"—with what?"
"Look, I'm not subtle about any of this," Sinestrina says wistfully. "The ship's called the Shithouse Vampire Castle. I'm deathly pallid and dressed like budget costume Elvira. Everything's black and covered in memento mori, Harriet, are you really that surprised?"
Harriet wrings her hands, looking repeatedly between Sinestrina and over her shoulder at the squat, snarling face cast into the cursed black iron of the engine; its burning red eyes and fangs of medical-grade stainless steel. Its aura of damned whispers.
"Well, you seemed very nice," she says, voice wobbling a bit. "It's not every day a goth milf invites me back to her ship for coffee. Even if I'd only got coffee out of it."
Sinestrina cups a hand round the back of her neck. She can feel the start of a headache coming on. "You were — into it?" she says, trying not to sound pleased. "Before I brought up feeding you to the Exsanguinating Terror Engine?"
"You seemed nice," Harriet mutters, in a sort of defeated slump, as if being fed to a cursed starship drive is just the kind of routine shit luck she should have expected.
Sinestrina sort of wants to give her a hug.
"Well," she says doubtfully. "No. Well. I can't really ask you to just — ignore this. It's a bit much. Bit of a red flag, really. And you'd be obliged to tell people, wouldn't you."
"Aren't vampires supposed to have powers of hypnotic persuasion," Harriet says, looking up through her lashes.
It's probably just a ploy to keep her blood on the inside, Sinestrina thinks glumly. That's only a marginally better basis for a hookup than Tinder.
