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?”
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.”
“He couldn’t have.” Reginald’s expression turned even more serious. “That man is head over fangs for you. The past few weeks have been a nightmare for me, personally, with how often I’ve had to listen to that goofball wax poetic about your literally everything. It’s been embarrassing for both of us.” He shook his head. “I have not seen the picture you are talking about, but he would never have willingly gone anywhere with Esmeralda. Especially now that he has you.”
My heart soared at the confirmation that Frederick had feelings for me, even as my stomach plummeted at the thought of him being in danger.
“So what do we do?”
“We have to get him out of there. If we don’t . . .” Reginald shook his head and looked over his shoulder again. “He’ll be shipped back to New York and married to a woman he doesn’t love before next week.”
“Can they do that?” I asked, horrified. “Would a wedding against someone’s will even be legal?”
He snorted. “We don’t do things the way humans do them, Cassandra.”
That had to be the understatement of the century. My fight-or-flight instincts were kicking in, the urge to go out to Naperville right that second and demand they let Frederick go nearly overpowering me. But I still had enough common sense to know that barging into a house full of angry vampires would be a seriously terrible idea.
And then, all at once, the beginnings of a plan came to me.
“I have one idea on what we could do to get him out,” I said. “You may not like it.”
Reginald stared at me. “That sounds ominous.”
“It might be,” I conceded. “Or it might just be legitimately ridiculous.”
“Let’s hear it.”
I spun my mug of coffee around and around, just for something to do with my hands. Some of its contents sloshed onto the table, but I was too keyed up to care about that. I’d clean it up later so whoever was in charge of closing wouldn’t have to.
“How familiar is vampire society with TikTok?”
From: Cassie Greenberg [[email protected]]
To: Edwina D. Fitzwilliam [[email protected]]
Subject: My terms
Dear Mrs. Fitzwilliam,
I will not beat around the bush with you. You have kidnapped someone who means a lot to me. Specifically: your son. I insist you and the Jamesons release him immediately from the Naperville Dungeon. If you do NOT let him go within twenty-four hours, I will be forced to go on TikTok and tell the entire world that vampires are real!!
I look forward to your immediate response.
Cassie Greenberg
I reread my email to Frederick’s mother, trying to work up the nerve to hit send.
“Your plan isn’t ridiculous,” Reginald said. “It’s brilliant.”
“You think so?”
“I do.”
“Will it work?”
Reginald hesitated. “Maybe.” He stood behind me, leaning over my chair as he read the email I’d just drafted. Around us, Gossamer’s patrons sipped their coffee and ate their muffins, hopefully oblivious to the fact that Reginald and I were plotting a vampire rescue in the western suburbs. “Aside from Esmeralda, who just uses Instagram to post pictures as far as I can tell, the social media phenomenon has passed most vampires by. A lot of them are centuries old, after all. They don’t pay much attention to current events. If they’ve even heard of social media, it’s likely just that it’s a tool today’s humans use to spread information.”
This tracked with everything I knew about Frederick’s Luddite ways. But the idea that his captors might find my threat convincing was still hard to believe.
Especially since I barely knew how to navigate TikTok myself.
“I get that Mrs. Fitzwilliam and the Jamesons don’t want the general human public to know that vampires are real—”
“They don’t,” Reginald said, bluntly. “None of us do.”
“Okay,” I said. “My concern is what happens if they call my bluff. I have seven followers on TikTok. I use it to watch cat videos. Even if I knew how to post something like this to TikTok—which I only barely do—there’s a roughly zero percent chance anyone would see it.”
“If they call your bluff, we’ll come up with a Plan B,” he said. “But I think if all we do is simply film you making a Vampires are real! announcement and send it with the email, it should be enough.”
“I wish I believed that.”
Reginald sat back in his chair and scratched his chin, pondering. “It isn’t as though Edwina or the Jamesons will go on TikTok to check whether you’ve followed through.” He regarded me before adding, “And to be honest, Frederick wouldn’t actually want something like that on the internet anyway. Neither would I.”
