Page 60 of Of Faith and Fangs

“He did.” Desiderius’s burned lips attempted a smile. “He belonged to a small faction within the Church that recognized our kind not as demons, but as souls trapped between life and death. A kind of embodied purgatory, if you will. Not a place where you’re meant to complete your punishment, but an opportunity to experience profound purification.”

“Profound, perhaps.” I chuckled. “And quite painful.”

“As it was for our Lord,” Desiderius added. “Father Neuhauser invited me to the church—not to destroy me, but to offer me a path toward communion.”

Father O’Malley nodded. “The Order of the Morning Dawn insists along with many other believers who are unaffiliated with the Order that all supernatural beings are demonic in origin and thus beyond salvation. But Father Neuhauser and those like him maintained that vampires retained their human souls, even if their souls were separated from their flesh for a time. Their souls could be recovered and healed. There may be a corruption that warped our nature, but we are not irredeemable.”

“My first attempt to take communion was...” Desiderius paused, searching for words. “Excruciating. The pain of crossing the threshold was nothing compared to what I felt when the host touched my lips. It burned like the sun itself had been placed on my tongue.”

“But you endured it.”

“Not at first,” Desiderius admitted. “I fled, cursing Neuhauser for his cruelty. But something called me back, week after week. The pain lessened gradually, though it never disappeared entirely. And something else happened—something unexpected. The body and blood of Christ became my nourishment when human blood could not satisfy. Today, I’m free from the consumption of common human blood entirely. I live solely on the Eucharist. It’s still human blood, but it’s pure—the body and blood born of the Virgin Mary, inhabited by the Son of God.”

Rebecca made a small, disbelieving sound. “You mean you stopped feeding on humans completely?”

“Not immediately,” Desiderius said. “The hunger remains—it always remains. But it became manageable. And the few times I fell back into those habits, it never satisfied. It wasn’t like I’d remembered it. So, I returned to confession and the Eucharist. It’s been a decade since I last consumed common human blood.”

Father O’Malley leaned forward, his eyes intense. “This is what the Order refuses to understand—that redemption is a process, not an event. When your view of salvation boils down to a single moment, a prayer, or stepping forward, and that’s that, it’s hard for them to imagine those who are so corrupted by evil as a vampire could possibly be saved. What the Order tells you, it’s all a farce. They don’t even believe it. Still, they’re content to use you—and they don’t believe they can lose their own salvation, so they justify that enabling the proliferation of one evil to destroy greater evil is justified. However, there’s not a sinner who has ever been born who doesn’t have a path back to grace, vampires included. It’s just for some, the path takes longer to traverse. It’s more arduous and painful. But for those who persevere, the reward is infinitely greater than the worst you’ll endure on the way.”

Desiderius nodded. “Actual demons cannot be saved, but vampires can. A true demon feels no pain in God’s presence—only hatred. It’s indifferent to holiness because it has no capacity to recognize it. But we—“ he gestured to include all of us, ”—we feel the burn because somewhere inside, we remember what it was to be human, and it’s in our makeup, in our design to desire communion with the divine.”

Ruth looked up, hope flickering across her blood-smeared face. “So the pain will lessen? As it did for you?”

Desiderius smiled at her kindly. “With time. With faith. With persistent effort to resist the darker urges of your condition.”

Father O’Malley rose, moving to a small chest in the corner of the chamber. From it, he withdrew a worn leather volume. “Humanity itself has thrived on bloodshed,” he said, his voice taking on a prophetic quality. “Wars, conquests, revolutions—all justified in the name of progress, of necessity. We tell ourselves these are aberrations, but perhaps they reveal something fundamental about our nature.”

He opened the book—a journal, I realized, filled with handwritten notes and newspaper clippings. “Signs and portents suggest the coming century may be the bloodiest yet. New weapons, new hatreds, new justifications for old sins. Mankind’s true bloodlust will be exposed for all to see.”

Rebecca shivered. “What does that mean for us?”

Father O’Malley’s gaze swept over us, lingering on me and Desiderius. “It means you have a purpose beyond mere survival. When that day arrives—when humans reveal themselves capable of horrors that rival anything your kind has done—you must stand as witnesses to a truth they have forgotten.”

“What truth?” I asked.

“That it is never too late to return to the Lord,” Father O’Malley said simply. “That His bloodied hands await all who seek redemption.”

Desiderius bowed his head, the gesture both reverent and aristocratic. “You speak as Neuhauser did, before the end.”

“Before what end?” I asked.

“Before the Order found him,” Desiderius said, his voice hollow with old grief. “Before they burned him for heresy, for daring to suggest that creatures like me might find salvation.”

“I nearly received a similar sentence,” Father O’Malley added. “But those of us who are killed for grace, who earn a martyr’s death, are not cursed. We’re blessed to die for the One who died for all. I suppose that particular blessing will elude me, at least for now.”

“I’m grateful as well,” Desiderius added. “I couldn’t bear the thought of enduring such a loss a second time.”

“Is that why you infiltrated them?” I finally asked. “The Order? To avenge him?”

Desiderius looked at me with eyes that had witnessed centuries of human folly. “Partly. But also to understand them—to learn how such hatred could persist across generations, how faith could become so twisted. I hoped to change their minds, to show them that as a vampire, I wasn’t evil. That maybe they’d see the truth of our potential redemption in me. Instead, they saw in me only an opportunity—to kill, to hate, to destroy.”

Father O’Malley placed a hand on Desiderius’s shoulder—a priest offering comfort to a creature that his own Church officially denied could be saved. “And now you’ve found another path.”

“With Alice,” Desiderius said, turning to me. “When I saw you in the church, unaffected by the consecrated ground, I knew you were like me. That somewhere in your transformation, grace had worked a miracle.”

I shook my head, uncomfortable with the weight of his regard. “I’m nothing special. Just a preacher’s daughter got bit.”

“No,” Father O’Malley said firmly. “You’re a soul in progress, just like all of us. And now, perhaps, you’re ready to take the next step toward reclaiming the humanity your condition has obscured but not destroyed.”

---