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I nod like that makes it make sense that I know nothing about… did she say Helsing Sect? Like the movie character? “I was thirteen. My parents kept a lot of stuff from me when they could.” Like the entire existence of vampires and our family’s connection to them.

“A lot of parents do that,” she agrees. “Especially in our community. It’s not always an easy one, am I right?”

“Right. Yeah.” Kidnapped. Ransomed. What did they want the vampire for?

“My sister was fine physically but she’s still got PTSD from everything she went through, especially seeing her vampire murdered⁠—”

Holy fucking Christ, what?

“—and it was traumatic for a lot of us. Vampires are so strong that it’s hard for anyone to hurt them, but the humans in their lives are their weaknesses, especially their feeders. Long-term feeders even more so. It’s a special relationship—well, you get that. You wouldn’t have registered if you weren’t invested in making that kind of commitment.”

My brain is working overtime trying to take in what she’s saying while also attempting to remember the details of Van Helsing. My parents insisted vampire movies were garbage and wouldn’t allow them in the house—which makes a lot more sense now—but I watched it one time at a friend’s place when I was a teenager. The main character was a vampire hunter, or maybe a generic monster hunter? And I think the Catholic Church was involved?

“Definitely,” I say, needing her to keep talking. “It’s a special commitment.”

“It’s what made up my mind. Joseph—my sister’s vampire—didn’t hesitate to surrender himself to the sect, even though he knew his chances of surviving it were non-existent. Feeders make themselves vulnerable to vampires, and the good ones respect that and protect their feeders in return, but options are limited. Unless they keep their feeders with them twenty-four seven, which violates the rights the Association fought to gain, they can’t guarantee safety. My goal—and Tristan is helping me with this—is to establish a network of human security agents to protect feeders and vampires. The sect members are human, and as humans we have a unique understanding of how they think that vampires don’t.”

I’m pretty sure I, a human, don’t have any understanding of how a bunch of people who named themselves after a fictional vampire killer— Wait. Was Van Helsing not fictional after all? I mean, vampires exist, so why not mythical vampire hunters?

Anna’s looking at me expectantly, so I push aside the millions of questions I now have and say, “That’s a great idea. I bet there are tons of legacies that don’t want to be feeders and have the right talents.”

“Exactly! We already had people from feeder families getting jobs as housekeepers, drivers, and assistants to vampires. We’ve got lawyers and accountants and all the other professionals, too. Ignoring personal security was stupid. Just because vampires are naturally stronger than humans doesn’t mean they have the skills to protect themselves. My cousin’s vampire is an author, and she’s so invested in the fantasy world she writes in that she barely remembers to feed. She’s not going to notice a possible security threat.”

A vampire author. Sure. Why not? Vampires are people too.

“Anyway,” Anna continues, in the tone of someone wrapping up the conversation, “that’s my origin story. I dropped out of uni and started taking classes in martial arts, hand-to-hand fighting, weapons, defensive driving… anything I thought might be useful. Even with all that, nobody wanted to take me seriously. I finally decided that if I was going to make a change, it needed to start at the top, and I called in so many favours owed to my family to get a meeting with Tristan.” She shakes her head, smiling ruefully. “Honestly, not even I thought he’d be on board. I figured I could plant a seed and maybe one day he might look into it further. But he heard me out, asked a shit ton of questions, then hired me to protect his feeder and begin working on a security network that could eventually be rolled out to all vampires.”

I smile weakly, my head spinning for the second time today, though this time it has nothing to do with my blood pressure. “Wow.”

Chapter 12

For possibly the first time ever, the strident tone of my alarm going off doesn’t drag me reluctantly from sleep—purely because I haven’t been to sleep. I meant to, but who the fuck can sleep with this many questions racing around their brain?

Silencing the alarm, I slump back against my headboard—because this fancy bed has a cushy upholstered headboard—and rub my eyes. They’re dry and tired, but I doubt I could sleep even now. I didn’t intend to stay up all night, but after I texted Cat, I picked up the Association’s orientation guide to flip through while waiting for her to reply. A phone call might have been faster, but since I don’t know how good Tristan’s hearing actually is, I wasn’t willing to risk it.

Cat never texted back, and I read the whole guide. There’s some pretty valuable information in there—like, not all vampires can afford a feeder. That makes sense, when you consider our base salary plus all the other expenses. A lot of older vampires have money because they’ve been around a long time and have had the chance to let their wealth accumulate. I never really stopped to think about how humans’ limited lifespans impact so many of our decisions, including how we invest our money—not that I’ve ever had money to invest. But if you know you have time to let an investment mature for a hundred years or so, it might change your strategy.

Anyway, most of the time those older vampires help the younger ones in their nest—the ones they sired—to get established, but until the younger vampires have enough annual income to cover the cost of a feeder and their own living expenses, they have to source their own food, which means seeking out appropriate humans, feeding, and then mind-wiping. The guide didn’t go into more detail than that since the information was aimed at encouraging new feeders to help recruit friends. Even though not all vampires can afford feeders, there’s still a feeder shortage. Not everyone meets the criteria for the job.

After that, I spent hours searching the internet for any information about vampire hunters that sounded even a little bit realistic while making a list of questions to ask my cousin. One thing I learned is that people are fucked up. Like, for real. I hope most of what I found about vampire hunters is made up, because if it’s not, there are a shit ton of dangerous, armed people out there who need to be locked up.

I mean, I kind of get how vampire hunters came to exist. You see a ravening monster with incredible strength rip apart your home and your loved ones, and your first instinct isn’t going to be to let them go about their life afterwards. You’re not going to hear about another monster preying on others nearby and think, Hey, it’s cool. For sure you grab your pitchfork or whatever and hunt those fuckers down.

But in this day and age, with registered feeders and vampires not killing indiscriminately, hunting them down and murdering them solely because they exist makes the hunter the monster.

Though I could be wrong. It’s not like the websites I found are verified sources, and I’m too new to the feeder-slash-vampire community to know much about it. Maybe there are still vampires who rip the insides out of people and feed until they’re dead—I wouldn’t know. Cat would know, but she hasn’t even read my text yet, which is weird. She’s usually surgically attached to her phone.

In the meantime, I need to get up and get downstairs to feed my vampire.

My vampire. That’s so weird. I try saying it out loud.

“My vampire. My vampire.”

Nope, can’t do it. I’m going to stick to “my boss” or “Tristan.” The idea of having a vampire, no matter what the context, just doesn’t feel right.

I stumble into the bathroom to piss and brush my teeth. I should probably get dressed and try to impress Tristan with my professionalism since I failed at that so spectacularly last night, but as soon as I get hold of Cat, I plan to crawl back into bed for a nap, so it doesn’t seem worth the effort.

Checking my phone for a response from my cousin one last time before I head downstairs, I remind myself what I read in the orientation guide last night. The enzymes in vampire saliva don’t just heal the bite wound, they help to build blood. That’s how vampires can feed twice a day, every day on the same person without killing them or making them sick. Over time, those enzymes build up and the acceleration of blood cell production can become dangerous to the feeder—which is one of the reasons why a full-time feeder career is capped at ten years. The ten years doesn’t have to be consecutive, so if, for example, Tristan and I decide after a year that we don’t want to extend the contract, I could take some time off, then find another vampire to work for whenever I want and still have nine years left.