"Excuse me."

It was a bar. Dim, as all those places tended to be, though perhaps a little less so in these dark-fearing times than in years past. Right now it was still early, and not crowded. So Megan was easily able to get the bartender's attention.

"I'm sorry to bother you, but I'm trying to find somebody. His name is Mack. He's kind of a big guy, with tattoos. Do you know him?"

The bartender regarded her for a moment, then nodded. "Yeah, I know him. He's in here most nights. Trying to cage a free drink with his crazy vampire story, more often than not."

Megan smiled. "Yeah, that would be the guy. I guess I'll wait then. Thanks."

David had described the man to her in detail, and she was glad she'd been able to track him down fairly quickly. She hadn't wanted to have to search all of Cottonwood. Or worse, to have found out that he'd gone somewhere else entirely. But she had been in the city barely two days, and it looked like she was going to be in luck.

It was only an hour later when a burly man in his late twenties with short-cropped fair hair, gray-blue eyes, and tattooed arms walked into the room. Megan regarded him for a few minutes as he ordered a drink and settled into a table. Then she got up, carrying her own drink, and crossed to his table.

"Hi. Are you Mack?"

He eyed her, but apparently found her unthreatening enough, and gestured for her to sit down. "Yeah, that's me. What do you want?"

She dropped into a chair across from him. "My name's Megan. I have a message for you from a mutual friend."

Mack lifted his eyebrows, the expression saying as much as words could have. "Mutual friend, hmm? And who would that be?"

"Well... he said you'd know him as D."

Mack looked startled. "D..." He gave Megan another once-over, possibly looking for some visible sign that she was friends with a vampire. She smiled, and turned her arm wrist up, showing the two little scars there.

Mack suddenly laughed. "I got a set of those too. Mine are kind of more impressive though." And he turned his own wrist outward. Megan had a moment of shock to see two fresh, bloody punctures there, and then she realized that it was a tattoo, realistically rendered over the real scars beneath. "I get a new tattoo whenever something important in my life happens," he said. "I got my first one when I dropped out of school and decided to do my own thing. And I got another one a few years later when I finished adult education and got my degree anyhow." He grinned. "And I figure that having met D, well... It was something I should commemorate. Though I had a hard time talking the artist into doing it."

Megan shook her head in amazement. She was starting to see why David had sent her here.

"But if you've got something from D, there's somebody else who ought to be here to hear it too. And maybe the bar isn't really the best place to discuss it. Somebody might overhear and take it wrong. I get enough people going on about me being a sympathizer as it is. No need to give them more excuses, really."

"Okay," said Megan. They got up, and she followed Mack out of the bar.

"Okay," said Megan. They got up, and she followed Mack out of the bar.

It proved to be a short walk to a little upstairs apartment. Mack opened the door for her and waved her inside, calling out as he entered, "Hey, Jeff! We've got company!"

As Megan sat on a somewhat faded couch in the small front parlor, another man stepped into the room. He was tall, very nearly having to duck to get through the doorway, though he wasn't particularly broad, in fact he seemed somewhat on the thin side. His face was lined, but his hair was black, with no trace of gray in it. And... she blinked and tried not to stare. His neck was covered in scars.

"Megan, this is Jeff. Jeff, Megan." said Mack. "She says she's got a message from D."

Jeff dropped into a chair and eyed her with surprise. "From D? That's not something I expected. But... good. Maybe she can take a message back to him for me, and I can finally have a chance to say thanks."

"He rescued you too?" she asked.

The tall man nodded. "He pulled me out of a den full of vampires. I think he saved my sanity, as well as saving my life." He gave a little shuddering sort of twitch as he said it.

"Oh!" Megan remembered what David had said about rescuing somebody from a lair full of vampires near Cottonwood.

"You heard the story?" said Jeff.

"He mentioned it. But he didn't say much, just that he'd gone kind of berserk and killed a whole bunch of vampires who'd caught a human, and that the vampires have kind of been scared of him ever since. Nothing else."

"Modest of him," said Jeff. "And that's not sarcasm," he added. "What he did..." Another little shudder went through him. "Sorry. I get kind of... twitchy about it sometimes, remembering... But I'm not going to let it screw me up any more than it has to. I should probably tell you the whole story."

He leaned back in the chair, and Mack sat down on the other end of the couch, listening with interest, though he had to have heard the story before.