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
.
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-down version of the same speech at first. Then, the next thing I know, she changed the rules on me and tried to manipulate me into falling for her. How is a guy supposed to deal with that?”
“Let me see. . . .” The
winikin
paused, considering. “A beautiful, talented woman you’ve been panting after decides she wants to be more than bed partners. . . . How should you feel? I’m thinking flattered would be a good start. Maybe grateful. How about overjoyed?”
“She changed the rules.”
“She changed herself. And she did it because of how she feels about you.”
That brought Lucius’s head up. He turned to face the
winikin
more fully, but scowled. “Not until I got buff.” He didn’t know the resentment was there until he’d said it aloud.
“Reality check. You don’t get to talk down about the old you and then get pissed when you think she likes the new-and-improved version better. And besides, I wasn’t talking about the past few weeks, or even the past few months. Think about it. When did she start standing up to Shandi and the others?”
“While I was gone.”
“It was
because
you were gone, dipshit. Anna had more or less checked out, and everyone else was concentrating on their own problems. Jade was the one who kept your name out there. Why do you think Michael put his own life on the line to get you out of the in-between?”
“Because it distracted the
boluntiku
and bought him enough time to cast the spell he needed to free himself of the Mictlan’s magic.”
“Screw that. He did it because he knew Jade wanted you back, and he owed her one. He did it for her. Because he knew how much she cared about you, even if she wasn’t ready to admit it at the time.”
A dull rushing noise built in the back of Lucius’s head, and a heavy weight settled on his chest. “I thought about her all the time. It was the only thing that kept me going.”
“So why are you pissed at her now?”
Lucius looked up at her, catching her eye. She glanced away, her chin high and her features tight. “I’m not. I’m . . . Shit, I don’t know. I think it was easy for us to care for each other when we were apart; we could remember the good stuff and forget the rest. How can I be sure we won’t go through the same pattern over and over? What if chemistry and friendship aren’t enough? She’s the one who says people don’t change, but I think they do. I mean, just look at her. She’s getting stronger every damn day, whether she realizes it or not. How do people make it work when they can’t control what they’re going to get from day to day?” He thought of his parents, locked in a thirty-year stalemate between football and Tupperware, thought of his brothers and their interchangeable, silent girlfriends, and his sisters and their husbands and lovers, who could have been swapped out for his brothers without anyone noticing or caring. Who the hell wanted to live like that?
“If two people truly want to stay together, then they grow in the same direction. Not accidentally, but because they work at it.” The
winikin
gestured at the picnic tables, where the mated pairs sat close together, sharing intimate looks and private smiles. “Doesn’t that look like people making it work?”
“Those are magi, not people. The gods care for humans, but they don’t give them destinies.”
Jox tapped Lucius’s wrist, right above the hellmark. “Don’t be so sure of that.” The
winikin
collected his plate and rose to his feet. “Break’s almost over, but like I said, go ahead and sit out the first shift if you want to.”
Lucius dumped his leftovers and headed toward the playing field, where the teams were assembling, the players looking steely eyed and rested, determined that one side or the other was going to get the upper hand. But when he reached the edge of the playing field, he paused and looked back to the tables, where Jade was helping Shandi clean up. As though she felt his eyes on her, Jade looked up, their gazes connecting.
He saw the hurt beneath the calm. More, he saw her determination, her refusal to give up on the people who needed her, even though she might have preferred to be somewhere else, doing something else. Duty, dignity, decorum; she’d said it was the harvester way, and she had all of those qualities. But she was also brave and intelligent, quietly fierce and loyal. And none of those things, he realized, jibed with her being shallow or manipulative. She was a kind person, a healer, not of the body like Sasha, but of the mind and spirit. She hadn’t been trying to trap him into anything; she’d been trying to do what she thought was right, trying to let him find his own way rather than control him, because she knew he needed to not be boxed in.
Which left them . . . where? Hell, he didn’t know, but he suddenly knew one thing for certain: They weren’t over. Not by a long shot.
