Chapter 17
B y the time they left the Council chamber, there were only a few hours left to the night. Tessa’s earnest declaration was still ringing in his ears. …the best man I ever met. And I would be honored to be claimed by him. He couldn’t help but shoot discreet, speculative glances at her as he turned her words over and over in his mind. Was she ready to accept? If he asked now, would she say yes? He’d promised her before the Council presentation that it didn’t mean she had to accept his claim right away. But how much longer did he have to wait before asking? Etta had courted Fran for a year before asking. Did Amos have to wait that long? Despite his lifespan, a year seemed entirely too long to wait.
He and Tessa walked slowly and nearly aimlessly through the city, gradually and indirectly making their way back to her house. The hemline of Tessa’s beautiful dress fluttered around her feet while the rest clung faithfully to her generous curves, revealing peeks now and then when the lapels of her jacket flapped open in the wind. Her heels clicked crisply against the pavement, a strangely satisfying sound.
“Are your feet sore?” Amos asked.
“Weirdly, no. And you know what else? I used to always have a sore back and heel pain at the end of a shift, but since I started seeing you, that’s gone away.”
Amos smirked, pleased. “That’s due to my venom.”
“Ah, that makes sense. Speaking of which… are you going to feed tonight?”
“No, not tonight. I don’t like to feed from you if I don’t have time to hold you and make sure you eat properly afterward.”
Tessa quirked a smile at him. “How can you be such a badass and also such a softie?”
Amos was torn between flattery and dismay. As much as he’d love for Tessa to think he was a “badass,” he didn’t want to give her false expectations. “I’m not a badass. Don’t listen to Etta.”
“So you aren’t freakishly strong for your age?”
“‘Freakish’ is an unflattering word,” he grumbled, but he didn’t deny it.
“Will you tell me about the vampires you killed?” Tessa asked cautiously.
Amos was quiet for a moment, contemplating. How to tell her without horrifying her. How much to tell her. Where to start. “What do you want to know?”
“You said they were turning children. That’s a crime for vampires?”
“The age of consent is twenty-five. But it’s not just a question of being turned—it’s why they were being turned.”
Tessa paled as she processed the implication.
“You remember what I told you about thralls? ”
Tessa nodded.
“So, it’s a form of turning, or siring, a vampire. But a thrall isn’t a full vampire. Because of that, they can still be fed on by their sire. Vampires who turn children usually enthrall them rather than turning them fully.”
“I see,” Tessa said grimly. She swallowed convulsively, lapsing into a fraught silence. After a moment, she changed the subject. “So why is the age of consent set at twenty-five?”
Amos paused, thinking. “How much do you know about English common law?”
Tessa’s brows drew together. “Uh… literally nothing?”
“Ever heard of coverture?”
Tessa shook her head, brows still furrowed.
“Okay. Well. Uh… so, women used to not have legal personhood under English common law. It was called ‘coverture’ and similar laws existed elsewhere across Europe. A woman was either covered by her father’s legal identity, or her husband’s. She had pretty much no individual rights under coverture. Coverture was the norm for a long time, stretching back to medieval Europe, and it was still U.S. law during my mortal lifetime.”
“Okay…” Tessa said slowly, clearly trying to sense where he was going with this.
“But if a woman didn’t marry, at a certain point, she gained a minor degree of legal agency. So, an unmarried woman over the age of twenty-five became a feme sole—a lone woman—as opposed to a feme covert—a ‘covered’ woman.”
Tessa nodded slowly, still obviously not following.
“So if twenty-five was the age at which a woman could be considered independent and self-identified, it seemed like a decent age to set for things like accepting a bloodbond regardless of gender.”
“ Ohhh …” It was finally clicking.
“Of course, laws change,” Amos continued. “Coverture fell out of use in mortal law codes and ages of majority lowered over time. But vampires are not quick with modernization. By the time the various Councils got around to discussing changes in the age of consent, research had emerged that indicated that the human brain didn’t fully mature until about the age of twenty-five.”
“Ah.”
