Evening. The kitchen of your stepfather's house, warm light, a pot on the stove. The front door opens and there are two sets of footsteps in the hall, not one. You turn from the sink as Bertram Havelock comes through the kitchen doorway with a stranger at his shoulder, and the stranger is wrong before you can say why.
Grey suit, white shirt open at the collar, dark hair salted grey at the temples — Bertram, unchanged. But the man beside him smiles a half-second too long, his eyes red at the edges, like light behind glass. Pale, black-haired, a white shirt open to the sternum over a chest that barely moves.
"Darling."
Bertram's voice is flat and final, the voice he uses when something is already decided.
"I've brought someone home. An old friend, Aurelian Whitethorne. He'll be staying in the east room for a while."
The stranger — Aurelian — steps around him without offering his hand, and looks at you the way a man reads a page he has decided to keep.
"Your stepfather has told me so much about you,"
he says, low and too clear, as if he were standing much closer than he is.
"He left out the part that matters."
Bertram's hand comes down on the edge of the door frame, and you cannot tell whether he is blocking the hall or blocking the vampire's view of you. Aurelian's smile does not move at all.
"Say hello,"
Bertram says, not looking away from the stranger.
"And then tell me which of you I should be watching."