He tried to convey that in a look, but her face went blank and confused at first, and then gained an edge of anger beneath. That anger reminded him too strongly of his own, of the green flash and the echo of the
makol
’s voice inside his skull. He couldn’t go to her, not yet. He needed to deal with the darkness inside him first . . . and pray to the gods it was possible to break free, finally, from his past mistakes.
Then Jox blew the conch shell and tossed the heavy rubber ball to Nate for the first serve, and Lucius told himself to get the hell on the field.
He crossed to the picnic table instead.
When he drew Jade aside, her eyes went stormy. “No,” she said firmly. “You don’t get to apologize. You were right about some of it, and so was I, but what’s said is said; what’s done is done. I don’t—” Her voice broke; she looked away, visibly trying to hold it together. “I don’t like feeling this way. I want my peace and quiet back.”
“Too late.” Not sure what possessed him, he tugged the scarf from her hair. Looping it around his arm, he tied it above where the ballplayers’ asymmetrical armor attached. Leaning in, he dropped a quick, hard kiss on her lips. “We’ll talk later.”
He retreated before she could respond, before she could insist that no, damn it, they were going to talk now. He didn’t know what he wanted to say to her, didn’t know what he wanted from her, but he knew it wasn’t what they had right then, and it wasn’t for them to go back to where they’d been before. They needed to go forward.
Moving fast, impelled by a sudden, fierce sense of urgency, he raced onto the playing field. Now, as he spun and pivoted, throwing hips and elbows, feet and shoulders as the scrum boiled from one side of the narrow pavilion to the other, there was nothing rote or mechanical in his actions. He was entirely there, entirely in the moment and the game.
He instinctively knew when Jade climbed the stairs and joined the audience, knew when she saw him, locked her eyes on him and didn’t look away. He played for her, trying to make his case without the words he couldn’t find just then. A faint note hummed on the air, high and sweet. It sounded like it might have come from Jox’s referee’s pipe, but the
winikin
stood off to the side, arms folded.
“Nightkeepers onto the field! Everyone,
now
!” Strike bellowed suddenly, and Jade and the others raced to join the game. The pace shifted, grew frenzied as the high, sweet note intensified and the orange light coming from up above seemed, for a moment, to brighten and turn white and warm.
Lucius was barely aware of these peripherals, though; his whole focus was on the ball and the play. Sven served to Nate, who returned to Alexis, who bumped back to Sven. Action and reaction, arc and flow.
Over there
, Lucius knew, and headed for a clear spot at the edge of the action. Seconds later, the ball flew straight toward him. So did Strike and Michael, their eyes locked on the arcing sphere.
Michael crouched; the ball hit his shoulder guard and deflected straight upward, when all physics said it should have ricocheted to Strike in the pass they had undoubtedly intended. Lucius didn’t slow or swerve; he barreled straight at Michael. He saw the other man’s eyes go wide, saw him brace for impact.
Only Lucius didn’t hit him—he jumped, spring-boarded off the other man’s shoulder, and went vertical.
The ball reached its apogee and descended, hurtling toward a ball court that represented imprisonment in the underworld. Lucius flew up to meet the sun ball, slammed his armored forearm into its yielding irregularity, and sent it hurtling through the heavy air. The ball shot sideways, not toward the underworld court now, but toward the sacred stone ring. Toward the future.
Gravity grabbed Lucius, yanking him earthbound as though pissed that he’d broken free for a brief and glorious moment. He slammed into the ground and rolled to lie flat, staring up, as the sun ball passed through the sacred ring without touching the sides. For a moment, the earth went still, and he imagined he could hear the cosmic swish of his sideways slam dunk.
Then the sweet note went to a scream, a brilliant red-gold flash split the air, and the world lurched around Lucius. Adrenaline slashed through him. This wasn’t his magic, whatever that was. There was no green haze, no feeling of inward pressure; this was entirely external, a greater force taking him somewhere. Then he was moving, accelerating, the world whipping sideways past him and going to a gray-green blur.