"Where do all the old vampires go?"

Hi there, this is Josefina. I'm just realizing I haven't written a blog entry in a long time! I've just been really distracted with school and stuff... the school newspaper takes up most of my writing time these days. It's good to be behind the keyboard for the blog again. :-)

Just to warn you, this isn't really a news post. It's more sort of a thinky post, about a conversation we had, and a question we couldn't figure out the answer to.

Several of us were sitting in the living room working on homework, when out of the blue, Kirsten asked, "Where do all the old vampires go?"

"What do you mean?" Felicity replied in a somewhat distracted way, looking up from the French verb conjugations she was memorizing.

Kirsten frowned, trying to explain her train of thought, and said, "Well, vampires are supposed to be immortal, right? So how come all the ones we've met have been turned really recently? Clare has been one for a little more than a year. Tabitha for less than two months. The ones who turned Clare and came after her don't seem all that ancient either, are they, Clare?"

Clare shook her head. "Nope. They were only turned a few years ago, as far as I know."

"Exactly!" Kirsten said. "So if they live forever, why haven't we met any old ones? Like Dracula, or something?"

"Because Dracula is fictional," Bree commented dryly without looking up from her book, her sole and oh-so-helpful contribution to the conversation.

Kirsten stuck her tongue out at Bree and rolled her eyes. "I don't mean Dracula specifically. Obviously! I mean really old ones like him. We know more vampires than the average people. How come we've never met any that were old? Like, not even that had been vampires for a few decades?"

All eyes turned to Clare, our resident insider vampire expert.

"I don't know," the resident insider vampire expert replied. "Vampires die a lot, though, I guess. We don't get old or pass away from natural causes, but we can be killed... and so far it seems like there are attempts to kill us a lot. Between vampire hunters and other vampires, the herd probably naturally gets thinned quite a bit."

We all thought this was likely true, but not a totally satisfying answer. That would explain why there weren't many older vampires. Like, why vampires don't just overrun humans and take everything over. It doesn't explain why haven't seen or heard of any, though... because there keep being new ones. Some of them are surviving long enough to create new ones, or else vampires would die out. If they can live that long, surely some of them make it to older age? Even much older?

"Maybe we should ask Inna this," Clare suggested. "She knows more than I do."

Including these two concepts - older vampires and Inna - in the same conversation made me wonder something. I wonder if that's what she's afraid of. If that's what's chasing her. She doesn't seem scared of newer vampires, like our resident ones or the ones chasing Clare. When Kiwi was taken, Inna was angry and afraid for Kiwi's safety, but she didn't seem to have any fears about surviving the rescue attempt herself; she seemed pretty confident. I'm sure some of it was for the sake of the rest of us - but I don't think all her courage was faked. When Inna manages to track the kidnapper vampires down again, she's planning to go after them, and again she seems confident about the outcome.

But there's something she is afraid of. I wonder if it could be the older sort of vampires that we haven't seen yet? Maybe she got on the bad side of one at some point, and now the vampire is out for revenge? It's just a guess, of course. But it's the only idea we've had so far of what might have scared Inna so badly she'd wonder if we were better off without her...

Love,
Josefina