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kajones_writing“I think that really depends on the vampire,” Alice replied, looking at Sam. She found herself smiling as she thought back to the first time she met Nick. “There are those who are purely predators, nothing more, because that’s what they want to be. A part of being a vampire is making a decision whether you want to be like them or not, and I chose not to be.”
“So did I,” Nick said quietly from behind her, and she knew that he was also thinking about the past.
Alice reached out behind her and Nick took hold of her hand. Having to do the history talk was really affecting him, but he wouldn’t talk about why it was affecting him so badly. Even though she understood she could get irritated by it. She wanted him to talk to her because she wanted to know why things had happened the way they had.
“Yet you were both behind the creation of the donor house,” Sam said, pulling Alice out of her thoughts.
“You have a problem with the donor house?” Alice asked, narrowing her eyes.
“A lot of people have a problem with the donor house.”
“Obviously you’d all prefer it if vampires still had to hunt for their victims.” Alice sighing, shaking her head. “We have three main choices when it come to feeding. A vampire can hunt humans and feed from random people; a vampire can buy someone from an auction; or they can come to the donor house.” She left out feeding from animals because very few vampires ever chose to do something like that. “Feeding from random people isn’t good for them. They will always survive the feed, unless the vampire is young and hasn’t yet learnt how to stop himself from killing the human, but this leaves a mark on the human that other vampires can smell. It’s not something that’s easy to explain to someone who doesn’t have our sense of smell. What we’ve found is that the auctions will often pick up these humans. Obviously buying a human is very wrong and almost all who get free from that situation will find themselves addicted to being bitten. That addiction is not nice.” Alice tried not to think of poor Caleb. “Then there’s the donor house. It’s not perfect but it’s safer than both of the other options.”
“How?” a voice asked from behind Sam and Alice realised that a group of people had gathered around them.
Nick squeezed Alice’s hand. “We have safeguards in place to make sure that no donor gets addicted to the bite of any one of the vampires in the donor house,” she replied, wondering how she’d suddenly become the spokesperson for the house.
“How do those safeguards work?” another voice asked.
“Okay, what you have in vampire saliva is a chemical that does several things. It’s that chemical that causes the addiction and can usually only be caused by one vampire feeding regularly from one person. If you have several different vampires feeding from that one person then it doesn’t have the same effect because each vampire’s saliva is minutely different. The level of addiction depends on how many times the vampire feeds from the human in, for example, a week and also how old the vampire is. As vampires age the chemical does often become stronger, so humans may succumb to the addiction faster. What we do is make sure that no one vampire feeds from one person more than once a week.” Alice thought for a moment. “A vampire has to feed three times a week and every feed must be from a different donor in the house.”
“A donor works five days a week?” the first voice asked.
Alice nodded. “Every donor in the house has a two hour period when they’re available to be feed from. Once that two hour period is over their time is their own.”
“How do you make sure that a donor doesn’t get fed from during their time off?”
“Humans wearing white are not available for feeding.”
“Is that the only safeguard you have?”
“The donor house is still very much a work in progress in some ways,” Nick answered, and Alice wished that sometimes he wasn’t quite so honest. “When we first opened a lot of the donors who entered the house were short term donors. A family had a small debt they wanted to pay off and someone would enter the house for six months in order to do so. There didn’t seem much of a reason to have any other safeguards. Now we’re getting more long-term donors we’re looking into other systems to put in place to keep them safe.”
“I personally go round to all the donors once a week and check on them,” Alice continued. “They know that of they have a problem then they can come to me. So far we haven’t had any problems, but we know that there are things we need to work on.”
“Why didn’t you wait to open the donor house until everything was in place?” Sam asked, and Alice could hear the anger in his voice.
“If we’d done that then the house would never have been opened. This is something that’s never been done before and everything we do is an experiment, but we want to make it a place that is safe for everyone. As problems arise we deal with them, because that’s what we have to do, because it’s been a long time since we’ve been humans, and because this is something we all believe in.”
“Sam, Nick came here to give a history talk,” Cate said, stepping forward so she stood next to Alice. “I understand that the donor house is a place that you’re all interested in, but I’d really like it if we could get to the actual history talk.”
When Alice turned her head to look at Nick she saw that the blood had drained from his face. Talking about the donor house was easy compared to talking about his own history and she knew that he would probably have preferred it if Cate hadn’t stepped in. Alice took a step back so she stood next to Nick, squeezing his hand.
“I’m here,” she whispered.
“Thank you,” he replied, sounding terrified.
Mirrored from K. A. Jones Writing.
