Chapter 16
Eric
It was three a.m., and even colder outside than it’d been last night, yet CRAVE was still filled to the brim with scantily clad people. The heavy bass vibrated through my whole body as I walked past the bouncer, who hadn’t even blinked an eye when I’d told him Aries wanted to see me.
To be honest, I was more than a little pissed that I’d had to leave Finn’s bed just to check in with him.
Especially since I didn’t get why I needed to in the first place.
He was neither my sire nor my clan head.
He was just some random vampire who owned a popular club in town.
Yes, granted, it’d been nice of him to tell me about the whole “mates” thing, otherwise I’d probably still be sitting on the rooftop opposite Finn’s apartment watching him from afar.
Well, I continued to do so, but I was also getting to know him.
However, one little act of human… vampiric decency shouldn’t put me in a position where I had to leave my mate’s bed just to go say hi.
I mean… he could simply call me. Or better yet, text me. No need for me to set foot in this fucking hellhole.
The blue and purple stroboscopic lights flickered through the room, dancing faster than the sea of people writhing on the dance floor. The stench of sweat and sex hung heavy in the air, mixed with the unmistakable notes of fresh blood.
Someone was feeding. Right here.
Letting my eyes wander, it didn’t take me long to find Bennie—why did it have to be Bennie who was being so utterly fucking careless?
—tucked into a corner, chewing away on some giant dude’s neck.
Okay, granted, to everyone not in the know, it probably looked like he was giving the guy a hickey, but I did know, and I could smell it.
He briefly caught me looking at him, and I rolled my eyes, trying to let him know that he should at least have the fucking decency to take the guy to the back alley or a damned restroom, but Bennie just winked, then turned his attention back to his snack.
Upon turning back around, I caught Aries grinning at me, once again manning the bar, lazily polishing a glass as if he didn’t have a care in the world.
“Don’t you have employees for that?” I asked as he placed the glass back on a shelf behind him and reached for the next one.
“Good evening, youngling,” he said, giving me the tiniest of nods. He didn’t say anything else, clearly waiting for me to say something.
“It was a good evening,” I said, thinking about the way Finn had been all snuggled up to me after our little endeavor in the shower. “Then I had to leave my mate’s bed to visit you here.”
God, how much I hated this club. And Aries’s pretentious face. The way he looked so fucking careless and unbothered by fucking everything. As if his whole existence were one big joke.
“Ohh… you were in your mate’s bed? Tell me everything, youngling.” Aries leaned forward, bracing his hands on the bar top.
I rolled my eyes. “A gentleman doesn’t kiss and tell.”
Aries gave me a laugh, running a hand through his long hair. “So, there were kisses involved? Interesting, youngling. Very interesting.”
Gah. I balled my hands into fists to keep from throttling him. How could one vampire be capable of shredding all my patience within thirty seconds? It had to be a special talent of his.
“Now, follow me. Your young sire can follow us once he’s done eating,” Aries said loudly. Loud enough for Bennie to give him a thumbs up, while still sucking face with his guy.
Aries took a moment to talk to his bar staff, then led the way to his office. I sat down on one of his couches and leaned back.
“Do you need a snack, youngling?” Aries asked, his back turned to me again as he rummaged through his fridge.
It was all a show, I was sure of it. A power play designed to make me aware of his status without having to say a word.
“No, thanks, I fed tonight.”
Aries turned to me with a grin, waggling his eyebrows. “Do tell, youngling. Is your mate as delicious as he looks?”
I couldn’t help the snarl escaping my throat.
Finn was mine.
Aries let out a delighted laugh. “It’s so easy to rile you up. Don’t be afraid, I’m not gonna take your mate away from you.”
I took a deep breath, just to calm myself down a bit. I’d known Aries was goading me, I’d known it, but I hadn’t been able to keep my cool. Not where Finn was involved.
“You wanted to talk to me,” I said, trying to change the topic.
Aries nodded, stepping up to the glass wall, looking at the club below. “Ah, yeah. But let’s wait for your sire. I believe he’s on his way up.”
And really, just a minute later, there was a knock on the door, and Bennie entered, smiling widely while trying to tame his hair. He reeked of arousal and blood. I wrinkled my nose, but he just raised his hand, shaking his head.
“I don’t want to hear a word, Eric.”
Rolling my eyes, I grumbled. “I wasn’t about to say anything.”
Not here, at least. I would’ve waited until we were home.
“How come you’re so uptight, youngling?” Aries asked gleefully.
I wasn’t uptight. I just had a shred of human decency left. Not that I told Aries that. I kept quiet, grinding my teeth.
“Why are we here?”
“Oh, right. Have a seat.” Aries motioned for Bennie to sit too, then headed over to us to sit in an armchair, legs extended, back resting against the cushion.
