“How was the first day?” Sal asked, a smile still stretched above his grizzled beard as if he already knew the answer to his question and delighted in it.

I lifted my head as I passed him on the porch. “The students here are severely deprived. They could use an atelier. Or at the very least a mall. It’s sad.”

I glided into the house before he could respond, but I heard him behind me chuckling.

“So, I guess you’ll be borrowing some of my flannel tomorrow too?”

That night, Reg and I gathered at the heavy wooden table in the kitchen, our dinner plates pushed to the side and our heads bent low over a sheet of parchment and an inkpot.

“Is all of this really necessary?” I gestured to the paper and ink. “Can’t we just shoot the Elder Seat an email or something?”

My attention was half on the parchment and half on Sal at the other end of the table, where he was whittling a length of wood that looked suspiciously like a post for his fence. I guess we didn’t have any reason to fear wooden stakes anymore, but after a hundred years of being afraid of something, it was hard to just shake it off, so Sal’s project was making me squirm.

“Charlie, please,” Reg said. “Let’s be appropriate for once. This is the most formal letter we have ever written, and parchment shows respect. It’s just fortunate that I had the good sense to pack my calligraphy kit. Besides, I am sure the Elders do not have email.” He said email with disdain, like electronic communications were somehow beneath him.

I hoped, for his sake, that we did manage to appeal our sentence, because he was never going to survive in the modern human world without embracing technology.

“They do, you know,” Sal said, glancing up from his pointy stick, “have email.”

My head whipped toward Sal, half suspicious and half in awe of this information. I supposed he must have high-up connections if he helped carry out life sentences like ours, but I still had a hard time reconciling the idea that a slayer of the infamous Sicarius line could be working so closely with the governing body of all vampire-kind.

“They have a clerk with an email account, in any case,” Sal said. “But Reg is probably right that no one has ever submitted a digital appeal. I imagine they’d find that kind of informality . . . distasteful.”

Well, this letter was certainly formal enough. I turned my gaze back to our draft.

Dearest Sirs and Madams of the Elder Seat,

We write today to beg your favor and beseech you to reconsider our mortal punishment. We recognize and apologize for our recent transgression . . .

Blah blah blah.