Afterglow (Brotherhood of the Blade Trilogy #2) Read Online Free PDF

on a Post-It note and handed it to me.
    “ Thanks. I don’t know what it is going to take to find Kristin and save Gabby from her own plan to do herself in when the opera is completed, but things are heating up around here, and Kristin hasn’t seen me for a long, long time. I think we really need a vampire for hire.”
     
     
     
    Chapter Four
     
    As usual, Ambra, the former movie stuntwoman and ex-Olympic skier, was kicking my ass on the intermediate parkour training. Today, we were running, vaulting, and jumping all over the newly designed obstacle course in the vast gym. I was both dreading the day that we did parkour, for real, on a vampire hunt, but also elated about it, to see if it would be my edge against the vampires. Parkour was all about body strength, movement and decisions. I was good at decisions and Ambra was such a great parkour trainer.
    After months of freerunning training and practice, I seemed to be as strong as when I had been about twenty-two years old. I was slim, I was fit, and I was cut. As a runner, I was substantially faster than I had ever been at any time in my life. I could cover ground or elevated structures without my old fear of heights. I was still afraid of sharks and jellyfish, but I had no problem scaling walls and jumping between structures, at least in the well-padded gym.
    Everyone was participating in parkour today, even Daphne, who was middle aged, but still fairly fast and strong for a woman. After months of training, we were all bouncing like jumping beans on the mats, the trampolines, the trapezes, padded walls, springboards and the climbing wall. It was nuts what Ambra had set up for us tonight, as our new parkour challenge—I was kind of regretting earlier making a pig out of myself on Swiss fondue and bread during my big-ass talk with Lucas.
    “ Come on!” Ambra urged us. “Let’s put a little more Cirque de Soleil into your vaults and leaps.”
    I tried to leap-climb a padded ten-foot wall and lost my grip due to pain. I slid down to the mat with a thump and gasped as I came out of my tuck and roll.
    “You all right?” Ambra asked.
    I winced. “Well, not perfectly all right.” I flexed my hands.
    “Let me see your hands,” she said. “Your palms.”
    I opened them to her, face up.
    She whistled low at the bloodiness. “They’re a mess. They are all torn up. The skin, I mean.”
    “ Well, if parkour was easy, everyone would do it, right?”
    “ It’s hard, but I see your problem. You need to shave down your callouses so they lay flat with the palm and don’t get torn up when you vault over things and touch mats, walls and other rough surfaces.”
    “ I was supposed to shave them with that Pedi-Egg thing you gave each of us?”
    “ Yes. I know the bits of skin are gross, but look at my palms,” she said.
    I ran my hand over them. “Smooth. Soft.”
    “That’s right. All of my parkour callouses are shaved flat with my palms so they don’t catch and tear the more tender skin next to the callouses.”
    “ I knew that. I just haven’t been keeping up with the regimen.”
    “ It could save your life to have your hands in shape for parkour.”
    I nodded. “I’ll take skin care more seriously,” I promised.
    “If you don’t, I’m going to make you watch a training video on parkour hand care. Ten times.”
    “ Can’t have that,” I teased.
    “ All right, you are off all hand use in parkour for a couple of days until your hands are in better shape,” she said. “Will you get some gloves on and coach the climbing wall?” she asked. It was the first time she assigned me a responsibility like that during parkour training.
    “ Sure,” I said, and moved to the two-story climbing wall. I spotted for Nariko, our resident tiny clothing designer and stealthy vampire hunter, who was four foot something and about ninety pounds. She had very little upper body strength, but her legs were like bands of steel due to her addiction to a stair-climber machine.