Page 75 of Meeting Her Mate

While still in my pajamas, I raced out of Will’s house and got into my pickup truck, my mind thinking in a dozen different directions as to what this latest development could mean. Had they perhaps made a breakthrough and somehow finished the production of Wolf’s Bane?

Fiddler’s Green turned into a veritable haunted town every winter. Now that we were on the brink of winter, the first of the foggy nights greeted the town at the most inopportune time. The entire town was covered in a dense layer of mist, making it extremely hard for me to get to Maliha’s place.

Half an hour and a few scraps on my pickup truck later, I reached Maliha’s apartment and knocked on her door.

I braced myself for the door to open and for her to yank me inside. It happened just as I had predicted. The door banged open, and Maliha grabbed me by the shoulders, pulling me inside.

“You’ve gotta stop doing that,” I said wearily. I yawned and stretched my arms as I walked behind Maliha.

“You look like you could have done with a few more hours of rest,” Maliha said.

“Couldn’t this have waited till the morning?”

“If it could have, I would not have disturbed you like that. But this whole program is overtaking my entire server, my computer power, and I barely have any RAM left to process my personal work,” she said. “I’ll make you some coffee while you go through the data. It’s all pulled up there; just point and click. Don’t worry; I haven’t seen any of it. Whatever it is, I don’t want to know. It’s against the principles of hacking. Let’s say you, and I end up in court. I’ll not know. Therefore, I won’t be convicted,” Maliha said.

“Yeah, but you hacked them for me,” I said. “You’re going to be complicit. These are your computers. This is your apartment.”

“Dammit,” Maliha said, slamming her fist on the computer table, rattling a bunch of keyboards. “I’m going to go make some coffee for you. Give me a second. I’ve got this new cappuccino that I want to try. It’s gonna take a while for me to get the machine going.

“Cool beans,” I said. Now that she was not in the room, I started combing through the data that her compression-based AI had aggregated.

The first thing that came up was a conference call with three attendees. Blair, Ralph, and Maurice. The call log was highlighted in red in five different places, and there was a search term next to it: Wolf’s Bane.

I clicked on it.

“Hello there, gents.” This was Ralph’s voice, undoubtedly. “You won’t believe what our furry friend did last night.”

“When you call him furry friend, it makes it sound like something in a porno for sick fucks,” Maurice said. “Let’s just call him by his name. At least give the fella that much courtesy. So what did Will do?”

“Will fucked up ten of my crew last night. I don’t know why he attacked yesterday of all days, but the few who survived told me that he was nothing short of rabid. It must be done now, Blair. He has to be eliminated. I can’t have any more casualties. Not after he killed two of my oldest men. It’s him and his fucking bitch that are running this town now, not us,” Ralph said. He sounded alarmed and afraid.

I had wondered where Will had gone when he had disappeared into the woods in his frenzy. Well, there was the answer to that riddle. He’d killed a couple of vampires. No big loss there.

“Relax, gentlemen. Remember Wolf’s Bane? The serum that I was supposed to make?” Blair spoke for the first time.

“Yes, you kept promising that it would blow our pants off, but you’ve done nothing of the sort as of yet,” Maurice said.

“Mr. Mayor, now don’t you take that tone with me. If we’re to do this, we’re going to do this together. Operation Wolf’s Bane is a go. I finally cracked it. I’ve made the serum, and right now, it’s in my lab in its final stages. It’ll be done tomorrow, and as soon as it is finished, we’re going to go on a wolf hunt. Let’s slaughter those sons of bitches,” Blair sneered.

“If you don’t mind my asking, how did you figure it out?” Ralph asked. “From chemist to chemist. I’m interested in knowing the formula.”

“If you’re a chemist, Ralph, I’m the king of England,” Blair said and started laughing.

“Laugh it up,” Maurice said. “But do tell us what you did.”

“Fine. I’ll tell you. Wolf’s Bane’s original formula was devised by my father. What he could not figure out, and what I was not able to figure out until recently, was how to make all the chemicals adhesive enough to create the concoction. I tried all the chemicals on the Periodic Table to see which one would be most effective. All of them failed. All except one,” Blair said.

“And which one is that?” Ralph snapped.

“Argentum,” Blair said.

“You mean silver?” Maurice asked.

“Silver indeed, gentlemen. Now you may laugh it up. All those old tales that we heard. It turns out they’re all true. Silver is going to be that werewolf’s undoing. Well, silver and a bunch of million-dollar of my proprietary chemical compounds,” Blair said.

“Fucking hell. Who would have thought?” Maurice asked. “So, I gotta ask. The Wolf’s Bane works with silver. But does silver alone do something to a wolf?”

“You know what, I never thought of it. Hey, Maurice. Why don’t you come around, and I’ll shoot you with a bunch of silver bullets, and we’ll see if you’ll live for the next midterms or not,” Blair said and then burst into snide cackles.