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too big on night life. I’m trying to run down an old friend of mine I’ve lost touch with. Is there a post office or a police station in Blut I could ask at?”
    “Better than that,” the man laughed. “The one you want to talk to is the Dispatcher. He keeps tabs on everybody. The third warehouse on your left as you enter town. He’s converted the whole second floor into an office. If he can’t help you, nobody can.”
    As vital as the information was, I only paid it partial attention. When the man laughed, I had gotten a better look at his mouth. His teeth were ...
    “Look at his teeth!” the girl gasped, speaking for the first time.
    “My teeth?” I blinked, realizing with a start that she was staring at me with undisguised astonishment.
    Her companion, in the meantime, had paled noticeably and was backing away on unsteady legs.
    “You ... you’re ... Where did you come from?”
    Trying my best to maintain a normal manner until I had figured out what was going on, I moved forward to keep our earlier conversational distance.
    “The castle on the hill back there. I was just ...”
    “THE CASTLE!?!”
    In a flash the couple turned and sprinted away from me down the road.
    “Monster!! Help!! MONSTER!!!”
    I actually spun and looked down the road behind me, trying to spot the object of their terror. Looking at the empty road, however, it slowly began to sink in. They were afraid of me! Monster?
    Of all the reactions I had tried to anticipate for our reception in this new land, I had never in my wildest imaginings expected this.
    Me? A monster?
    “I think we’ve got problems, High Roller,” Massha said as she and Guido emerged from the brush at my side.
    “I’ll say. Unless I’m reading the signs all wrong, they’re afraid of me.”
    She heaved a great sigh and shook her head.
    “That’s not what I’m talking about. Did you see their teeth?”
    “I saw his,” I said. “The canines were long and pointed. Pretty weird, huh?”
    “Not all that weird, Hot Stuff. Think about it. My bet is that you were just talking to a couple of vampires!”

“VAMPIRES,” I SAID carefully.
    “Sure. It all fits.” Massha nodded. “The pale skin, the sharp fangs, the red eyeliner, and the way they turned into bats ...”
    “Turned into bats?”
    “You missed it, Boss,” Guido supplied. “You were lookin’ behind you when they did it. Wildest thing I ever saw. One second they was runnin’ for their lives and the next they’re flutterin’ up into the dark. Are all the other dimensions like this?”
    “Vampires ...”
    Actually, my shock wasn’t all that great. Realizing the things Aahz and I had run into cruising the so-called “known and safe” dimensions, I had expected something a bit out of the ordinary in this one. If anything, I was a bit relieved. The second shoe had been dropped ... and it really wasn’t all that bad! That is, it could have been worse. (If hanging around with Aahz had taught me anything, it was that things could always be worse!) The repetitive nature of my conversational brilliance was merely a clever ploy to cover my mental efforts to both digest this new bit of information and decide what to do with it.
    “Vampires are rare in any dimension,” my apprentice replied, stepping into the void to answer Guido’s question
    “What’s more, they’re pretty much feared universally. What I can’t figure out is why those two were so scared of’ Skeeve here.”
    “Then again,” I said thoughtfully, “there’s the question of whether or not we can safely assume the whole dimension is populated with beings like the two we just met. I know it’s a long shot, but we might have run into the only two vampires in the place.”
    “I dunno, High Roller. They acted pretty much at home here, and they sure didn’t think you’d find anything unusual about their appearance. My guess is that they’re the norm and we’re the exceptions around here.”
    “Whatever,” I said, reaching a