Page 4 of The Blessing of Vampires

Clementine thought he caught the tiniest grimace from Shaylee. “There’s five of us, not including my partner. We don’t have the resources or the personnel that human groups do, but we’re doing what we can to locate and preserve anything with historic vampiric significance, even if it’s grueling and frustrating and finds like this take us years to fully catalogue and restore.” She glared at him.

Clementine laughed, soft and low and breathless. “That you’re saving our history—finding the pieces of us that have been forced into the cracks and making sure that someone still remembers—that’sincredible. God, this place alone is! Seeing this, knowing who first built it, lived in it? It proves—they prove—” He waved back toward the portraits, but he couldn’t finish through the lump in his throat.

Justin saved him. “They prove that people like us—people like you—” Gently, he turned Clementine’s head and kissed him in such a way that his lower lip nicked on Clem’s fangs. Clementine gave an instinctive suck, a flash of Justin’s bittersweet blood rewarding him before his saliva closed the wound again. Justin pulled back with a smile. “They prove that we have been living brave and beautiful lives for a long time. And if they can do it, so can we.”

“So can we,” Clementine agreed.

Shaylee made a little softhuhnoise, and the very edge of one of her lips cooked up. “They do indeed.” Her gaze drifting to the dark chamber behind them. “If you left a car in the castle lot, you should probably return before they close the gates, but while we’re here…”

She reached for a little knob built into the wall, and when she hit it, the chamber lit up, not from lamps or bulbs, but straight through the windows, as though the darkness of the underground had been replaced with a thousand fairy lights. It gave a life to the place that hadn’t been there under Justin’s simple phone light, turning its colors lush and its shadows joyous.

“They were originally gas-fueled,” Shaylee explained, “but we installed an electric alternative that still preserves the original.”

“It’s gorgeous.” Clementine breathed out, and it felt like he had been holding the air inside himself since they’d first fallen, reluctant to let it mingle with a place as old and foreign as this. But this fortress was not so foreign after all. With the lights shining through the stained glass and the portraits smiling down on them, it seemed to welcome them in, no longer invaders but lovers. Lovers, and family—one spread across genes and oceans and eras. “If the above-ground castle went through cycles, as the tour claimed, were they safe here?”

“It wasn’t all great for them, but from what we’ve gathered, the families who lived here—a mix of blood relatives and those who’d been adopted into the fold—would set up in the above castle during the years when suspicion and hatred were lowest, building their stores through their surrounding farmland and what trade they could, then move down here more permanently when they no longer felt safe,” Shaylee explained. “Someone still had to come and go during those times, and it wasn’t a perfect system, but they got to be themselves at Beatitude.” She gave them a knowing smirk as she added, “In more ways than one. In the end, eleven generations maintained this property before the family shrunk too small to keep it up. The group you were looking at were the last. When the family lost their final vampiric member, the remaining humans—the young Genevieve and her elderly father—finally decided the upkeep was too great, and they locked the place up for good.”

“But that wasn’t really the end, was it?” Clementine asked. “There’s you now, and your partner.”

“I guess so.” Shaylee gave one final, admiring look around the room, and Clementine knew it was true—she loved this place as much as the vampires of old. It would be safe in her hands. “Someday we hope we can share it with the rest of the world. Prove just what incredible lives these vampires had, despite society trying to tear it away at every turn.” She shut the lights back off. “Until then, they can rest in peace.”

Rest. Peace.

It felt like a fitting interlude for a castle called Beatitude—not a tragedy, but a momentary lull before the full return of life and love the place deserved. And as Shaylee led them to the surface, Clementine’s hand clutched tightly in Justin’s and his heart full and warm like nothing else this vacation could have given him, he delighted in just how wrong their tour guide had been.

This castle wasn’t cursed with vampires, but blessed with them. And that blessing would keep coming back around, time and time again. Because vampires like them weren’t going anywhere; they would keep carving space and joy from their world in whatever form they had to, until the blessing cycled back around again.