QUESTION 1: Thank you so very much for the lovely short story! I loved Jonas in it, as always. But it got me wondering – just how old is Jonas now, and how long has he known Pritkin? How did they meet? And how much does Jonas know about what happened with Pritkin’s wife?
Jonas, as he told Cassie, is “damned old,” and he wasn’t exaggerating. Magical humans live around 200 years, and Jonas is edging up on the latter part of that range. He’s in good shape for his age, but still not a young man.
He met Pritkin a few decades before the incident at Cobb End, in the late nineteenth century. One of these days, I may do a short on that, because it’s really funny. Basically, it was when Jonas was still in the field, and on a demon hunt (remember his golem? Jonas specialized in demons, once upon a time).
But there are thousands of types of demons, and the Corps doesn’t really understand more than a handful of the usual suspects. And what Jonas was after wasn’t one of those. Fortunately for him, Pritkin was around and helped him out, and Jonas remembered him later on when more esoteric demon questions came up. He eventually persuaded Pritkin into doing a little work for the Circle, mostly in a teaching capacity, because too many of their mages were getting their asses handed to them when they came up against magic they didn’t understand.
As far as what Jonas knows about the marriage…well, he found Pritkin, drunk and in sorry shape, at Cobb End after Pritkin got back from finding and trying to kill and then being rescued by his father. But that was several decades after the incident with Ruth, following which Pritkin had simply disappeared. Remember, time in the demon realms runs differently than here, so years had passed on earth while he was away.
Anyway, Jonas rousted him out to come on a demon hunt, not because he really thought he was needed, but to give the guy something to do rather than drink himself to death. But Pritkin ended up saving a bunch of Corps members from some rogue mages pretending to be demons. Thereafter, Jonas pestered the hell (ha) out of him until he finally joined the Corps just to shut him up, and because he didn’t have anything better to do. So, yes, Jonas knows something happened to put Pritkin into a self-destructive spiral, but as to exactly what he knows…well, with Jonas, you can never be sure, can you?
By the way, Pritkin didn’t join the Circle officially until after WWII, at which time he was introduced to everyone as the former adjunct’s son. That was necessary because he had supposedly died on the dark mage hunt (since no one else would have survived how that ended). And because minor-level demons, which Pritkin was pretending to be, don’t usually live any longer than magical humans, and it was going to be hard to explain why he looked so darned young otherwise.
QUESTION 2: Since Cassie and Mircea are “Married” by vampire law, if Cassie wanted to date someone else could she? Would Mircea still own her? How does it work?
If you read the part in Hunt the Moon when Cassie and Jonas are talking (the first time), it will mostly explain this question. It also helps to recall what Cassie said to Pritkin in the pizza parlor. Basically, it boils down to the fact that vampires have a very distinct hierarchy among themselves, with everyone clearly knowing his or her place, who they do and do not owe what kind of fealty to, and who takes precedence over who in the constantly changing dance of power. But when it comes to humans, it’s a whole other story.
As Cassie told Pritkin, there’s not a lot of gradation in the way vampires treat humans. There’s two main categories: servants and food. Meaning that Mircea is embarking on kind of a new thing in dating her, rather than simply keeping her as a pet or a servant, which is how most master vampires treat favored humans. Not that there are a lot of those, because most of the ones they really like, they turn. But Cassie can’t be turned, so she needs a new category.
At the moment, she is in the highest category they have for humans, which (as Cassie told Jonas) is usually reserved for capable mages who they can’t turn because they would lose their magic, but who they don’t want some other family poaching. So they bind them with a bond, the same kind that, coincidentally, is used as a marriage between master vampires. It gives someone entrée into a vampire family without having to actually join it, which no senior master is going to do for another no matter how attractive they find them.
So, after all that, the answer to your question is: it depends on how you look at it. If you consider Cassie merely a useful human bound to Mircea’s family, then of course she can date whoever she likes. That category covers someone’s occupation, not their personal life, so it wouldn’t matter. However, if you consider her to have the status of a master vampire, that wouldn’t be the case because they only enter that type of bond as a marriage arrangement.
