The vampire stepped out of the carpark, up towards the entrance to the bar. He was enough to give any woman a hormonal surge, and had a slight swagger, an unconscious poise that marked him as a predator. He was handsome in a sharp, well-built way, and wore a collared shirt and slacks, as close as he ever came to casual.

William Thomas Compton was born March 13, 1835, and died in 1865. But he didn't stay dead, and had crossed over as a Black Court childe. The Black Court were unable to bring many over, the success rate was so low that they'd never had numbers. And thanks to the White Court, only the exceptionally clever and exceptionally powerful still lived, scattered throughout the world.

Bill was neither. He was simply careful, fearful of his own nature, and good at passing for a human. He wore suits, and concentrated most of his powers on keeping his body young and handsome, as many gets did before they accepted their new lives and willingly passed on, becoming the living corpses that formed the Black Court's aristocracy. His preservation was not a simple matter of vanity, even the most superficial and self-absorbed vampire tended to allow their body to move on before the first year was up. It was due to the fact it would be so very easy to stop his constant efforts at preserving the shell he'd lived his mortal life in. But when he did, he really wouldn't be human anymore. He'd stop caring, and pass over completely. So he was little better than Red Court chattel, but he was as close to human as he could manage.

His life had been all but empty, the world of the living had become what a man who had suffered through Malaria might remember the darkest, deepest phase of the illness. Voices seemed to echo and overlap each other, and the simplest acts were hard to do, a struggle to make himself care enough. But people were worst. They had become shadows pulsing with red life that he longed to take and use to ease the terrible emptiness he felt inside. It was a struggle not to kill, to fight his nature. And after so long, it was all he could do to even remember why he did.

He was losing the battle to remain human. He knew it. And he didn't care anymore. Indeed, he'd come back here, to the town he'd been born and raised, to find if he still felt anything at all. His house was empty, a rundown shell on the outskirts, forgotten by all but the oldest, and he could see a family resemblance in everyone he saw. It was like a dream, where everything was strange, and yet familiar, viewed through a twilight world.

He could see elements of their ancestors in all of them, evidence of the town's original appearance in the street and buildings, and a hundred other cues that sent him tumbling back to the past.

So at last, he came here, Merlotte's Bar and Grill, hoping to take a last look at those he saw. Largely resigned to being disappointed by what he found, he thought it was still his only chance at closure, at finding some last link to hold him in the world, before he fell into the night forever.

"Not in my backyard. Piss off." A man says as he approached, in a bored drawl. He looks like anybody you see on the street, a tall man of no age with a broad, intelligent brow, receding dark hair and a certain rugged charm. Despite the humid heat of the swamp, the stranger wore a short, denim jacket belted at the waist, faded, pegged jeans, and old, dusty rundown cowboy boots.

He's well in the process of smirking a sardonic grin, mocking the world and hope and all the people in it, his arms folded across his broad chest. Occasionally he'd give a greeting to some passerby or another, who'd speed up without quite knowing why, certain in the back of their mind they'd seen him before, but not quite able to place him.

He had, in fact, come to Bon Temps, Louisiana often. At least twice a decade, though never for more then a few months. He'd been everywhere, he felt sometimes, and here was better then most. It was his country, and none knew or loved it better. He knew where the roads went and came from, and he treaded them at night in the sure knowledge that the night held nothing more terrible then him...and wasn't it fine?

He had never come as himself, of course. He came under a different name each time, always with a different face and a different bag of tricks. However, two things about him never changed. He always came hooded, a man who seemed almost to have no face, and he always left the same way, twenty or so minutes before whatever he'd done was picked up on and attracted the sort of interest he didn't care for, walking onward to his next place of interest.

He'd never worked great things here, because great things didn't happen in the middle of nowhere. But he liked things the way he worked just the same, none of that cheap mass produced murder, no, you got to savor all the little emotions, all of it. Lynching's, beatings, it was all so easy, harnessing the wave of ignorance, malcontent and petty viciousness into a weapon he could turn on whoever it pleased him to target, and watch as they tore them apart.

For Flagg was a sickness, a fever looking for a cool brow to heat up. He hooded his actions in mystery and deceit just as he hooded his face. And – as it always did after a span of years – trouble came, and he was discovered, Flagg always disappeared like shadows at dawn. Later, when the carnage was over and the fever had passed, when the rebuilding was complete and there was again something worth destroying, Flagg would appear once more, grinning that infernal grin.

He was always moving throughout America and who knows where else, a clot, a tiny spec of foreign matter, a splinter of bone looking for an organ to puncture, a lonely lunatic cell looking for a mate to raise a cozy malignant tumor, and the Nevernever and Network and the country roads he walked were the veins and capillaries he traveled along in the vast body that was humanity, ready to take him wherever he wished to go.

Even now he leans against a post and grins, whistling Johnny Cash's 'When The Man Comes Around'. It's a genuine grin alright, one that shines with a dark hilarity, that echoes the feeling in his heart. Most men wore their beliefs in a way all could see them, and so does Flagg, needing nothing more then that smile. It was the grin of a hatefully happy man, a grin that spoke of a love of being the only one not in pain, that radiated a horrible charismatic cruelty. It was a grin that was guaranteed to make animals slink away whining and arguments over inconsequential things turn bloody. A mad smile. 'Oh, but we're all mad here,' as the Cheshire Cat had told Alice. He darkles. He tincts. And spins evil across the lands.

