Page 96 of My Roommate Is a Vampire

For one thing, Frederick was shouting from inside the apartment.

“Howdareyou come to my home unannounced and behave in this way!”

For another, a woman whose voice I did not recognize was shouting, too.

“You dare to askmehowIdare?” the woman scoffed, the sharp click of her heels echoing so loudly on the hardwood floors I could easily hear her footsteps from where I stood. “I would have thought your manners better than that,Frederick John Fitzwilliam!”

I hesitated at the door, unsure what to do. The only other person who had been in our apartment the entire time I’d lived there was Reginald—another vampire. And that had ended in disaster.

From the sounds of things, another disaster was brewing in there right now. But what should I do? This argument, as bitter as it sounded, had nothing to do with me. Even inadvertently hearing what I had so far felt like an intrusion.

“Cassie will be home shortly,” Frederick said. “I ask that you please leave before she returns home. I do not wish to discuss this matter with you any further.”

“No,” the woman said flatly. “I intend to meet this human girl to whom you’ve taken such a fancy.”

Frederick barked a humorless laugh. “Over my dead body.”

“That’s easy enough to arrange.”

“Edwina.”

“No need to get snippy with me, Frederick.” The woman started pacing again, her heels clicking so loudly across the hardwood floors it sounded like she was determined to break a hole through to the apartment on the second floor. “If I cannot make you see reason, perhaps this Cassie Greenberg will be more malleable.”

At the sound of my name, my heart thundered so loudly in my ears it drowned out the rest of whatever Frederick and the woman shouting at him were saying. I guess this argument concerned me after all.

Maybe I should intervene.

Before I could talk myself out of it, I threw open the apartment’s front door.

The woman in the living room looked roughly my parents’ age, with crow’s-feet at the corners of her eyes and graying hair ather temples. Any similarities between the woman currently glaring ice daggers at me and Ben and Rae Greenberg ended there, though. Her dress was an all-black silk-and-crepe affair with velvet puffed sleeves, made in a vaguely historical mash-up of a style that would have looked right at home on the set ofBridgerton.

Her eye makeup, though, was what really drew my attention. The last time I’d seen face paint that dramatic I’d been in middle school, when Sam’s older brother dragged us to see a KISS cover band on a night their parents were out of town. It stood out in such sharp contrast with her overall pallor it made my eyes ache to look at her.

“Is this her?” The woman pointed an accusatory finger with a perfectly manicured bright-red fingernail in my direction. But her eyes stayed fixed on Frederick. “The hussy you have thrown everything away for?”

“Hussy?” I couldn’t believe my ears. Who talked like that? “Excuse me, but who are you?”

“This,” Frederick said, hissing the word, “is Mrs. Edwina Fitzwilliam.” A pause. “My mother.”

Time seemed to stop. I closed my eyes, trying to make sense of what Frederick had just said, and of the ridiculous situation I now seemed to be in the middle of.

Hismother?

But how was thatpossible?

Shouldn’t his mother have been dead for hundreds of years?

Then Mrs. Edwina Fitzwilliam bared a set of sharp, pointed fangs at me, and it all clicked into place.

“You’re a vampire, too,” I breathed, feeling dizzy and weak-kneed.

“Of course I’m a vampire,” Frederick’s mother said, before sauntering across the room like she owned the place. Which, Irealized with a start, might be true. I didn’t know anything about Frederick’s finances—or really very much about him at all.

That had never been clearer to me than it was right then.

“I am not going back to New York with you, Mother. That had never been my plan.” His eyes flicked to mine, filled with guilt. “Cassie has nothing to do with it. Leave her out of this.”

Mrs. Edwina Fitzwilliam waved a dismissive hand at me. “Fine. In that regard at least I will do as you say. In fact, out of respect for you, I won’t even eat her.”