Page 2 of The Blessing of Vampires
Clem kissed his way down the side of Justin’s jaw with ruthless precision. He received a chorus of groans, Justin’s hands gripping into his hair, and when he buried his fangs in Justin’s neck, the sound his boyfriend made—hot and heady and breathless—was just as delicious as the blood that followed. As Clem fed, Justin rutted against him with the kind of intensity that would finish them both if he didn’t let up. It made Clementine bite harder, one hand gripping Justin’s ass as he fought for purchase on the wall with the other. Arms still trembling, he dug his fingers into a crack between the stones and held on like he was trying to meld himself into the place, to leave an etching of his lust and love for longer than their simple lifespans could last. Orgasms were a moment, but the breath of their moans and the depth of their yearning would linger here through the cycles, a contrast to the castle’s curse. Something alive to combat all the death.
Clementine’s lungs caught and he moaned into Justin’s bleeding neck, gripping the wall harder. The rock within gave way beneath his fingers. A grinding startled him. Then the wall disappeared.
Clementine had the instinct, at least, to retract his fangs from Justin’s neck as he fell backward. His feet slipped over a ledge and he tumbled through the darkness with a weak, whiny shriek. He hit the ground hard. A groan left him, in every way different from the one he’d been making above.
Justin shouted frantically at him. A phone light burst on, momentarily blinding Clementine as his boyfriend started down what had to be a ladder built along the side of—of whatever the hell this place was. A shaft? An old basement tunnel? It had to be two or three stories below the cellar. If not for his vampiric genes, that plunge would have left him far worse for the wear. As it was, he could already feel some gnarly bruises forming.
Clementine groaned again, but gave a gruff, “I’m okay,” as Justin squatted gingerly beside him, clearly trying not to antagonize his chronically aching back. He held one hand to his still-bleeding neck, and Clem forced himself to sit up, giving it a quick lick to close the wound before squinting through the receding pain and the lingering sun-shakes to stare up at the top of the shaft. The trap door—trapwall?—above them clunked shut.
“Fuck,” Justin cursed, then again, slower and softer as he lifted his light properly for the first time. “Fuck…”
“Yeah,” was the only word Clementine could find in response.
He could have sworn they hadn’t fallen through a door or a shaft, but through a portal, directly into the past. They stood once more in the castle’s kitchen, but the room was no longer bare. Pots and pans, elegant furnishings and simple decorations, all old but well-kept and organized to perfection. Light no longer streamed in through the windows, the glass darkened to a pitchy black with embedded designs of fruit and flowers and farm animals. The quiet that stretched through the space was a sound all of its own, claiming the hush of their breaths like a jealous lover.
Through the wide archway at the end of the room, he could just make out the great hall.
“There’s no service here,” Justin said.
“Probably because we’re underground.”
“Yeah. Probably.” But the way he said it, it was more like a prayer than an agreement. Clementine felt the weight of it in his chest. They had fallen down a shaft in a basement. They had to be underground. That was all there was to it. Butallhardly covered the room around them.
Slowly, Clementine stood, his aches and pains forgotten. Justin’s phone was just bright enough that his night vision refused to set in properly, so he drew out his own to add to the light. He took one reverent step, then another. Apprehensively, he trailed his fingers over the wood of a countertop, shuddering at the lack of dust.
“What do you think…” Justin started, but he didn’t seem able to finish the thought.
Magic wasn’t real—vampires weren’t supernatural, they were genes and hormones and a dash of science that their society didn’t quite understand yet, but they weren’t magic. This wasn’t magic either.
It couldn’t have been…
Clementine swallowed, the last of Justin’s blood still on his lips. “I think there’s only one way to know anything for certain, and that’s forward.”
Justin shone his phone back toward the shaft. “You don’t want to try the trap door again?”
“Do you?”
Clementine couldn’t see Justin’s smirk from behind his light, but he could hear it, sharp and brilliant. “Not a chance.”
“Then so long as I have my black knight here to protect me…” Clementine held out his hand.
Justin’s fingers slid between his, grip firm and warm. “Lead on, my prince.”
They moved cautiously through the kitchen, wondering at the beauty of the antiques, from the engraved silver utensils to the polished wood-burning stove to the jarred, pickled leeches on the top shelf, their bodies a dark sanguine color. After the first sweep of his fingers confirmed the lack of dust, it felt disrespectful to Clementine to touch anything, or perhaps outright dangerous, like the humans who ate the fairies’ food in legends and locked themselves into that realm for all eternity. This place, at least, was beautiful.
Beautiful, but eerie.
“These can’t all be from the castle’s founding,” Clementine mused. “They’re too new, relatively speaking. I’m not great at time periods but these are, what, Edwardian? Victorian?”
“Edwardian was right before the First World War. That was around the start of electric lighting.”
Clem lifted his brow.
Justin shrugged, like historical facts were his forte instead of his usual mixture of charity and punching people in the face. “I found a DIY channel that recreates early 20thcentury shit. It’s pretty fascinating, actually.”
Now that did sound like Justin. “Did they recreate any entire castles and then hide them beneath crumbling tourist attractions?”
Justin paused to stare at a set of tiny crystalline cups. Three of them were stained red inside. “Something tells me this wasn’t built for the mere chance at a viral video.”
