Page 5 of Never Invite a Vampire to Dinner

“I did.”

“With your own hands.”

“With my own hands.”

Mabel’s eyes go bright in a way that makes me want to check the exits. “I have been writing to that man since June. Three times. I got three notes back—all very polite, all saying no, all in handwriting I would happily frame.” She squeezes my fingers hard enough to hurt. “And you got him with a soup.”

“He hasn’t come yet.”

“He will,” Mabel says, with the flat confidence of a woman who has been right about this town for fifty years, and goes to find her seat.

By half past seven the room is loud. Twenty-three people, four bottles down, and the mayor has already told the story about the lobster boat and the wedding cake, which is a good story and which he has now told in this building three years running. Harriet is explaining her second husband to somebody who did not ask. Her first husband was a werewolf and the least said about that the better. Somewhere under the table, a child who is meant to be asleep upstairs is systematically working his way through a bowl of candied orange peel.

“Penny.” Theo is at my elbow with a bottle in each hand, all barrel chest and salt-and-pepper beard and a flannel shirt he has tucked in as a concession to formality. “Where do you want these?”

“On the bar. Thank you.”

“You’ve got a face on.”

“I have a normal face.”

“You’ve got the face you had the year the oven died.” He looks down the table, finds the gap, and understands it immediately, because Theo Goodwin is the least complicated man in Maine and misses absolutely nothing. “Ah.”

“Don’t.”

“I didn’t say anything.”

“You said ah.”

“That’s not a word,” Theo says. “That’s a noise. You can’t hold a noise against a man.” He takes his bottles off to the bar end, and I go back to the kitchen and plate twenty-four first courses, because I set twenty-four places whether he comes or not, and if that’s stubbornness then I’ve been called worse things by better people.

I’m carrying the first six goblets out, the steaming Widow’s Broth a gorgeous deep red that Lucy has already photographed twice, when the room stops.

I don’t hear it, exactly. I feel it. A cool draft off the harbor slides across the floor and touches my ankles, and the sound of the room changes. A wave of silence sweeps across the room, conversations trailing off mid-sentence like someone’s turning a dial down, until the only thing left is the small hiss of the candles and Theo saying “—and I told him, that’s not a lobster, that’s a—” before even Theo runs out of words.

Julian Volkov fills my doorway.

I got him wrong. Completely wrong. In my head a mysterious man in a haunted house was going to be thin—reedy, pale, wax-museum elegant, some cobwebbed aristocrat who’d blow over in the harbor wind. This man is broad. He's tall enough that he tilts his head a fraction coming in, and his shoulders brush the frame on the way through. His dark coat was very obviously made for exactly those shoulders and no others. He moves like the floor’s been expecting him.

Dark hair, nearly black, a little longer than the men around here wear it, with a wave in it he clearly can’t be bothered to fight. A face that has no business existing on a Tuesday in Maine—high cheekbones, a straight nose, a hard clean jaw, and a mouth that I look at exactly once and then have to consciously stop looking at. Pale skin. Not sick-pale, but the kind of pale that makes the candlelight seem to like him more than it likes the rest of us.

He’s the best-dressed thing to walk into this town since the lighthouse got its centennial plaque.

“Good evening,” Julian says.

His voice does something to the room. It’s low and unhurried and there’s an accent in it I can’t place, the kind of accent that’s been sanded down by a lot of years somewhere else. Every head turns to me, because I’m the host, because this is my party, because it’s my job now to walk over there and welcome the mysterious man I personally shoved an invitation at through a cold brass slot.

I’ve hosted hundreds of these parties. I could welcome a guest in my sleep. I have literally welcomed a guest while asleep on my feet at 2 a.m. after a wedding.

I open my mouth.

“Mr. Volkov,” I say. “Hi. You came. Through the door. Welcome. To it. The party.”

The party. To it. The door.

“Oh my God,” Lucy mutters.

Julian’s gaze moves unhurriedly over the room, taking in the candles, the linen, the goblets, and the twenty-three staring faces. Then it settles on me, and something at the corner of that unfair mouth moves. Not a smile, but the idea of one. The rough draft.