Imagine that the world was once full of terrible and evil creatures. In the darkest hours of your ancestor’s nights, mankind was so plagued by them that every sensible soul stayed locked indoors, fearing for his life. Imagine now one man who forged a blade of pure silver, holding the knowledge that this metal burned the demons and darklings of the night— in his hands the literal and figurative edge mankind did not natively have before: the power to slay those creatures.
Such a sword would cut a bloody swathe through the supernatural enemies of man, reaping a great sorrow amongst the dark creatures. The blade itself would become a legendary thing; imbued with the righteous power of those who wielded it on behalf of mankind, tempered to a wicked hardness and sharpness by the unnatural fears of the creatures it slew.
But time wore on, and although the blade remained as sharp as ever, evil, and men, adapt. As times changed, it became harder to vanquish the dark ones with a simple edge. And so firstly the sword was broken down into powerful silver arrows, to be fired from a bow chased with the blade’s silver. As our catalogue of deadliness again expanded, it became a sheaf of crossbow bolts, capable of puncturing the armour now adopted by the beings of darkness.
Penultimately, it became a pouchful of silver musket balls, which wreaked a mighty toll on the unliving and undying, and when the century turned again, those balls were finally melted into a handful of silver bullets, each carrying the heavy legacy of centuries of slaughter. Each bullet was a near-sentient thing, remembering just how and where to tear through the cold flesh of mankind’s greatest enemies, and each as powerful —if not more so— than the silver sword from whence they originally came.
And now we are done imagining. In the present day, but one bullet remains.
My bullet.
You don’t become the darkling hunter who possesses the last silver bullet without gaining a reputation. Yes, you will kill with every shot. Yes, you will be protected from all manner of demonic powers just by holding the gun it resides in— but word still gets around, amongst those who have not forgotten the enemies are real, and the beasts themselves. How does this demon hunter leave each scene without a scratch? Why does it only ever take a single shot, perfectly aimed, for him to kill his quarry?
Even if you move around, such a reputation follows you. Eventually, no matter how hard you dissemble that you couldn’t have that legendary bullet, the one that surely no longer exists, suspicions turn to certainties— which is exactly how my mentor had died. Myself? I’d done my best, only relying on the bullet when I absolutely needed it. Even so, the bullet itself radiates a kind of presence the supernaturals of this world can feel, as if it’s now grown so powerful it could strike them dead just by being in the same room as them.
Which is precisely how I’d ended up in the situation I’m about to describe.
I’d been tracking a particularly vicious vampire who’d been stalking the streets of London, following an unanticipatedly deadly feeding frenzy. My involvement was unusual, as the fanged ones usually dealt to their own when they lost control, but this vampire appeared to be uncommonly powerful and unapproachable. Indeed, my tip-off came from another vampire’s retainer, who approached me with the original contract.
There was an uneasy peace between the dark ones and the hunters these days; so long as they kept their heads down and didn’t cause too much trouble, they could avoid the attention of people like me, and my silver bullet. Hell, we’d killed so many over the centuries, how many of the old and powerful were left lurking in this modern age?
The trail of the vampire had been difficult to follow, despite the blatant obviousness of her crimes; lots of traipsing across rooftops, slogging through sewerage tunnels, and stopping to take out my bullet and focus to see if it would leap, within my closed fist, in the direction of my quarry. The fact that I couldn’t track this beast without using the bullet’s nose really should have been my first clue that something was awry. But so bent was I on killing her before her next frenzy that I didn’t heed that whisper of my subconscious.
Not until long after I had breached the internals of the old brick factory and made my way down to the sub-sub-basement did I suspect I’d been had. Initially, I’d assumed she’d gone to ground due to the impending sunrise, hence why she’d gone so deep; the older and more powerful you were, the more you burned like phosphorus in the first gloam of dawn.
As I crept into through the dripping bowels of the building, my gun jerked in my hand, and a voice slithered into my head:
“Lower the weapon, you are surrounded.”
On cue, six figures emerged from the gloom in a circle around me, each very different to the last.
I recognised my quarry immediately; a delicately pale woman with bloody-red hair, bedecked with unsubtle crimson jewellery, she wore her statement clearly: I am the vampire here.
