"David?" Megan looked over at him where he sat next to her in the clearing, watching the stars. "Are you okay?"

David shrugged. It had now been nearly two weeks since he'd seen his mother, and two and a half weeks since he'd rescued Megan. Two and a half weeks since he'd last killed a vampire.

"I'm okay. I'm just... getting a little frustrated, I guess. I don't want to leave you alone, I want to take care of you, and I'd be very lonely if you weren't here. But every night I'm here is one more night when the vampires are free to hunt with no opposition, one more night in which humans will suffer and die, and nobody is there to help them. It's starting to bother me."

Megan nodded. "Maybe you should just take me to a city then. What you do is more important, really."

He sighed. He didn't want to give her up, to send her away. But it seemed like the only option. "I wish Aidan were still here. If there were two of us..." he trailed off, and sighed again. "But there's just me."

"Two of you..." Megan sat up suddenly, her eyes bright. "That's the thought!"

"Huh?"

"I've had this feeling... this feeling that there was a reason I was here with you. That there was something I was supposed to do, something important, but I didn't know what. But that's what it is. If you were alone, you'd just keep on alone. Having me here means you need two. And two..." Her heart was going fast, she was obviously excited. "The solution, to everything. To the cities, the war, the vampires..."

David stared at her.

She caught his look. "I haven't gone crazy. Sorry. The idea just snapped into place just now, so I'm kind of thinking out loud. But look. The problem we have is that most vampires are selfish and amoral, right?"

David nodded.

"Now if most vampires were like you, it wouldn't really be a problem. But since the nature of vampires means that they'll always mostly be bad, there needs to be a way to keep them in check. And that's you, a good vampire. But just you, you said it yourself, you can't save everyone. But what if, what if there were more? Not just one more, but lots more, one for every city maybe, I don't know. What if there was a vampire police force, to keep the other vampires away from humans?"

David tried to think through the possibilities. "But... you'd need a lot of people who were willing to become vampires. And if you had that kind of system, you'd need a lot of humans, too, who were willing to donate blood to keep the vampires going. You'd have to find people. And I don't know if there are that many."

"I think there might be. Human nature can be amazing. You've told me about the people who offered you blood. If there are that many people who are willing to give blood to somebody who saved them, surely we can find one person to be a hunter, and one person to be a donor, in each city! Just two people, out of all those. There has to be at least that many who would do it. We just have to find them. We'd have to... I don't know." She stopped, then shook her head. "We'd have to do it ourselves. Just reading about vampires would have been enough to get me exiled, even without all my other ideas. The leaders of the cities don't want to think about it. They'd rather pretend the vampires aren't there at all, I think. But still... I've read things. Underground movements have done great things before."

"Underground?" asked David.

"Well, not literally!" Megan laughed. "Or maybe it will be literally. But that's what they used to call things that were secret, like this is going to have to be. I mean... the city people are going to know that there are good vampires who are protecting them, but this is going to need an organization, a kind of government to run it, to make sure the donors stay protected, and that the vampires can't gang up on hunters, and to recruit new people, and make sure the recruits are the right kind of people, and find ways to go in and out of cities, and all kinds of things, and I don't think the city people should know about that." The she laughed again. "But that's way ahead of ourselves. Right now we just need one person who's not afraid to become a vampire. If that works out, well... we can go on from there."

"You think big," said David.

She smiled. "I guess so. But I'm not so sure where to start, or how to go about finding that first person. Everybody I know would be terrified of the very idea of being a vampire."

David considered. "Actually, I think I might know somebody."