EIGHTEEN
Text messages between Stuart and Sullivan, the night guards of Naperville Dungeon
Hey Stuart
Hey man what’s up
Caught the Naperville Police Department sniffing around this morning
Well, fudge
Yeah
Not good
Did you tell the boss
Not yet
I’m about to
I tell you what, between our new prisoner, who’s done nothing since he got here last night but cry and write letters to some human girl, and the police dropping by, it’s been a hell of a week already
And it’s only Tuesday!
Ugh, I know
Should I ask Mark to go take care of the cops?
Actually scratch that
I haven’t eaten in a while
I’ll do it
Thanks
I owe you one
Yeah, yeah
Meanwhile I better get some ear plugs or else Count von Romeo in here is gonna drive me batty
I’d begun suspecting something was wrong when I woke up in the middle of the night and Frederick still hadn’t come home from the Ritz-Carlton.
Now, though, fifteen hours had passed, with still no word from him. I was nearly sick with worry, and even more convinced that agreeing to meet with his mother and the Jamesons had been a terrible idea.
I hated that if Frederick were in trouble there was literally nothing I—a human—could do about it. But it was unfortunately also the truth.
And right now, I had to focus on my interview with Harmony Academy—which, through a cruel twist of fate, had been set for that afternoon. I told myself that if I could just get through this interview I’d try and find a way to reach Reginald to see if he could help me figure out what had happened. Reginald might be a jerk, but I believed he did care for Frederick on some level and would help if there were something we could do.
More importantly—Reginald was the only other vampire I knew. I didn’t have a lot of options.
In the meantime, focusing on the fact that this afternoon I was interviewing for a position that could potentially change my life was a welcome distraction from how worried I was. And how powerless I felt.
I examined myself in my bedroom’s full-length mirror and frowned at my reflection. The navy-blue suit I wore was the only outfit I owned that counted as business attire. I didn’t know if Harmony Academy expected me to wear a suit today, and part of me hoped that they’d want applicants for this position to show up in paint-spattered overalls. But Sam told me it was better to show up overdressed to a job interview than underdressed.
Having minimal experience interviewing for jobs with benefits, and terrible job-searching instincts generally, I did what he said and put on the suit.
I still needed to fix my hair, though. It still hadn’t fully recovered from my haircutting experiment a few weeks ago, stuck up in odd places in the back, and was in general extremely annoying.
I might show up to this interview looking and feeling like a fraud, but if I could avoid also looking like a Muppet I probably should.
Muttering under my breath, I stalked out of the bedroom and made my way to the bathroom, where my hair stuff was. Just as my fingers closed around my hairbrush handle, I heard a loud, throat-clearing noise from a few feet behind me.
“Excuse me.”
I froze.
I recognized that voice. It was burned into my memory from the night I learned my roommate was a vampire.
“Reginald?”
What was he doing here? And how was he here? Hadn’t Frederick said vampires needed an express invitation to enter someone’s home?
But my surprise melted away when I saw his face. In the handful of times we’d interacted, I had seen Reginald look amused, insolent, and bored. But I had never seen him look worried before.
He looked worried now, though.
Very worried.
“I’m concerned about Freddie. He’s—” Reginald broke off, giving me a quick once-over before his nose wrinkled in disapproval. “What on earth is that outfit, Cassandra?”
“Cassie,” I corrected. “And never mind my outfit. Why are you worried about Freddie?” My heart rate quickened. “Has . . . has something happened to him?”
He crossed into the living room and sat down in one of the leather armchairs, not even waiting for me to invite him to make himself at home. “I suspect so, yes. I haven’t heard from him since he left to meet with his mother and the Jamesons.”
I tried to suppress my rising panic. He hadn’t heard from him either, then. “And you’d expected to hear from him by now?”
“Definitely.” Reggie hesitated. “We kind of hate each other—”
“I’d gathered as much.”
“—but we’re also really close.”
