Their Unusual Mating [Paranormal Protection Unit 5] (Siren Publishing Classic) (17 page)

“That it was,” he murmured quietly to her. Brushing a kiss to her lips, he stepped back slightly. “Clean up a bit, my love, and we will go home and shower,” he said quietly. “See if we can’t come up with something else to do there as well.”

“Mmm, I like that idea a lot,” she promised him. “Let’s get ourselves cleaned up and then we will get ourselves home, showered, and maybe watch some TV or something.”

“And food, definitely need food,” he said with a grin, helping her out of the robe once more for another dip in the pond.

She moved away from him and walked into the water’s edge. Leaning down, she began to wash her body off, since she wasn’t willing to get back in for another swim. Once she had most of their shared orgasms off of her body, she moved back toward him and smiled. “All right, love. Let’s get back to our home and get some food in us.”

Standing to the side and just behind his mate and Queen, Laighean tipped his head to the side to see what it was Quincy was showing everyone. The Mage had said he’d found out a little more information about those that had been at Rimi’s house, the reason she’d come to stay at Kat’s originally. There wasn’t much, so this was to be, at least from what he understood, a chat session to see if there was more information there that they’d missed.

Rimi slipped her hand into Lee’s and gave it a squeeze. She had no idea why someone had wanted her, just knew that someone had said that she was the key to finding “unnaturals,” whatever that was. She listened to the Mage as he spoke and felt more and more sick to her stomach as he went on.

“Skittles, boil it down for us before my head explodes,” Talon said to the man.

“All right.” Quincy looked around. “Basically it comes down to humans want to find us, experiment on us, and kill us,” he said shooting everyone a look. “We boys and girls of the paranormal world are what they term ‘unnaturals.’ The mates, like Rimi, are their targets because they know eventually an ‘unnatural’ will find them and claim them. Then they can trap us and do whatever they plan to do.”

Drawing Rimi back against him, Laighean wrapped his arm around her middle and held her close to him. He didn’t like the idea of the mates being used to trap anyone. “How do they know?” He asked the big question hanging in the air.

“That is a very good question. How could they have known that Rimi was going to be a bond-mate? She didn’t even know, not really,” Katherine put out there. “And humankind will always hunt down what they don’t understand.” It was a sad but true fact. “They are constantly searching for the whos, whats, whens, and wheres, especially if it might make one of them a little cash.”

“So the question still stands, how did they know?” Quincy said and grinned at all the dirty looks it got him. “Well, boys and girls, I may have one solution to that. It’s out there, but it’s possible. So—” He turned around and hit the keys on the keyboard. “Bear with me here. This will all seem seriously convoluted, but I do have a point here. We have Kat, who moved here on a whim, sort of. Her father was powerful and had an unusually well-hidden background where he only popped up now and again,” he said to the room.

“Then we have Jackie, her parents, average and relatively off the radar except for her father who is high powered and in the know about us.” He tapped some more buttons. “Talina, way off the radar except for the hospital records for her mother and a few domestic reports to the cops. Pretty mundane and no big triggers. And last, for this demonstration, we have Rimi. Average childhood, mundane adult life, sorry Rim.” He grinned at her. “Absolutely nothing out of the ordinary.”

He pulled up another screen and shot everything up to the main large screen on the wall. “Until you start digging,” Quincy told them. Getting up, he moved to the wall screen. “Once you start looking into the ancestry, that’s when you find the curious things. Now, they have to literally be looking at every female and male ever born, huge programs constantly running and spitting out data. If these were changers, I’d say they had an inside track, but these are humans and they are doing their homework.”

Hitting a couple things on the touch screen, he lined up the ancestry charts and blew them all up. “If you will note, here, here, here, and here.” He pointed to each of the four he was using. “What do we see, boys and girls?”

Talon leaned forward and frowned, reading the names, and cursed. “Holy mother of the Gods,” he muttered softly. “Those are all names of some of the first Kings and Queens. Gregorvich is one of the first Dragons,” he said pointing to Talina’s bloodline, which was his basically, given she was his daughter, quite a ways back.

