Cato_House of Flames

  “That is odd,” Cato said, setting his laptop on her dining room table.

  “I’ve been searching for her myself,” she said. “I haven’t gotten very far. Oh yes, except for the anonymous forum user who informed me that she’d been kidnapped by vampires. That was immensely helpful.”

  “Vampires?” Cato said, turning to her.

  “Crazy right?” she said with a chuckle.

  The tone in his voice almost seemed nervous. Why would the mention of vampires make him nervous? Things weren’t setting right with Penelope. She had niggling suspicions at the back of her mind. Who was Cato really? He came into her library with a strange story about leaking data that she hadn’t witnessed it until after he had arrived. Then she’d conveniently found the leak a few hours later. Then, he appeared again and fixed the problem, using code that looked mysteriously similar to the code in the database she had broken into yesterday. A database she’d found following a lead from that same anonymous user.

  She stared at the drawer where she kept her mace and fondled the cell phone in her pocket. She was going to see this out as long as she could. Cato hadn’t made any moves to harm her, so maybe they were on the same side. As much as she doubted any stories about vampires, she was beginning to feel there was something deeper going on.

  “Honestly,” she said. “I think it’s all a big conspiracy. I have found evidence of other missing people. Reliable people who disappeared. The police claimed the same thing about them. These were mothers and fathers and professionals. People who wouldn’t just disappear for no reason.”

  “What kind of conspiracy?”

  “Human trafficking? But it still doesn’t make sense. Of course, Flora was an attractive young woman. But many of these people were middle-aged, some even elderly, human traffickers don’t usually target old men.”

  “You’re right. That doesn’t make a lot of sense,” Cato said sitting down at the dining room table and opening up his laptop.”

  “I’m sorry,” she said, heading over to him. “I didn’t invite you over here to tell you about my problems. I want to learn more about the security protocols you installed at the library.”

  “Your sister is missing. That’s far more important than security protocols at the library.”

  “I agree. But I can’t expect you to get involved with that.”

  “I’d like to help you.”

  “Help me how?”

  “I can get you information you may not have access to.”

  She sat beside him and chuckled, drumming her fingers on the table top. “There’s not a lot of information I don’t have access to.”

  He glanced at her and then back down at his computer. “I don’t have a hard time believing that.”

  “My last lead went cold though. The vampire guy disappeared.”

  “You need help tracking him down?”

  “I already did. He disappeared yesterday morning. Never showed up for work. He still hasn’t been reported missing, but I’m sure he will be soon. The worst part is, he told me it would happen. He told me it would happen to me too because the vampires would come after me. Wooo.”

  “And you aren’t concerned?”

  She scoffed. “How concerned could I be? It’s a ridiculous story. Don’t you think so?”

  She studied his face, trying to read his expression, which proved to be exceedingly difficult. His face was completely impassive. He closed his computer and looked over at her with big blue eyes. She could tell he felt compassion for her. But that was about it.

  “What do you think?”

  “I told you what I think. I think it’s ridiculous. But it’s the last lead I had. Everything else was a dead end. The same people telling the same stories. No one has any more information than I do. In fact, I have the most information. I was helping the others. It was only the vampire guy who had a piece of the puzzle that I was missing. But you can’t really call ‘your sister was kidnapped by vampires’ a piece of any puzzle, can you?”

  “Maybe it was a metaphor?” Cato said, rubbing his chin.

  “A metaphor? I suppose. But a metaphor for what?”

  “You said you thought it was a conspiracy. People are being kidnapped and the police are covering it up. Now if vampire is a metaphor for a certain type of person, what type would it be a metaphor for?”

  “Let me see. Vampires suck people’s blood. They’re immortal, rich, and powerful.”

  She stopped and went silent as the puzzle pieces linked together, and a picture began to take shape.

  “Why would the rich and powerful take my sister? Why would they kidnap old men and women? What do they want?”

  “Maybe we won’t understand their motives,” he said.

  “But understanding why is the best way to understand how, when, and where.”

  “I can see your point,” Cato said.

  She sat back in her chair, shoving her hands in her pockets. She was still suspicious of Cato, but he was proving to be helpful already. Now that she was thinking about “vampires” in a different way, it was beginning to make sense. Maybe the people who were kidnapped had some special skill that these people wanted. There had to be a similarity between them. Something that linked them together, something that would make them desirable enough for the wealthy and powerful to kidnap them.

  “We just have to find out what these people had in common,” she said, pulling her own laptop across the table toward her.

  “You have a list of names?” Cato asked.

  “I do,” she said. “Give me your email address, and I’ll send it to you now.”

  He gave her his email address and they both begin typing furiously on their laptops. Looking into the lives of the people who had been taken, she found a broad cross-section of people. On the surface, there was no similarity whatsoever. She and Cato worked deep into the night, looking for any possible link between the dozens of missing persons who had disappeared mysteriously and then their cases closed. The biggest similarity she could find, right off the bat, was that they were all responsible people who would not characteristically disappear that way. That was what had made their families suspicious.

