Page 63 of Hot Blooded

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.

---