I took in the worry lines creasing Reginald’s otherwise ageless brow. The rigidity of his shoulders. His clenched jaw. “I’d guessed that, too.”
“I don’t want to assume the worst,” he continued. “But I think it’s time we consider that they might have done something to him.”
So my worries hadn’t been irrational, then. “You really think so?”
“Mrs. Fitzwilliam is a force to be reckoned with. To say nothing of what Esmeralda and her family are capable of.” He paused again. “Esmeralda’s actually a total bitch, if you ask me.”
Normally, I hated it when men used the word bitch to describe women. In this case, though, it felt oddly vindicating.
“She is?”
“I don’t know her well,” he conceded. “Let’s just say the impression she made on me in Paris in the 1820s wasn’t a good one. I’m definitely glad Frederick’s the one she’s decided to marry and not me.”
Every interaction I had with Reginald made it that much clearer to me why Frederick found him so annoying.
I glared at him. “You’re glad she wants to marry him, are you?”
Reginald shrugged. “No offense, of course. Look her up if you like,” he added. “She’s got much more of an internet presence than most vampires do. Her social media accounts give a pretty good understanding of who she is as a person.” He paused, then added, “She’s pretty darn easy on the eyes as well, if you know what I mean.”
I squeezed my eyes shut tight. I had to finish getting ready, and then I had to go humiliate myself in front of a hiring committee that would probably never give me a job. I didn’t care if Reggie stuck around for a while, but I didn’t have time to waste right now thinking about how attractive Esmeralda Jameson might be.
“I need to go.” I gestured to my suit. “I have an interview in two hours, and it’s far from here.”
Reggie stood up. “Want me to fly you there?”
“What?”
“I said,” he cleared his throat, enunciating his syllables very carefully. “Do . . . you . . . want . . . me . . . to . . . fly . . . you . . . there?”
I rolled my eyes. “I heard you. I just . . . wasn’t expecting the offer.” I paused and added, “So it’s true, then? Some of you can fly?”
Smirking at me, Reginald—without warning—started to float off the ground. He rose higher, and higher, until the top of his head nearly brushed the living room’s high ceiling. All at once, it felt like the room was spinning. It had been one thing for Frederick to tell me some vampires could fly. It was entirely another to actually see someone defy the laws of gravity like this.
“I try not to do this in front of Freddie very often, since his skills are so lame.”
I bristled. “His skills are not lame. His pineapples are delicious, I will have you know.”
He ignored my comment and began to do slow, leisurely laps around the room, stopping only to run his finger across the top of the bookshelf. To check for dust, maybe. He was clearly showing off at this point, but I couldn’t even be mad at it. It was legitimately impressive, watching him fly.
“You’re wrong, Cassandra. His skills are actually deeply, extremely lame insofar as these things go. But like I said, I’m not such an asshole that I would rub my cooler abilities in his face. At least, not more than once or twice a week.”
“How . . .” I watched, still awed in spite of myself, as Reginald slowly lowered himself back down to the floor. “How did you do that?”
Reginald shrugged. “I haven’t the foggiest. How do vampires do anything? It’s magic, I guess.”
“Magic,” I repeated, feeling stupid and slow.
“Magic,” he confirmed. “So. Want me to fly you to wherever it is you’re going?”
I considered the offer as much as my addled brain would allow and recognized that Reginald was being sincere in offering it. But I dismissed it as being a bad idea. I was already too distracted and worried by Frederick’s disappearance to be adequately prepared for this interview. If I flew up to Evanston with Reginald—without an airplane, no less—that would likely shatter whatever remained of my focus into thousands of little pieces.
Also, it was daytime. Flying might be cool and all, but people would be able to see us in the air. And what would they think when they did?
“I appreciate the offer,” I said, surprised to realize I meant it. “But I think I’ll just take the El.”
He raised an eyebrow. “You sure?”
“Very.”
