Page 125 of Never Invite a Vampire to Dinner

I go up the hill at half past ten. Julian is in the library. There are nineteen journals in the crate now and he is standing over it doing nothing at all.

“Say it again,” he says, when I finish telling him about the Lantern.

“Julian—”

“The exact words. Not what he meant. What he said.”

So I say it again.

“‘We know who we’ve got. He’s Julian.’”

He asks me who was in the room. He asks how many. He asks whether Theo said it to Rowan or to the room. I say he said it to Rowan, but at the volume you use for a room, and something moves in his face. He asks whether anyone left afterwards. He asks whether anyone went quiet.

I answer all of it, and about halfway through I understand what he’s doing, and it takes the legs out from under me. He’s checking for the trap. He’s going over it the way you’d go over a hull. He has been in one form or another of this situation many times in four hundred years and every single time the room has gone quiet and somebody has left. Now he’s standing in his library at eleven at night looking for the part where it turns.

“Nobody left,” I say. “Nobody went quiet. Bess sold three chowders.”

“Bess,” he says.

“Bess said, anybody else want the chowder before I take it off, and three people did, and that was the loudest thing that happened.”

Julian sits down. He does it rather suddenly, in the chair by the fire, the way I sat down in the same room three weeks ago. He puts one hand flat over his mouth and stays like that.

“Theo Goodwin,” he says eventually, from behind his hand.

“Yes.”

“Theo asks me to move things because I am tall.”

“I know.”

“He has asked me to move things approximately thirty times and I have always assumed that was the whole of it.”

“I know.”

“Penny.” He takes his hand down. His eyes are wet, which I have not seen, and which I am not going to describe further because it belongs to him. “I have spent two hundred and thirty years believing that this town was only conditionally mine. That wasn’t fear. It was experience. I have been asked to leave places I had been useful in, by people who liked me, and it didn’t take very long, and it didn’t require anyone to be cruel.”

“I know.”

“I built all of it on the assumption that the moment they knew, I would have to go.” He looks at the fire. “I have never once considered that they might have known for some time and simply⁠—”

He stops.

“Gone on selling chowder,” I say.

“Yes.”

“Mabel’s mother worked in your house in 1960.”

“I know,” says Julian. “I hired her.”

I go and sit on the arm of the chair. He puts his head against my side, which he has never done, and I put my hand in his hair and hold him against me.

“This doesn’t fix it,” I say after a while, because somebody has to. “Rowan’s still here. It doesn’t fix any of it.”

“No.”

“Do you want it to?”