Page 29 of Never Invite a Vampire to Dinner

“Twice.”

“You didn’t even get pie.”

His eyes meet mine.

“I got the evening,” he says simply, like it’s obvious, and my stomach drops straight through the floor.

Across the room, Theo is helping fold tables, and I think about his chalkboard. Twelve to one on never. I would take the other side at any price. With money I don’t have.

Julian shifts beside me, and his knee comes to rest against mine.

Neither of us moves.

CHAPTER 8

The wind takes the shutter off the shed first. I hear it go from the kitchen, a great tearing crack followed by a clatter like the whole world is dropping a tray of dishes. By the time I get to the window, my grandmother’s rose trellis is leaning at an angle roses were not designed to achieve. It hesitates for a second, then it lies down flat across the herb bed.

“Okay,” I tell the kitchen. “That’s fine.”

Rain hits the glass sideways. Not down, but sideways, like the ocean has decided it belongs up here now.

It is not fine.

The storm has been on the radio since Tuesday and has a different name depending on who’s describing it. A low-pressure system if you listen to Portland. A nor’easter if you listen to Theo. Simply weather, if you listen to Eunice Ballard, who has firm opinions about naming things.

Lucy called this morning from her sister’s house in Bangor.

“Board up,” she said. “Fill the tub. Don’t be a hero about the herbs.”

“I’m not going to be a hero about the herbs.”

“Penny.”

“They’re four-year-old rosemary plants.”

“They’re shrubs.”

“They have sentimental value.”

She sighed and made me promise to call when the power went out. I told her the power wasn’t going out.

At five twenty-three, the power goes out. The refrigerator sighs to a stop. The clock over the stove disappears. The little green eye of the microwave blinks out. Suddenly the storm is enormous, filling the darkness the electricity had been holding back. I stand in the middle of the dark kitchen with a wooden spoon in one hand and a headlamp on my forehead.

“Great,” I say into the dark. “Perfect.”

I have a gas range, which is useful. I have a well pump, which is now decorative. I have four hundred dollars of produce, eleven quarts of stock, and a walk-in at Salt & Sage full of other people’s parties, which is tomorrow’s problem if the town still exists tomorrow. What I do not have is a working flashlight.

I do, however, have candles. An unreasonable number of candles. Last October I ordered thirty black tapers at one in the morning and received three hundred and twelve. Lucy said I’d be lighting them at my own funeral. Tonight I consider the possibility that she may have been right.

I’m carrying a crate of candles into the front room when someone knocks on my door. Nobody knocks on my door in a nor’easter. Nobody with sense is out in this.

I freeze.

The reasonable part of my brain remembers that I live alone at the end of a lane in a two-hundred-year-old house. The unreasonable part is already at the door, and I haul it open against the wind.

Julian is on my porch.

He’s soaked. His dark hair is plastered to his forehead, with rain running off the ends of it and down the sharp line of his jaw. His coat is black with water all the way through. He looks like he has been personally delivered by the Atlantic.