Page 118 of Never Invite a Vampire to Dinner

“Yes.”

“He asked whether there was a funeral for the last Volkov, and I said I didn’t know. He said in a town this size the caterer would know.”

Julian is quiet for a moment.

“That’s very good,” he says. “I haven’t heard anyone get to it that quickly.”

“He isn’t coming to find out, Julian. He’s already found out. He came for the confirmation. He came for the present tense.”

“I know.”

“He knows about the bell.”

Julian looks at me.

“Ines told him.”

Something passes over his face that’s not quite regret. “Of course she did.”

“She didn’t do anything wrong. Neither did he. That’s almost worse.”

“Yes.”

“He wants to talk to you.”

“I know. He sent requests for an interview.”

“Which you didn’t tell me about, but we’ll get back to that. He says he’ll respect your no. He says he won’t come to the gate or put a camera over the wall. But if he sees you in town, he’ll say hello. And you’re packing.”

Julian looks towards the open crate.

“Yes.”

I look at the dozen journals.

“Don’t do this quietly,” I say. “That’s all I’m asking tonight. If you’re going to go, don’t do it in stacks of twelve while I’m out doing crab things. Do it in front of me.”

Julian looks at the crate for a long moment. Then he says, “Sit down. I’ll make you tea you won’t like, and I’ll tell you exactly what I’m planning, and you may say anything you wish about it.”

So we do that.

And he tells me all of it. The arrangements and the firm in Boston and the six weeks and the shutters, laid out plainly and in order, with nothing kept back. It’s what I asked for in a hidden room in December and what I now discover I did not want in the least. I sit in the good chair and listen to the man I love describe how he intends to stop existing in Black Harbor, and I don’t argue with a single word of it.

Not that night.

CHAPTER 23

The stool at the end of my prep counter is empty on the seventh of January.

It’s empty on the eighth as well, and on the ninth he comes down but not until nine at night, when the front of the shop is dark. He parks on Mill Lane and comes in through the loading door. I don’t say anything about that either, and I hate every second of not saying anything about it.

The Veil has been in town for a week. In case you were imagining vans and production crews and crowds, it’s not like that at all. Instead it looks like three people having lunch at The Rusty Kettle. It looks like Ben Carter filming the harbor from the town dock at seven in the morning with his hood up. It looks like Rowan Pierce at the far end of the bar at the Widow’s Lantern on Tuesday and Friday, buying his own drinks and losing at cribbage to Doris Alden, who is merciless, and who hasn’t noticed that he isn’t trying very hard.

It is the least sinister thing I have ever seen, and it’s destroying me.

On the sixth, Rowan wrote to Julian a third time. On the eighth, Ben Carter drove up Point Road to film the gate from the outside, which he is entirely allowed to do, and which he did carefully and from the road, and which took eight minutes. Then Arthur Finch came round the corner of the wall with an axe in his hand and Ben apologized so hard he nearly fell over. On the ninth, somebody from the production emailed the county about the deed transfers.

And on the tenth, in my grandmother’s kitchen at half past ten at night, Julian says, “I’ve given the firm the thirty-first.”