Old Vampire Law

Old Vampire Law is the restored legal order governing the relationship between Vampires and Humans after the Queen’s political reversal. It is significant not merely because it changes a statute, but because it converts an entire kingdom’s hierarchy into lived practice: Humans disappear from ordinary civic life, human breeding farms open, captured adults are sold in cages, and ownership is marked by collars and leashes. The law therefore supplies the institutional background for Aleksander Dumoulin’s purchase of Esmeralda and exposes the conflict between state power, inherited racial ideology, personal possession, and a supernatural bond that disregards racial boundaries.

Restoration and Political Enforcement

Old Vampire Law returns when the Queen reinstates the old vampire laws, producing immediate disorder in the city and the opening of Human breeding farms on the same day. The speed of that transformation leads Aleksander Dumoulin to suspect that the policy had been prepared in advance and that corruption within the ruling power lay behind its public presentation. The law is thus framed as a restoration, but its return is also a political project whose infrastructure appears ready before the announcement becomes visible in everyday life.

The restored order divides the population sharply. Humans, who had previously been seen throughout the city and worked in blood banks, are removed from ordinary public life and placed back into a subordinate position on the food chain. Some Vampires are horrified by the new laws because hybrid families are torn apart. Protest follows, but the Queen suppresses opposition through violence or death, ending any possibility of an open revolution. The law’s authority consequently rests on both legal declaration and coercive enforcement: dissent is not answered by debate, but made dangerous to express.

Aleksander’s response reveals the law’s ideological appeal to members of the dominant group. Although he recognizes the extremity of the new measures and suspects corruption, he also welcomes the restoration because it awakens what he describes as his ancient predatory instinct. The spectacle of Humans being captured makes him feel alive, and he interprets their subordination as a natural order rather than as a newly organized political arrangement. This contrast between the policy’s recent implementation and its presentation as timeless nature is central to the law’s operation: power makes a historical hierarchy appear inevitable.

Religion, Custom, and Competing Norms

The law is accompanied by a state-directed religious change. Inside the royal palace, portraits of Hecate, the goddess regarded as the mother of Vampires, are replaced by portraits of Alastor, a demon and spirit of vengeance. The official religion of the kingdom has been changed by royal command, and opposition is punishable by death. Even though Aleksander is not religious, he recognizes the replacement as wrong, which shows that the regime’s legal restoration reaches beyond rules about blood and status into collective memory, sacred imagery, and public identity.

Old Vampire Law does not stand alone as the only normative system in the story. Esmeralda comes from a remote pack of Werewolf Witches, although she was born without either a wolf or magic. Her pack’s customs and distance from Vampire society explain her ignorance of Vampire practices and reflect a separate communal order shaped by interspecies distrust. The conflict later becomes a dispute over authority within that pack: Thomas, the Alpha, challenges the presence of a Vampire in his daughter’s life, while Alyson, the Luna, asserts her own authority and refuses to let racial hostility settle the matter by itself.

The strongest challenge to the restored law comes from the Moon Goddess’s rule of fated mates. Alyson insists that the Moon Goddess does not care about races and acts according to her own will, declaring the bond between fated mates purer and more important than racial separation. Her position places a sacred norm above both Vampire law and the Alpha’s immediate command. Old Vampire Law may classify Humans and Vampires politically, and pack authority may define whom a daughter should be allowed to join, but the fated-mate bond introduces a supernatural jurisdiction that neither system fully controls.

From Legal Category to Human Market

The law becomes materially visible through the Human pet trade. Two days after encountering the desire for fresh blood, Aleksander goes to the Ichoryllia Human Pet Store. The shop had once sold merchandise for Humans; under the restored order, it now sells Humans themselves. The building is small, dim, and marked by the smell of urine. Cages line its walls, each holding a Human with straw, water, and food scraps. Some are asleep, while others cling to the bars in panic. The scene shows how law turns people into inventory through space, routine, and display.

The store owner distinguishes between captured adults and farm-produced children. The adults in the cages were caught in the city, while those produced on the breeding farms are still babies. This distinction reveals a broader supply system behind the shop: the restored order does not depend only on individual abductions, but also on organized reproduction designed to replenish the market. Human life is managed according to age, source, health, and usefulness, making the breeding farm and pet shop connected institutions within the same legal economy.

Aleksander examines the caged Humans as potential sources of blood and rejects them according to appearance, smell, and personal preference before becoming interested in Esmeralda. The market’s language of selection is inseparable from bodily classification. Her eventual status is signaled through objects purchased from the shop: a black collar decorated with pearls and lace, bearing a large black gemstone, and a long black leather leash. These accessories do more than adorn her. They make the legal and commercial category of pet visible on her body and translate ownership into a daily physical constraint.

When Esmeralda hesitates to put on the collar, Aleksander asserts ownership and compels her to obey. He takes pleasure in the rebellious look in her eyes and wants to tame her, while the collar’s gemstone appears to him to complement her. The moment captures the law’s intimate reach: a public hierarchy becomes a command between two individuals, and the language of purchase becomes control over another person’s body. Aleksander’s claim that no one touches what belongs to him later intensifies this structure, turning protection into an expression of possession rather than undoing the original legal status.

Consequences and Limits of the Order

Old Vampire Law produces the conditions in which Esmeralda can be captured, purchased, threatened, and treated as a source of fresh blood. Aleksander’s family had previously preferred blood wine and remembered the earlier dark times when the Human population had been reduced almost to extinction. His mother regarded that history as a warning against repeating the past. The restored law reverses that caution by making direct access to Human blood desirable again, and Aleksander’s growing thirst becomes an individual symptom of the regime’s ideological normalization.

Yet the law’s authority proves incomplete when Esmeralda’s identity and relationship are revealed. She is not simply an anonymous Human captured from the city: she is the daughter of Thomas and Alyson, the Alpha and Luna of her pack, and the next leader of the Werewolf Witches. Her family’s attempt to recover her is therefore driven by both parental attachment and the political importance of the heir. Thomas treats Aleksander as a threat because Esmeralda’s life is at stake, while Alyson recognizes that the Vampire’s claim may have a different status once the fated-mate bond is understood.

The resulting confrontation exposes the difference between possession under Old Vampire Law and recognition under the fated-mate rule. Alyson accepts that if Aleksander is truly Esmeralda’s fated mate, he is the one with whom Esmeralda should be. Esmeralda then returns to Aleksander by her own choice, thanking her mother. That choice does not erase the coercive circumstances of the purchase: Aleksander himself remembers that Esmeralda had genuinely been his prisoner at first. Instead, it reveals a contradiction the restored law cannot resolve. A system that defines her as property is forced into contact with a bond and a decision that present her as a person capable of choosing.

Narrative Significance

The law functions as the foundation of the book’s central social conflict. It explains why Humans are absent from the streets, why breeding farms and pet stores can operate openly, why a collar can be purchased as an ordinary accessory, and why racial hierarchy is defended as natural. It also gives Aleksander a political environment that rewards his predatory impulses while allowing him to mistake institutional privilege for personal instinct.

At the same time, Old Vampire Law is continually tested by competing forms of belonging. The restored Vampire regime attempts to organize bodies through race, reproduction, commerce, religion, and force. The Werewolf Witches pack answers through family authority and communal identity. The Moon Goddess’s fated-mate bond cuts across both systems, asserting a sacred relationship that the law did not create and cannot simply prohibit. The result is not a clean abolition of the law within the supplied events, but a demonstration of its limits: even an order backed by royal violence cannot fully determine kinship, desire, or the meaning of a person’s chosen allegiance.