“First, I wanted to know how things with your mate are progressing. It’s been a while since I last witnessed a vampire meeting their fated one, and I have to admit it’s… rather entertaining.”
Rolling my eyes, I bit back a snarky remark, trying to remind myself that I wouldn’t even know who Finn was to me without Aries’s help. I didn’t have to like the guy—and I really didn’t—but I did have to give him props for letting me know.
“Things are good,” I said. We were making progress.
“So, you stopped stalking him?”
Bennie barked out a laugh, shaking his head. I gave him a dirty look, but he appeared to be completely unbothered by it.
“Soo… the stalking is still happening?”
Bennie nodded. “At this point, he’s basically only at home during the day so he can get a bit of sleep.”
I rolled my eyes.
I wasn’t that bad.
Not really.
“It’s completely natural,” Aries said, folding his hands on his knees.
“Stalking is natural?” Bennie asked, raising his eyebrows. “Dude, please don’t encourage him. I’m over here trying to teach him that stalking isn’t okay.”
Aries gave Bennie a withering glare, his pale blue eyes basically shooting icy daggers. “I’m not your dude. Also, I’m not saying I condone your youngling’s methods. But I imagine he’s feeling quite… untethered with no bond in place. His instincts are probably running rampant.”
Great.
“I have it under control,” I said tightly, crossing my arms in front of my chest.
“No one said you didn’t.” Bennie turned to me, his expression a lot less teasing now.
No, there was actual compassion on his face as he placed a hand on my shoulder and squeezed.
“You forget that I can feel when your anxiety is getting bad. I can feel it ramping up the longer you don’t see him or don’t text with him. I hate that you’re stalking him…”
“Watching over him,” I grumbled. It wasn’t like I’d put a tracker on him or anything like that.
“Whatever you want to call it. I don’t like your methods, but I get it. And if stalking him gives you a bit of peace of mind, I’m not gonna stop you. Just… I hope once the two of you get to know each other better, you can stop with those creepy-ass notes.”
“Naaaw,” Aries cooed, hands on his cheeks. “You younglings are so disgustingly sweet. Really, it’s quite unusual for vampires. Anyway. There’s a second thing I wanted to talk to you about.”
“There is?”
Aries gave me a hard look. “Believe it or not, I’m not just calling you over for a bit of gossip.”
Bennie and I exchanged looks. Aries definitely liked to know the latest tea, but since we both wanted to keep our heads, we kept quiet, waiting for him to tell us what he wanted to know.
Aries pulled his phone out of his pocket, his fingers dancing over the display for a few moments, then he turned it around to show us.
“Here. Do any of you know this guy?”
I looked at the image of a young, very pale guy with curly black hair. In the picture, he was standing at the bar downstairs, obviously talking to Aries, his hands up in the air.
“No idea.” Bennie shook his head. “Can’t say I’ve ever seen the guy. What about you?”
“Nope,” I said, shaking my head. “He looks like a vamp, though.”
“He is.” Aries nodded, his lip curling into a sneer. “He’s a fledgling. A fucking baby. And he’s running around town all alone, asking questions about the two of you.”
“Us?”
“Yeah.” Aries shrugged. “I figured you’d want to know.” He leveled Bennie with a hard look. “You haven’t sired any other vampires, right?”
Bennie shook his head vehemently. Gone was any playfulness. “Definitely not.”
“Good,” Aries sighed. “Because leaving a fledgling, a baby, out on the streets like that is not cool. It’s against all kinds of protocol.”
“And here I thought you didn’t like vampire politics and stuff.”
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. He just 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 basically a 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.
“Nope,” he laughed, his playful smile returning. “It’s not like there are ‘how to raise a vampire’ books freely available. And as it turns out, my old master has been kinda bad about sharing important things.”
That one I believed.
Bennie’s old clan leader was a fucking scumbag.
“Anyway, that’s not important right now,” Bennie said, kicking off his shoes. “Let’s both get a bit of sleep, and then we can talk about what we want to do about that fledgling guy in the afternoon. I assume you want to meet Finn in the evening?”
I grimaced. “I’ll… uh… check in with him. But I’m kinda meeting the guys who live opposite him this evening.”
Bennie raised his eyebrows at me.
Oops. I might never have told him about that bit. “We became good friends because we spent a lot of time together in the summers… They like to hang out on the roof.”
Bennie blinked at me, oh so slowly. “You made friends while stalking your mate?”
“Kinda?”
“And now you’re hanging out with them?”
“They’re watching hockey, and I realized I haven’t been over in quite a while, soo… yeah?”
Bennie laughed, clapping my shoulder while simultaneously shaking his head. “I want to say please don’t ever change, but I still can’t condone your stalking tendencies.”