caffeinatedOtter
@caffeinatedOtter

"Vampire vessel, this is Star Squad patrol boat Javert, Captain Webster commanding. You're ordered to cut your engines and submit to search. Repeat, cut your engines and submit to search."

"Bother," Sinestrina says boredly, and flicks comms open. "Star Squad patrol. As you know, vampires recognise no authority of either god nor man. Cower and flee." She reaches down to where Harriet is sitting on the deck, dressed in a silk dressing gown and using her leg as a backrest, and cards fingers through her hair.

Harriet keeps reading her book, but goes, if possible, even more boneless.

The main display mists into life, the Star Squad Captain stiffly poised, glaring into her bridge's imaging cam to deliver rote but heartfelt condemnations. "Vampire, your depredations will not be tolerated! Your existence is an affront and an abomination. Cut engines and submit to search, and earn the leniency of a trial of your peers for any evidence of human consumption discovered. Refusal to comply is instead grounds for summary destruction—"

Harriet's book droops lower with every word. She fumbles behind her to tap Sinestrina's leg for attention, inadvertently drawing both Sinestrina's and the onscreen Captain's.

"Harriet?" says the Star Squad Captain, stunned.

Sinestrina conspicuously points a remote control at the display and presses mute. An overlay graphic of stitched-together lips, labelled SILENCE, flickers over the top of the call.

"That's Sandra," Harriet says, in an embarrassed sort of way. "She's — she was my girlfriend? Since college? Until a few weeks ago?"

"In that case," Sinestrina says, and hauls Harriet off the floor into her lap, pins both her wrists, and unmutes the call somewhere in the middle of her lips on Harriet's neck turning her giggles into moaning.

"Say it," she murmurs against Harriet's pulse.

"I'm a debauched vampire thrall," Harriet says dreamily, which Sinestrina rewards with a long, catlike, conspicuous lick.

"Harriet," Captain Webster says.

Sinestrina points at the figure on the display, narrows her eyes and draws on dread power. Captain Webster startles and curses as a sourceless bloodstain blooms on her uniform, first as a spot over her heart and then, rapidly, soaking the entire front.

"Do your worst, you third-rate Van Helsing," she says. "If you think you've got what it takes to be a vampire's nemesis. If you think—"

"Nemesis?"

"—If you think you can challenge me for what's mine by conquest," Sinsetrina continues, louder, poking Harriet somewhere ticklish so she'll underscore it with a wriggling squeak. "Set yourself upon your white whale! Wager your soul, your sanity, your life!"

"This is a routine stop and search," Captain Webster says helplessly, holding her arms away from her body as rivulets of blood begin to drip down her trousers.

Sinestrina curls a hand round Harriet's jaw. "You picked the wrong vampire," she says, and kisses her deeply while silently calling upon the ship's cursed engine. Its damned scream begins as a scarcely perceptible hiss, rapidly gaining volume and reverberation, audible aboard both ships as it escalates.

"Halt your vessel!" Captain Webster yells. "Harriet—"

The Shithouse Vampire Castle vanishes from the Star Squad vessel's scopes, the screaming of its drive cut off instantly to deathly silence. On optical, it seems to burst apart into a myriad omnidirectional scatter of bats, lost to the dark of space.

"I'll get you the incident report paperwork, Captain," Webster's first mate says eventually, in a studiedly nonjudgemental tone. "...Take a shower."


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