My Roommate Is A Shy Vampire

The ancient stone walls of Castle Valdris had stood for seven hundred years. Tonight, they were about to evict their sole resident.

Sera pressed her pale fingers against the final notice, watching the bold red stamps bleed into the aged parchment. FORECLOSURE. UTILITIES OVERDUE. VACATE IMMEDIATELY. Three phrases. Three catastrophes. And beneath them all, the quiet, inexorable truth that she had nowhere left to go.

Two hundred and seventeen years old, and she had never faced a more terrifying enemy than her own mailbox.

“This cannot be happening,” she whispered to the empty great hall. Her voice echoed against vaulted ceilings that had once hosted medieval banquets, now collecting dust and cobwebs. Tapestries hung in tatters. Chandeliers swayed in drafts. The castle had become less a home and more a very expensive problem.

She was broke. Genuinely, catastrophically, historically broke.

The estate manager’s letter lay open on the table, its formal script a death sentence written in legal ink: the castle’s operational costs had exceeded its dwindling trust fund for the third consecutive decade. The vampires who had once funded her quiet existence had all either perished in wars, turned to ash under careless exposure to sunlight, drifted into the void of eternal ennui, or simply vanished without explanation in ways that suggested either death or a profound desire to stop being found. She, Sera, last surviving member of House Valdris, had outlived every solution to her own survival.

The castle had been her birthright. Her prison. Her sanctuary. For two hundred and seventeen years, she had lived within its walls in the comfortable, familiar darkness of a creature designed by nature to prefer the absence of light. She had watched the world change outside its gates — revolutions and industrial revolutions, world wars and cold wars and whatever the current era called its various geopolitical anxieties — and she had done so from a position of perfect, undisturbed solitude.

She was, by any reasonable measure, a professional recluse.

She had also been, it turned out, a financially irresponsible immortal with no understanding of inflation, property tax, or the basic concept of a savings account.

And now the bank did not negotiate with seven-hundred-year-old architecture, no matter how impressive its Gothic credentials.

With trembling hands — not from fear, exactly, but from the specific helplessness of someone watching their entire life collapse in slow motion — she pulled out the device her friends had insisted she purchase. A smartphone, dark as her castle’s corridors, slick and rectangular and entirely incomprehensible. It had come with a manual written in a language she did not speak, and she had spent the better part of a month trying to understand how to turn it on without accidentally calling the emergency services of a country she had never visited.

It took her eleven minutes to find the correct application for rental listings. It took another twenty-three minutes to figure out how to scroll without accidentally triggering a call to someone named “Grandma” whom she had never met and did not know how she had apparently added to her contacts.

Apartment. She needed an apartment. One that did not cost more than she could shamelessly beg from her remaining acquaintances. One that was quiet, private, and preferably without any windows that faced east, because east meant morning light, and morning light meant pain.

Three hours and seventeen unanswered inquiry messages later, a notification pinged.

RENTAL LISTING: Private room in shared apartment. Quiet building. Flexible landlord. No smoking. No pets. Price negotiable for the right tenant. Available immediately.

Sera’s undead heart performed something uncomfortably close to a leap of hope.

She typed back with one finger, each word requiring significant deliberation: “I am interested. I am quiet. I pay on time.”

Technically true on all counts. She was quiet. She was undead. And as for paying on time — well, she would figure that part out before anyone discovered she was, in fact, not remotely human, had no verifiable income, and possessed exactly one suitcase and a crumbling medieval estate that was about to become the bank’s problem.

The reply came within the hour.

“Hi! I’m Leo. The apartment is yours if you want it. Move-in whenever. I’ll leave a key under the mat. Fair warning: I talk to furniture a lot. It’s a whole thing. Anyway, looking forward to meeting you! :)”

Sera stared at the message. At the exclamation points. At the smiley face, rendered in punctuation like a tiny, enthusiastic ambassador of casual human friendship.

No interrogation. No demands for references. No questions about employment or income or why a person her apparent age needed a roommate with such desperate, unhesitating urgency. Just warmth. Effortless, uncomplicated warmth, delivered through a glass screen by a stranger who had apparently decided, based on three lines of text and zero supporting documentation, that she was trustworthy enough to hand over the keys to his home.

“Just like that?” she murmured to the empty room.

The phone buzzed again. This time it was the group chat she shared with her three closest — and only — friends. The girls squad, as they ironically called themselves, though none of them were remotely feminine in the traditional sense and two of them were technically not even female.

MEVEL: Did you find a place??? Tell me you found a place.

SERA: I found a place. A human lives there.

