Aries leveled me with a hard glance. “There’s a difference between not wanting to be involved in politics and not having a shred of ethics, youngling.”
“Sorry,” I said.
Aries waved his hand dismissively. “It’s okay. You’ll learn. After all, you’re basically still a baby yourself. A toddler, maybe… oh, hey, and your mate is your favorite toy, so now you throw a tantrum whenever anyone so much as talks to him.”
Bennie started giggling. “Oh damn. He got you good. Eric here almost killed me because I interrupted his date today.”
“Can we please get back to the topic at hand: a random fledgling asking questions about us?”
Aries shrugged. “What more is there to tell? He didn’t tell me why he wanted to find you.”
“And you didn’t ask?”
Aries laughed. “Youngling. I’m a bartender. I get questions like this all the damn time. If he hadn’t been a fledgling out in the open alone, the whole situation wouldn’t even have registered as weird.”
Perfect. Just perfect.
I looked at Bennie, who was still staring at the pic of the young guy.
“Could you send me the pic?” he asked, and I bit back a laugh. It looked like someone else was going to do a bit of stalking tonight.
Aries grinned. “Sure. Just give me your number. And while we’re at it, your youngling can give me his too. You never know when it’ll come in handy.”
“Does that mean you’ll text us if you see him again?”
Aries shrugged. “That depends. Do you promise not to fight him in here?”
Bennie snorted. “We’re not fighters. We just want to know why he’s looking for us.”
“Fine.” Aries rolled his eyes dramatically. “But you’ll owe me one.”
In my opinion, owing someone like Aries a favor wasn’t a good idea, but Bennie did not seem to have the same reservations. Hejust nodded, a wide grin firmly in place before pulling out his phone.
I really needed to talk to him about being more careful with Aries.
I didn’t trust that fucker.
“Tonight was a bust,” Bennie said with a sigh, running a hand through his hair. He looked wary, his eyes pinging from one corner to the other, constantly looking for anything out of the ordinary or, you know, a random fledgling asking questions about us.
“What did you expect? That we’d find that fledgling immediately?”
We rounded the corner onto our street. It was already after six, and the sky was getting lighter and lighter. There wasn’t much time left until sunrise.
Bennie shrugged, giving me an apologetic grin. “Kinda? I mean, he’s supposedly looking for us, so I thought being available out in the open would help.”
I snorted. “If you wanted us to be available out in the open, you shouldn’t have had us looking in every fucking alley within a six-block radius of the club.”
Bennie gave me a sheepish grin, then walked past me, jogging up the couple of stairs to our old town villa.
“I don’t know what we’re looking for,” he said, rolling his eyes. “And I have no idea why that guy is looking for us in the first place.”
“Maybe he wants you to help him navigate life as a vampire?”
Bennie threw his hands up in the air. “Why the fuck would he want that? Don’t ever tell Aries this, but he’s right. I’m basicallya baby myself. Hell, do you think your”—he gave me a secretive look before whispering low enough that even another vampire would have trouble hearing him if they were standing more than a few feet away—“mate issue was the first thing I had to ask him for help about?”
“It’s not?”
Bennie opened our front door and entered.
