Page 14 of Never Invite a Vampire to Dinner

“No,” he agrees pleasantly. “It is not.”

He does this. He does this constantly and I keep letting him do it.

Ledger comes down the stairs at that moment with the expression of a landlord. He walks the whole length of the shop. He jumps onto the sofa, then the arm of the sofa, and then—without consulting anyone—onto Julian.

“Oh,” I say. “He doesn’t do that.”

“He appears to.”

“Gil has stitches from that cat. There’s a photograph in the back.”

Julian looks down at eighteen pounds of animal arranging itself across his forearm and the open journal. He doesn’t move. He simply shifts the book a fraction so the cat has more room. Ledger starts purring like a small outboard motor. Neither of them says a word about it. I stand in local history at nine fifteen in the morning, feeling something enormous and inconvenient turn over in my chest.

“Do you drink coffee?” I say.

“No.”

“Would you sit with me while I drink coffee?”

“Yes,” he says, immediately.

The café two doors down from Harbor Books is called The Rusty Kettle, and it’s small and cluttered and familiar. I know exactly where the good table is and exactly how long to wait before you flag down Bess, who owns it and considers hurrying a moral failing. I steer us to the good table, the one in the window with the wobbly leg that Bess refuses to fix because she says it “gives the place character.”

Julian folds himself into the chair across from me, and the normal-sized chair suddenly looks small.

Bess ambles over with her pad. “Pen. The usual?”

“The usual, thanks, Bess.”

“And for the—” Bess looks up at Julian and forgets, briefly, what she was saying, which seems to happen frequently to people around him. I’m choosing to ignore it because it happens to me too. “For you, hon?”

“Nothing for me, thank you.”

“Nothing?”

“I’m quite all right.”

Bess looks at me. I shrug the shrug of a woman who has learned things. She ambles off. I fold my hands on the table, and I fix Julian Volkov with the full weight of my unanswered questions.

“Right,” I say. “So.”

“So.”

“You came to a café with me and you’re not going to eat or drink anything.”

“I agreed to accompany you to coffee,” he says. “I did not agree to drink anything. Those are different verbs.”

“Are they?”

“Grammatically, they are entirely different.”

I narrow my eyes at him. He gazes back, serene as a lake, those magnificent hands relaxed on the table. I understand, suddenly and completely, that this is a game to him. Some part of Julian Volkov is enjoying this, enjoying me trying to find answers and him deflecting. And the deeply maddening thing is that I’m enjoying it too.

“Okay,” I say. “I have theories.”

“I feared you might.”

“I’ve narrowed them down. One. Intermittent fasting. It’s big right now. You’ve read a lot of books, you got into it, now you can only eat between the hours of two and never.”