Page 3 of Never Invite a Vampire to Dinner

I throw a rose at her.

The gate is worse up close than it is from town.

I’ve walked most of Black Harbor a thousand times—the harbor path, the bluff trail, the cemetery shortcut that saves you six minutes if you don’t mind the company—but I’ve never come all the way up here. Not since I lost that shoe. The road turns to gravel, then to something that isn’t really road at all, just two ruts worn into the grass by tires I’ve never seen. The wind up here has teeth. It comes straight off the Atlantic and hits the house and the house doesn’t so much as shiver. For some reason that satisfies me more than I want to admit.

The iron gate is enormous. Black metal twisted into shapes that might be thorns or might be birds or might be the artistic representation of a very bad idea. Beyond it, a garden gone to seed but not to ruin. The roses are dead, but they’ve been cut back for the winter. The paths are mostly clear of fallen leaves. Arthur Finch’s father did these gardens and now Arthur does, and in ninety years between them not one Finch has ever had a word to say about the inside of that house.

The card feels very small in my hand.

This is insane, I think, for the first time all day. I’m standing at a haunted gate in the wind about to leave a party invitation for a man no one in town has seen. I lost a shoe here. A whole shoe.

I look for a mailbox, but of course there isn’t one. That would be too easy, too normal, too much like a man who wants to receive things.

There is a tarnished brass slot, though, set into the stone pillar beside the gate, the kind of thing they’d have used for calling cards two hundred years ago. It looks like it hasn’t been touched since. I run my thumb over the metal and the metal is as cold as if winter has already arrived.

“Okay,” I say out loud, because the house is too quiet and I hate quiet. “Okay. Here’s the thing. You don’t know me. I’m Penny. Penny Harrington, I run the catering place on the harbor, the Salt & Sage. You’ve probably seen the lights—well. You probably haven’t seen anything, no offense, you don’t seem like a going-out kind of guy.” I’m talking to a slot. I’m aware I’m talking to a slot. “I do themed dinner parties. They’re fun and the food is excellent and there’s a soup with a name. You don’t have to come. You can burn this. But there’s a seat, and it’s yours if you want it, and⁠—”

The wind drops. All at once, like someone shut a door. The dead roses go still. The whole bluff holds its breath, and for one second I have the absolute, spine-crawling certainty that somewhere behind those dark windows, someone is listening.

I shove the card through the slot so fast I nearly take my knuckle off on the brass.

“—okay bye,” I finish, and I walk back down that hill at a pace I will later describe to Lucy as “dignified” and which is, in fact, a barely controlled scramble. I do not look back at the windows, not once, not even when the skin between my shoulder blades prickles the whole way down.

I don’t lose a shoe.

I count it as a win.

Two days later, I’ve forgotten about it. Mostly. There’s a wedding tasting on Thursday and the fishmonger’s holding out on me about the halibut. I’ve burnt an entire tray of blood-orange tarts because I was arguing with Lucy on the phone about whether “spooky elegant” and “just spooky” are meaningfully different aesthetics. She’s wrong—they are. The Twilight Feast is two days out and my brain is a spinning wheel of borscht, black garlic, and burgundy dahlias. Julian Volkov and his cold brass slot have slid comfortably to the bottom of the pile.

Then I open the shop in the morning and there’s an envelope in the mail slot with no stamp on it. I stand there holding my keys and staring at it for a good five seconds.

The envelope is cream, heavy and expensive, and my name is on the front in ink so black it looks wet. The handwriting looks like it belongs in a museum—all long confident strokes and a capital P that loops like it’s showing off. Miss Penny Harrington.

My stomach does something complicated.

I pick it up. The paper is thick as a playing card and it smells, faintly, impossibly, of old books and salt. I turn it over. The flap is sealed with actual wax. A deep red wax seal impressed with a signet that shows a thorn branch curled around a single small bird.

“No way,” I whisper, to the empty shop. “No way.”

I slide my thumb under the wax and it cracks clean off in one satisfying piece and I unfold a single sheet. In that same museum handwriting is the most devastating acceptance I have ever received in my life:

Miss Harrington,

I accept with pleasure.

You should know that I do not dine. This is a longstanding arrangement, and I would not wish it to disrupt your table. If my presence on those terms is unwelcome, you have only to say so, and I will understand completely.

You should also know that no one has invited me anywhere in a very long time.

J. Volkov

I read it once. I read it twice. I make a sound that no dignified thirty-two-year-old woman should ever make about a piece of stationery, and I press the sheet to my chest with both hands.

Lucy comes in twenty minutes later and finds me standing in exactly the same spot.

“What?” she asks immediately.

I hold it out, and she reads it. Her eyebrows climb at the second paragraph and stay up through the third.