The hulking, jet mound of fur to the vampire’s left dwarfed her. It drooled thick, yellow saliva at the sight of me, and its wolf’s eyes tracked every movement of my gun hand as though its unnatural life depended on it.
Which it certainly does, I thought grimly. Of all the creatures present, the werebeast was most naturally vulnerable to my bullet. Turning carefully to regard the rest of the circle, I observed next a crone clad in shapeless black, her withered face steeped in the mysteries of the darkest arts. After her, a thing from the depths of the Thames; man-shaped, but huge, and a bilious green. Its webbed limbs and spined fins cast looming shadows in the play of the phosphorescent lantern-finger hanging from its head, and a gaping hole full of needle-like teeth gleamed below blind and milky eyes.
To its right was another thing of legend, rarely seen in this era. What had once been a man, wrapped in the mouldering grey rags of a distant land’s ancient burial rites: a mummy of the lost ages, bristling with the arcane energies of the old gods, and animated by their magics.
And last, a silhouette that no light penetrated, yet from it crept deep into some primitive part of my brain an impression of more limbs than any being on this earth needed. The hungry presence of that crawling void pulled at my living flesh like a magnet pulls steel.
“You have me,” I conceded, putting up my gun and my other hand, keeping my stance relaxed.
I cannot adequately describe the hiss and ripple of satisfaction that traversed the circle of terrors at my apparent surrender. “You don’t know how long we’ve been waiting for this,” rasped the witch.
“Or how carefully we planned,” continued the vampire.
“You are a plague upon us,” said the mummy, in a torture of voice pulled from far beyond the grave.
“And you must die.” finished the werewolf. Small stones rattled with the great bass of his speech.
My options were few, I knew. This was the kind of situation I’d feared, ever since my vigilant and brilliant mentor had been torn to pieces by a pack of ghouls. The saving grace had been that the bullet had pierced all three when he’d fired, so at least they’d not survived his own death.
My index finger weighed heavy, held to the side of the trigger guard. These creatures knew, and I knew, that although my death was certain, at least one of them would also die tonight, torn from this world forever by the bullet.
“Shall we talk this over?” I suggested quietly. “After all, one of you is going to have to die. Will it be whoever makes the first move? Will it be the one I consider the most powerful?” I paused to flick my gaze from one monstrous shape to another. “Or will it simply be the one I hate the most?”
A deep silence reigned for some minutes, and I knew those who could communicate with telepathy were doing so. Discussing me, bargaining with one another, deciding who could be sacrificed on the coveted altar of my death.
“You do know they’re talking without you,” I told the werewolf, facing the gargantuan beast directly. “They think your mind is too primitive for their discussion. They trade their thoughts and make bargains based on your death— after all, silver is the anathema of your kind.”
“Clever human,” said the vampire, the two words light, musical. “But bargains were made long before you arrived. You’ll not sway us to infighting. Our overarching desire is quite united— and that is your death, hunter. And the destruction of that wretched artifact.”
“Is that so?” I wondered aloud. “Then why don’t you include the river monster and the werebeast? We both know you could reach their minds. You can reach mine, can you not?”
The creature from the Thames gurgled wetly, gills flaring. The werewolf growled like a newborn earthquake and swung its head to regard the vampire.
“He’s lying,” she stated, smooth, swift, and confident. “Only those versed in arcane lore can mentally converse. He’s studied the occult himself, so his mind is simply… open in ways yours is not.”
I grinned.
“You did hear that, right? She’s saying you guys are inferior.”
Frost crackled across the bare concrete floor of the under-basement as the Chthonic void shambled forward on unseen limbs.
“Deceit,” it whispered, the hiss cold as frostbite and vacuum, sharp as razored glass. “It seeks to deceive and divide, it is its only hope.”
“You say that,” I replied, my breath billowing frigid in front of my face. I could only hope the cloud concealed my fear. “But the fact remains. ONE of you must die tonight.”
“We could rush him,” rumbled the werewolf, “then it will be a random choice.”
“I do not play Russian roulette,” cut back the vampire.
“Or he could realise that his situation is hopeless,” said the crone, “and simply put down the weapon.” I felt the fine hairs on my arms quiver as her words birthed sigils that faintly glowed in the dark. “It would be a final act of compassionate compensation for the loss of so many of my sisters.”
I laughed. They knew it was forced, but they still didn’t like it.
