My Bad Boy Werewolf Quadrillionaire Space Lord

Second Time Lucky

Let me tell you, it said a lot about me that most of my saliva was still in my mouth.

Because this ship was the sexiest thing I have ever seen. Slick, sleek, bristling with things that go boom, and engines able to pound and pound into the best kind of dizzying speeds. The sensors could hear a moth fart in the vacuum of space, and see thousands of kilometres around the curvature of a planet by evaluating the light lensing from its gravity. The targeting lasers were so powerful they doubled as a cutting tool at five kilometres, and the supercomputer running the targeting systems could murder my ex-boyfriends from anywhere in the solar system.

Not that I was going to. Even if they totes deserved a dramatic and fiery death. Never mind that I dumped them.

But to summarize it quickly, Nightmare 2.0 was the spaceship equivalent of Luca's abs. If he was holding a machine gun at the time.

"Your drool is starting to soak your collar," Alcuard said. He somehow, astonishingly, managed to say that without a smirk, or a snigger, guffaw or chuckle. The multi-millennial old vampire is clearly closer to sainthood than I am.

"Right," I said as I wiped my mouth with my sleeve. "Pre-flight check, system status."

I spent half a minute scrolling through the various mechanical and electrical systems, trying my best to look like I knew what any of them did. Thankfully, their status was conveniently colour-coded, and all I really needed to do was look for something that wasn't green.

No idea what I'd do if one of them wasn't, though I suspect Luca would get sick of waiting and just portal his whole yacht over to Mars.

In fact, that question deserved to be asked.

"Why don't you just portal your yacht?" Alcuard asked before I could.

"I can't make a portal big enough," Luca admitted. "Shoving this warship through is about the limits of the technology."

"Really?" I asked. "You're going with 'it's too big to fit'?"

"Look, darling, portals are complicated. They also require power. And bigger portals are exponentially more of both. Most of the problem comes from the fact that without intervention, a portal is perfectly stationary when it appears," Luca said.

"Oh," I said, my eyes widening and the hair on my arms rising despite myself. For anyone who knew anything about spaceflight, that fact should make you wish you were on a toilet when someone told you.

"How is that a problem?" Alcuard asked.

My palm hit my forehead with surprising force.

"The problem is that nothing is stationary," Isabella replied. "When you're standing on the earth, you're spinning around it at about 1,200 kilometres per hour. Give or take, the closer to the equator you are, the faster you're going. And the Earth spins around the sun at over 100,000 clicks an hour. And from there it gets nutty, because the Sun spins around the centre of the galaxy roughly seven times faster than that, and the galaxy is travelling over two million clicks an hour. So a stationary portal would look like it's moving at almost three percent the speed of light."

"Oh," Alcuard said.

"It's a planet-ending weapon of mass destruction in the wrong hands," Luca said. "The real trouble with any kind of power is surviving long enough to become responsible with it."

"How did you manage?" I asked.

"I grew up knowing the consequences of uncontrolled power. I still live with it. I still burden others with it, and I hate myself for it," Luca said quietly. "And I trust those fuckers heading to my planet about as far as I can throw them."