Page 48 of The Good Vampire’s Guide to Blood & Boyfriends

ALONE AGAIN, NATURALLY

A Pamphlet

Protecting Your Territory: Practices for the High-Level Vampire

By Nellie Adams

While your clan and clan leaders do much of the work of protecting you and your loved ones from potential rogue vampires, we understand the desire to take extra precautions, especially in times of conflict.

While everyone can do simpler protection work (see “Protecting Your Territory: Wards and Protection Charms for the Low-Level Vampire” for information about environmental wards, protective charms, and other low-level measures of protection), there are more advanced methods of protection for those with some magical ability.

Binding

Binding a vampire’s ability to use their powers is one of the most extreme routes of protection and is typically used as a last-resort punishment for unruly clan members.

To bind a powerful vampire, the binder or binders must be at least half as strong collectively as the vampire or vampires they are binding.

Banishment

Banishment is the practice of limiting a vampire’s area of access by keeping them out of certain places, or restricted to a certain area.

While simple environmental wards keep all low-level vampires from entering certain places, banishment is effective on all levels of vampires, and is a targeted effect that keeps one or more vampires from being able to move freely past the bounds of the banishment.

Thrall

A vampire’s thrall is the high-level vampire’s most accessible weapon, allowing them to temporarily incapacitate an enemy or prey.

It coaxes the enthralled into a dreamlike state.

Mild, dazing thralls take very little power, but deeper, longer-lasting thralls require high-level abilities and ongoing focus to maintain.

It’s important to remember that these protective measures are reserved for higher-level vampires and clan leaders. You should count on your clan leaders for defense, and if you need help addressing a conflict, please reach out to them for additional aid.

The thing was, when Brennan thought about it logically, they were kind of fucked.

The ball was a gathering of humans and vampires alike, so any combination with vampire blood would be bad.

At best, the vampires would go berserk and start biting everyone; at worst, those attacks would also turn those humans into more vampires.

Either way, vampires would get exposed. Lose-lose situations all around.

Brennan threw himself into research, trying to find everything he could on vampire blood, vampire thralls and how to break them, and defeating an all-powerful millennia-old vampire. Shockingly, the research was neither straightforward nor conclusive.

He didn’t eat, couldn’t sleep, and put off drinking as long as possible to ration his supply. (Dr. Morris would say that not taking care of yourself is a form of self-harm. Whatever.)

It took him two days of radio silence from Cole to work up the courage to venture into the library, partially for research, partially in hopes of groveling.

Except Cole wasn’t there.

Brennan stayed holed up in the library for twenty-four hours and Cole never showed up.

Finally, he asked one of the other library aides when Cole was scheduled.

The blue-haired librarian Brennan had seen with Cole a few times smiled sadly at him. “Cole’s not at the library anymore. He has some new internship. It sucks, we love him around here.”

Brennan retreated to his corner of the silent floor, the one he and Cole always used to occupy, and imagined Cole was there, too. Head in his lap, reading while Brennan leafed through a pamphlet that would have all the answers.

The library was no longer the comfort it used to be. He could only think of all the nights spent here with Cole, and how empty it felt without him. He tried to ignore the stinging feeling of the absence.

He knew this was how it would end all along, really.

But somewhere along the way, he’d grown the audacity to think he could cling to his humanity.

He thought he could be both vampire and human, that his life didn’t have to be over even though it technically ended.

That he could be normal. But his vampirism was real, it was his, and he had to deal with it as it inevitably blew up in his face.

He just wished Cole hadn’t been collateral damage. Even if he’d offered help, being threatened by Travis and letting Brennan bite him had clearly shaken him, and Brennan couldn’t blame him.

It was his fault Cole was in the cross fire.

He was taking notes on a pamphlet about vampire thralls, having lost track of the time ages ago, when Mari found him in his corner of the stacks.

Brennan pulled his attention from his notebook, dread building in his stomach.

“I know I messed up,” Brennan said before she could speak. “Whatever you want to say, know it won’t be worse than what I’m already saying to myself.”

She had her backpack on, her short hair was pulled back in a wild, stubby ponytail, and she held a mug of something steaming. Coffee, by the smell wafting toward him.

“Jesus,” Mari said. “I figured you were having a pity party, but this is pretty pathetic.”