“So twenty-five remained as the age of consent, and has been for centuries. Of course, the law has been broken countless times. Etta’s a prime example of that. Luckily, our own research seems to suggest that the closer a vampire was to twenty-five as a mortal, the more likely it is that their vampiric regenerative properties will allow them to reach full cognitive maturation. Etta’s fine. But the younger they are, the more likely they are to be locked eternally into that stage of development. A child turned at, say, six years old, will never mature much past that stage.” Amos’s voice roughened with anger.
“How did you find out they were turning children?” Tessa asked.
“Before I started my current company, I had a different one where I did installations for various home technologies—including security systems. I discovered the turned children when one of the predators hired me to set up a security system for a sealed chamber in his basement. I could hear them crying through the walls.”
“Oh my god.” She clutched his arm. As much as he hated upsetting her, he was glad she turned to him for comfort, instead of turning away in disgust. “What happened to the children?” she asked faintly.
“They’re housed in a Council-owned facility with others like them. There’s always been stories of thralls who managed to throw off their enthrallment and revert to their mortal state, though we have no evidence of such a thing happening. In any case, there’s hope that someday our researchers will have a breakthrough that allows us to revert them back to a mortal state or possibly manipulate the regenerative properties in our venom in a way that will allow them to reach physical and cognitive maturity.”
Tessa took that in, leaning into him as they walked. He put his arm around her shoulders, both giving and taking comfort.
Amos could feel the impending sunrise when they finally made it to Tessa’s house. He kissed her gently, both of them content to keep it soft and sweet.
“Thank you,” he said when he drew back.
“For what?”
“For being brave and facing the Council. For putting up with the ancient lunatics. If you give me a list, I’ll have words with the ones who were offensive.”
Tessa gave him a wry look. “No, I will not be doing that.”
“Just words, ” Amos promised.
“No. A tricky man could finagle ‘having words’ into ‘ripping out tongues.’”
“They’ll grow back.”
She laughed. “No, Amos!”
“Bleeding heart,” he grumbled, accepting a playful kiss from her. Holding her face, looking down into her big brown eyes, he said, “Thank you for what you said to the Council. About me. ”
She leaned into him, gripping the lapels of his jacket. “I meant it.”
Amos stared at her, almost trembling with the urge to claim her. His fangs throbbed with the need to do so. His fingers curled into white-knuckled fists. Swallowing hard, he forced himself to draw back from her.
“I should go. Sunrise is close. Sleep—” The wind shifted subtly, bringing with it a familiar scent. The same thrall Amos had been tracking and failing to apprehend for days now. Amos seized Tessa and surged to her front door. He couldn’t open it, not without an invitation. “Get inside,” he growled. “Now.”
Tessa hurried to obey, slipping inside and pulling the door shut. The deadbolt slid into place as she called, “Be safe!”
He was gone before he could answer her, chasing after the rogue thrall. Despite the thrall’s inferior speed, the cursed creature was unexpectedly slippery. He darted down narrow alleys at the last second, faking Amos out, scampering up drainpipes and leaping from rooftop to rooftop. Amos had finally cornered him behind an auto parts store all the way out in Austin when the harsh burn of sunrise sizzled against his back.
He and the thrall both hissed. The light became blinding at the precise second that the sun crested the horizon. Limited to just scent and hearing, made clumsy by the drag of his daysleep, Amos made a cursory attempt at grabbing the thrall. One hand closed on filthy fabric, but the thrall managed to jerk free, cloth tearing. He scrambled away past some dumpsters, where the overwhelming scent of gasoline, oil, and other chemicals masked his scent entirely.
Thwarted, blinded, and burning alive, Amos raced home. When he reached his door, he collapsed inside gratefully, swinging it shut, and hurrying for the stairs. He didn’t want a repeat of the last time he’d stayed out too late. At the very least, he’d like to collapse on the floor of his light-proofed bedroom instead of the hallway where a full day of indirect light would strip his skin like acid.
He made it over the threshold of his bedroom, kicking the door shut with sleep-addled gracelessness. He collapsed onto his bed, still fully dressed.
His last thought as the oblivion of daysleep slipped over him was that the thrall wasn’t fixated on him. If he was, he wouldn’t keep running from Amos. Instead, he continued to linger near Tessa’s house.
The thrall had fixated on her.