Page 11 of Never Invite a Vampire to Dinner

“Because you brought it yourself,” he says at last. “In the wind. And stood there and talked to a slot in a wall for some minutes, and did not know I could hear you.”

Every drop of blood in my body relocates to my face.

“Oh my God.”

“You explained that the soup had a name.”

“Oh my God.”

“It was,” Julian says, “the most extraordinary thing that has happened to me in a very long time.” He pulls the plug, and the water goes down, and he stands looking at the empty basin. “People do not knock, Miss Harrington. As a rule. Not on that gate.”

“Penny.”

He turns his head.

“Penny,” he says, like he’s testing whether he’s allowed to say it, and something in my chest turns right over.

He pulls his sleeves back down, and shrugs his coat on, and becomes once again the impossible, immaculate man who filled my doorway four and a half hours ago.

“Thank you,” he says. “I don’t—” He hesitates, and I get the sense he’s choosing words the way I chose the tart, wanting to place the exact right one in front of me. “I haven’t sat at a table like that in a very long time.”

“You didn’t sit at it. You didn’t eat.”

“No.” His eyes hold mine, and in the dying candlelight the reddish brown of them seems to glow. “But I was at it. That was the part I’d forgotten I missed.”

And that’s it. That’s what I believe about tables, what I’ve never managed to say out loud without sounding like a greeting card. This cold, careful, secretive man just said it back to me like he learned it somewhere I’ve never been.

“You could come again,” I hear myself say. “I do these all the time. Not always the vampire thing, that’s annual, but there’s harvest suppers and the solstice one and I do a thing in February that’s basically just an excuse to use up preserves. You wouldn’t have to eat.” I’m babbling. I know I’m babbling. I cannot stop. “You could just—be at the table.”

Something crosses his face that looks almost like hope before he buries it.

“You’d invite me again.”

“Of course I would.”

For a long moment he doesn’t say anything, and then he inclines his head in a way that’s almost a bow.

“Thank you. Good night, Penny.”

And then he’s at the door, and out of it. He’s gone into the darkness towards two miles of bad gravel, on foot, in a cold he doesn’t seem to feel.

I stand alone in my beautiful ruined room staring after him. Then I blow out the candles one by one. I wrap the leftover tarts. I stack the last of the plates. And it isn’t until I’m turning the key in the lock, with the harbor sighing at the bottom of the hill, that it fully hits me what I’ve spent the last five hours doing.

I ran a party for twenty-four people I love. And I thought about exactly one of them.

I pull my coat around me. The gravel road up to Blackthorn is a pale scar on the black hill, and I can’t see him on it. He’s already gone, swallowed up by his big dark house and his big dark secrets. And the truly appalling part isn’t that I spent the whole night thinking about him.

It’s that I already know I’m going to invite him again.

And I’m already planning the menu.

CHAPTER 4

“Two hundred pages,” Lucy says. “On bees.”

“On the emotional lives of bees. There’s a difference and it’s an important one.”

“On Wednesday it was lighthouses. On Thursday it was knots.” She sets her camera down on my counter, which is how I know we’ve arrived somewhere serious. “You do not care about knots, Pen. I have watched you tie a bow on a cake box with your teeth.”