Hidden Trump (Bite Back 2) (4 page)

We’d reached the edge of the park. My Ops 4-10 training and my instincts were in conflict. The training said this was becoming dangerous, we’d been too exposed too long. The instincts said I should be making more time for Tullah, make sure she was all right and safe.

“I’ll call him tomorrow,” I said, my attention distracted by color and movement back at the middle gate. Three clowns had come into the park. One was pushing a cart and banging a bass drum; the other two were running around, selling ice cream from the cart.

Classic setup. They were moving too fast. They’d sell more by standing still.

“Come on.” I grabbed her elbow and hauled her out of the park and behind the nearest van.

“You got a thing about clowns?” she said.

“I’ve got a thing about noise and distraction in crowds,” I replied. “Maybe just my paranoia, but you never know, one of these nights a clown may try and eat you.”

“Eww. You know, you’re freaky sometimes, boss. Surely Hoben’s not going to be able to do much with ZK gone?”

“Just like he’s still free, I doubt all of ZK have been caught. And anyway, he’s borrowing people from Matlal, and that’s even more worrying.” I peered around the van. The clowns were moving in the other direction. False alarm, maybe. “Anything else?”

“Yeah. The FBI want to talk to you.” Tullah passed over the last note in her file. “I don’t want to be out of line here,” she said hesitantly, “but it’s probably better to talk to them while they’re kinda not sure what they want to talk to you about.”

“Hmm.” I nodded gloomily.

I knew she was right, but I couldn’t imagine any visit with the feds would be pleasant or short. I had a life hedged with secrets. All my time in Ops 4-10 was special access program levels of secret. And of course, I couldn’t talk about the Athanate. Or Were. Or Adepts. They were bound to stumble across something I couldn’t tell them. In the worst case scenario, they might decide they had sufficient to detain me for obstructing an investigation—while they ‘cleared things up.’ Or have me restrained under the mental health regulations. That was a big risk for me; I
had
to be free to go after Hoben and I
had
to be at the Athanate Assembly on Saturday.

“Is it okay?” she asked, joining me to look back at the park. “I didn’t see anything suspicious.”

“Yeah, probably nothing, this time,” I said.

“I better get back. I have to leave early today.”

She sounded concerned. I raised an eyebrow.

“Talk with Ma and Pa.” She rolled her eyes. “Formal. Meet the boyfriend. Then, later, discuss the job. Review my progress as an Adept.”

She was trying to laugh it off, and it wasn’t quite working.

I retrieved the cell I’d taken at Castle Pines from my pocket.

“If you’re seeing Matt, ask him to run his analyses on this cell, please. And warn him I’ll want a couple of other little jobs.” Matt was her new boyfriend, with the brain of an über-geek behind the face of an angel. He worked for the Kingslund Group.

“You cleared it with Jen?”

“I will.”

“Okay.” She walked off. I watched her get into her car, and no one followed or even appeared to notice her leaving. The groups of people I’d been worried about were still in the park, 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 of the unit as it went through its routine.

The readout started flashing at me.

Damn. The batteries were probably getting low. I didn’t even know where they went in. I unstrapped it and turned it over. This wasn’t a consumer product with a handy little battery compartment. I’d need a screwdriver to take the thing apart.

I turned it back right side up and looked more carefully at the flashing message.

“ANOM 0.38” was blinking, and next to it, in steady letters, “: 0.41.”

I reset it. That’s to say I switched it off, banged it on the steering wheel a couple of times and then started again. It came up with the same result. It had never done that before. It always came up with a reading like 0.45 or something like that, in solid letters.

Time to ask questions.

The colonel didn’t answer his cell. That was the first time ever, and I sat there staring thoughtfully as the voicemail message came on for the second time.

I had one other number—for the Obs team at the main laboratory. I didn’t want to talk to them, but those flashing numbers were making me nervous.

One of the scientists answered. I recognized his voice, but couldn’t bring the name or face to mind.

“Hi, it’s Amber Farrell, can I talk to you about the blood test readings please?” I said awkwardly. I probably wasn’t supposed to have the test unit.

“Oh, yes, Ms. Farrell. It’s time you came in and we did another full review.”

“Fine,” I lied. “When the colonel arranges it. But today, I just wanted to check a message I’ve got on the unit.”

“Okay, but the messages are very simple. It should be obvious.”

“So what does a flashing ANOM mean?”

“You can’t have that reading. Look, you’ll need to come in and we can do a full test of everything.”

