Page 108 of Never Invite a Vampire to Dinner

It was. Technically.

No one hurt him. No one broke into his house. No one violated any law that mattered enough to stop what followed. They simply came. Hundreds of people with phones, questions, cameras, gifts, and demands. People who knocked at two in the morning because they had driven twelve hours and believed that entitled them to an answer. People who waited outside restaurants and followed him to the grocery store and posted every place he went.

Eleven months later, he left.

“Where did he go?” I ask.

“Lisbon.”

Nobody says anything to that.

“He lives in one room and rarely goes out,” Victoria says. “Rowan Pierce did not do that to him. I want to be precise. Pierce isn’t malicious. He isn’t a bigot and he isn’t a fraud, and when you meet him you will probably like him. But he believes discovery is inherently good, and he has never learned that finding something does not necessarily give you the right to show it to everyone else.”

I look over at Julian. He’s standing with his hands behind his back, looking down the bluff at the water, and I have spent eleven weeks learning to read the back of that man’s head.

“You’ve decided,” I say.

“I have made arrangements.”

“That’s not the same as deciding.”

“No,” he says. “It is not.”

“He’ll go,” Victoria says to me, as though he has left the room. “He won’t tell you the date. He’ll tell you he’s thinking about it, and he will be thinking about it, and the thinking will be genuine, and one day you’ll drive up this hill and there will be shutters.”

“Victoria,” Julian says, and I can hear the warning in his voice. She ignores it.

“I have watched you do it four times.”

“Three.”

She arches a manicured brow. “Bristol.”

“Bristol was not the same.”

“Bristol was exactly the same, and it was the worst of them, because you did it to people who had done nothing but be fond of you.” She picks the teacup up again, although she still doesn’t drink. “Close the house. Salt the earth behind you. Go still until the world forgets your face, then wait fifty years and start again. It always works. That’s the trouble with it.”

Julian turns around.

“What would you have me do?”

“I have no idea,” she says. “I’ve never had anything to lose that couldn’t be put in a car.”

Her eyes settle on me for a moment, and I understand that this is the part she drove three hours for.

“I am not here to stop you,” she tells him. “I have never stopped you and I would not know how. I came because I would rather you went on purpose than by habit.”

Something in Julian’s face changes, just a little. Victoria watches him, then looks at me and back.

“How long do you intend to leave it?” she asks.

“That’s not your concern.”

“She is thirty-two years old,” Victoria says. “You told me that inside the first minute. You told me eleven weeks, and you did not have to stop and work it out. I have watched your face for two hundred and fourteen years. How long do you intend to leave it before you tell her?”

“Tell me what?” I ask.

Julian goes very still, and suddenly I know. Not whatever Victoria thinks I haven’t been told, but the thing I’ve known without looking at it directly, the stove burning in the next room. Four hundred years. Thirty-two. Another calculation I chose not to do.