She turned and left. He didn’t call her back.
When her family-only cell phone rang, Patience nearly dropped a plate of eggs in her husband’s lap.
Brandt’s head came up at the unfamiliar ringtone. “Who’s that?”
The accusatory edge to the question assuaged her guilt when she flipped open the phone and blithely lied, “Kristie, at the dojo. I know I’m not an official owner anymore, but I gave her my private number in case there were any questions we didn’t go over during the transfer.” Don’t overexplain. She placed the plate in front of him at the dining table they hardly used anymore. “Dig in. I’ll take this in the bedroom while I finish getting ready for today.”
Alone, she pressed the phone to her ear. “Ms. Montana?”
“Nope. Apparently today my name is Kristie and I own a dojo. I’m betting I dot the ‘i’ in my name with a little smiley face. Or am I a Kristy-with-a-‘y’?”
Having already discovered that the bounty hunter had a high retainer, a killer hourly rate for nonbounty work, a smart mouth, and little interest in making friends or even being polite, Patience didn’t bother responding to the dig. “Did you find something?”
“Not just somethin g. I found your sons.”
“You—” Patience’s voice broke on a surge of emotion.
The other woman rattled off a quick summary about facial recognition and driver’s licenses, blah, blah, followed by an address.
“Wait! Let me write this down.”
“I’ll text it.”
“Thanks.” Her heart was going rapid- fire and her palms were damp; it’d been months since she’d last felt this good. A year. “Do that.”
The phone clicked. It took her a few seconds to realize the bounty hunter had hung up on her.
Moments later, the text came through. She stared at the address, memorizing it. Then she pressed her lips together and made herself delete the info, just as she’d deleted all the other small nuggets of info as soon as she’d committed them to memory, just in case. All the while, her head spun with a litany of She found them! She found them! I can’t believe she found them!
Dropping the phone back into her pocket, she headed back out into the kitchen to scare up some cereal for herself while Brandt finished his cholesterol bomb. He gave her a fork wave as she passed.
“Everything okay?”
She smiled. “Everything’s fine now. Just a few details we need to nail down.” And then, after that?
Clear sailing.
Within the first hour of playing Kinich Ahau’s game, Lucius discovered that being a jock wasn’t nearly as cool as he’d imagined it would be. Or rather, it was fun being one of the cool kids, but it was also damned hard work. By the second hour, he’d come to understand the game on a cellular level; his body seemed to know where to put itself to return each serve with a forearm, shin, or hip. By the third hour, he’d become almost prescient within the confines of the ball court, always placing himself at the point of maximum impact, maximum play.
The heavy ball, made of natural rubber and infused with some sort of magic that had kept it resilient despite the years, was heavy and irregular, meaning that it bounced erratically, often confounding lifelong athletes Strike, Michael, and Alexis, as well as more analytical players like Nate, Brandt, and Leah. Sven flung himself through the game with wild abandon, usually winding up out-of-bounds, while Rabbit played with vicious glee and lots of knees and elbows. By that time, the others had rotated out and were watching from above.
The points stayed grimly even, rising and falling together, never hitting the magic thirteen. The hoop, eighteen feet in the air and mere inches larger than the ball of play, could’ve been an illusion; the ball passed by it, banged off it, arched over it, but never went through.
By hour four, when the strange orange sun hit the apex of the sky and began its descent toward dark and destiny, Lucius had entered a glazed, numb-feeling zone where he was down to physical action without internal reaction, sport without soul. He’d even ceased being aware of Jade sitting up above, carefully not watching him with cool, hurt eyes.
A finger tapped him on his unarmored shoulder and a voice said, “It’s over.”
Anger surged through him, hard and hot and searching for an outlet. Blood hitting fever pitch in an instant, he whirled on his enemy, lifting his stone-weighted hand. “Fuck you.”
Jox stood there in a referee’s robe, with the conch-shell pipe that acted as a time-out whistle, his eyes going wide and scared as the hand stone descended. Lucius’s vision flickered green, then normal; he didn’t pull the punch.
“Son of a bitch!” A heavy blow slammed into him from the side, sending him to his knees; he lost his grip on the hand stone and came up swinging with his fists, dully surprised that it was Rabbit who had knocked him aside, Rabbit who protected Jox with his body and shouted, “Leave him alone, asshole; he’s just doing his job!”
“He—” Lucius stopped dead, aware that the others had stopped playing, were ready to step in. “Shit.
Fuck. Sorry, I—Sorry. I got caught up.” Was that all it had been? He hoped to hell so.
“Understood.” Jox nodded, accepting the apology, though he stayed behind Rabbit’s bigger bulk.
“But like I said, play is over for right now. We’re breaking for an hour. You might want to take two.”
“I’ll take an hour,” Lucius grated. “I don’t have time to be tired today.”
He grabbed food at random from the overloaded picnic tables that had been moved to just outside the court, found a spot far away from all the others, and sat on the steps of the ball court alone. He ate mechanically but didn’t make any headway against the hollowness inside.
“I’m disappointed in you.” The censure came from slightly above him, in Jox’s voice.
He glanced back and saw the winikin set down his plate and take a seat one step up and a few feet over, out of his immediate reach. Lucius shook his head. “I don’t have anything against you personally. You just seem to be the guy in my way when I lose it.”
The winikin bit into a hot dog. “That wasn’t what I was talking about. You’re wimping out.”
“The old me was the wimp. Try again.”
“The old you might not have been able to bench-press a Hummer, but he wasn’t afraid to go after what he wanted.”
“You’re talking about Jade.” Appetite gone, Lucius shoved aside his plate. “You’re off on that one; she didn’t want the old guy. Besides, he was terrified of being alone, and spent most of his time wishing, not doing. He . . . Shit. I don’t want to talk about it.”
“You don’t need to talk to me anyway. Talk to her.”
Lucius looked over to where Jade sat between Sasha and Patience, chatting. She was wearing a pale peach-colored shirt and had a matching scarf tied around her loose ponytail, its color nearly washed out in the funky sunlight. The others might think nothing had changed. Her face was smooth, her eyes clear, her tone light. Lucius, though, saw the hurt beneath the calm surface. “I can’t. I’m not ready to.
She’s the one who says that people don’t change, not at their core, and I think that’s true to a point.
I’m bigger and stronger now, better coordinated. I’ve made choices not to repeat old patterns. But deep inside, I’m still me.”
“You’re the one distinguishing between the old version of you and the new one,” the winikin observed mildly. “The rest of us aren’t.”
“She is. She gave the old me the ‘let’s just be fuck buddies’ speech. The new me got a watered-