Page 30 of Never Invite a Vampire to Dinner

“Your shutter’s gone,” he says.

“I heard.”

“There’s a tree down across Point Road. The coast road is flooding. You won’t get out tonight, and neither will anyone else.” He glances past me into the dark house. “I came to help you close the cottage before it gets worse.”

“It’s already worse.”

“It’s going to get worse than worse.”

I stand there with the wind trying to rip the door out of my hand and look at him. He came down here. Through this. For me. My mouth, naturally, chooses that moment to do what it does.

“You’re going to catch your death.”

Something flickers over his face, but it’s gone before I can name it.

“I’ll risk it.” He puts one hand on the door above mine, steadying it effortlessly against a gust that nearly takes me with it. “Let me in, Penny. Before your door does the same thing as the trellis.”

“Come in, Julian.”

Now there is a very large, very wet Julian Volkov dripping onto my grandmother’s braided rug, but I don’t have time to be strange about any part of that because the house is groaning and there’s genuine work to do.

Julian, it turns out, is very good at work.

He knows old houses—not in the way a man who has watched several renovation videos knows old houses, but like he’d been there when it was built. He goes through mine like the place has handed him instructions.

He checks every window latch and reinforces the worst one with a wedge from the junk drawer I didn’t know could be used for anything. He rolls two towels tight and jams them under the back door where water has already started creeping across the floor. He takes the porch chairs to the shed two at a time. He braces the loose shutter on the north side before the wind can take that one too.

When the roof leak in the back hall turns from an occasional drip into a stream, he puts down both buckets, looks at the ceiling, and adds my largest stockpot.

“You’ve done this before.”

“I have encountered roofs.”

“That’s not what I asked.”

“No.”

Of course not.

The good chair in the front room is too close to the window that’s rattling hardest. I grab one end.

“Help me move this.”

Julian takes the other. I lift. He lifts, and the chair moves with such enthusiastic speed that I nearly fall over backwards.

“Show-off.”

“I have a low center of gravity.”

“You have something.”

His mouth does that almost-smile. Then a gust slams into the north wall and somewhere outside, something cracks. Julian turns his head towards the sound.

“Stay here.”

“Absolutely not.”

“Penny.”