“The thing about changers is, we keep exceptionally well-documented records, and being linked to Magi and Sorcerers like myself, all those documents got put onto the Net as soon as it came into being,” Quincy told them. “It makes tracking the bloodlines much easier instead of having to travel miles to meet with each historian of each clan to find out when there were marriages and matings. All is actively and correctly tracked and documented.”

“Isn’t this stuff classified, hidden, and buried though?” Trey asked from his seat next to Kat.

“Oh it is. In the beginning it wasn’t,” Quincy said softly, “But once we realized what the Net was becoming, we scoured it clean and pulled all the documents back into our vaults. But the Net never forgets, and though I spend nearly half my time finding, copying, and digitally erasing documents just like these out there, there’s always more still to find. And we only clued in to what would occur a few years ago and starting digging everything back up. Really wish one of the seers had figured it out earlier,” he muttered.

“So the humans have all our papers, all the lineages, and have programs set to track and trace the lines of everyone on earth?” Laighean asked with a frown, not entirely understanding how that was possible or what it all meant.

“Essentially,” Quincy said. “They’ve had over forty years to do it before we realized the issues with the Internet and started the recall into our vaults. But they could literally have a copy of every single clan, every bloodline of the changers, Mage, and Fae out there. Once they had a copy saved to their computers, and if they kept them offline only using very specific search parameters, they’d never pop up on our radar.”

“That’s why they aren’t finding them all,” Mac murmured. “Some of the bloodlines are so convoluted not even us changers know how they work or how to track and trace them. They have to limit themselves a bit to parameters that won’t take forever to trace.”

“No,” Quincy said and held up a hand. “Let me explain. The more details you have, the better refined your search engine is. For example, you search for restaurants you’re literally going to get hundreds of thousands worldwide. But you search for restaurants in New York that serve Italian and have tiramisu and serve an ‘88 Chianti, you’ll get maybe a couple or so, unlike the hundreds of thousands you had before.”

Licking his lips, he leaned against the wall. “Same thing for our bloodlines. The more refined they are in the details, the more narrow the search, but time is a huge element, plus the fact there are over seven billion people on the planet that they have to search through. Now, technically, that’s narrowed down a little because third-world countries don’t exactly have great records. Plus they will be likely limiting it to certain age groups in the hopes to find those that are young and able to bear children. Talina likely would never have been found though,” Quincy told them.

“While Talon’s name was on the birth certificate, he’s had a few surnames over the years, part of the blending with society thing we do. Yes, we keep track of the names and always link them back to him, but those were not part of the original papers. The Dragons were a hold out,” Quincy told the group. “They had fairly uptight views of the Net and of us having their records. I only could do the trace because Talon finally told the older Dragons to shove it where the sun didn’t shine and gave the bloodline files to me. They, though, have never been on the Internet proper, strictly in our vaults.”

Katherine nodded. “Which makes sense. And I likely wasn’t found because I was hidden so well because of Daddy.” She chewed her lower lip and added, “And I can’t see my grandmother signing up to give a full genealogy, and since all of the Fae were in stasis anyway she likely didn’t feel she had to.”

Rimi looked to Quincy and then Maya before saying, “So it would seem that I’m distantly related to the Magic users? Specifically you, Maya. So the question is, who in the human world has the money and smarts to put this together? Who would even know how to trace all of this?” That was the biggest question.

“Not a clue,” Quincy said and rolled his eyes at all the looks he got. “Look, I can on occasion be a miracle worker, but until about two hours ago, I didn’t even know what I was looking for. Now I do, so I will keep digging and hopefully be able to give you all the answer. But right now, all I can say is, whoever this is has huge money, geeks coming out of the ass, and has been working steadily for a long time. I’d say it’s a group of some sort, probably something left over from one of the wars that has survived father to son, mother to daughter through the ages. Unfortunately we shot ourselves in the foot and gave them a way to find our mates. But on the plus side, it tells us that all the mates are descendants of the original lines, which tells us why the bonding works, why we’re drawn to them, and why they can survive all we put them through.”