  “Most of these people were talented and intelligent,” Cato said, several hours later. “They come from various walks of life, but they all had something special about them. Something that separated them from regular people.”

  “I was beginning to see the same pattern,” Penelope said. “At first, it wasn’t obvious. But then it became clear. For example, this stay-at-home mom. On the surface, she seemed like a regular mom of two who’d left her office job when her children were born. But then I discovered that she had been developing urban gardens for inner-city youth. That development has been attributed to lowering the crime rate in those neighborhoods by five percent. Not an insignificant number. The seventy-five-year-old man who had been living in a nursing home. He’d worked for an insurance company for forty years. But in his youth, he’d been in the military and was awarded a medal of valor for his acts of bravery.”

  “I’m observing the same thing,” Cato said.

  “But what would the rich and powerful want with these people? How could they possibly harness and use these talents? It just doesn’t make any sense. Unless… No. That’s crazy.”

  “What?” Cato asked.

  “Unless there really is something about their blood,” Penelope mused.

  “It’s getting late,” Cato said, looking at his watch.

  “Oh, crap,” Penelope said. “I need to be at work in three hours. This is the third night this week I’ve done this.”

  “Done what?”

  “Stayed up all night working. You’re right. I need to get to bed.”

  “Very well,” he said closing his laptop and standing.

  She led him to the door and opened it, relieved that he hadn’t tried to rape or murder her during their research session.

  “Thank you for your help. I feel like I made a lot of progress tonight.”

/>   “Don’t mention it,” he said. “I may come and check my work at the library tomorrow.”

  “Okay then. I’ll see you tomorrow.”

  Penelope shut the door, her suspicions about Cato worse than ever. But even if he wasn’t what he claimed to be, he was still helping her. If vampires were real, then maybe superheroes were also real. Maybe Cato was like Superman and the Internet security consultant identity was just a cover. She chuckled at herself; her lack of sleep was getting to her. Penelope trudged through her apartment, turned off all the lights and collapsed into bed. If Cato was like Superman, then maybe she could be his Lois Lane. A nice thought as she drifted off to sleep.

  Chapter 7

  Cato went back to his apartment across the street from Penelope’s building and set up a surveillance system that would alert him to any suspicious activity happening in the vicinity of her condo. He then contacted Kian about his progress and went to sleep.

  When he woke up in the morning, he went over what had happened the day before with Penelope. He’d skirted the subject of the vampires well enough. But eventually it would have to come out. If Penelope was in fact his mate, she would learn about them by default. He’d considered telling her last night but had decided against it.

  He still didn’t know if she was his fated one. He couldn’t trust the ravings of his inner beast to give him that information. He needed cold, hard facts. A confirmation from the mating analysis was all he would accept. Until then, he would only look after her and make sure she was not attacked by the same vampires who had taken her sister. Surely, if the vampires could take her twin sister, they would come after her as well.

  This worried Cato more than a little, and he was glad he’d put in the effort to come and protect her. What were Dragon Guardians for if not to protect whatever Dragon Soul they came across? Mate or not.

  He showered, dressed, and ate a quick breakfast before grabbing his things and making his way to the library. Penelope was already there by the time he’d arrived. He set up his laptop at a desk in the corner of the second floor.

  “Hey,” Penelope said, stopping beside table. “You’re already here.”

  “Yes. I wanted to continue monitoring my security upgrade.”

  “Great,” she said. Her voice gave away underlying suspicion. “Well, let me know if you need anything.” She walked off and disappeared behind her office door.

  He needed her to believe him, at least until he could confirm she was or was not his mate. Then he would decide how to best protect her. If he and his crew could protect every Dragon Soul on the planet, then they would do that. But as it was, they could not.

  Aiden’s mate Winnifred had discovered that when a vampire bit a mated Dragon Soul, the blood was toxic to the vampire. The elder who’d bitten her had fallen dead the moment he’d tasted her. Cato had been researching the implications of such a toxin, with the hopes of creating a type of vampire vaccine for all Dragon Souls and possibly humans as well. It was in the extreme early stages, really just an idea at this point. Cato had been forced to abandon his research when he’d discovered Penelope.

  His dragon’s insistence that she was his mate left no room for anything else. The promising evidence of a vampire toxin would have to be left for another time. Now, his one and only priority was his mate. His prospective mate, he corrected himself.

  When the match was confirmed, then he would decide what to do next. Too bad his dragon did not agree. Cato had never been at such extreme odds with his inner beast. Usually, his inner dragon was as studious and rational as he. But as soon as he saw Penelope’s face on the computer screen, his inner dragon lost all semblance of control.

  Cato hated that the mating impulse could do this to him. He was making ridiculous errors all over the place. He’d come to Seattle without a plan, given Penelope a ridiculous cover story, which luckily, she bought. He’d gone over to her house, almost confirmed the existence of vampires and sent her on a wild goose chase looking for evil humans in positions of power. If he made another error of this magnitude, he didn’t know what he’d do with himself.

  “You want to go grab some lunch?” Penelope asked, approaching his table later that day.

  “Sure,” he said. “I was just finishing up.”

