Page 13 of Never Invite a Vampire to Dinner

He is not smaller. He’s under the low part of the ceiling in a dark coat cut by someone who was told the truth about those shoulders. Beneath it, he’s wearing a charcoal grey sweater that looks softer than anything I own, and dark pants so exquisitely tailored that my mouth goes dry. He’s turned three-quarters away so I can see the line of his jaw and the way his hair falls and the frown of concentration between his brows.

He’s got a very thin book open in those beautiful hands. The book is old. I can tell from here, the leather cover faded at the edges and the pages the color of weak tea. He turns a page with two fingers, barely touching it, like the paper is a living thing he doesn’t want to startle.

I should say something clever. I’ve had three days to prepare something clever.

“Oh!” I say. “It’s you!”

Julian looks up.

And here’s the thing about Julian Volkov that I keep forgetting between sightings, the way you forget how bright the sun is until you walk out into it. He’s a lot. All of him, at once. Those dark brown eyes find me and something in his face shifts, warming a fraction before the courtly mask slides back down.

“Penny,” he says. “Good morning.”

“You come here in the mornings.”

“I do.”

“Mabel mentioned it.” Say nothing else. Do not say one more word. “In passing. She mentions a lot of things. I don’t retain most of them.”

“Naturally,” Julian says, entirely straight-faced, and I look desperately at the nearest shelf.

“I read constantly,” I say.

“Do you?”

“Absolutely.”

“What are you reading?”

Oh, no.

“Books,” I say. “Lots of… The classics, mostly. And the… the new ones. Whatever’s new.” I gesture at the shelf beside me, which I have not looked at, and which turns out to be Marine Diesel Engine Maintenance, Third Edition. “This, for instance. I love this.”

“You keep a diesel engine?”

“No.”

“Ah.”

“I like to be prepared,” I say primly, and change the subject. “What are you reading?” I lean in to look at the old book in his hands, and he doesn’t close it, which surprises me. “That’s not actually a book.”

“Gil disagrees and has priced it accordingly.”

“Is it any good?”

“It is extremely bad.” He tips it so I can see. A Journal Kept at Black Harbor, 1774 to 1791. Ansel Pratt, harbormaster. “Pratt was a dull man with a small vocabulary who complained about the weather for seventeen years. He is also the only person here who wrote anything down.”

“What are you looking for?”

He’s quiet a second.

“A wharf,” he says. “There was a wharf on the north side that is not on any survey after 1802. I would like to know what became of it.”

“Why?”

“Because it interests me.”

“That’s not an answer.”