Why did Mircea want to imprison Dorina in Shadow’s Bane? I thought he was all about family. Isn’t she family, too?

This is a good question. So good, in fact, that I’m giving it its own Q&A. It addresses a lot of vampire lore, so if that’s your thing, buckle up.

First, you have to remember that Mircea is a vampire, and he’s been a vamp for a very long time. He CAN see things from a human perspective easier than some vamps, because it’s an important part of his work. He has to be able to communicate with the Silver Circle, and understand their motivations and spot their lies, or he wouldn’t be an effective diplomat. But when it’s not about diplomacy, when it’s something personal, he’s much more likely to revert to vamp thought processes.

So, what are those? Well, do you remember the Count on Sesame Street? Yes, I’m serious. He was made to look like a vampire, with his little felt teeth and tiny cape, because an important part of vampire lore is that vamps are obsessive/compulsive. In old Romania, for instance, if you suspected that a recently deceased person might be a vampire, how did you keep them from rising from their grave and coming after you? Well, sure, you could pre-emptively stake them, but the family often took that badly. An easier way, and one less likely to result in a feud, was to sprinkle rice all around the grave. The thought was that the newly risen vamp would be forced by his or her obsessive behavior to count every grain, and would likely still be at it by dawn, ensuring that they had no time left to attack you.

No, seriously. This was a thing.

I took the vampires-are-obsessive myth and used it a little differently in my books. My vampires aren’t obsessive about everything, just about some things. Namely, as Cleo told Mircea in Masks, they are often fixated on something in their lives that didn’t go the way they wanted it to, something big. In her case, it was opting out of the Battle of Actium. She and Antony lost that fight, and therefore the war, because they fled the scene when things looked like they were going badly, and thus ensured that they did. If she’d stayed and braved it out, she might have won, and history would have been very different. In Masks, she was confronted by a similar situation, but made the opposite choice. That time, she risked her life for her people, and won the right to rule because of her actions, not because of her birth.

She also put to rest her obsession, which is why she’s still here.

As you discovered in Ride the Storm, vampires always have their obsession, but it’s more manageable when they’re younger. But the older they get, the more it consumes them. Eventually, if they don’t come to grips with it as the consul did, it distracts them to the point that they pay attention to nothing else. Including other vamps who see an opportunity to climb up the ladder by removing the competition. That’s where all the old vamps went—killed off, not by a lack of power, but by a lack of focus.

So, we come to Mircea. He’s almost six hundred years old, making him older than the majority of vampires. He isn’t as old as the consul was when she faced her dilemma, but he’s getting there, and his power levels are approaching hers. And as they grow, so does his obsession. In his case, of course, it’s not a valid base for his rule that he seeks, but rather to put back together the family he lost.

Enter Dorina.

She IS family, of course, as much as Dory is, and Mircea therefore wants to protect her. But he also wants to protect Dory, and there seemed to be only one way to keep both of his daughters alive. Dorina, from his intermittent associations with her, he knew to be savage, unrelenting, and cruel. She did have another side, of course, but what reason did he have to assume that she would show it to Dory, a girl who had been given everything that she was denied?

Most people imprisoned for more than five centuries would not have been in a forgiving mood and Mircea was deathly afraid that he was about to lose another family member. And possibly more than one, if Louis-Cesare decided to challenge Dorina over Dory’s banishment and death. In that case, he would lose either Dorina or Louis-Cesare, both of whom were family, and both of whom were precious to him. There seemed to be no upside, therefore, to allowing Dorina time to deal with Dory, when Mircea thought he knew what her decision would be. Putting her back in her mental cell, on the other hand, while unkind, would at least keep both of his daughters alive.

Mircea as a human might not have been willing to make that deal. But Mircea as a family obsessed master vampire with a clock ticking in the background and already under a huge amount of stress? Yes, he’d make the trade: Dorina’s freedom for Dory’s life—for both their lives. He’d already been partially to blame for his family’s destruction once; he simply wasn’t willing to risk it again.

Hope that helps!