“A compassionate act? Like… slaughtering children to use their organs as your oracular tools? Or drinking the blood of innocents? Or slaughtering wholesale to sate your wild rages? No. I don’t think so.”
My finger eased toward the trigger. They all saw it or sensed it, and the circle grew a step tighter.
“So who will it be?”
Eyes of myriad shapes and colours swept this way and that. The air crackled with the occult energies of ferocious telepathic arguing. The lantern dangling in front of the fishman’s blind eyes began to pulse, eerie flashes strobing faster and faster, the room washed with a rhythm mirroring anxious hearts living and undead.
As my finger slipped fully onto the trigger, I felt the creatures collectively freeze. The moment stretched needle-thin as the sudden seriousness of someone’s impending and very final death, became a visible sword of Damocles. Sharp, silver, ancient, and hungrier than any of them.
I lowered the gun and spun in a slow circle.
“Will it be you?”
The werewolf snarled; spit-slick fangs and mottled gums exposed in a terrifying rictus that made my knees feel loose.
“Will it be you?” I challenged the vampire, “After all, it’s your fault I’m even here.”
Her pale features waxed a shade paler as the muzzle of my revolver, its silent and eager passenger, pinpointed her long-dead heart.
“Or you, or you?”
Neither the mummy nor the witch could contain their flinches as I moved the gun: that righteous, single-minded energy focused on them for the first time.
“Oh, maybe you,” I said, as the muzzle thirsted toward the boiling void. “So few of us have managed to kill one of you. I’d secure my legend forever.”
“But then there’s you, swamp thing. or whatever the hell you’re called. Come to think of it, I’m sure some of your friends would buy your flesh as a delicacy.”
The gun flicked smoothly between my transfixed targets, the deadliest spinning jenny. Then, from the sizzling, sub-space rift, static hiss coalesced into a single word: “Now”.
Time slowed, and even knowing it was an illusion, just my primitive human brain pumping adrenaline and heightening my senses, it felt like a strange kind of grace. I saw all their monstrous shapes move towards me; some with serpentine smoothness, some with a burst of eldritch power that shocked me like a sonic boom, and some with a shambling speed so unnatural my mind fought to reject it out of hand.
I was between targets. I grappled with the gun and my own fear-stricken muscles, trying to force the barrel to fix on one of them, to select a target. But my hand was greasy with sweat, and my other hand instinctively moved to steady it, costing me even more time. As I tried to steady my breathing, grasping the weapon hand over hand, the worn silver grip of my revolver betrayed me, and the gun slid wetly through my fingers. Even as it fell, I was diving for it. If I could even graze the trigger, I knew there was no chance that hungry bullet would let itself be fired without a kill.
Whether by luck, fate, or magic, the tumbling weapon slapped into my hand, and I squeezed the trigger with no more thought.
In the close, dark, and airless space of the basement, the gunshot left me painfully deaf and blind. I clutched my ears, vision pulsing with the afterimage of the of the muzzle flash, fully expecting to be torn apart by the lucky survivors.
It took me several minutes to regain my senses. When I did, I saw not one body, but six, crumpled in a macabre circle around me.
All dead. All shot through whatever passed for a heart.
I stumbled through the gloom, and eventually found a working faucet, then drank until my racing heart began to steady. Splashing water on my face and wrists, I holstered my empty gun, and returned to the scene of the massacre with my pocket knife open. I needed to autopsy the beasts.
As it turned out, the bullet had shot all of them, but not in the way I expected.
In the concrete floor near where I had been standing was an ancient iron bolt. The bullet had fired itself directly into it, and had shattered. From there, the six single-minded fragments had sought out my enemies and slain them simultaneously, instantly tearing all six supernatural essences asunder.
When I at last returned home, I placed the fragments on the table and examined them carefully. All nearly equal shapes and sizes, each one stained with a different coloured fluid from its chosen victim.
After giving them a bath of holy water, I put the fragments in a crucible, heated them with a blowtorch until molten, then poured the liquid silver into a bullet mold. It pulsed with light, seeming more alive than I felt. The question was a gleaming hook in my brain: what kind of power would be bestowed on a bullet that had killed six of this world’s most powerful supernaturals at the same time?
As the bullet cooled, I prepped the primer, gunpowder and casing for my newly forged companion.
There was only one way to find out.