I’m not sure what’s worse: knowing that there are Drainers out there or knowing about the rogue vampires. A rogue is a vamp who refuses to live by the rules that the human population has laid down. When the other vamps find out about one, it’s up to the sheriff of the area to deal with him. Eric is very thorough and isn’t bothered all that much if he has to put an end to a rogue. Rogues are bad for business.

Of course, since there are humans who live off preying on vampires, there are humans who live to be preyed on by vampires—fangbangers. They get off sexually from letting vampires feed on them. I’ve heard that some of them get off erotically from just being in the same room as a vampire. But loving to have your own blood taken is just as dangerous as taking vampire blood yourself. Even if you’re in a committed relationship, like I was with Bill and am now with Eric, the vampire has to be very, very careful about how much blood he takes.

The big problem with the fangbangers is that they can get really addicted to the bite and will keep coming back for more and more frequent feedings with any vamp they can attract. If the vampire isn’t careful, and some of them aren’t, the fangbanger ends up being accidentally drained or even turned.

You can’t be born a vampire. There’s only one way to become one. A human being has to be “turned” by a vampire, the way Bill was by that bitch Lorena.

Bill told me it isn’t easy to make a new vampire. The victim has to be drained of blood at a single sitting or over a period of no more than three days, till he’s almost at the point of the true death. Then the sire has to donate most of his or her own blood to the prospective vampire. After that, it can take up to three days in the dark for the whole change to occur, and it doesn’t always turn out right. Sometimes the vampire-to-be doesn’t make it. Sometimes they have to be destroyed, they’re so damaged. If the baby vampire survives, it’s the obligation of the sire to teach the child how to be a good vampire.

Just like a newborn child, the newborn vampire is hungry and doesn’t have a lot of control over his or her baser instincts. Amelia and I had firsthand experience with this when a shapeshifter named Jake Purifoy turned into a vampire and rose in a closet in my cousin Hadley’s apartment. We got lucky. We were able to call the vampire cops, who could control him during his hunger pangs.