MEVEL: A HUMAN??? SEVEN HUNDRED YEARS OF SOLITUDE AND NOW YOU’RE ROOMING WITH A HUMAN??? This is either the bravest or the stupidest thing you’ve ever done. I’m so proud. Also terrified. Mostly terrified.

NORA: A human. With your social skills. You’re going to communicate exclusively through notes under the door, aren’t you. That’s your plan. That’s what you’re going to do.

SERA: I can talk. I talk. I simply prefer not to.

NORA: And yet here you are, about to share a WALL with a stranger. The universe has a spectacular sense of humor.

KELLY: WHAT KIND OF HUMAN??? Are they hot??? This matters. I’m not letting my best friend move in with some random loser. Send pics. Wait, you don’t have pics. Describe. DESCRIBE.

Sera looked back at the phone. She had exactly zero information about this Leo person, other than the fact that he used exclamation points with suspicious enthusiasm, had offered her a room without a single invasive question, and had signed his texts with a smiley face that suggested a level of emotional openness she found simultaneously endearing and deeply unsettling.

SERA: I don’t know. They seem... nice?

MEVEL: “Nice.” That’s the energy of someone who’s about to walk into the most socially catastrophic living arrangement in vampire history. I’m genuinely excited for you. This is going to be a disaster. I’m so here for it.

NORA: If he murders you, I’m using your good cape for upholstery.

KELLY: IF HE’S CUTE I’M COMING OVER TO STARE AT HIM THROUGH THE WINDOWS. Fair warning. That’s not a threat. That’s a promise.

Sera put the phone down and pressed both hands against her cheeks. They were cold, as always. But somewhere beneath the ice of two centuries of solitude, something unfamiliar was stirring — something warm and electric and terrifying, like the first spark of a fire that had been extinguished so long ago she had forgotten it could ever have been lit.

Nervousness. Anticipation. Her heart, what was left of it, was racing in a way she had not experienced since the Renaissance, and she felt, for the first time in two centuries, genuinely, thoroughly unprepared for what came next.

She had lived in the castle for two hundred and seventeen years. She knew every crack in every stone, every draft from every window, every shadow where the light never reached. She knew the specific creak of the third stair that meant someone was approaching her quarters. She knew the particular silence of a space that belonged entirely to her and no one else — a silence so complete, so total, that it had become indistinguishable from loneliness and she had long ago stopped noticing the difference.

Leaving it felt like dying all over again.

But staying meant slowly starving in the dark, and even immortality had limits when it came to paying property taxes.

She began to pack.

One suitcase. That was all she allowed herself. Two hundred years of accumulated existence, compressed into a single piece of luggage, because humans apparently lived differently, and she had no idea what that looked like. She brought three changes of clothes, a hairbrush, the small portrait of her mother that she had carried since the seventeenth century, and a jar of dirt from the castle’s courtyard that she was not sentimental about but could not bring herself to leave behind.

She had also, in a moment of what she would later describe as temporary insanity, attempted to pack her favorite medieval chair. It did not fit in the suitcase. She had tried for eleven minutes before admitting defeat, at which point she sat on the floor of her castle and had what she could only describe as a profound existential crisis about the nature of priorities. The chair was very comfortable. The chair understood her. But the chair was also three feet wide and made of solid oak, and she had already used her one allowed suitcase on clothes she would never wear and a jar of dirt she did not actually need. Everything else — the furniture, the books, the tapestries, the centuries of accumulated history — would go to the bank.

She hoped the bank wanted a fifteenth-century armoire, because that was all she had left to give.

The apartment was forty-seven minutes away by car. She would leave at sundown, as she always did, because daylight was not her friend and had not been for a very long time. She would meet this Leo person — briefly, discreetly, without making eye contact if she could help it — and she would establish herself as the world’s quietest, most unobtrusive tenant.

She would pay rent. She would stay in her room. She would never, under any circumstances, become emotionally attached to a human she was destined to outlive by several centuries.

That was the plan.

Sera, last of House Valdris, looked around the empty castle that had been her tomb and her sanctuary for two hundred and seventeen years, and felt the future closing in like a set of fangs.

“Goodbye,” she whispered to the dark.

The castle, as always, said nothing back.

She stepped into the night, suitcase rolling behind her like a loyal ghost, and walked toward the human world — toward a stranger named Leo, toward a room with a key under the mat, toward the most terrifying and wonderful mistake of her very long, very lonely life.

The car was cold. The night was quiet. And somewhere ahead, a light was waiting that she was not yet sure she deserved to share.

She wondered what he was like. The human who had said yes without asking why. The human who left keys under ceramic cats and signed his texts with smiley faces and apparently believed, with the naive optimism of someone who had never met a creature of the night, that strangers were worth trusting.

She wondered if he knew how rare that was.

She wondered if he knew how much it mattered.