I rolled my eyes. This was worse than a computer support line.

“Just tell me what it means when there’s a flashing ANOM on the readout.”

I could hear him sigh. “The unit could be faulty. It’s set up to read vampiric prions, and when it does it will give you the standard index reading between 0 and 1. Any other kind of prion, it’ll flash up an anomalous reading.” He stopped, and I could hear him change mental gears suddenly. “Hey, you sent us some werewolf stuff a couple of weeks ago, didn’t you? You haven’t just run the test on a werewolf? Oh my God, you have. Listen, you have to bring them in. This is so important.”

My stomach twisted. Werewolf prions.

“Yeah,” I said, pretending I wasn’t concerned. “Tell Colonel Laine to call and arrange it.” Over my dead body. I ended the call.

Shit. I sat there shivering and let it sink in.

This can’t be happening to me.

Were and Athanate
can’t
cross-infuse. Alex had told me that.

Oh, my God. Alex. What had we done?

I called him. Voicemail, and this wasn’t the sort of thing you leave messages about.

Had he called me?

I flicked through my messages. He had. My stomach sank.

I’d run out on him this morning, responding to Jen’s call for help. We’d been in mid-session, just about to get naked and horizontal. Our first ever time together, my first guy for more than a couple of years. Oh, and my first ever werewolf. We’d been steaming and he had to have been angry when I’d gone, however well he’d hidden it. Had I screwed this up before we even got started? Or was this a call to ask why he was suddenly getting a different type of fang?

I listened to his voicemail, carefully, a couple of times. He’d had to go out of town and would call me on his return. Probably tomorrow. There was something important that he wanted to explain to me as soon as possible. His voice had a warm edge when he said that and in spite of the turmoil I felt, I grinned as my body responded to his tone. Definitely not a ‘thanks and I’ll call you’ message. No indication he’d had any Athanate-induced problems, either.

One of the reasons I’d avoided dating guys for the last couple of years was the danger of infusing them, as Athanate put it. I’d met Alex at a charity ball last week and the memory of it still set my pulse racing. He was tall, six-two or thereabouts, with broad shoulders and narrow hips. He had the right amount of swagger and he was hot as hell, even before I’d looked into his eyes. When I did that, I was lost. There was something wild behind those eyes that called to me.

It had pissed me off at the time, thinking that all I dared do was flirt with him. But that went right out the window when I found out the reason he looked so untamed. He was a werewolf, and, joy, I’d just been told Athanate and Were don’t cross-infuse.

Maybe Athanate and Were
can
cross-infuse. Would I end up not just Athanate and Adept, but Were as well? Was Alex going to turn half Athanate? But there was no hint of that in his message.

But what if we hadn’t cross-infused? That would mean I had Were prions for some other reason, before Alex and I started making out this morning.

I couldn’t decide if that was even worse, because of the implications for David.

David was my friend, so close I thought of him as the brother I’d never had. I’d saved his life last night. He was an Aspirant, someone in the process of becoming Athanate. His transformation was being handled by House Altau, and was supposed to be a safe and controlled process, unlike mine. Altau had assigned David a Mentor, Pia, to guide him through the crusis.

But something had gone wrong and she’d practically drained him yesterday. When I’d found him, he’d been hypovolemic, his heart thrashing as it tried to pump too little blood around his body. He’d been minutes away from dying. With no time for anything else, I’d made him feed on me, and the Athanate organs in his throat had mainlined my blood into him.

I’d known those Athanate organs would be sending the agents of change back into me at the same time, accelerating the process of becoming Athanate in me. But when faced with a choice of avoiding becoming fully Athanate for a while more or saving David, he’d won, hands down.

Once he was out of danger, I’d paid the price. A change had swept through my body, and I’d stumbled away from his house, weak from blood loss but finally, I thought, Athanate. Alex had come and rescued me, wandering around in the park in the early hours of the morning.

So, if I’d had the Were prions
before
I went to David’s? He’d mainlined a mixture of Athanate and Were.

We were already in trouble—he’d broken the confidentiality rules by talking to me while he was an Aspirant and I hadn’t yet met House Altau, but I imagined that paled into insignificance if I’d gone and infused him with Were prions.

I’d freak out about myself some other time. I had to check on David now. His house was just the other side of Wash Park. I drove quickly.

I parked outside of his white A-frame house. His car hadn’t moved since yesterday. One of the living room windows was open, but I couldn’t see anyone moving around.