Reginald sighed. “Fair enough.” He inclined his head towards me and made his way to the door. “If you do hear from Freddie, could you let him know his old pal is worried? I’m going to try and do some reconnaissance in the meantime to figure out what’s going on.”
I couldn’t imagine what he meant by do some reconnaissance. Probably better that way. “I will,” I said. “I promise. And if you learn anything, could you let me know?”
Reginald regarded me, as though trying to make up his mind about something. Eventually, he seemed to come to a decision and smiled at me.
“I will,” he said.
The pictures on Harmony Academy’s website didn’t do the campus justice. It was big and beautiful, located on several wooded acres of real estate just a mile west of Lake Michigan. There was a small, half-frozen pond in the center of campus, with a paved path around it that suggested people liked walking the grounds here when the weather wasn’t quite this November-y.
I decided to wear my only pair of heels for this interview. Fortunately, they mostly matched my suit if you squinted and the light wasn’t too good. But I regretted this decision the second I walked under the archway that led into the administration building. They clicked loudly against the marble tile floor as I made my way towards the Head of School’s office for my eleven o’clock interview, echoing loudly inside the high-vaulted atrium.
The only other noise that registered was the beating of my heart, pounding in my ears like a drum. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d been this nervous. I thought back to my own serviceable, but generic, high school. There had been no marble entryways or art teachers who focused on found art back at Carbonway High.
I was as convinced as ever that any second now someone would appear in front of me and tell me they’d made a mistake inviting me here.
“Good morning.” The receptionist was about my mother’s age, dressed in a muted green dress that made me think of a spring day in the country. The desk she worked behind was almost as large as the bedroom in my last apartment. “You must be Cassie Greenberg.”
I gripped my purse a little tighter, a bead of sweat forming at the back of my neck. “Yes.”
She motioned to a pair of plush chairs at one end of the room. “Have a seat while I see if they’re ready for you. Can I get you something to drink? Coffee? Water?”
“Water, please.” I was already nervous. Adding caffeine to the mix would be disastrous. “Thank you.”
Beside the chairs was a stack of glossy-looking brochures with smiling students in matching green uniforms on the cover. As I waited for the receptionist to return, I leafed through one of them, trying to absorb some of what I was seeing and willing my hands to stop shaking.
I pulled out my phone and reread the texts Sam had sent me this morning.
Good luck!!
You’ve got this.
He’d spent an hour with me last night going over possible interview questions and how I might answer them. He’d told me I hit every answer out of the park and that I was as prepared for this interview as I’d ever be. I only wished I could believe him.
“They’re ready for you, Miss Greenberg.” I looked up at the receptionist, who handed me a tall glass of water. “Will you follow me?”
I took the glass from her, gripping my purse strap with my free hand so hard my knuckles hurt.
The room the receptionist brought me to was small and much more casually decorated than anything I’d seen so far this morning. There was nothing on any of the walls other than a framed oil painting of a vase of sunflowers and a large window overlooking the grassy meadow behind the school.
“Have a seat.” A woman I recognized from my internet research as Cressida Marks, Head of School, sat smiling at one end of a small, rectangular table. Two other people I didn’t recognize were sitting beside her. One of them looked about my age, with flaming pink hair.
For reasons I couldn’t quite put into words, seeing that pink hair in a place that otherwise seemed so conventional and austere put me a little more at ease.
I sat in the chair across from them and placed my glass of water on the table.
I let out a slow breath.
I could do this.
“Welcome, Cassie,” the head of school said. And then, turning to the other people at the table, “Let’s start by introducing ourselves.”
“I’m Jeff Castor,” said the guy to Cressida’s left. He looked about fifty and had on a plaid bow tie with a rumpled white button-down. The absentminded professor vibes he gave off were immaculate. “I’m the vice principal for Harmony’s Upper School.”
“And I’m Bethany Powers,” said the pink-haired woman. “I’m the head of the arts program for the Lower and Upper Schools.”