So what was the subtext between Cassie and Mircea in HTM? Mircea was trying to have it both ways–claiming Cassie as a wife, but treating her as a servant. A favored servant, but still. While Cassie was effectively telling him, if you keep treating me as merely a servant, then I can do as I like, because I’m just a human loosely bound to the family. If I am your wife, however, then you’re going to have to treat me that way. Which he wasn’t doing, because that would have meant also treating her like a master vampire outside of the bedroom. And that would have opened up a whole can of worms with the Senate and he had enough issues he was dealing with already. But that was why they were having problems. Well, one of the reasons. Mircea was acting like Cassie didn’t know how vampire society worked, and that just wasn’t the case.
QUESTION 3: Okay, here’s another question I’ve been asked to send to you from Marlowe’s no.1 fan: Are we going to see more of Marlowe in the next Dory book? He got, like, two paragraphs in Hunt the Moon.
Yes, actually. You see a fair amount of him.:-)
QUESTION 4: “Do vampires pee? I ask because in HtM Cassie’s vampire guards were consuming mass quantities of beer, yet they did not use the bathrooms…which is why they missed the bathroom phone that Cassie eventually used to contact Pritkin and plan her escape from the hotel suite. Inquiring minds want to know…”
First of all, ewww. I mean, honestly, I don’t like to think about my characters (or anybody else’s characters, for that matter) going to the bathroom. Using the bathroom for scenes, particularly funny or sexy scenes, sure. Using it for the purpose for which it was intended? Not so much.
But you asked, yes you did, so here you go. Vampires in my universe, like in most people’s universes since I am Legend appeared on the scene, were made by a virus. It’s passed along (sometimes) when they bite someone. There are exceptions, like Mircea and Louis-Cesare the first time around, who were cursed, but that’s rare. And even then, they were cursed with the disease, so the difference was really only in the method of transmission.
So, it’s a disease. But plenty of people have diseases, and while their bodies may work a little differently because of them, they still have all their various parts. Vampires are in the same situation—same body, just works differently now. And one of the ways in which it works differently is in how they gain the energy we all need to live. And, of course, it’s not through food.
Okay, so say you’re a baby vamp, newly sprung from your not-so-permanent resting place. You get hungry. Can you go eat a Big Mac? Sure you can. Your stomach is still there, along with all its varied accoutrements. But you’re not going to get any food value out of that Big Mac (I know, like anybody ever does, right?) because your body no longer gains energy that way. You can eat it and, er, process it, but it won’t make the hunger go away. It also won’t taste like much of anything, and not just because you got it from McDonald’s. But because your taste buds no longer work. That will remain true until you hit master status, assuming you ever do, and by then most people are out of the habit. Mircea, for example, ate in Hunt the Moon to keep Cassie company or because he really, really likes savaging bunnies, your choice. But he didn’t gain anything from that meal other than the taste.
So to your question. There’s no food in the suite most of the time, because only one of the masters (Marco) likes to eat. But there’s beer because…do I have to explain why there’s beer? They’re playing poker. Can you even do that without beer? Even shitty beer like Foster’s, which to answer someone else’s question, Pritkin brought because he was being a bastard. Just his luck vamp taste buds couldn’t tell the difference.
Anyway, when a vampire eats or drinks something, it is processed, so yeah, they have to use the toilet occasionally. But not often, because compared to what we consume in a day, their intake is minimal. And there was a small bathroom for guests off the living room of the suite, as was mentioned in the book. They used that, not Cassie’s own toilet, which in any case was in a cubicle separate from the rest of the bathroom that they couldn’t see from the door. The point is that vamps don’t spend a lot of time in toilets, so they just didn’t think of it when sequestering the phones.
And that is as much as I ever want to say about vampires and toilets.