Page 3 of The Blessing of Vampires
Clementine swallowed. They kept moving, but he glanced back at the little glasses twice before they made it to the next room.
The walls of the great hall rose tall and clean and in perfect repair, each slim window bearing a pane of stained glass with a series of floral and celestial designs far more elaborate than the ones above. Immaculate antiques furnished the space, and the long, brightly colored carpets covering the polished stone floor made Clementine want to pull off his shoes in respect. He shuddered down the instinct and moved toward one of the portraits that hung between the room’s four scenic tapestries.
A woman sat at its center, clothed in a gown of black velvet and deep emerald satin, her dark hair pinned elegantly up.
“That’s definitely Victorian,” Justin said, then made a sound. “Oh. Damn, do you see that?”
“Yeah.” Clementine felt something odd pulling in his gut, an ache behind his eyes, and suddenly he wasn’t sure how to breathe, at least not while staring at her, enthralled under the piercing of her dark gaze and her sharp smile. But he couldn’t look away either—couldn’t look away from the little pair of fangs that protruded over her canines. “She was a vampire.”
“They said that vampires lived in the castle from time to time…”
“But not like this,” Clementine finished for his boyfriend. “As vagabonds, not aristocrats. The tour claimed they hadkilledthe royals who lived here. Though perhaps they could have replaced them, or…”
Now it was Justin’s turn to finish his thought, the year-old trauma still not quite scarred over for Clementine. “Or turned them, maybe.”
But Clementine had been there—he’d been the wealthy, high-society human who woke up from an accident to find what civilization deemed his humanity stripped away from him. Holding onto his old life, hiding what he was, had been nearly impossible. The constant stress of it alone would be enough to break someone over time. He couldn’t imagine the woman in the portrait could have maintained her old status for long after turning.
“Look at this one,” Justin called from further down.
Clementine’s heart caught again at the next picture, this time not because there were vampires, but because they weren’tallvampires. The three fanged individuals posed casually with two humans, not counting the close-lipped child who clutched the now greyer and thinner—but still just as gorgeous—matriarch’s skirt. There was something else odd about the portrait too, and it took Clementine a moment to pull himself out of his existence in a predominantly queer-accepting community and his obsession with gay-majority fandoms to notice it: the way the two feminine people in the pictureheldeach other like a married couple. Behind them, one of the men had his arm draped affectionately over the shoulder of a vampire who didn’t conform to any of their fellows’ gendered styles, while the third vampire watched them like they were starlight.
Clementine swiped a finger under his eye before he quite realized what he was doing. Crying. He was crying, for these people he didn’t know, for their hidden lives that had been locked in perfect majesty in this haunting place beneath the ruins. Somehow, despite living in a world that did all it could to destroy them, their family had found peace.
Justin wrapped an arm around him, pressing a soft kiss to Clementine’s cheek.
Peace, for a little while at least. Clementine recalled the tour guide’s description of their tragic cycles, the desolation and reclaiming of the castle over the centuries. How long had therebeena family here? How often had the place been locked, suspended in time as it waited for caretakers who would never return?
In a way, it was almost more devastating than the decay above them. At least the ruins still saw love, feet passing through and voices bouncing off its walls. Here… here this place seemed liminal; a grave not for the peace of the living but the true mourning of the dead.
The lack of dust though… the neat arrangements…
Clementine’s skin crawled. He kept walking, his feet carrying him toward the open doors on the other end of the room.
As he moved into their archway, someone else stepped out. She could have been a ghost, with her skin nearly as pale as her white nightdress and her long platinum hair braided down her back, but the way she grabbed him was undeniably physical, fingers gripping into his sweater as she bared her teeth. Her fangs sliding down.
Clementine returned the posturing on instinct with a hiss, shoving her back forcefully enough that he heard something rip in his sweater. “Goddamn,” he muttered, feeling for a tear.
Then they were both just staring at each other.
“How did you get in here?” The other vampire demanded, her gaze bouncing between him and Justin.
Clementine held up his hands. “I’m so sorry, this is all an accident. My boyfriend”—he figured that was probably a safe term to use around someone who lived in an old building constructed by queers—“and I had just popped down to the basement so I could feed, and I activated some sort of trap door and—well, here we are!”
She narrowed her eyes. “You didn’t touch anything, did you?”
“Just two inches of the counter in the kitchen and the floor where we’ve stepped.”
“We’re gonna go with that as a no, then.” She sighed. “I’m Shaylee. And you are?”
“Clementine. And this is—”
“His human,” Justin cut in, angling his chin as he said it and running his hand across his neck in a way that might have seemed like ordinary twitchiness if he hadn’t paired it with those words and a smirk, and if their awkward disentangling earlier hadn’t left him with two little blood-smeared bruises. “Justin.”
Clementine wanted to murder him almost as much as he wanted to see how many more bruises he could give the man. He forced himself to turn his attention back to Shaylee. “You’re real, then, and this is real, and we’re definitely not caught in some bizarre time loop situation?”
“You took that damn tour where they talk about thecurse, didn’t you.” She sighed. “Right. Let me introduce myself better. I’m Dr. Shaylee Michaels. I’m an archeologist.Myhuman is an anthropologist. We’re here from the Vampiric Historical Society.”
“There’s a Vampiric Historical Society?” Science was Clem’s thing, not history, but he still felt a bubble of excitement at the thought of vampires conducting any kind of research, even if they were forced to do so in secret.
