Page 82 of Never Invite a Vampire to Dinner

CHAPTER 17

Julian walks back into the library and goes to stand in front of the windows looking down at the town.

“I do not particularly like Black Harbor all the time,” he says when I join him, which surprises a laugh out of me. “I want to be clear about that. You have a tendency to make things romantic after the fact.”

“I do not.”

“You do.”

I sigh and admit it. “Fine. A little.”

“I have watched this town be foolish and small and occasionally cruel. I have watched it burn. There is a family on Water Street I have disliked for four generations on principle.”

“Which family?”

“I am not telling you.”

“Julian.”

“They know what they did too.”

I am laughing now, which I suspect was his intention. Then he looks back towards the hidden room.

“But I know this place. I know what stood where the pharmacy is now. I remember when the road below this house was mud. I remember the winter the harbor froze beyond the Sisters. I remember which roofs came off in which storms.”

“And you keep paying for them.”

“Not all of them.”

“But you paid for the reading room. And the customs house.”

“They were going to demolish it for a filling station.”

“And the Finches.”

His eyebrow goes up, and I tap the 1809 journal.

“You wrote about sending them coal.”

“That was not meant to be an enduring arrangement.”

“How long did it last?”

“Two hundred and ten years, approximately.”

I stare at him, and he gives a half-shrug.

“After the coal it was oil. Later there was a fund.”

“A fund they think is a state program.”

“It is administered through the state.”

“Funded by money from you.”

“Yes.”

I put my hand over my eyes.