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By Root 3767 0

Glazers will shatter bone, but don’t really go through bone, the difference between a shotgun and a rifle round, sort of. Edward had actually come into town just to take me out to the shooting range and test fire stuff. He’d asked me questions about specific gun fights, and what I’d learned was that the reason the Glazers had done what I wanted them to do was mostly being almost point blank every time I used them for a kill. What I needed was something that was a reliable kill from a safer distance than arm’s length. It also might explain why I’d hit some older vamps from a distance, but they hadn’t stopped. Maybe not. Maybe they were just that old, but . . . Edward had been very convincing. Something with more penetrating power, more stopping power, ammo meant not to wound but to kill. Because let’s face it: when was the last time I’d wounded anyone that I hadn’t meant to kill? Wounding was an accident for me. Killing was the goal.

I’d settled on the Homady Custom XTP handgun ammo. To be exact the 9 mm Luger, 147 JHP/XTP, silver-coated of course. There were other hollow point bullets that will expand to a bigger mass, but some of them don’t penetrate nearly as far into a body mass. With a vamp you need to make sure you hit something vital, not just that you make a big hole. There were even bullets that penetrated farther into a mass, which meant they’d reliably go through a body and out the other side. But all the Homady XTPs were designed to penetrate the target, but not so far as to pass through the target object and “create a hazard.” That last was a quote from some of the Hornady Manufacturing literature. The ammo followed the FBI penetration requirements. The Feds, even more than little ol’ me, have to worry about what happens when a bullet hits the bad guy and keeps traveling. Is it going to hit a kid, a pregnant woman, a nun out for her morning stroll? Once a bullet hits the mark and keeps traveling, you really never know where it will end up. So the plan is to make sure it doesn’t leave the target, but that the target doesn’t get up either.

Of course, Edward had made his own recipe for killing. He’d taken silver hollow points and filled the end with holy water and mercury, then sealed the top with wax. I’d been afraid that the wax would make the bullets jam in a gun, but they ran through like silk—smooth, dependable, like Edward himself. The ammo was a hell of a show. So Edward had told me. I hadn’t used Edward’s homemade surprise yet. I was still vaguely wary of them. He shouldn’t have told me that they might jam the gun. Or maybe, I would have been nervous of them anyway. With these even if you hit in a non-lethal area, missed the heart, the head, everything vital, you still did damage. The holy water and silver mercury would explode through the vamp’s body, burning where they touched. The holy water would eat through the body like acid. Hit a vamp even in a leg or arm with this shit, and they might lose all interest in killing you and just want to stop the pain.

I stared at the two boxes of ammo, and finally loaded up with the Homady XTP, Edward’s specials in their box. If I did have to shoot any vamps tonight, I had no court order of execution, and carrying the homemade seemed too much like premeditation. Premeditation is the difference between first degree murder and second degree murder or even manslaughter if you had a good lawyer and a sympathetic jury. There were people in jail at this very moment for killing vamps. I did not want to be one of them. Besides, we were just going down there to ask questions, nothing major. So I told myself as I closed the suitcase and left the other bullets behind.

But I knew better than most that what should be simple always grows complex when you add a vampire. Add a Master of the City, any city, and you never really know what you’re walking into. I’d killed three Masters of the City: one with a sword, one with fire, one by killing their human servant. Never just a straight-on shootout. I probably wouldn’t be shooting anyone tonight, but . . . I loaded up my extra clip