Page 2 of Never Invite a Vampire to Dinner

“So no Barry.”

“No Barry.” I chew the pen. Twenty-four seats. Twenty-three names. My gaze drifts out the window, past the harbor, past the boats knocking gently in their slips, and up the dark shoulder of the bluff to the one thing on the coast that never had a single light in its windows.

Blackthorn House.

It squats up there on the rocks like it’s judging the whole town. Three stories of black stone and grey cedar, all iron gates and dead gardens, and everybody in Black Harbor has a theory about it. Haunted. Cursed. Built over a shipwreck or a plague pit or a smuggler’s grave, pick your local legend. When I was nine, Tommy Alden dared me to touch the front gate and I did, and then I ran so hard I lost a shoe.

For most of my life, Blackthorn House has been dark. The lights came back on four months ago. A man named Julian Volkov owns the house, and apparently he’s come back to it.

“You know nobody’s met him,” I say slowly.

Lucy doesn’t lower the camera this time. “Met who?”

“The man who owns Blackthorn. Julian Volkov.”

She finally looks at me over the top of the camera, and her expression has gone wary, because she knows me. God help her, she knows exactly what my brain is doing.

“Penny.”

“He’s lived up there for months.”

“Penny.”

“Months, Lucy. And nobody’s seen him. Not at the Widow’s Lantern. Not at the historical society open house. Not at the fire department pancake breakfast in August, which is attended by every living soul within nine miles and, according to Mabel Libby, several who aren’t. He gets groceries delivered. Doris at the market says the driver leaves the boxes at the gate and by the time he gets back to his van they’re gone.” I’m pacing now. I pace when I’m plotting. “That’s not a person. That’s a rumor with a mailing address.”

“Which is a great reason to leave him alone⁠—”

“Or…” I spin the pen and do my best to look casual. “It’s a person who’s been sitting in a giant creepy house with nobody to talk to, eating delivery groceries by himself in the dark, and no one in this entire town has thought to do the single most obvious kind thing you can do for a lonely stranger.”

Lucy sets the camera down. That’s how I know she’s serious. “And what’s that?”

“Feed him.”

“Oh my God.”

“I have a seat.” I hold up the clipboard like it’s a legal document. “I have a beautiful, empty, twenty-fourth seat. It’s fate, Lucy. It’s practically rude not to.”

“He’s not going to come. Nobody’s even seen the guy.”

“Then no harm done.” I’m already reaching for the good cardstock, the heavy cream-colored one with the deckled edge that I save for the invitations that matter. “I’ll deliver it myself. He can throw it in the sea if he wants. But at least somebody in this town will have knocked.”

Lucy watches me uncap my calligraphy pen. She watches me write his name in my best, blackest ink—Mr. Julian Volkov—like I’m addressing a nineteenth-century count, which, given the theme, tickles me so much I have to bite my lip.

“He’s not going to come,” she repeats.

“Probably not.”

“So why⁠—”

“Because then he’ll have been asked.” My pen pauses over the card. “That’s different from not being asked.”

Lucy looks at me a second longer than she needs to, then picks up her camera again.

“You realize,” she says, “that this is exactly how horror movies start.”

“It’s exactly how dinner parties start.” I blow on the ink. “You should know the difference. You’ve been to enough of mine.”

“Debatable which is scarier.”