As Halloween approaches, Castle and Beckett are called to a graveyard where the body of a young man sporting vampire fangs has been discovered with a wooden stake driven through his heart. Their investigation takes them deep into the heart of New York's underground vampire fetish community, where they learn that the motive for the victim's murder may be hiding within the pages of the graphic novel he was writing before his death.

Castle and Beckett investigate the hit-and-run death of a bike messenger, brutally murdered to prevent him from delivering a package, the contents of which could free a wrongly convicted man from prison. In a surprising twist, this tragic death is linked to a murder case that Captain Montgomery investigated a decade earlier. To solve the present murder, Castle and Beckett must dredge up the past by uncovering the secrets and scandals of a prominent New York family.