“It’s great to meet you,” I said.
“You as well,” Bethany said. “So. Tell us a little about why you want to work as an art teacher.” She was riffling through a file full of printouts of the pictures I’d sent with my application. My beach landscapes from Saugatuck. The piece I submitted to the River North Gallery art exhibition. “It’s clear from your portfolio that you have a very specific vision, and that you are committed to a career in the arts. Why kids, though? That’s the piece we’re missing.”
It was a tough question, but a fair one. My résumé was long, but my experience with kids was mostly limited to art nights in the library. If I’d been asked to interview a new art teacher, and someone walked in the door with my credentials, I’d ask the exact same thing.
Fortunately, I was ready for this.
“I work at a library right now,” I began. “On Tuesday nights we have an art night, where parents drop off their kids and we spend two hours making things with them.” I paused, thinking back on the last art event we’d hosted. “I’ve found it incredibly rewarding to help kids who might not otherwise have exposure to artistic forms of expression realize their visions through paint and modeling clay.”
Bethany and Jeff each jotted down a few notes. Cressida Marks leaned forward a little over the table, hands clasped together in front of her. “Why haven’t you thought of teaching art before?”
I considered that. When I’d practiced interview questions with Sam last night, we’d agreed this one would likely come up. The answer we agreed I’d give, though—that I’d just been waiting for the right teaching opportunity to come along, that Harmony Academy was the first school I thought might be a good fit—didn’t feel right, now that I was here.
For one thing, it was a lie. I’d applied to several teaching positions over the past few years and was rejected by each of them.
For another, sitting there in that sparsely furnished conference room, with three people who might be my coworkers soon—if all went well—a better answer finally came to me.
“I didn’t think any school would have me.”
That caused Bethany to look up from her notepad.
“Why is that?” she asked.
We were off the script Sam and I had rehearsed, but that didn’t matter. I knew the answer all the same.
“My art isn’t conventional.” I gestured to the copy of my portfolio in the center of the conference room table. “I don’t paint pretty pictures or make coffee mugs on the potter’s wheel that people can buy for their sisters at Christmas. I take trash, ephemera—things other people throw away—and turn them into something beautiful.” I shook my head. “I didn’t think my vision fit in with the kinds of things kids were taught in art classes when I was in school.”
“But you decided to go for it with us,” Cressida said. “What made you change your mind?”
I pondered that a moment. What did make me change my mind?
Suddenly, I knew.
Frederick, in our living room, telling me he could see that I brought a real, unique vision to my work. The awe in his voice as he said the words. The look in his eyes when he told me that anyone who refused to hire me was a fool.
“I realized that I’m good, actually.” I smiled and sat up a little straighter in my chair. “And that Harmony would be lucky to have me.”
All three of them nodded a little. The woman with the pink hair jotted down a few notes. As they continued to ask me questions about my career goals and my résumé, I started worrying whether that answer had been what they were looking for. But at least it was the truth.
And either way, there was no taking it back now.
“Do you have any questions for us?” Jeff asked, closing the folder he’d been consulting throughout the interview. He had a warm, inviting voice that put me at ease despite my roiling nerves.
I thought over everything Sam and I had talked about, trying to filter it all through the ground this interview had already covered.
“I do,” I said. “I’d like to hear more about what I’ll be teaching here. What can you tell me about the kinds of arts programming you have here at Harmony, and where my classes would fit into that?”
“I can speak to that.” Bethany set down my portfolio and folded her hands neatly in front of her on the table. “Here at Harmony we take nurturing students’ artistic expression very seriously. From kindergarten through eighth grade students are exposed to visual, musical, or literary arts every day. By the time students are in the Upper School—or high school, as it’s known in the public schools—students select one of four different art tracks that they pursue all four years.”
