Page 97 of Never Invite a Vampire to Dinner

“You’re very quiet,” Julian says.

“I’m conserving.”

“Conserving what.”

“You’ll see.”

He doesn’t answer that, but the corner of his mouth moves, and he takes the switchbacks considerably faster than he strictly needs to. The road comes up through the spruce and wet rock and levels out. Blackthorn House is sitting there with every window on the ground floor lit, which is more than I’ve ever seen from this house in my entire life.

He opens my door and offers me his hand, then frowns when his fingers close around it.

“You’re cold.”

“I’ve been on the Atlantic in December.”

“You’re cold because you gave me a quantity of blood roughly equivalent to a small glass of wine. And then refused the second cookie.”

“I ate a cookie.”

“You ate one cookie.”

“There’s a cookie in my coat.”

“There is a cookie in my coat,” he says, “because you put it there and told me it was for later, in a tone I decided not to examine.”

The smell of the sea follows us in as he takes off the coat he loaned me, then takes off my own coat and hangs it on the hook by the door. My coat, on his hook. Then he stands in the middle of the front hall and doesn’t move. At first I think he’s stalling, then I decide he doesn’t know what to do.

“Julian,” I say softly.

“Yes?”

“Take me to bed.”

He looks at me for two full seconds before he moves. This time he doesn’t sweep me up in his arms. Instead he takes my hand and leads me carefully up the magnificent staircase and down the long corridor to the room at the north end. At the door he stops again.

“May I ask you something?”

“You may ask me anything. I want it noted that we’ve already established the permission issue.”

“Does your throat hurt?”

It isn’t the question I expect. I put my fingers on my neck and find two small places above my collarbone, already closed, which I am going to have to explain to Lucy by Monday.

“No.”

“Are you telling me the truth?”

“Yes. It aches a bit. Like a bruise, not like a wound.” I let my hand drop. “Why?”

“Because I’ve never done that and then stayed,” he says.

The hall goes very quiet, suddenly, the way old houses do. Below us the sea crashes against the rocks, the same way it’s been doing for two hundred and thirty years.

“Not once?”

“Not once.”

“What did you do instead?”