Cato: House of Flames
Guardian Dragons 4
Scarlett Grove
Contents
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Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
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Chapter 1
Penelope Baptiste groaned, slapping at her buzzing alarm. She knocked her phone off the table and it landed with a thud on the ground. Penelope knew she should not have stayed up so late last night. But what choice did she have? If she didn’t look for her twin sister Flora, who would?
The police had been unhelpful, so Penelope had to take things into her own hands. But an entire night of hacking into government databases and security cameras had left her exhausted.
She rolled out of bed, palmed her eyes and trudged into the bathroom. When she looked at herself in the mirror, her hazel eyes were puffy and red. Her long honey brown hair was tangled, and her curves looked curvier than ever.
“Note to self, avoid Ben and Jerry while late-night hacking.”
Penelope stepped into the shower, washed and hurried to get dressed. With only a few moments to spare, she brushed out her hair and slapped on a serviceable amount of makeup. She pushed her glasses up the bridge of her nose and smiled. Her red lips belied her exhaustion and the growing sense of panic she felt every day that her sister Flora was missing.
Penelope hurried out of her building, hopped on her bus and made her way to the downtown branch of the Seattle Public Library. Head of information technology for the entire city library system, she’d come a long way since graduating with her master’s in IT last year.
Her sister Flora was of course still finishing her doctorate in genetic science. Not that she was in competition with Flora… Who was she kidding, they were always in competition. But thinking about it now, with Flora missing for over a week, made her feel like the biggest B to ever exist.
Penelope stepped off her bus in front of the library and made her way inside. She was greeted by the security guard and then by the branch manager on her way to her second-floor office.
She logged in and started her day, resolving bugs in the library’s card catalog. She’d developed and implemented a brand-new system last month, and it was still being worked out. So far, the patrons loved the faster, more streamlined search engine that allowed them to search and order books from any branch faster, easier, and with less fuss than ever before.
Penelope didn’t look up from her computer for a full three hours before realizing she’d been so deeply focused her feet were falling asleep. She groaned and got up, going to the break room for a cup of coffee and a chat with whoever was around.
She found her co-worker Candice stirring creamer into her freshly brewed coffee, while staring out the window at the construction workers across the street. Penelope threw a packet into the coffee machine, squished it down, and started it brewing over her favorite mug.
“What I wouldn’t do for a taste of that,” Candice purred.
Penelope ventured across the break room and gazed in the direction of Candice’s stare. A denim-clad and muscle-bound construction worker bent over, giving them a view of his rather yummy behind.
Penelope cleared her throat and looked away, hurrying back to the coffee maker where her cup had finished brewing.
“Don’t pretend like you don’t want a piece of that,” Candice said, licking her stir straw.
“I’m not,” Penelope said, pushing her glasses up the bridge of her nose. “He’s…cute,” she ventured. Although, she knew that probably wasn’t the best adjective.
“Cute? He’s fiiine,” Candice corrected.
“Right. Yes. That’s what I meant.”
“You okay, Penelope? How is the man hunt going?”
“Man hunt?”
“I know you’ve been online dating.”
“Oh, right, that. Um…It hasn’t.”
“What? A catch like you can’t find some loving in this city? I’m sure there are a pack of nerds lining up for a girl as pretty and as smart as you are.”
“A pack of…” Penelope stared at Candice, dumbfounded.
Candice threw her head back and laughed.
“I’m sure you could get one of those too if you wanted,” she said, pursing her lips at the construction workers. She then shook her head as if the guys over there were just too much to be real.
“No nerds or otherwise,” Penelope admitted.
“Why not? You’re a great girl. Aren’t you trying?”
Penelope had tried to date guys. And Candice was right, with her intellect and job title she did attract some top-notch Seattle nerds. Men with good jobs themselves. They had plenty to talk about. But then it never seemed to lead anywhere. No one could seal the deal.
When she dated the type that worked with his hands or had a regular office job, they ended up not having anything to talk about. They’d lean in to kiss her at the end of the night, but she wouldn’t feel anything because she’d been so bored the whole night.
“You’ll find your guy,” Candice said. “But in the meantime, there is no shame in sampling from the buffet. You’re young, Penelope, live a little.”
