Page 6 of Never Invite a Vampire to Dinner

“You invited me.”

I put down the soup. I put down all six goblets, in a row, without spilling any of them, and I intend to be proud of that for the rest of my life.

“Let me take your coat.”

He gives it to me, and the wool is cold, the way a coat is after a long walk. The road up to Blackthorn is two miles of bad gravel and there is no car in my lot. And when his hand passes near mine I feel the cold come off him too, like standing next to a window in January.

“It’s freezing out,” I say. “Did you walk?”

“I like the air.”

“You walked from Blackthorn?”

“It is not far.” One side of his mouth lifts half an inch. “You are holding my coat as though it has done something wrong.”

“Sorry. It’s a very good coat.” I hang it up. “Come and sit down. You’re at the head of that table, next to Mabel, and I should warn you⁠—”

“Mabel Libby,” he says. “Yes.”

I stop with my hand still on the hook. “You know Mabel?”

“I know her letters.”

And then he smiles properly, for about a second and a half, and I forget every single thing I was going to say next.

Mabel, bless her ancient interfering heart, rises out of her seat with the smooth authority of a woman who has broken up thirty-one years of teenage necking in library stacks. “Mr. Volkov. Mabel Libby. Come and sit. Theo, move your elbows, the man needs a chair he fits in.”

And just like that the spell breaks. The room exhales and finds its voice again, and Julian crosses my dining room to the head of my table. I return to the stove with the dawning, awful realization that I have been completely incoherent with the most beautiful man I have ever seen.

Lucy appears at my shoulder. “‘Through the door,’” she whispers. “‘Welcome. To it.’”

“Shut up.”

“Take these out or I’ll put you in the soup.”

I plate the rest of the soup with hands that are not entirely steady, and I tell myself it’s the heat off the pan.

Here’s the thing about my parties—I know how they’re supposed to go. I built the machine. I know exactly when to bring the next course, exactly when to top up the wine, exactly when to lean in and give the shy guest an opening and when to leave the loud one alone. I run this room the way Theo runs his bar and Mabel ran her library. It’s mine. I’m good at it. It’s the one place on earth where I always, always know what to do.

So it is genuinely disorienting to spend the next hour of my own dinner party sneaking looks at the man at the head of my second table. Some of that is the face. Obviously. But the longer I watch him, the more interesting the rest of him gets.

Because Julian Volkov is, I realize as I circle the table with the third course, magnificent at this. Every person who speaks to him gets his whole attention, his eyes steady on their face like whatever they’re saying is the most interesting thing said all year. He asks Theo about the fishing—not small talk, real questions, like the difference between a good season and a bad one, and whether the cod have come back. He asks Doris about the market. He listens to the mayor’s story about the lobster with the patience of a man who has all the time in the world, which, I’m starting to think, he might.

He charms every single person at both tables. Over the next two hours we learn that he is something like an art collector, and that he restores things. He came back to Black Harbor because the house needed him, which is a strange way to put it and which I don’t think about until much later. He doesn’t own a phone. He has read the Ansel Pratt journal, which is something perhaps four people in this town have done, and one of them is Mabel and the other three are dead. And now five people have read it.

We learn absolutely nothing else.

He isn’t evasive. That’s what gets me. I know evasive—I’ve catered enough second weddings—and he definitely isn’t. Julian answers every question he’s asked, and then redirects it. Somebody asks where he’s from and he says “a great many places, none of them recently” and turns it into a question about them so smoothly that by the time they answer they’ve forgotten they asked him anything. Somebody asks what an art collector actually does all day up in that big house, and he says, “Mostly I dust,” and the whole end of the table laughs, and nobody notices he still hasn’t answered. I notice, because I notice everything.

By nine o’clock Harriet Coyne has told him about her hip and both her husbands. Theo has him cornered about the ‘78 storm. Mabel is arguing with him about the north wharf and the 1826 survey—actually arguing, red-cheeked and radiant—and I hear her say Well then where do you think it was? in a voice she has never once used on me.

And then Doris Alden’s grandson comes back down after he’s supposedly been herded upstairs. He stands in the doorway a moment, taking in twenty-four adults and forty candles. Then he walks the entire length of my dining room, directly to the strange man at the head of the table, and puts a wooden horse in his lap.

The room notices. Doris starts to get up, and I put a hand on her shoulder.

Julian looks at the horse for a moment. Then he says, entirely seriously, “That is a very fine animal.”

“His name is Horse.”