Page 132 of Never Invite a Vampire to Dinner

“I know.”

“In four hundred years. I have never once stayed in the room.” His voice is not right. “I have left at least fifty times. I have left in the middle of the night with a bag and I have left over the course of a year with lawyers and I have left in the most beautiful ways you have ever seen. I have never stayed in the room.”

“You moved a barrel.”

“Theo asked me to move a barrel.”

“Julian.” I get in front of him because I need to see his face. “Theo asked you to move a barrel afterwards.”

I watch him process that. He looks over my head at the pub door and the light shining from the window. Something happens on his face that I have never seen and am not going to be able to describe properly however long I have.

“Yes,” he says.

“That’s the answer right there, isn’t it?”

“Yes.”

“He didn’t even look up.”

“He didn’t look up,” says Julian Volkov, “because there was a barrel.”

Then he laughs, unguarded and much too loud for a parking lot, and Deirdre Fanning looks out of the window at us, and I put both arms around him in the freezing cold and hold on.

After a while he says, “You didn’t come and get me.”

“No.”

“You wanted to.”

“God, I wanted to so much.”

“Why didn’t you?”

I lean my head against his arm.

“Because I wanted it to be your table,” I say. “Not mine, with a place set for you. Yours.”

He’s quiet for a few seconds before his hand closes around mine.

“I think,” he says slowly, “that I may have found one.”

“A table?”

“A place.”

My throat closes.

“Yeah,” I say. “I think you might.”

Behind us the door bangs open.

“Volkov,” Theo bellows. “If you’re done having a moment, there’s another barrel.”

Julian closes his eyes, and I laugh into his coat.

“Your neighborhood needs you.”

“So I gather.”