Some sarcastic retort died on his lips when Mari slid the mug of coffee toward him in offering. Brennan stared at her neatly trimmed fingernails pushing it forward, at the sloshing black liquid, at the mug itself, which read TEAM JACOB .

“Thanks,” Brennan said. He wasn’t sure how long he’d been holed up in the corner.

“I overheard one of the library aides saying a guy has been camped out on the third floor for more than forty-eight hours,” Mari explained. “I had a guess it might’ve been you.”

Brennan blinked, rubbing his eyes, pulling himself out of his research coma and back to reality. “Guilty,” he said. “What day is it?”

“Friday.”

Shit. “Seventy-two hours, then.” He’d skipped two days of classes. What did classes matter next to all of this, anyway?

Mari scanned Brennan, took in the stacks of books, opened and bookmarked and scattered around him. Whatever she saw, she took pity.

“Look, the comfort basket is more of Cole’s thing,” she said. “But it’s depressing as hell that you’re holed up here alone.”

“Gee, thanks?” Brennan said.

Mari winced. “No, I meant—I just mean…”

She stopped and sat down across from him, laying her hands out flat, cards on the table.

“I know I come off, like,” Mari started, mouth twisting up in obvious discomfort. “Well, I know I’m not the gentlest person. But, we’re kind of friends, right?”

“Are we?” Brennan was so shocked that the words tumbled out on their own. “I thought you hated me.”

Mari’s head dropped, covering her face with her hands. “I mean, I was skeptical, obviously, but it’s not personal.”

“Right,” Brennan said. “Just the vampire thing.”

“Yes, obviously. But it’s not just that, or you. It’s me, and Cole, too.”

“Okay…?” He wasn’t sure where Mari was going with this.

“I’m fucking terrible at this,” Mari murmured into her hands, then withdrew, straightening up and staring Brennan down with determination. “Listen up, because I’m not doing this monologue shit more than once, got it?”

“Yeah, sure, got it.” He said it dismissively, but he was listening intently.

“Cole is my best friend in the entire world,” Mari said.

“He’s got the kindest, purest light inside him and I am so lucky to be near it.

His parents and my parents were friends, so me and him and Noah were best friends since we were in diapers.

We were like, this super awesome trio, for years. From kindergarten to graduation.

“In preschool this kid punched a boy for being mean to me. In middle school, when Noah was getting bullied, Cole made sure he never had to go anywhere alone. He’d sneak out of class to walk him to the bathroom.

And now, no matter where I fall asleep in the apartment, at my desk, on the couch, I always wake up with a blanket draped over me. That’s the kind of person Cole is.

“Do you understand what I’m saying? I’m not gonna apologize for being protective of Cole because the boy has no self-preservation instincts of his own.

I get protective because there are people out there who would bleed him dry.

” She cringed at the words. “Fuckin’ A. Well, I mean.

He will give and give and give to the people he loves and that is a gift .

“So when I realized he was choosing you to be one of those people, I thought, he’s gonna get hurt.”

“And now he did,” Brennan finished.

“Yeah, but not how you think,” Mari said. “Not how I thought, either.”

“It’s exactly what you thought. I’m a literal vampire and I literally drank his blood. You saw it coming since you found out about me.”

“You’re not listening. That’s not the problem. You can’t keep Cole from giving you his all because god knows no one could stop him if they tried.”

“Then what are you saying, Mari?”

“I’m saying that for as long as Cole chooses you to be one of those people he’d give anything for, you have to give him everything right back. That’s what he deserves. Do it for real or don’t do it at all.”

She frowned, looked him up and down, and concluded, “In other words, get your shit together.”

Brennan couldn’t even be offended. “But none of that matters if he won’t talk to me ever again.”

“Oh, for Christ’s sake, the melodrama. You really have no idea how gone he is for you?

” Brennan blinked back at her and she threw her hands up in disbelief.

“Since you crash-landed in the library, it’s been nonstop ‘Brennan’s so smart’ this, ‘Brennan’s so thoughtful’ that, and ‘Yes he’s a vampire but he’s a good vampire. ’”

It didn’t make sense. That Mari didn’t hate him, that Mari thought he still had a chance.

“Do I have to spell it out for you? Show him you care. At least try. ”