'Good evening Mr Compton… Bill,' Tagahashi corrected himself, 'thank you for being so prompt with the blood sample. It arrived by express courier this morning and thanks to the technology at our disposal we have already commenced tests and have some preliminary results that I would like to share with you.'

Upon rising Bill had checked his many emails, sorting anything that needed his immediate attention, forwarding on others that could be dealt with by Jessica – generally a large proportion were from ladies groups that had somehow or other found his own email address and were requesting his appearance at this and that function or others with requests for book signings. He was a little chuffed with the fact that his book was still number one on the best seller list after all this time but he just didn't have the capacity to fit these events into his schedule right now. As for the many personal appearance requests from those interested ladies, well they would have to make do with biding their time.

At first he had attended as many of these various events as he could but he became so uncomfortable with the many offers from ladies willing to donate blood to him, and the more persistent ladies that seemed to show up at each of these functions who were almost stalking him, that he began to fear for his own safety. Things were getting out of hand when at a talk he gave in Sacramento he was approached by an enchanting raven haired doll of a creature who wanted nothing more than a lock of his hair to 'place in a locket next to her heart', she explained to Bill. He was flattered, tempted and scared all at once by this wonderful woman and was barely able to escape from her charms.

But the final straw came when he had been at one of these appearances in Albuquerque, New Mexico and returned to his hotel room only to find a ravishing blonde naked in his bed offering a lot more than room service could supply. She was so tempting that it took a lot of his will power to refuse. So as not to overly disappoint the stunningly gorgeous temptress, he was reduced to glamouring her into a good place and sending a personalised autographed photo that she would frame and treasure for the rest of her life, leaving her believing she had spent the night in bed having had the most fantastic sex she could ever have imagined but was sworn to secrecy about it to protect Bill's reputation.

Much to Bill's embarrassment the photos had been one of Jessica's schemes. She came up with the idea after being inundated by so many requests for pictures and because of the countless correspondence she had to deal with from the many fan sites that had sprung up around the country. The Bon Temps post office had been forced to hire two extra postmen just do deal with all the letters coming in and it got to the point where Bill and Jessica had been forced to approach a web design group to set up an official website, one of the many rules for membership proclaiming that only electronic requests would be dealt with from now on. It did little to curb his popularity and many requests, in fact it only increased the adulation for him on a worldwide basis now that he had taken the cyber space plunge and the mail continued to flood in, both in paper and electronic form.

He had been overwhelmed by all the attention and simply could not understand the interest in him and said as much to Jess within weeks of it all first starting. 'Oh come on Bill, get real. What thinking woman with a heartbeat wouldn't want to get you flat on your back and jump your bones?' Jessica observed. Bill's eyes opened wide as saucers. 'Jessica, please!' he admonished a little prudishly. 'I am not going to have this conversation with you. It wouldn't be… fitting.' Jessica laughed, 'Oh Bill you are so precious. I am vampire, I am not the little virgin girl that you turned remember.'

He had been shocked that firstly she would say such a thing and secondly, he had never thought of himself that way. Of course there were some women attracted to the notion of vampires, believing in the perception that, well, they could "go all night" as the glossy magazines and the media put it but well, even though he could, it was not something that he wanted to discuss. He might be the most attentive, satisfying and imaginative lover that any lucky woman was to find in the bedroom but that was not something he was prepared to admit to in public. It was private between himself and the lady involved. Real men didn't kiss and tell was how he had been brought up in his human life and he wasn't about to start changing now. Not for anyone.

'Jessica I am sorry. I sometimes forget that you are a woman with err … your own values. I guess part of me will always think of you as that girl that I … as my daughter, and no Father wants to hear his daughter talking about those kind of things. Besides, that is not how I see myself. I never have, I have never been comfortable with that way of thinking.'

Jess took his hand in hers and squeezed it. 'Bill you are the most handsome man I have ever met. Not just on the outside but on the inside too. Now come on, about those pictures, I have a photographer coming next week.' So he had been coerced into sitting for various shots in various forms of dress depending on what Jessica and the photographer thought would be of most interest to his legions of fans and influenced by the kind of requests Jess had made note of from the multitude of fan sites.

One enterprising site in particular, the most popular Jess noted, had even run a poll asking their members to rate what kind of pose they would like to see Bill in. Jess had thought that Bill had almost blushed red, if it were possible, when she showed him the results.

What would you like to see Bill dressed in:

1. A suit

2. Tight jeans and a white Henley

3. Jeans, open to the waist shirt and leather

jacket

4. Tight cargo pants and tight t shirt

5. His birthday suit

6. All the above

The results of the poll:

1. 100%

2. 100%

3. 100%

4. 100%

5. 500%

6. 900%

When Jess had showed him he blinked. 'These figures don't make sense,' he commented, startled by the poll and clearly not up with how fan sites worked. 'How can you have 900%?' he asked. Jessica was laughing. 'You silly, you don't get it do you?' She was giggling at the expression of total bewilderment on his face.

'They want you Bill no matter what you have on but well, you with nothing on is their preference. And as for how, well they just sit there clicking on the button over and over and even though they come up with these ridiculous figures, they love you and want to do their bit, you know, show you how much they love you in their own way.' She rolled her eyes. 'In other words you are smoking hot and they know it and want to make sure you know it too. It doesn't matter what you have or haven't got on, bottom line Bill is that they love you to pieces.'

He left her going through the shots from the shoot, gobsmacked and shaking his head in disbelief. Woman, he would never understand them if he did live for all eternity!

After filtering his email he was left with three that required his immediate personal attention. One was from the White House, a thank you for making the time to meet with the President and praising him for the job that he was doing. It was from a private email address that only those in the know received and encrypted with the highest security possible. Bill smiled as he read it and responded with his thanks for the support he was receiving and advising that he was hopeful there may be good news in the near future.

He filed the email and his response in a folder on an external drive he kept in his hidden wall safe then locked it back up. He knew backing up was mandatory with important matters such as these and besides, in his own way he treasured the genuine gratitude shown to him and wanted to keep the emails.

He was still human enough to be a little chuffed to be on first name basis with a President and at times he wondered if in some ways the epidemic, once they had found a cure of course, if it had done some good. If it was to bring about a new world, not just for vampires but for all that existed on the planet, then there was something to say for the whole sorry mess.

Despite all that had befallen Bill over the years since he had been turned, and even in his human life when fate had intervened into what should have been a weary soldier's return after a war that he didn't believe in but fought on principal never the less, despite all of his experiences, he was an optimist. That may be contradictory to the hopelessness that he had fallen into and had lead him to the desperate measure of drinking Lilith's blood but he had felt he had little else in his existence at the time and really, the way he was seeing it then, it was more of a journey of discovery.

He had sought something better than the lonely emptiness that he was feeling and the bitterness that had overwhelmed him at the time. Turning to the belief in Lilith as he had, had merely reflected his hopes for something to once again mean something to him, to give him back some kind of feeling because right at that point in time, he had been numb, bereft of anything to keep him going through the long endless eternity that flowed into the future. Grieving for the life that he had been deprived of, the love that had been relinquished and the humanity he had lost. He was at a turning point hoping beyond hope for any kind of solace and thought that if there was any chance of finding something, anything to make him feel worthwhile again then it was in the embracing arms of the vampire goddess.

And now only time would tell if he had been right to do so or not but at least for his part he had no regrets over his actions on that score when he thought of saving Jessica and all other creatures of his kind. That was something that he could truly thank the goddess for, if not for anything else.