Vampires are predators, and have senses beyond their prey, that let them feel the world around them. They are drawn to crypts and graveyards because death comforted them, revitalizing them and giving them rest where there was only emptiness, they could sense each other and feel the presence of prey. And they could sense things that were hidden to others. He saw more then he wished to see, enough to see that there was a lot more to Flagg then that shape he wore. He knew what Flagg was, even if he didn't have words for it. The Archetype of the Shadow. The dark in every man, he was. He spoke to the worst in all people, and they loved to hear it, to listen to him, because he sounded just like temptation.

Whatever his antecedents, his past, he was something wholly other than their sum, and there was no way divide him back into his origins, find his beginning, for he would not go. Whoever would seek out his history would find only tenuous links, unconnected events, cryptic mentions and be bourn through the lack of anything definitive to at last find no sign at all of his commencing. Beyond time, beyond events, he has stepped from a void without terminus or origin. He was more then that.

Bill got all this in a flash, and it sent him reeling, staggering back on his heels and almost falling on his rear. The man didn't move, but suddenly seemed to loom above him, and his smile widened. "Oh good, you're paying attention. Hate to repeat myself, you know?" He uncrosses his arms and lets them hang for a moment, then curls one around the wooden pole that held up the roof he's been leaning on.

"Go on then. Back your shit down, and get outa town. Or I'll eat you all up." Then he threw back his head, and bellowed laughter up at the stars for all the world to hear. He might be laughing, but he wasn't joking.

Bill took a step back, and held up his hands. "You want me to leave? Why? What for?"

"To be honest? I don't care what you do. I just want you out of town, you Black Court whipping boy, so take care of it." He lets go of the post and begins walking forward, Bill finding himself caught petrified in that gaze, held in place like a rabbit caught in the headlights. He tries to fight it, but he has no purchase, nothing to fight back with. His will wasn't merely pushed aside, it was swept away as though it had never been. "Or you'll live a long time, but not in good health."

Bill had lived a long time by any standard. Even the most ancient of demons saw the better part of two hundred years as a respectable amount of time. Anyone could use another two hundred years. And he was wise enough to understand that, if he wanted to keep on living, he'd leave.

Bill left as silently as he'd come, unseen and unremarked.

The dark man smiled again, gave him a cheery wave that he wasn't around to see, and turned on his heel. Interlocking his fingers and resting them on his flat belly, he walked around the driveway and up to the front door.

A dog in the parking lot yelped and backed away. He stared over at it, meeting it's eyes for just a moment, and the yelps changed to a whine as it cringed, turned and bolted, yelping at everyone it could see. A few gave it confused looks, but most paid it little attention. But if it could have spoken, the dog would have told them that the black scent approaching them from behind did not belong to a man; it was a monster chasing them, something horrible beyond horrible.

Sam, who sometimes was the dog, could have told them everything the dog wanted to say, but Sam was inside, and wasn't able to hear it's complaints.

The men in the bar, however, were not so prescient or aware as the dog, and only gave him a quick gaze before returning to their drinks and greasy meals, their thoughts and their lives had them caught up that they couldn't sense the darkness that passed within inches of them.

He steps up to the table and sits down, crossing his legs beneath it and looking about, waiting until he saw the face he was looking for.

She was a southern belle, sun-kissed, golden haired and blue eyed, with a face that was pretty and open rather then beautiful, until she smiled at least, and a slim build with generous hips and an impressive bust. Her smile was infectious, although a little flat. She was smiling for tips, not for pleasure. He smiles right back, eyes settling on her.

Sookie makes her way to his table, then starts. As she's stepped through the bar, she's heard the inane babble, the susurrus of voices and sounds as people thought. She had managed to drown it out mostly, although she still heard snatches, most of it unwelcome.

He was different. As she looks down at his tale, she starts, almost dropping her tray, as she hears nothing where she should be sensing the whirl of thoughts that were his mind. Not silence, emptiness, complete and total. She felt as though she were groping her way through a familiar room, in the dark, reaching mindlessly out only to meet only empty air as her stomach drops away. For a moment, there is a primal instinct to flee, to run away as hard as she can, then it goes, and she finds herself staring into his eyes. And what eyes they were.

His eyes shone with more amusement, and he stuck out his thumbs. They were both double jointed, and they wiggled back and forth in angles that seemed to defy biology and physics.

He leans back.

"What can I do for you?" She asks, although it's not the question she wants to ask. 'Who are you? What are you?' would be much better.

"Now that would be asking." He says, his smile widening, like something the color of sun on the grass that crouches, making only the noise it wants to be heard, only stirring when something young and tender wobbles by. And she was caught in his gaze, too young, innocent and foolish to realize that if she didn't run, and run now, she'd be bones picked clean by the time the sun rose.

And Flagg winked. "There isn't a hotel in town, is there?" He asks, then whispers conspiratorially "I wanna do bad things to you."