“I’ll have to try that,” Penelope said, taking her coffee and slipping out of the break room.
She wished she had Candice’s confidence with men. Penelope had had boyfriends before in college, but ever since she’d graduated, it had become even more challenging to find anyone she connected with. Mentally and physically. She wanted it all. And why wouldn’t she? She’d had plenty of chances to play the field. She could go to bed with guys she found attractive yet boring, but she just couldn’t do it. It felt wrong.
So, she’d been alone for…how long had it been? Over a year? Two years? Crap. It had been two years since she’d been
with anyone. But Penelope didn’t have time to think about such silly things right now. She had work to do. And more importantly she had to find Flora.
She went back to her office and spent another hour deep in the library’s computer systems. By the time she looked up from her work, it was lunch. Avoiding the break room and Candice’s dating advice, she made her way downstairs and across the street to the cafe where she liked to take her lunch breaks.
She ordered a Caesar salad from the lunch menu and took her plate to a table by the window. Opening her laptop, she went over the files she’d hacked from the police department the night before. If anyone knew she had these files, she’d go to jail for a long time. But no one would ever know. She was that good.
They had taken her report of her missing sister. But had soon filed it as a solved case. They’d explained away Flora’s disappearance as a case of a person who didn’t want to be found. Flora was writing a dissertation on genetic engineering at the top university in the state and had never done a single thing in her life to lead anyone to conclude that she would ever decide to just drop out of society and disappear.
It was not right, and Penelope was determined to get to the bottom of it. She would not let it rest. From her research, she’d discovered that there had been a slew of missing persons cases just like Flora’s. Other people on the internet and the deep web were complaining that their friend, family member, or spouse had gone missing and the police had done nothing to help them. All these people were accomplished, drug free, good citizens with no prior history of disappearing. It made no sense to anyone.
The more Penelope dug, the more panicked she became. She wasn’t much for conspiracy theories, but a lot of the people she’d talked to on the internet were. There was a growing suspicion that this was a conspiracy by police departments all around the country to cover up these missing persons cases.
Penelope wouldn’t stand for it. She would find her sister if it was the last thing she did. Shoving a bite of Caesar salad in her mouth, she squinted at the text messages on her screen from an anonymous user on a forum she’d been trolling.
The message was ludicrous, and she assumed this person was just your typical internet lunatic. She blinked several times and wiped her fingers on a paper napkin, rereading the message again and again.
“Your sister was taken by vampires.”
She slammed her laptop closed and hurried out of the cafe, making her way across the street to library. Glancing over her shoulder at the construction site as she walked inside, she sighed. That same hunky construction worker was staring down at her from the second floor of the new apartment complex.
He smiled and winked at her. Penelope pursed her lips and swung open the door to the library. She did not have time for man meat, no matter how hunky. Too bad she couldn’t just shut off her brain and use them the way that Candice suggested. Men had been doing it for eons. She believed in equal rights. But maybe that would taking it just a bit too far.
After she finished for the day, having worked out ninety-nine percent of the bugs in her new system, she caught the bus home to her cute little apartment looking over Green Lake Park.
She loved her home and was lucky she’d inherited it from her great aunt. With the prices in the city hiking up more each year, even someone with her salary could never afford to live in this building alone. She and Flora had lived here together. Which maybe was part of why she could never bring anyone home. Flora never approved of the men Penelope dated. Of course, Penelope never approved of any of Flora’s boyfriends either. No one was never good enough for her sister, and Flora felt the same way. That attitude was either keeping them both from making terrible mistakes, or it was keeping them lonely. Penelope hadn’t decided which yet.
She would never date anyone for the rest of her life if it meant that she found her sister. Penelope and Flora were identical twins. With similar personalities, dispositions, and IQs. They’d been inseparable all their lives and even more so since they’d lost their parents in a freak skiing accident as children. They’d gone to live with their great aunt Camilla, who’d pushed them to be the best they could be. It had paid off too. Both girls won full ride scholarships to University of Washington but had taken divergent paths after starting.
Penelope was in love with technology and computer systems. Flora found her passion in genetics. Penelope had finished school first and gotten a job while Flora continued her studies. It had made their life-long competition more pronounced at first, but both of them liked what Penelope’s salary did for their overall lifestyle. So, after a few months, Flora had stopped teasing her for not continuing her education and taking a job with the public library.
