Page 76 of Never Invite a Vampire to Dinner

That’s the part I have to put my pencil down for.

Eighteen ninety-two, a reading room. Nineteen thirty-eight, a customs house bought for the town so it wouldn’t come down for something newer and uglier. A road graded every spring whether there’s a soul in Blackthorn House or not. My grandmother’s town has been held up all that time by a man who keeps removing his own name from it.

I sit in a cold room with a pencil behind my ear and grieve for him, quietly, over a shoebox. And then, because grief is apparently not the only thing I’m capable of today, I get irritated. Not at Julian. Mostly. I understand why he does it. That’s the problem.

Monday night, that man sat across from me and told me the truth for hours. He answered every question I asked. He showed me his fangs. He told me what he drinks and where it comes from and why he doesn’t feed from people. He told me about Marguerite and the pans and the rooms he stopped entering. Then he took me upstairs and, in the interests of historical accuracy, thoroughly demonstrated several other things I hadn’t thought to ask.

And I came away thinking I knew him.

I didn’t. I had exactly what I ordered. Because that’s what Julian does. He never lies. He never even quite hides. He simply waits for the question and gives me the answer, exactly as much as I asked for and not one syllable more. He has been serving me my own questions back on a small plate, beautifully arranged, and letting me leave satisfied.

I understand why. It isn’t strategy. It isn’t manipulation. It’s a man who has been rationing himself for so long that a small, careful portion is the only way he knows how to be known without frightening the person doing the knowing.

And I love that man a little for it. That’s an alarming sentence, so I put it away for later. But understanding him doesn’t mean I’m willing to keep doing this forever. I am done eating off that plate.

I walk down Water Street at half past two with a pencil still behind my ear and three photographs on my phone. I’m not frightened, and I’ve stopped expecting to be. I want to see Julian so badly that it is a physical ache. I get as far as the bait shed and have to stand there being interested in a boat until my face cools down, which is not a dignified thing to do in front of Ray.

By the time I reach the Salt & Sage, I have a prep list for eighty people in my head, my keys in one hand, and absolutely no intention of waiting until tomorrow.

I take my phone out.

Are you at home tonight?

His answer comes back before I have the loading door all the way up, which means he was holding the telephone, which means something.

I am always at home. Yes.

I stand in my doorway looking at six words and think about a man who has spent centuries answering exactly what he is asked.

Tonight he’s going to sit across a table from me.

And for once, I’m not going to let him decide the portion.

CHAPTER 16

Imake it halfway up the hill to Blackthorn House before I realize Mabel’s archival gloves are still in my coat pocket. I leave them where they are, and stand for a second under the black iron gate. The same gate Julian has walked through under at least four different names, wearing at least three different coats, while generations of Black Harbor watched him leave and come back and somehow never quite put the pieces together.

I have never in my life shown up somewhere without a basket. I’ve arrived at funerals with a basket. I have taken muffins to the DMV. I once brought six jars of chutney to a dentist appointment because I’d made too much and there were people in the waiting room. And here I am, empty-handed, heart going like a hand mixer on high, because for the first time I don’t have a single dish that could hold what I’ve come to say.

He opens the door before I knock. Of course he does. He heard my car. He probably heard my heart coming up the road.

“Penny.”

His eyes go over me once, and I watch him clock everything—the coat buttoned wrong because I did it in a hurry, the glove-shaped bulge in my pocket, the fact that my face is apparently a whole sentence.

“You’ve been at the Historical Society.”

“You know what I found.”

“I know what the Sturgises kept.” He steps back to let me in. Calm. Courtly. That beautiful still surface I have recently learned does not mean nearly as much as I thought it did. “Which is nearly everything. Come in from the cold.”

I come in.

The house closes warmly around me, smelling of old wood and beeswax and something faintly metallic underneath that I only started noticing once I knew to notice it. Julian takes my coat. He always takes my coat. Four hundred years of changing names, and apparently the manners survive intact.

“Four,” I say.

His hands stop on the shoulders of my coat.