Page 128 of Never Invite a Vampire to Dinner

“You heard everything I had on the tenth. I’m not going to say it louder. You know exactly what leaving costs and you know exactly what I think and you know I’ll come with you if you go.” I stand up and get my coat, which nearly kills me. “I’m not going to make this one for you, Julian. If I make it, it isn’t yours. I love you and I’m going home. I’ll be at the shop in the morning, and the door’s still open whichever way you decide, and I mean that in every single sense of the sentence.”

“Penny.” His expression is so raw that every part of me wants to go over and put my arms around him. I step back instead.

“No. You get to decide.”

Then I leave.

I drive home shaking. I sit in my kitchen at midnight and I do not sleep and I do not text him, and it is the single most unnatural thing I have ever done. At about three in the morning I understand that this is the actual proof of what I keep telling him. That you can love a person all the way down and still leave a door where a wall would be safer.

CHAPTER 26

Julian shows up at the Widow’s Lantern the next evening at seven o’clock.

I’m not there when he arrives.

I hear about it from Lucy, who texts me a single line—get down here—and I leave a tray of something in the oven that I will throw in the trash later and I run. Because Julian Volkov has never once in four hundred years walked into a public room knowing somebody inside is waiting to ask him the question he has spent four centuries avoiding. Tonight, he’s done it on purpose.

By the time I get there the pub is full.

The room hasn’t stopped. Nobody in Black Harbor has ever stopped for anything. But a great many people are looking towards the end of the bar while pretending not to, and conversations are happening at the slightly lower volume people use when something has occurred that they intend to discuss thoroughly later.

Julian is on the stool beside Rowan Pierce, and his coat is hanging on the peg by the door like it belongs there. I make it as far as the fire before Julian sees me. His eyes find mine and stay there for half a second, and that’s all. No rescue requested. No rescue offered.

Rowan has his recorder on the bar between them. The red light is off.

“Can I buy you a drink?” Rowan asks.

“No,” says Julian. “Thank you. I do not drink and I would rather not pretend for you for an hour.”

Rowan’s eyebrows go up about a quarter of an inch.

“Okay,” he says slowly. “Thank you.”

“Ask me your questions.”

“Right here?”

“Here, or on the road outside in the cold, or at my gate at some point in February when you have run out of other things to try.” Julian folds his hands on the bar. “This is warmer, and there are people I know in the room, and I find I prefer that. Ask.”

Rowan looks at the recorder.

“May I?”

“Yes.”

The red light comes on. And for the next forty minutes I watch a man who has spent four hundred years perfecting one single technique take it out into the open and use it in front of the entire town. He doesn’t lie. He doesn’t lie once. I am listening for it the whole time and it never comes.

“How long have you lived in Blackthorn House?”

“I have lived in that house since it came to me.”

“When was that?”

Julian raises an eyebrow. “The transfer is in the county record. You’ve read it; Ms. Ramirez pulled it in October.”

“Two years ago.”

“That is what the record says,” he agrees. “I moved in in June.”