**—3—**
Turning someone into a vampire is not a simple matter of swapping blood. There has to be intent. There also has to be actual death involved. So in order to make a vampire, I have to drink the subject, I have to give him or her my blood, and I have to kill them, all while wanting the turning to happen. I can break their necks, or shoot them, or hang them – it doesn’t matter, really – but the simplest and neatest way to do this is to just drain them of their blood.
If you don’t kill the subject, but follow all the other steps – with intent – then there still will be a transformation, but what you will end up with is a ghoul, not a full vampire. Ghouls also need blood to survive, but they don’t get all the perks the vampires do. They don’t grow sharp retractable incisors, they don’t have our mesmerism or superstrength, and the aversion-to-sun cure doesn’t actually work on them. Their minds also cannot really handle the blood thirst, and they lose their sanity very rapidly. All in all, ghouls are an unnecessary mess. Very few vampires keep them around. We are allowed to create as many as we want as they usually die out within a few months, but we usually have no reason to. (This is unlike making new vampires, where we have to request permission from the vampire lords, and may not get one for several decades. And yes, we do have vampire lords – they are in charge of running our vampire utopia.)