“For some students, the artistic track they pursue may be music,” Jeff clarified. “For others, it may be theater, or creative writing. Upper School students who select the fourth track—visual arts—would be the ones in your classes.”
“Harmony Academy is proud of all four of its artistic expression tracks,” Cressida Marks said, glancing at her colleagues. They nodded. “That said, our visual arts track has traditionally had the least adventurous and diverse offerings.”
I wasn’t sure what she meant by that. “Least adventurous and diverse? How do you mean?”
“Historically, a lot of our visual arts classes have covered the sorts of things you said earlier that you don’t do,” Bethany said, glancing at her colleagues. “Painting watercolor still lifes. Art history classes covering the famous paintings you’d find in the Art Institute of Chicago or the Louvre. Lessons on the pottery wheel. And while any Upper School visual arts program worth its salt must cover these things, we believe we do our students a disservice if we stop there.”
“And that,” Cressida said, “is why we wanted to interview you for this position. We are looking for art teachers who think about art in innovative ways and are excited about sharing these innovations with our Upper School kids.”
All three of them looked at me, as though gauging my response to what they’d just said. My mind was going a mile a minute trying to process everything.
What they were describing sounded . . .
Well. It sounded perfect. Like, too-good-to-be-true perfect.
“That sounds incredible.” I didn’t know if I should be playing my genuine excitement closer to the chest than this, but I couldn’t help it.
Cressida smiled. “We’re glad you think so.”
“Let’s go on a tour of the Upper School,” Jeff suggested. “We can take you to the art studios and show you where you’d be teaching if you join us in the fall.”
That had to be a good sign.
I grinned at them, unable to help myself. “That sounds great to me.”
My excitement over how well my interview went was short-lived.
When I got back home and there was still no sign of Frederick, all my worry from earlier in the day came rushing back. I checked my phone and saw I had no messages from Reginald, either, which only heightened my anxiety.
True crime documentaries weren’t my favorite flavor of sketchy television, but I knew enough about kidnapping and murder cases to know that the longer you went without news, the greater the chances that the news you ultimately got wouldn’t be good.
On a whim that I recognized as a terrible idea even as it occurred to me, I took out my laptop and Googled Esmeralda Jameson. If she had as much of an internet presence as Reginald had implied, maybe looking her up would give me some clues.
Reginald hadn’t even told me the half of it. Google brought up so many search results for Esmeralda Jameson there was no possible way of looking through them all absent a serious obsession with her I was uninterested in developing.
The top search result was a link to her Instagram. That seemed like as good a place to start as any.
Immediately after clicking, the very-bad-idea-ness of this plan came crashing down on me like a Doberman on a plate of hamburgers. I’d been prepared for Esmeralda to be beautiful and flawless, in the same way sort-of-but-not-quite-ex-girlfriends of hot guys usually tended to be. But nothing could have prepared me for the pictures I was looking at now.
I didn’t know if vampires ever worked as supermodels. If they did, Esmeralda Jameson would have been really good at her job. She was easily six feet tall, with legs for days and a figure that made me question my own heretofore straight sexuality. Her latest picture showed her in a bikini that was notable for what it didn’t cover, reclining on a lounge chair beneath a beach umbrella that kept her completely in the shade. According to the caption, it had been taken somewhere on Maui. Her long, dark hair was artfully arranged, covering her bare, olive-toned shoulders and half of her angular face.
I clicked through the rest of her Instagram. There were pictures of Esmeralda being stunning in Switzerland in a ski outfit. Pictures of her prettily examining a flower in one of the largest gardens I had ever seen.
Here I am in Costa Rica, swimming with turtles.
It is so beautiful and peaceful here in the Andes.
My garden at home needs tending. The flowers here are beautiful, but I cannot wait to be back home again among my peonies.
There were no funny personal stories or witty hashtags. Nothing to really give me a sense of what she was like as a person. Esmeralda had over one hundred thousand followers anyway—probably people who were as captivated by her beauty as I was.
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.