Rimi nodded and laughed. “I could totally see that.” It was intense, the bonding that occurred between mates. It was beyond incredible and it was something she loved. “But now that we know, is there a way that we can somehow look for the bond-mates? Find them and put guards on them before whoever it is that’s looking for them finds them?” She knew that would seriously tax manpower, but if it had to be done they could at worst hire it out to some of the retired marines or SEALS that the group knew.

“Yes and no,” Quincy said. “And before you all jump down my throat, listen,” he advised the rowdy bunch. “While I would be essentially starting from scratch in the search, we do have one, plus, we have all the original records including some, Dragons and Fae included, that were never scanned into the Net. On the downside, I’d be starting from scratch plus trying to backtrack those that are working for this group, find the group, and get into their system. The algorithm is simple enough to write for the search parameters and linking it to the vault, our central computer storage, but it’s going to burn a lot of computer power that quite frankly, we don’t have.”

“Get it,” Talon said instantly and decisively.

“Already on order, boss,” Quincy said with a grin. “Just don’t be surprised by the bill that comes with it.”

“Rarely am anymore, Q,” the Dragon said honestly with a lazy shrug.

“Good.” Quincy looked at everyone again. “Second issue is that I’m going to need people to monitor and make the calls. The system will send us alerts if it finds a possible hit, but we still need to do the back tracing ourselves, with a program of course, to verify if they have the right lineages and aren’t some bizarre coincidence of an offshoot deal. We can’t make mistakes and we can’t miss any of them. In the meantime, on top of all that, I have to find this group and still need to run the ops for all the missions. Basically, I need mega help from people with at least basic computer skills. Hacking would be a plus.”

“I think Q might be right here,” Katherine spoke up. “Some of the brightest minds are hackers. So why not put out there a forum that only tempts them into wanting to break into our servers? Dangle the bait, reel them in, and make them work for us,” she said with a grin. “I don’t have a lot of time to give, but anything that I have is at your disposal, including Wilder Inc. Just put it out there and I’m sure that you will find what you are looking for.”

“Already got it in the works,” Skittles said with a grin. “I’m a hacker at heart and know just how to lure them in. I have a bunch of things on various boards about this awesome site that is impossible to hack. I’ve put it out there all on the DL and we’ll see who can get through what I constructed. It’s constructed to test their skills, and they’ll never even know it is a test or that I know where to find them if they pass.” Winking at Kat, he chuckled at the growls he got from the Bears and Wolf. “But I’m glad you had the same idea, kitten,” he teased her, using the nickname he knew her mates had given her.

Katherine put her hands on her mates’ chests and laughed. “Honey, he’s giving you a hard time. You know as well as I do that this man is so much in love with his mate that it’s not even funny. Don’t worry about it, honey. Really it will be good, sweetheart.”

“Course I adore and love my mate.” Quincy grinned and blew kisses at Maya. “Doesn’t mean I’m not going to yank the Bears’ and Wolf’s tails from time to time. Besides, Kat’s family, and that means I get to do it. She even said so herself,” he told the Bears and Wolf in question. “Anyway, hopefully I’ll have some hackers soon that can do the work, but I’ll still need a couple of people to put the calls out. ‘Cause we all know that the Teams will only take orders from those they know and those that Talon puts in a position to give those orders.”

“Maybe we can get my father to get us some help?” Jackie popped out there. “I mean, come on, what’s the use of having the secretary-general of the military as your father if you don’t call in a favor every now and again?” She winked at her bond-mate and added, “Or we could call in a couple of my brothers. I think that they still are ready to take a piece out of Allister for the last time they tried to play football together.” Which had ended in lots of bloody noses and growls. It had been epic.

Allister grinned evilly. “We really should get them out to play again,” he said, chuckling darkly. Damned humans hadn’t had a prayer. It had been great.

“Well, let’s not do anything yet,” Quincy said to everyone. “I need to figure out who we’re dealing with, get the hackers lined up, and then we’ll pull in those we need.” Digging out his phone, he shook his head. “Seriously, in my day a hacker knew how to get through a few little security measures,” he muttered. “Hell, I regularly hack the Secret Service just to mess with their schedules for fun.”