Page 57 of Never Invite a Vampire to Dinner

“It’s your chin, Julian.”

“Every man in 1816 had that chin,” he says. “There were four faces and they shared them. It was a smaller country.”

I’m laughing. I put my hand through his arm because I want to, because the gallery is cold and he is right there and I am allowed to now. I lean into his chest the way you lean on a doorpost.

There’s nothing under it.

No lift. No fall. No beat. None of the small ordinary machinery of a person standing beside you in a cold room. I’ve had my hand flat on that chest. I’ve been kissed against my own counter by the man wearing it, and I’ve felt exactly this same nothing every single time, and I’ve never once acknowledged it.

“You’re cold,” says Julian.

“I’m fine.”

“You have goose bumps.”

“That’s the gallery.” My voice comes out completely level, which is the most impressive thing I’ve ever done with my voice. “They heat this place with hope and one fifty-year-old radiator.”

And then everything rushes in at once.

Weeks of untouched plates. A full wine glass at the grange and a full wine glass at my own table, always set down full. A mug of cocoa held in two hands for an hour by a man who never lifted it. Forty heads of garlic on my prep counter and Julian Volkov walking to the far end of my kitchen with the air of a man evaluating his options.

His skin is cool. Cool under my hands, cool at my throat, cool between my legs, and warm only where I make him warm. A chair coming off my floor so fast I nearly went over backward. Lag bolts driven into wet planking faster than Theo Goodwin, who has been doing it since 1994.

He knows what the yellow house looked like when it was blue. He knows why two men were drying nets over a brazier in February, and he is annoyed about it. Tonight he looked at a bell in a case and told a curator what was written in a place no one has seen since the Truman administration.

Forty years. It doesn’t seem very long.

Red beneath the brown by candlelight in my grandmother’s front room. Twice. And I said the candles to myself, like a woman putting a lid on something.

“Penny.”

“Mm.”

“Would you like my coat?”

“No,” I say. “Thank you. Tell me about the man in the picture.”

“There is nothing to tell. He is a man in a coat.”

“Someone painted him.”

“Someone painted a great many people,” he says. “It was that or conversation.”

I laugh again. God help me, I laugh, standing six inches from him with my hand on his sleeve, and here is the part I would rather skip, because I do not come out of it well.

I have known vampires and other supernatural creatures exist since I was about six. Everyone has. They live in the same drawer as sharks and the deep-sea things with the lights on their heads. They’re real, documented, occasionally on television, and nothing whatever to do with a Sunday in Black Harbor, Maine. Deirdre Fanning has been telling this town for nine years that there is something not right about the mailman. Gil Amory’s brother is certain his landlord in Providence is a demon and cannot produce a single fact about the man beyond the parking.

I have never met one. Not once in thirty-two years.

I had every piece. That’s the part that is going to keep me up tonight. I had every single piece for weeks and carried them around in my apron pocket like change because at a dinner in October I sat beside a man with a plate in front of him he was never going to touch and thought, very clearly, I don’t need to solve it tonight. Every time something failed to add up, I put it in the drawer with the others and shut the drawer and called it kindness.

And once I got all the way there. He leaned away from my grandmother’s garlic bread like it had said something about his mother, and my own brain put the word up in front of me in letters a foot high. I looked straight at it and decided I was not going to diagnose a man with vampirism over carbohydrates.

I was so pleased with that. I have been carrying it around for weeks like it was wisdom.

Some of it really was kindness. The rest was a woman who had figured out, somewhere under the floorboards where I do my actual thinking, that solving him might be the end of something that was making her happy. So I put food in front of him instead. I let him hold a mug. I invited this man to a Transylvanian Twilight Feast, with black roses in silver goblets and a soup called a crimson reduction, and invited him to it in writing, and he came and sat at the head of it all night being unbelievably polite.

Julian Volkov is a vampire.