My Roommate Is a Vampire(84)

And then, I saw a post that nearly stopped my heart.

Here I am with Frederick, my fiancé. Isn’t he handsome?

It was a grainy picture, taken from a distance and late at night. Esmeralda stood beside a black stretch limousine as she helped Frederick into the back seat. If it hadn’t been for the caption, it would have been difficult to make out his features enough to realize it was him. But now that I was really looking, there was no question that it was, in fact, the same Frederick I lived with—and had started falling in love with. The angle of his jaw, his dark hair, the way he tilted his face away from the streetlights . . .

It was, beyond a shadow of a doubt, him.

The post was made at ten o’clock the previous night.

I closed my eyes and slammed my laptop shut. I could all but feel my heart breaking.

It was possible Reginald was right and something had happened to him, of course. But those pictures didn’t lie. Esmeralda was everything Cassie Greenberg would never be. Tall, beautiful, self-possessed—and immortal.

He’d told me that he was into me. He’d acted like it, too. But what if meeting up with Esmeralda had reminded him of all he’d be missing if he stayed with a human like me? Surely someone like her—someone who wouldn’t shrivel up and age and eventually die—had to be more appealing than a semi-employed artist with few skills, and with a few more decades left in her at most.

But then a moment later, my phone pinged with new texts from an unknown number.

    Cassandra. It’s Reginald.

Frederick is in BIG trouble.

He needs our help.

Meet me at Gossamer’s in an hour and I’ll tell you everything.





NINETEEN




    Letter from Mr. Frederick J. Fitzwilliam to Cassie Greenberg, dated November 17, confiscated and unsent

My dearest Cassie,

It has been nearly twenty-four hours since I last saw you. In that time, I have written you three letters—though, if what the guard to my cell just told me is true, none of them have made it out of this dungeon. I shall continue to write you every day I remain imprisoned, however—both because it helps ground me in the here and now, in a place where time has no meaning and one hour bleeds into the next, and because who knows? Maybe eventually the courier will take pity on me and ferret at least one of my letters out of this place before it is noticed by my captors.

To make a long story short: the Jamesons have not taken my refusal of their daughter well. My mother must have warned them of my intentions, because upon my arrival at the Ritz-Carlton a pair of incredibly strong and scary-looking vampires were waiting for me. I tried repeatedly to tell them that I had no reason to believe Esmeralda was anything but a perfectly lovely woman—that the issue was with me, not her—but they didn’t seem terribly interested in talking.

And now I sit, imprisoned in a dungeon in Naperville, Illinois, of all places. Every few hours one of my guards asks me if I have relented and if I will agree to marry Miss Jameson. Each time I tell them that my answer has not changed.

As you and I have discussed, I know what my life would be were I to marry Miss Jameson. It is a life I actively rejected when I came to Chicago all those years ago. My meeting you only furthers my resolve not to give in to my captors’ wishes. I remain hopeful that if I see Miss Jameson again I may speak with her about the situation and convince her to come to an understanding. She was unwilling to talk last night—but then, she’d also been under the watchful eyes of her parents.

That said, all things considered I have been treated better than I expected. They do require me to eat the way those of our kind typically do (a nasty business which I try and dispense with as painlessly as possible for all involved)—but at least they are feeding me. I also have a relatively comfortable bed, as well as a few books and recordings of American situation comedies from the 1980s. I do not like those nearly as well as the programs we have watched together (several of them seem to involve a talking car, for example, a concept so ridiculous as to defy belief). But as far as I can tell this dungeon has no WiFi, so my entertainment options are very limited.

I miss you more than I can adequately express in a letter. I hope that I am somehow able to tell you this in person very soon.

Yours,

Frederick




I stared at Reginald, struggling to process what he was telling me.

“You have to be joking,” I said.

Reginald shook his head. “If I were joking, I’d have said, ‘A pirate walks into a bar with a steering wheel on the front of his pants. The bartender says, Sir, are you aware you have a steering wheel on the front of your pants? And the pirate says, Aye, and it’s driving me nuts.’?”

The room spun. My head spun. This couldn’t be happening.

“I’m sorry, but . . . what?”

“Never mind,” Reginald said. He picked up the decoy We Are Lively he’d ordered from Gossamer’s barista and pretended to sip from it before setting it back down again. “I just mean that, no, I’m not joking.”

His eyes betrayed no humor. For once, he was being serious. Deadly serious.

My blood went cold with fear.

“So, they’ve really kidnapped him?”

He nodded.

“And they’re holding him inside a dungeon in . . . Naperville?”