Page 105 of My Roommate Is a Vampire

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 shallcontinueto 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 myarrival 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 thisdungeon 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 decoyWe Are Livelyhe’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 vantagepoint 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.”

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