How she wished she could hear one of Flora’s challenging jibes right now as she sat in front of her desk and turned on her computer. The message she’d received from that anonymous forum user had haunted her all day. It couldn’t possibly be true. Vampires? That was just insane. But the more she considered it, the more it dug into her mind and started to take root.
She opened her deep web browser and followed the information the user had given her, hacking into the back door of a system with such tight security protocols she suspected it was tougher than hacking the pentagon.
When she finally got in, she found such brilliant code that she almost wet herself. She didn’t have long to be impressed though, because after about five seconds of being inside the system she was abruptly kicked back out.
“Oops,” she said. “That’s not good.”
She then cut power on her all computers.
Chapter 2
“Intruder detected,” Bethi, the House of Flames, shipboard AI stated.
Cato blinked with surprise as his fingers moved over the holographic dashboard, trying to detect the intruder.
“Quarantine the intruder,” Cato said. “And remove him from our system immediately.”
The House of Flames databases were so secure, Cato couldn’t believe any human could crack them. But here he was, watching his screen as Bethi chased the intruder through his system and eventually kicked him out.
“Intruder evicted,” Bethi stated.
“Was there any damage? Any data lost? What were they after?”
“The intruder entered through a weakness in our firewall,” Bethi said. “He was only able to access a small fragment of our database.”
“But this intruder was able to get into our system,” Cato mused, rubbing his chin. “Bethi, evaluate security protocols. I never thought I would say this, but we will need to fortify our firewalls against humans. It was a human, correct?”
“That is undetermined,” Bethi said.
“I want you to track this hacker,” Cato said. “I’m going to find him and I’m going to stop him from ever cracking my system again. I need to know what this man found out while in my database.”
“The hacker was routed through multiple IP’s. I’m tracing them now.”
“Good.”
Cato pushed away from his dashboard and stood. He could imagine a vampire could possibly crack his system, since they knew dragons existed. But a human? Never. Human technology was eons less advanced than the dragons’.
“Originating IP address located,” Bethi said. “It’s coming from an apartment in downtown Seattle.”
“What?” Cato asked.
That was the last thing he’d expected. Vampires usually lived in compounds with an entire coven living altogether. Or they would live in a mansion closer to the city if they were officials or were involved in local politics. Which was fairly common.
But the apartment address Bethi provided for him was a simple three-bedroom apartment in an upper-middle-class building. Not the kind of place he would expect to find vampires.
“Who owns this apartment?” He asked.
“The apartment is owned by Penelope and Flora Baptiste.”
A picture of the women came up on the screen. They were identical twin sisters. Lovely young women with honey brown hair and big
hazel eyes.
“Penelope Baptiste is the head of IT for the Seattle Public Library system,” Bethi said.
“You’re telling me that a librarian hacked our system?”
“It would appear that way,” Bethi said.
“This is ludicrous,” Cato said pacing the room. “Give me all the information you can on Penelope Baptiste.”
Suddenly his screen was covered in pictures of the young woman. Cato was shot in the heart by the most intense sensation he had ever experienced. Although almost completely identical to her sister Flora, he felt Penelope was the most beautiful woman he had ever seen. Generous curves were stretched tight by a pink polka-dot bikini as she threw a frisbee to her sister on a warm sunny day at the beach. Full, luscious lips parted as she chewed on the end of a pen, pouring over a book in a library. Her pretty oval face was framed by pink horn-rimmed glasses with crystal embellishments in the corners.
His inner dragon roared so loudly that Cato fell to his knees. He gripped his temples as the sound of his dragon overtook every other thought in his brain. He gasped, fearing he might lose his mind.
Ever since the dragons of the House of Flames had awoken two months ago, they had each felt their mating impulse activated. It was a deep driving need that every dragon felt when he found his mate. Cato had attributed this activation to the presence of Dragon Souls on the planet.
When the dragons of Dragonia had escaped their planet during the cataclysmic event following the death of their sun, the survivors had searched for a new home. When they had finally found the planet Earth a million years ago, the dragons had seeded the primordial planet with the souls of their ancestors.