Given the gory detail we get in the The Short Second Life of Bree Tanner about how newborns feed, I imagine that the older and more experienced vampires get, the cleaner they feed
So we had Bree’s covenmates (Victoria’s army, if you’ve not read this book) ripping humans apart quite savagely, and how uncontrollable Jasper describes newborns
Then we have post-newborn to mature vampires feeding like the Cullens & their friends, getting some around their mouths and on their clothes sometimes but not super messy at all
So I think, by this logic, that ancient vampires like the Volturi family, and possibly the Romanians and the older Egyptians, feed quite cleanly. They bite only into where they need to go to get the blood the fastest. They don’t rip the entire neck apart, and they don’t get messy. If attacked from behind, humans wouldn’t know an ancient was draining them until they were dead. I think they’re also much less likely to play with their food, as newborns and some mature vampires do, as they’ve seen hundreds of times every single reaction prey can have to their situation. It’s boring. They find it pathetic to get power trips off playing with food and look down on vampires who do
« and i remember my mother’s nails piercing flesh, cold eyes whispering, demanding prayers. “be devout to hunger, child.” »
She was pierced with a memory as sharp as an arrow. And it’s arrow point—a name—buried so deep inside of her it had reached even those nooks she couldn’t quite look at, afraid of their ever growing shadows. Bree was good at bearing pain, or so she had believed. This ache would be the same, she insisted, just a terror dripping over her frame, just an ancient bruise, somewhere on her chest for—forever. (Since she would always remember; since she, like the world, was made to endure). The weight of loss accompanied her like a ghost, quietly sat on her shoulder, always so clean and well-behaved that it became difficult to think of it as what it truly was: the unbearable trace of guilt, and worse, longing.
Because she missed Diego. The Diego she knew but, mostly, the Diego she had believed he was—the Diego she imagined. They hadn’t known much about each other anyway except, perhaps, that they were young, and lonely, and clueless so, who would have blamed them for searching instead of finding each other? Did that matter, anyway? Everytime Bree remembered him, she would slightly alter her ideas of Diego, or them, or what they could have been if—maybe, perhaps.
(Over and over: the way the curls bounced over his knitted-tight eyebrows; the freckles spreading like wildfire on his smooth, taupe skin; the echo of his laughter, reverberating inside her; their fingers interlocking without asking or looking, a perfectly coordinated and silent click—the quenching of that part of her that so deeply wanted to belong, and to be loved. And then, over the dismembered bodies and salt-like way Riley said his name: the endless possibilities of two cageless teens, holding fists like hands, running to the ends of time and back, singing whenever they felt like crying...).
Everytime, Bree exonerated the body of her silence and firmly held onto it, reminding herself that it was real—even now, when he was gone. Gone forever, she thought, biting on every syllable, forcing them down her throat until they landed over the impotence that lived in her stomach. Forever, repeated—the thin voice of her mother, the fearsome one of his father, and lastly, just hers. (Forever, forever, forever…)
The claw-like fingers (as if these weren’t hers) sank in Bree’s hair, drowning in the wavy strands. Her pupils were trembling—never able to shed a tear again—and still bright red. It didn’t matter how much she wanted to please the Cullen’s, it didn’t matter how much they tried to help; how reassuring they were, how Rosalie made her stare just so she could realize that, in her amber eyes, there wasn’t a bit of disappointment—just concern. Pain she could handle, yes, but not hunger. And she knew because she died for it, because she fucking condemned herself for it—because she always wanted too much, even when life had given her nothing or, perhaps, because life had given her nothing. Was this what she was, then? an unyielding craving, a gash that kept bleeding? Forever. She almost laughed—mad, and trembling, and hungry.
How God—if there was one—was able to bear with it all, she couldn’t understand.
Oh, but she knew of hunger and all its faces. Not only the thirst, but the equally terrifying want that had pushed her forward all her life and that it hadn’t died yet. Her knees pressed against her chest—a gnawing there, always, like a wound / or a needy mouth. Curling up, she felt it all chew at once, inside her: every person she had loved, every person she had wanted to be loved by—swallowing her up. It hurted so badly. It was just like back then, on that dirty alley, where the sudden pain had stopped her just before she could get one bite out of—Eden’s apple—that damned burger. Some twisted joke that her skin got littered by teeth marks, after then.
Not enough attention is given to Bree’s friend Fred. Fred, a vampire who hates being a vampire and just wanted to be a marine biologist, who has the opposite gift of Didyme and can repel everyone around him with an aura of nausea, who saw through Riley and knew something was up because the manipulation techniques didn’t work on him…
