Out of Chances (Taken by the Panther, #2) Read Free Page B

it had happened to her before, on vacation or maybe even before college, and something about how she’d been given it had delayed the onset of her first shift.
    Neither of which made sense. But he’d just have to roll with what he knew until he had enough pieces of the puzzle to put them together.
    “Did you do the full background on her?” Chay asked Annie.
    Annie was a woman of many talents. She could drive or fly practically any machine ever built, and she was wicked fast with lock picking and safe cracking. But having been largely confined to Black Mesa over the past three years when she wasn’t in the field, she’d been one of a handful on his team who had taken to coding like they’d been born to it.
    And Annie’s interest was in identities—both ferreting them out and creating new ones.
    “Of course I did, Beany baby,” she said in a reproachful voice. “What do you take me for? All medical, government, and school records for the past six years. Haven’t gotten to social media yet.”
    She tapped a few keys at her workstation, and windows cascaded across one of Chay’s shared screens.
    “Everything since she turned eighteen, just like you asked,” Annie said.
    Chay poked through her medical records first. Tara was right—she had been vaccinated for practically every disease in existence. Flu vaccines every year since she had graduated high school. When she was eighteen, she’d gotten vaccinated against yellow fever, meningitis, typhoid, Hepatitis A, and had gotten another polio booster. At twenty, she’d added Japanese encephalitis and rabies. At twenty-two a Tdap booster. In all, he counted eleven different opportunities for her to be injected with shifter factor.
    He felt the first warning twinge of a huge headache coming on.
    “Are you sure there hasn’t been an outbreak of panther shifters anywhere?” Chay asked, clicking through the records of different clinics and doctors’ offices in a desultory fashion.
    Annie chuckled. “You know that’s Ophelia’s department, not mine, but surely we would have heard something if schools were breaking out in a rash of panthers.”
    “So that means one of two things,” Chay said. “Either she was targeted specifically, or the other people who are infected haven’t turned yet.”
    “Or the other ones just didn’t take,” Annie added.
    Chay frowned. Even that was possible, with an older military strain. Everything was speculation at this point, and he wasn’t happy about that. But finding answers sure wasn’t going to be easy.
    He poked through Tara’s other records—not just government but school, too. Nothing unusual there. Very few driving incidents, which made sense because as far as he could tell, she didn’t own a car. No arrests. Passport records had her going in and out of the country a number of times over the past few years, which matched up with her time in Sudan and backpacking around the world.
    Tara had a small merit-based scholarship, reserved for older students who had “significantly contributed to the wellbeing of his or her local, national, or global community.” Solid grades at a 3.5 GPA. No college debt, though he wasn’t sure whether her parents were paying or she was.
    “Financial records, coming at you,” Annie chirped, and more windows appeared on his screen.
    Tara had a part-time job manning the desk at a 24-hour fitness center in the early mornings. With three hundred dollars in the bank and one hundred due on her credit card, she was skating by on income, but that wasn’t unusual for a student. No records of plasma donations or anything of that sort that might give someone the opportunity to dose her.
    With a slightly guilty twinge for all his snooping, Chay paid off her credit card with a stroke of a key. She didn’t need to have fines for missed payments on top of everything else.
    “I’ll grab the social media,” he told Annie.
    “Aw, that’s the easy part, anyway,” she said, flipping her hair