  “There is a great cafe across the street with the best chicken Caesar salads. If you like that type of thing.”

  “I love salad,” he said, following her down the stairs to the first floor of the library.

  They walked across the street. He heard a whistle from the construction workers in the apartment building next door. He looked up at the man in the tight-fitting faded blue jeans. The man was looking down at Penelope with lust in his eyes.

  “Is he cat-calling you?” Cato asked.

  “Probably,” Penelope muttered. “My coworker likes to flirt with them from the break room. She gets me to do it sometimes.”

  Cato could feel his blood beginning to boil. It took every ounce of his strength to prevent himself from shifting, jumping into the air, and eating that human man in one bite.

  “Do you want me to do something about it?” he asked in a tight voice as they stepped onto the sidewalk in front of the cafe.

  “What? No. Please don’t. There’s been a whole thing with the librarians and these guys ever since the construction started. I think he wants to date me to be honest. Too bad he’s not my type.”

  Cato grumbled under his breath and shook his head. “What is your type?” he asked as he held the door of the cafe for her.

  She gave him a sly look and blushed. Turning away, she hid behind the cascade of her wavy brown hair.

  “I’ll have a chicken Caesar salad and a green smoothie,” Penelope said to the girl at the counter. Turning to Cato, she said, “Trying to eat healthy.” She rubbed her stomach. “Got to lose some pounds.”

  “Why?” Cato asked, completely confused. She looked perfect. More than perfect. Her luscious curves were driving him insane at that very moment. Why would she ever want to lose them? The girl behind the counter gave him a side-eye and Penelope chuckled.

  “Don’t all women say that?”

  “They shouldn’t,” Cato grumbled. “You shouldn’t.”

  “What can I get you?” the cashier asked. Cato looked up and realized he’d been holding up the line for several minutes, contemplating Penelope’s perfect curves.

  “Oh, the same as her.”

  The clerk took his money and handed him a container of salad. They stood at the end of the bar while the smoothie maker blended their drinks. With drinks in hand, Penelope and Cato took their lunches to a counter by the window.

  “I like watching people go by while I eat lunch,” Penelope said. “It makes me feel less alone.”

  “Why would you feel alone?” he asked.

  “I’ve always had my sister, even though I’ve had a hard time making friends, especially boyfriends.” She laughed. “But now that I can’t find her, it makes it harder than ever.”

  “So, you don’t have one? A boyfriend, that is?”

  “No,” she said, looking down at her salad as she stabbed a big piece of Romaine lettuce with her plastic fork.

  “You never told me your type,” he said, the words slipping out of his mouth like he had no control of himself. He felt like slapping his forehead, but he couldn’t make it that obvious what an idiot he was right now.

  “Ha, my type. Well…”

  She kept eating her lunch without looking at him, staring down at her salad. She let out a long sigh and faced him, smirking like she was about to laugh. Her cheeks had turned a lovely shade of pink.

  “To be honest, someone a lot like… you,” she said, staring him straight in the eye.

  “Oh…”

  He’d walked right into that one. What was he going to do now? Tell her that if the gods had made a woman exactly to his specifications it would be her? Tell her is inner beast was at that very moment screaming for him to grab her and kiss her? And not to stop there. No,
it demanded he wouldn’t stop until he’d made her his forever? He could not say that. Instead, he sat there silently like a mute fool.

  “What’s your type,” she said, breaking the silence.

  “What?” he stammered. “My type. I um…”

  “Why are you so embarrassed?” she said teasingly. “You asked me. What—do you like something freaky, like girls who dress up as cats?”

  “Cats?” he muttered. “No. It isn’t that.”

  “Just spit it out then.” She giggled.

  “The truth is…I’ve been attracted to you since the first moment I saw you.”

  “Oh,” she said, the pink in her cheeks growing brighter. “Good to know.”

  “Well, now we’ve admitted our attraction to each other,” he said, his throat incredibly dry. He had to slurp down his smoothie until it was gone to clear the lump that had formed. “What do you think we should do?”

  “Under normal circumstances, I’d say we should start dating. But I need to find my sister. I can feel she’s in distress. She would never leave in the middle of her dissertation and not come back. That’s just not possible. Something is definitely wrong. Someone took her, and she can’t come home or even contact me. I need to find her. And I think you can help me.”

  “I might be able to,” he muttered.

  “Look, Cato. I know there’s something you aren’t telling me. That bogus story about the internet security, it was a little convenient. Don’t you think? I keep a very tight ship, and I found no evidence of the data loss until after you showed up. That’s a bit too much of a coincidence in my book.”

  “I can’t tell you any more than I already have.”

  “Are you like a superhero or something? Here to protect Seattle from crime?”

  “Something like that.”

  “Ha, I knew it,” she said in a teasing tone. “No really. I know there is something up. I have the suspicion that I hacked your database the other night and that led you to come check up on me. I probably shouldn’t be telling you this, but there it is. We spent all night together last night, and we both just admitted we were into each other. It’s getting a little too intimate for me to beat around the bush anymore. So, I’m just coming out and telling you what I suspect. Take it or leave it.”