them.’

            There was more to this kind of industry than that. I let out a growl, stepping away from the wall. ‘We are not animals that can be legally shot at in a season,’ I said, speaking for the first time since entering the smoky office.