“I would have set the whole island on fire,” Sal growled. “But Adelina . . . She appeared like an apparition, right at the edge of the island, where the rocky shore met the water. I was standing on the end of a dock, my pockets full of dynamite and my hands wrapped around two stakes.”

Sal opened and closed his hands, as if feeling the cursed wood in his palms still.

“Adelina stood in front of the whole group like a shield, all that blond hair glowing white in the moonlight, looking so human. And then—” Sal shook his head.

I was breathless. “And then what?”

He ran a hand over his face—a gesture that was becoming familiar and distinctly Sal.

“And then she walked right off the island. All the way to me.”

I didn’t see the big deal. “She walked down the dock? I mean, I guess it’s brave to approach a slayer, but—”

“No, Charlie.” Sal said. “She didn’t walk down the dock. She walked on the damn water.”

Reg gasped, and my jaw dropped open. Now, that was a new one.

“And for the next ten years, as far as I was concerned, she never stopped walking on water.” Amusement and disdain were at war on Sal’s face.

“Ten years?!” I cried. “You were—were—together? For a decade?”

Ten years wasn’t exactly epic in the scope of an immortal life, but it was ten years longer than I’d ever heard of any other vampire-slayer friendship. And the story Sal was telling was clearly one of more than friendship.

“How long ago?” I demanded to know.

“We met . . . wow, some twenty-five years ago now. I couldn’t have been older than thirty-five.”

Sal saw me doing the math in my head.

“Yeah, she was robbing the cradle a bit,” he joked. “Hard to believe, but I looked quite a bit younger than her at the time. It took those ten years for me to catch up to the age where she was frozen in time.”

“And then what happened?” Reg asked.

“I realized that in another ten years, we’d be back where we started, but in reverse. And ten years after that, I’d be old enough to be her father, then her grandfather.”

“Ew,” I said.

Sal agreed. “Ew, indeed.”

“So why didn’t she just change you?” I asked.

“Now, why is that always the question? Why is it always me who has to change in this story?”

I wondered how many times he’d told this tale—how many poor souls had passed through Sal’s cottage had heard his sad love story.

“She offered, of course,” Sal said.

“You refused?” Reg asked.

“I made the same offer in return.”

“And she refused too,” I said.