Page 37

That’s not exactly what I’ve asked, but it raises another question. “Cat said there aren’t many new vampires these days but that when there are, they’re desperate to feed. Does that mean they feed more than twice a day?”

“New vampires feed constantly for the first few months, and they do so chained up under the supervision of older vampires.” Dad shakes his head. “They’re unstable and not able to control themselves. It takes months, sometimes years, before they can be trusted around humans. Unless something happened in the past ten years, there hasn’t been a new vampire since you were a toddler.”

“Modern technology makes the risk of discovery hard enough,” Mum interjects, “without adding the insanity of new vampires to that. The Council put a death sentence on the creation of new vampires without explicit permission.”

So. Many. Questions. I glance at the clock and decide to stick to the most relevant ones. “The Council?”

“About three hundred years ago, people began to push back against vampires. Things were getting out of control in the Balkans and up through the Carpathian Mountains—vampires were going pretty much unchecked, to the point that governments were actually beginning to listen to the tales of panicked villagers. There was talk of armies being mobilised.”

“Really? They were going to send the army in to hunt vampires?” How come I never got taught that in any history class?

Dad shakes his head. “I don’t think anyone believed vampires existed, but given the increased death rate, they knew something was going on. The rationale behind sending troops was likely to calm people down while they investigated the cause of the problem.”

“But it was enough for some of the older vampires to take action,” Mum continues. “Vampires were all loners back then, mostly forced to stay indoors during the day to avoid the sun’s damaging rays. Even if they’d all banded together—which was never going to happen—they would still have been outnumbered by an army with cannons and guns that could do significant damage to them. And they would have been vulnerable during the day, basically trapped unless they could be sure of a blood source. They wanted to avoid that, so they started cleaning up after the problematic vampires.”

“That’s a nice way of saying they executed them,” Dad explains. “Six of the oldest, most powerful vampires alive took their nests and systematically hunted and killed the vampires that were causing the most trouble, and while they were at it, they bullied and threatened every other vampire they came across. They called it the Cleansing. When it was over and things had calmed down enough that the governments were focused on other things, those vampires decreed that they were the ruling Council and all vampires answered to them.”

“Ballsy. The other vampires were okay with that?”

Mum snorts. “No. They spent the next fifty or so years executing any vampire that defied them. They still do, but there aren’t as many who bother anymore. Vampires have it good now, with their own personal cattle.” Her bitterness is clear, but I ignore it. I don’t want to have that argument with her again.

“When did feeders come into it?”

“During the Cleansing,” Dad says. “It was one of the things they did to try to escape the notice of governments. Vampires were ordered not to kill while feeding, and then to offer humans money in exchange for feeding from them. The Council wanted the humans who were being fed from to have a vested interest in keeping their secret, unlike humans who were unwilling.”

That’s unhinged. “And then over time that became more organised?”

“Yes. There were many reports of humans who’d been taken unwillingly and then had money thrown at them afterward, and that wasn’t what the Council wanted, so they stopped leaving it up to individual vampires and started implementing rules. The Association came into existence about a hundred years later, but it existed unofficially for decades before that.”

“So is a regent a member of the Council?”

“No, members of the Council are councillors,” Mum corrects. “In the late eighteenth century, they got bored with running all over Europe to kill rule breakers. They set up local governments, each one headed by a regent. The regent basically acts as the voice of the Council.”

“Oh.” Oh. Fuck. I somehow got tied to the local boss vampire? “But why is Tristan based here in Melbourne instead of Canberra? That’s the capital of Australia.” It comes out on a whine, and Dad rolls his eyes.

“I doubt Tristan cares where the capital is. When I was a kid, he lived in Sydney. That’s part of the reason we moved here, but then he moved too, shortly after you were born.”

I frown. “Why would he move the whole government?”

“He doesn’t age, Adam,” Mum says, exasperated. “Vampires tend to move around every few decades to prevent people from noticing them. It’s easier in big cities, but they can’t just live in the same house forever.”

That’s a good point. “Okay, so he’s the boss here in Australia?”

“Australia, Aotearoa, and the Pacific Islands,” Dad corrects. “We used to all be under the aegis of the South-East Asian regent, but after the federation of Australia, the Council took note that we actually had a vampire population and split the regions. Tristan was sent over from England even though he was only a hundred and three at the time.”

I’m not touching that number just yet, although it’s definitely going to warrant a breakdown later. “Wait, vampires are gross colonisers too? Seriously?”

Mum pinches the bridge of her nose. “What?”

“Why didn’t the Council pick a local vampire to be the regent?”

“Because the local vampires were running riot,” she explains patiently. “They were going into Aboriginal communities and trying to recruit feeders, and when they were declined, they took feeders by force.”

“They even made some into vampires against their will,” Dad adds. “Their behaviour was the whole reason the Council noticed that there were vampires living here.”

“Sure, but why wasn’t one of the Aboriginal vampires offered the position of regent?”

“They were new vampires, Adam. They weren’t even capable of looking at humans without descending into bloodlust, never mind governing.”