I swallowed down the fear that rose at the thought that this plan might endanger Frederick even as I was attempting to save him.
“Okay,” I said, closing my laptop without hitting send on the email. “Where should we film this?”
“Freddie’s apartment,” Reginald said immediately. “His mom will recognize the setting, and your being there even when he’s gone will send a strong message of Back off, this man is mine.” He tilted his head as he regarded me. “Assuming, of course, that that’s the message you want to send.”
He had a knowing look on his face, and I felt myself flush under his gaze. Because it wasn’t just that I didn’t want Frederick to be coerced into marrying someone he did not love.
It was more than that.
I wanted Frederick to be safe.
But I also wanted him for me.
I needed his captors to understand that.
“That is the message I want to send,” I confirmed. “Let’s go back to the apartment and film this thing.”
Reginald smiled his agreement. Though it’s possible he was smirking at me instead.
“This isn’t going to work.”
“It will.”
I stared at Reginald as the terrible video he’d just taken of me threatening to expose all of vampire-kind played back to us from my laptop.
“Were we convincing?”
Reginald frowned contemplatively and made a seesawing motion with his hand. “Yes? Maybe? Hard to say. Either way it’s too late for do-overs. We’ve already emailed it to Mrs. Fitzwilliam.”
I sighed and buried my face in my hands.
“Humans of North America,” the video version of me chirped with false bravado, Frederick’s creepy stuffed wolf’s head with the glowing red eyes hanging just above my head. (“I got it for him at Disney World,” Reginald had explained. “But I told him I chopped off a werewolf’s head so I’d sound tough.”) “I come to you with news of great importance.”
The video-me held aloft two bags of blood I’d gotten from the small refrigerator Frederick kept in his bedroom, one in each hand. I thought back to how horrified I’d been the first time I saw all that blood in the kitchen. It didn’t bother me so much anymore. Frederick had kept his promise to me, never once eating in my presence or storing his blood in a place I might find it.
It was clear to me now that he’d chosen the most humane way to survive that he possibly could.
The video-me managed to keep from broadcasting any of these tender thoughts. That part had gone well, at least. Usually I had zero poker face at all. Brandishing the bags, video-me said, “The recent rash of blood bank break-ins have all been the work of vampires living in our midst. And here is the proof!”
Video-me pointed up to the “werewolf head” hanging above me. “They behead werewolves for sport! They drink the blood of our children! They live right here in Chicago. In New York City. Everywhere! No corner of the earth is safe while they roam free!”
(“You’re good,” Reginald mused.
“You’re lying,” I accused.
“Maybe,” Reginald admitted.)
A moment later, video-Reginald burst into the scene. “Mwah-ha-ha!” he exclaimed, his fangs out, his eyes wide. “I’ve come to drink your blood!” he continued in the cheesiest fake-Transylvanian accent I’d ever heard. Video-Reginald then grabbed one of the bags of blood in my hand and tore it open with a flourish, sucking it down with as much gusto as he had the night I found out he was a vampire.
Video-me screamed, and then the scene went dark.
Reginald closed the laptop and shrugged. “Okay, so I admit it’s not my best work. But we’re on a deadline. And as you’ve no doubt already noticed, hyperbole and overacting are the metaphorical bread and butter of the larger vampire community.”
I thought back to my first impression of Edwina D. Fitzwilliam, in her satin-silk-velvet black mishmash of a dress and her 1970s glam-rock makeup. “I may have noticed that.”
“Anyway, there’s nothing we can do right now but wait,” Reginald said reasonably. “If Edwina buys it, we ride tomorrow at sunset. And if she doesn’t . . .”
Reginald didn’t finish that thought.
But he didn’t have to.
If Frederick’s mother and the Jamesons didn’t buy this ruse, I knew full well that neither of us had a Plan B.