My Bad Boy Werewolf Quadrillionaire Space Lord

8 - Fight and Flight

The man sitting in his coffin was unnaturally pale.

More than the milky paleness of an engineering student who hadn't seen the sun since he enrolled. Whiter than geisha makeup, close to the chronic vitamin D deficiency supermodels on Luna were fond of maintaining, the man was so pale Luca idle wondered if this man could glow in the dark.

One of those supermodels on Luna had actually gotten a bioluminescent gene modification to her skin. Drove cameramen absolutely berserk, but Luca has rather enjoyed it.

"No, goddamnit, no!" Isabella's AI assistant, BIRD, squawked in indignation.

"What's wrong with birdbrain?" Luca asked.

"This is actually pretty normal for him," Isabella breathed, her chest doing that thing she was fond of doing where her breathing would try to push her breasts out of her bra.

"A vampire? A love triangle with a vampire? Why am I not equipped with a self-destruct feature?" BIRD asked.

"He's a vampire?" Luca asked.

"That should be patently obvious. Long hair, pale, fussily dressed, coat with a collar roughly the size of a woman's handbag, and he has fangs. Does he need to count to six with a Transylvanian accent and then laugh maniacally with lightning flashing in the background?"

Something about the confidence BIRD made the claim with bothered Luca, niggled at his understanding of the world almost as dramatically as the idea that there was something he couldn't buy.

Or that a woman didn't want to sleep with him.

"Excuse me a second," the man said, holding up his hand. He turned away, and with both hands, began to frantically scratch at his nose.

"Uh..." Isabella said.

"My dear girl, I have lain in cryogenic stasis for eons. My nose has itched since the battle of Waterloo. Allow me my proclivities," the man replied, still scratching his nose. He kept it up for a few seconds, then stopped, and let out a long sigh of relief. "Oh, that feels exactly as good as I imagined it would."

"Eons? You've been in that pod for eons?" Isabella asked.

"To a historian, yes. To an astronomer, definitely not. But it has been millennia," the man said, and he swung his legs over the side of the pod. "But let me introduce myself. My name is Alcuard Cominetti Von Dracul."

"Wow. Not even the pretence of subtlety," BIRD groaned. "How long until he tries to turn Bella, I mean Isabella? Because this plot line has never been done before. Ever."

"I don't want the girl," Alcuard said.

Luca wasn't particularly surprised. There was something in the way this unnaturally pale man was looking at him, a look he was used to from most of the women in his life, with a slight twist. The lust was there, certainly, but it was a slightly more sinister sort of longing. Gold digger rather than party girl lust, or the women who saw him for his bank account rather than his abs.

"Woah. I didn't see that coming," BIRD admitted.

"I have lain in stasis for millennia. I have hungered, frozen in time, for almost as long," Alcuard explained, pushing himself up and out of his coffin with unnatural ease. "And at the end of my long fast a man walks into my home, announces himself a friend, with the most appetizing blood I have ever smelt. Why would I content myself with salad when I can have steak?"

"What do you mean, blood like his?" Isabella asked. "Do you have any idea where he's been? Pretty sure he'd give you a list that looks like the census of a small town."