#vampire!van

TAISSA TURNER

"Politicans are vampires anyways, I'm just fitting the model."

A Sleepwaker, a rare offshoot of vampire that’s basically two beings in one body: her “normal mortal self” and her “vampiric self.” The catch? The vampiric instincts only surface when she’s asleep. So while day-Tai is a focused, ambitious overachiever juggling pre-law classes, night-Tai is… a predatory blur of hunger and instincts.

Mortally embarrassed about this. She wakes up with blood on her hands (sometimes literal), no memory of what she did, and a very good reason to keep herself extremely sleep-deprived.

She’s gotten very good at pretending she’s just a Type-A insomniac, but anyone paying attention (like Van) notices the cracks: half-eaten vending machine wrappers under her bed, vague scratches on her arms, bizarre excuses for why she “fell asleep in the library and woke up in the ceiling rafters.”

Deep down, she’s terrified that her vampiric self will hurt someone she cares about—making her the most cautious, self-controlled vampire on campus by day, and the most reckless, animalistic one by night.

VANESSA "VAN" PALMER

"Happy wife, happy life. Hunting is just like really intense tag, anyways."

A vampire hunter who has somehow survived hunts that should have been her last a dozen times over. She’s got scars she wears like badges of honor, and a gallows humor about the fact that she should be dead by now. Her friends joke she’s the “Final Girl of the Hunters’ Guild.”

Her survival isn’t due to skill so much as sheer stubbornness and luck. She’ll run headfirst into fights and walk away bloodied but still standing, much to the bewilderment of everyone around her.

Meets Taissa as part of the guild’s suspicions about the Sleepwaker phenomenon. Instead of killing her, she ends up fascinated—partly because Tai’s “mortal self” is so different from her vampiric one, and partly because she sees the loneliness behind Tai’s façade.

Their relationship starts with sharp banter and slowly softens into trust, which only deepens when Van chooses to be turned. It’s less about “wanting power” and more about solidarity: if Tai has to live straddling two worlds, Van wants to live there with her.