Hidden Trump (Bite Back 2) Read Online Free PDF

even the clowns. My paranoia wasn’t always right, but just to be on the safe side, I never went to sleep with a clown in the room.
    Tullah was a bit distracted today, whether that was because of her parents, or Matt, or the additional responsibility she’d taken on. I’d have to keep a close eye on that. She hadn’t yet taken on any overtly dangerous work for the business, but it wasn’t a safe job and it didn’t pay to get distracted, working as a PI.
    A bit of advice I should pay more attention to. 

Chapter 4
     
    I walked back to my car, still checking out the park.
    I drove a couple of blocks and found a shady spot to park in a quiet street, behind my old school, South High. I spent a couple of minutes just looking at the buildings with a sense of nostalgia. Damn, I’d thought my life was complicated back then. How wrong could I be?
    I hadn’t been completely honest with Bian today, and now I’d done the same with Tullah. I wasn’t feeling proud of myself. Telling Bian about Larry would have lost me my chance to get Hoben, I felt clear about that. Not telling Tullah I was now fully Athanate wasn’t so clear.
    What would happen when I did tell her? Mary had said she would have to leave; Adepts don’t work with Athanate. I might have to close the business. What would I do then? I couldn’t work for anyone else, certainly not until I was sure I had everything Athanate under control. Did that mean I’d have to go and beg a living from House Altau? Diana had said they would welcome me, but I’d never checked what that meant.
    In truth, I wasn’t even sure about whether I was fully Athanate. Would I feel suddenly different? Would there be a moment when I just knew?
    And what about my spirit guide? I’d had a dream vision last night; my Arapaho great-grandmother, Speaks-to-Wolves, had appeared to me. What was it she’d said? ‘ You are none of the things they will think you are.’ And she introduced me to my wolf spirit guide, Hana, who she said would speak to me ‘ when your spirits balance .’
    Adepts had spirit guides, not Athanate.
    Did that mean I would become Athanate and Adept? And welcome in both communities? Or neither?
    I rubbed my face, tired and frustrated. An Athanate-Adept, believing dreams and talking to voices in her head. Paranoid and dating a werewolf. At that thought, finally, I had to chuckle. At least my life couldn’t possibly get any weirder.
    While I was sitting there in the car, I might as well run the blood test. I reached behind the seat and picked up the little unit.
    The army hadn’t believed in vampires until my team had been wiped out by them in the South American jungles and they got me back more dead than alive. I had healed in five days. My throat had been ripped open and a week later, you couldn’t see it. Kinda hard for them to ignore that.
    The army had kept it all top secret and put together a medical team called Obs to investigate me. My old commander from Ops 4-10, Colonel Laine, had been put in charge.
    They’d kept me in isolation to start with, of course. But they’d developed a test machine to monitor the progress of the infection and when that told them I was stable, they’d let me out. The agreement I’d had to sign was that everything was secret: Ops 4-10, Obs, vampires, everything. If I leaked, I was back in that isolation cell. And if I infected anyone else, then both of us would be in isolation cells.
    The unit I strapped on my arm measured the level of a type of prion, a protein string, in the body, that was a marker for what Obs still called vampiric infection. According to the colonel, an active vampire would have an index of 0.8, and I’d confirmed that on Diana when I’d run the test on her. I’d had a reading of 0.5 or so last week. I was guessing I was close to 0.8 now.
    It didn’t bother me as it would have done once, but still…
    There was the eerie sensation of the microsensors finding my vein, the prick of the needle and then the hum