Page 1 of The Blessing of Vampires
“Beatitude Castle’s stability never lasted for more than a decade or two before another tragedy would befall it.” The tour guide’s voice echoed through the castle’s lofty main hall, resounding hollowly in the empty space with its worn brick and high ceiling. “Often the family would vanish without a trace, leaving the place to languish under the thrall of a vampire squatter, until a group of hunters eventually took the vampire down, allowing for a new family to move in and starting the cycle over.”
Tragedy. Vampires.
Two words that no one seemed able—or willing—to detangle. They crawled up Clementine’s skin and tried to resettle into his bones the way they had when they’d first taken his life by storm some months ago.
Vampires. Tragedy.
One begot the other, certainly, but to Clementine, it seemed their tour guide’s ordering was all wrong. This place had known vampires—had seen them try to make a home, over and over, each time ending with a stake to the heart or a bullet to the head. Of course these humans would still see the tragedy as the vampires’ existence and not their struggle, not their pain, not their deaths.
Clementine tried not to let himself drown in the thought.
In the peace of the old castle, with its sturdy brick walls as statements of eternity and survival, Clementine tried to imagine the period between the tragedies: the time when a vampire had claimed this small morsel of beauty as their own.
The castle’s twinkling dust motes would have floated with the same timeless, graceful suspension they as did now, catching in light that spilled from the dining hall’s high, stained glass windows. Three of the panes were visibly cracked, another two replaced by sheets of plain glass, but those that remained painted the center of the empty place with a brilliant rainbow that lured Clementine into its touch.
Clem had already seen too much sun for one evening, hiding in the back seat behind dark glasses and a low hood while his boyfriend sped them through the twisting mountain curves just in time to catch the final tour of the day. Still, he slid into the light, casting himself in patterns that had existed for hundreds of years. It danced across his pale fingers and shone through his golden hair in streams of color that sent a thrill through him, even as he felt the sun-poisoning ache in his bones. Had the vampires of this castle felt it too, been touched by this same sun? Been burned by it?
Justin’s hand covered his, shielding him with tanned skin and Filipino tribal ink and old scars. The man squeezed Clementine’s fingers gently, and Clem let himself be pulled back out of the direct light. This, he was sure no vampire had ever had at Beatitude Castle before: a human to love them, to dedicate everything to, to build a family with. It would have been hard enough for two queer human men, and outright impossible if one was a vampire.
Behind them, the tour guide’s voice grew more distant as the main group moved into the next room. “Some say the cycle of stability and tragedy is a curse shaped by the first vampires to overtake the place, and that it’s only a matter of time before that tragedy happens again… and the vampires return.”
If only they knew. But then, Clementine wasn’t exactly the threat most people thought of when they heard the word “vampire”. How could he be, when he spent more time nerding out over science, writing ridiculous amounts of Spock x Kirk fanfic, and abetting his boyfriend’s eccentric salt and pepper shaker collection than he did attacking humans in alleys? Though it certainly helped that the one human hehadattacked in an alley had been freely offering him blood ever since.
Justin stared after the tour group, his nose wrinkled. “Fuck them.”
Clementine checked that no stragglers were staring before wrapping his arm around his boyfriend’s shoulders. “You’d think that eventually they’d find a new villain to blame for every human mistake, wouldn’t you? Doesn’t the vampire tragedy spiel get boring after a while?”
“Right?” Justin grumbled. “You know what wouldn’t get boring, though? If I got to fuck up every person who bought into it.”
“All of them? Across the globe? That sounds incredibly exhausting, and I can’t imagine I’d get to see you very much. I’d have to find someone else to feed on.” Clementine teasingly caressed the length of his boyfriend’s neck. Even through the layers of skin, he could feel the beat of Justin’s heart in his veins. His fangs responded by slipping free, and with the sound of the tour group fading away behind them, he didn’t bother forcing the pair of sharp canines back into hiding. Any chance to exist with them unconcealed, he would happily take, even if these moments could only come when his back was turned to the rest of the world. The fact that the sight of the fangs often provoked his boyfriend into baring his neck in all sorts of taunting ways was a bonus. “But I suppose wedohave to take over this castle. It’s fate, after all.”
“Now that I can get behind.” Justin lifted his head, pressing a soft kiss to the edge of Clementine’s lips. “If we lived here, you could be the beautiful, strategic prince, and I’d be your gruff, loyal knight, forever kneeling at your feet.”
“No,” Clementine objected with a snort. “If I’m the prince, it’s only fair that I do the kneeling.” And with the speed and grace of his vampirism, he demonstrated the statement, holding Justin’s hand before him. “Besides, you’re the knight, you have a sword. You could take it and just so delicately…” He slid one of Justin’s fingers against his throat, feeling the pressure of it as he swallowed.
A knowing smirk spread across Justin’s face and he dragged his nail along the underside of Clem’s chin, tipping it slowly up. “What sin am I pardoning you for?”
“Loving you when you didn’t think you deserved it,” Clementine whispered.
The way Justin’s expression deepened, the happy and the sad bleeding together, made Clem want to tell him all over again how wonderful he was. How much he was worth this. Instead it was Justin who spoke, his concern sharp and chiding. “You’re shaking.”
So he was. And his bones were aching, just a bit. “We’re on vacation. I get to have a little sunlight if I want it,” Clem protested. That light would fade fast once it dipped below the hillside, but its final orange glow seemed to be shining all the brighter to overcompensate.
“You know, a quick drink would ease it faster. Weareon vacation, after all.” Justin’s smirk returned, and he dragged his fingers teasingly across his own neck, head tipping to one side to show off the curve of it, long and lean with his tattoos peeking out above the collar of his jean jacket.
Clementine snatched his hand with a grin. He led Justin into the smaller medieval kitchen off to the great hall’s side, but its windows still brought in swathes of the setting sun, so Clementine kept moving, toward the open doorway the tour guide had pointed out as the entrance to the basement. With each step they took into the darkness, the air grew muskier and the quiet overwhelming. Clem’s eyes adjusted to the low lighting by slipping into his monochromatic night vision.
Arms trembling with the sun-shakes, he leaned against the cold stone of the basement wall and pulled Justin close. As his boyfriend pressed against him, hips to hips and breath warm on the collar of Clem’s sweater, Clementine took a moment just to enjoy his presence, the flutter of his dark lashes and the bob of his throat, the solid width of his shoulders and lean length of his torso beneath, the way he held himself so agile and tense, even if half of that was born of his violent past and half from the back pain that never quite released him. How many vampires had been blessed with this privilege over the years? How many had managed to hold onto it once they found it? Clementine could not imagine anyone luckier than him, and part of him hated that. There were so many others who’d deserved their own Justin—some, according to the tour, who’d been killed in these very walls.
He was so very lucky indeed, and so very grateful.
“I love you,” Clementine whispered, like it was a secret and not a cord they’d wound between them, stronger and tighter with each passing month, a thing that was turningalwaysintoforever.
Justin smiled. His human vision could not quite connect with Clem’s gaze in the darkness, but it held a sharpness to it all the same. “Then show me.”
By god, Clementine would.
He possessed Justin’s mouth like he was that first vampire to storm these castle walls, taking hold of his one little piece of the world and suspending it in time for his own pleasure. Justin pushed back, pushed like the passing of eons and the breathless decay of the building around them. They could not change the past, perhaps, but they could brighten their own future, for a few minutes at least.
