Page 64 of Never Invite a Vampire to Dinner

“Can I?”

“You do not need to.”

“I know. I want to.”

He watches me for several seconds, and then he opens his mouth and they come down.

That’s the only honest way to put it. No dramatic transformation, no snarl, no flash of lightning conveniently striking Blackthorn House. His upper canines simply lengthen, sliding down until they’re unmistakable—thin and white and slightly curved, closer to a cat’s than anything on the covers at Harbor Books.

But that isn’t the strange part. The strange part is that his face doesn’t change. He is still Julian. Calm and composed, patiently watching me stare at his mouth. It’s a courteous man’s face with a predator’s hardware in it, being reasonable at me.

I make a small noise, and he closes his mouth.

“Okay,” I say.

“Penny.”

“I keep waiting to feel differently about you.”

He says nothing.

“And I keep not doing it.” I rub my hands over my face. “That is honestly the most confusing part of this entire situation. You’re sitting there telling me you’re a four-hundred-year-old vampire, and all I can think is that this explains why you never eat anything and why your hands are cold and why you know entirely too much about shipbuilding.”

“Approximately four hundred.”

“That is not the important part of that sentence.”

“It seemed important to you earlier.”

I drop my hands.

“You’re making jokes.”

“I have always made jokes.”

“No. You’ve made dry observations that I generously interpreted as jokes. This is different.”

He looks faintly offended. I look at him and he looks back and somehow, impossibly, the world settles. Not all the way. I have questions stacked three deep in my brain and at least two of them are wildly inappropriate, but the thing I have been braced for since Sunday doesn’t happen. Julian does not become someone else. He is simply more himself than he was before.

I glance at the copper pan on the cabinet.

“Who cooked here?”

His expression changes.

“Penny.”

“The true thing,” I say. “Not the garlic or the mirrors or whether you turn into a bat.”

“I do not turn into a bat.”

“I know. Very disappointing. Who loved that pan?”

He’s silent for a long moment. The compressor hums behind the walk-in door. Somewhere behind the enormous house, the sea throws itself against the rocks at the foot of the bluff, the way it has for every one of the four hundred years he’s just handed me.

“There was a woman named Marguerite.”

I wait.