Page 110 of Never Invite a Vampire to Dinner

“It doesn’t make you a vampire,” she says. “You must be clear about that. You do not stop aging. You do not become what we are. Turning is something else entirely, and this cannot do it. It also won’t save you from a bus.”

“Good to know.”

“Some humans respond more than others. Some live another two hundred years. Some three. I have known a few who lived much longer. There is no way to know in advance, and anyone who promises you a number is selling something.”

“How much blood?”

“Very little, but regularly.” Victoria glances at Julian. “It’s not one dramatic evening. It is a decision made again and again, by both people, over a very long time.”

I look at Julian.

“Is that true?”

“Yes.”

“And you thought about it.”

“Yes.”

“How long?”

“About the effect? Since approximately 1740.”

“About me.”

He is quiet for a moment.

“Since the ninth of November,” he says, “at approximately eleven at night, when you fell asleep on my shoulder in front of the fire and I sat there and did the arithmetic.”

I close my eyes. Of course he did the math.

“And then what?”

“I went into the kitchen.”

“For how long?”

“Approximately two hours.”

Of course he knows that too.

I open my eyes. “Why didn’t you tell me?”

Victoria starts to speak, but Julian looks at her.

“No,” he says. “I’ll answer.”

She sits back, and he crosses the room. He does it in a few steps and stops in front of me, then takes my flour-dusted hands in his cool ones.

“I didn’t tell you because I would never ask it of you,” he says. His voice is low and rough at the edges, not the careful voice he uses when he has already decided exactly how much of himself he is going to give me. “It’s not an easy thing, and it cannot be something I want for you. You would hear what I wanted, and I would never be certain you had chosen it for yourself.”

“Julian—”

“I take your blood. I take your table. I walk through your door as if I own it.”

“You are expected there.”

“I know.” Something unlocks in his face when he says it. “I know. That’s the miracle of you, Penny. I know I’m expected there. And because I know that, I will not use it to ask you for two hundred years. Or three hundred. Or whatever number your body might give us.”