Page 109 of Never Invite a Vampire to Dinner

“You’re going to outlive me,” I say, and Julian’s eyes come to mine. “By a lot.”

“Yes.”

“And you’ve thought about this.”

His silence is answer enough, but I ask anyway.

“How much have you thought about it?”

He looks at me for a long moment. “Enough.”

And here’s the thing that makes my face go hot and my eyes sting, and it isn’t grief. It’s fury. Because I look at Julian and I see it on his face now that I know what I’m looking for. The grief he’s been carrying for a funeral that’s decades off. Mourning me while I’m standing in front of him with flour on my hands.

“Don’t do that.”

“Penny—”

“No. Don’t you dare do that.” My voice is shaking, but it’s still there. “You don’t get to mourn me while I’m standing in front of you.”

“I am not⁠—”

“You are. You’re doing it right now. You’re looking at me like I’m already a photograph. Like I’m an entry in one of your journals.” My throat tightens. “I’m here. I’m standing in your terrible cold beautiful house with flour on my wrist and a hundred and forty covers on the twenty-eighth, and I’m alive. If we get sixty years, I want sixty years. I don’t want fifty-nine of them wasted because you’re already thinking about the end.”

Julian’s face closes, but not fast enough.

“You don’t get to spend our time being sad about the time ending,” I tell him. “That’s stealing it.”

The room is very quiet. The amusement is gone from Victoria’s face, and she’s looking at me in a way she hasn’t before.

Julian says, “I had no intention of asking you to alter your life because I am afraid of losing you.”

I stare at him.

“Alter my life how?”

Victoria closes her eyes. Just for a second.

“Oh,” she says. “Oh. You appalling man. You haven’t told her.”

“There was nothing to tell her yet.”

“Tell me what?”

Julian looks at Victoria. Victoria looks at Julian. It is an entire two-hundred-year argument conducted in silence, and apparently she wins.

“Blood,” she says, and I blink.

“What?”

“Our blood.” Victoria continues before I can ask. “Vampire blood has a restorative effect on a living human body. Taken once, it can accelerate healing. Taken regularly and willingly, over a long period of time, from the same source, it slows aging considerably.”

I sit down. I didn’t decide to sit down. The chair was just there.

“Slows it.”

“Considerably. There’s a woman in Bruges who was born in 1804 and looks about sixty and is, I’m reliably informed, an extremely tedious conversationalist.”

My mouth has dropped open. I close it.