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?”
Reginald gestured to the photographs he’d brought with him, which he’d apparently taken a few hours ago from a vantage point of two hundred feet in the air. They were an aerial view of a nondescript suburban neighborhood. He’d drawn a big red circle over the house where he claimed Frederick was being held against his will.
“If my contacts in the western suburbs are to be trusted,” he said, jabbing his finger at the circled house, “then, yes.”
I couldn’t believe this. “And all because he wouldn’t agree to marry Esmeralda?”
“Alas, yes. The arranged marriage thing is a big deal among the older generations.” His expression became grave. “If you’re unlucky enough to still have parents kicking around the way Freddie is, defying them in these matters is as close to a death sentence as you can really get in our world.”
My mind reeled as I tried to make sense of this. How was any of it actually happening? This whole situation felt like a bad plotline cooked up by a Jane Austen aficionado in the seventh circle of hell.
“I just can’t wrap my head around the fact that vampire dungeons are real.”
“They were, for the most part, abolished among most civilized members of vampiric society shortly after the French Revolution.” He shook his head. “The Jamesons still do things the old-fashioned way, though. According to my contacts, when Frederick said he would not marry Esmeralda, they tossed him into it.”
“That seems a bad way to make someone fall in love with their daughter.”
He snorted. “Indeed.”
“But . . . Naperville? There are vampire dungeons in Naperville?” I thought back to the cookie-cutter suburb I’d visited once back in college when my roommate invited me home for Thanksgiving. How could a place like that have a vampire dungeon?
“You’d be surprised how many unassuming suburbs have vampire dungeons,” Reginald explained. “Here in Chicago, the Jamesons must have had to make do with the limited options at their disposal. Though honestly, hiding him out there is kind of perfect.” He gave me a sardonic smile. “Nobody expects a vampire dungeon in Naperville.”
He had a point there.
“You know,” he added, shooting a pointed look over his shoulder. “We should probably keep our voices down. The Jamesons have ears everywhere.”
My skin prickled. “Really?” I asked, sotto voce.
He shrugged. “Probably not, but I’ve always wanted to say something like that. Either way, I don’t think it’s a good idea if we’re overheard.”
He had a point there, too. Nothing good would come of Gossamer’s very human clientele overhearing this conversation.
“So that picture I saw on Instagram . . .” I trailed off, fidgeting with the rim of my We Are Pulchritudinous as I remembered the image of Frederick being helped into the back seat of a stretch limo by a gorgeous Esmeralda. “You’re saying that he didn’t go into that limo willingly.”