Assuming the vampire is the natural predator of the human, what is the natural predator of the vampire?
I asked this question awhile back on my Facebook page and got a wide variety of responses. Werewolves and witches were the most popular choices, Buffy was in there somewhere, one person even suggested killer owls, and a few put forth dhampirs, vampire/human hybrids, that only feed off vampire blood (that was probably my favorite).
Bram Stoker to Stephanie Meyer—one of the most common consensus among writers of vampire literature is that they do not get along with werewolves. They’re like Tolkien’s Elves and Dwarves—they hate each others guts into oblivion—but they seem too evenly matched to me. A true predator has a distinctive advantage over their prey. One might say the Werewolves have the edge of going out in the sunlight, but they are at their strongest under a full moon and there goes that idea.
I confess to never having read Dracula, but I’ve been told Stoker put forth the theory that vampires are hunted by witches. This leaves too many variables for me. You need to explain whether or not the witches in question are a separate species or a special classification of human and if they actually feed off the vampires or just use them in spells…I think this makes them more of just an enemy.
Buffy doesn’t count because she is a single human, not a race. (Though I’m sure lots of vampires would have nightmares about her.) As for killer owls—holy crap if there was an owl that ate vampires, I’d never sleep again.
A dhampir is probably the closest to what I had in mind. There is a certain irony in a half human creature feeding off vampires and if you go by the general philosophy on dhampirs, they possess all the strengths of the vampire and none of the weaknesses (sunlight, silver, wooden stakes, crosses, garlic, what have you). Marvel Comic’s Blade went with this theory.
Tied with the dhampir in my personal opinion, is a creature that feeds not on the vampire’s blood, but their life force. I’m not really sure what it would be called or what its vulnerabilities would be, but I imagine it in human form with preternatural strength just like its prey.
Vampire lore has been rehashed and retold of late more than any other mythological creature’s with the exception of perhaps fey. Because of that, there are a multitude of versions of vampires and therefore a multitude of possible predators. This question could be answered twenty different ways by twenty different people and they could all be right. It’s all subjective to the particular incarnation of the lore. Nonetheless, it seems there should be a rule about this because after all, everything in nature gets hunted by something. Why would the paranormal world be any different? This might just be something to address in my Fanged Princess series…
Inkspelled Faery 