“I didn’t abandon him. Lex told me to go.”
“Fine, but the rest is true.”
Olivia said nothing for a long time. She knew I was right.
After a minute, her voice came through the line, quieter and more subdued than before. “Just tell me if you’ve seen him.”
“I haven’t seen him since I brought him home.”
“You didn’t recruit him on the sly or something?”
I chuckled. “No, Olivia. Pretty sure if he doesn’t want to be part of your team, he won’t want to be on mine.”
She hung up, and I stared at the phone like she had reached down the line and slapped me across the face. What the ever-loving fuck was that about? “Truth hurts, doesn’t it?” I said to no one.
I pocketed my phone and ran through the conversation again. Gale was missing? She talked like it was normal for him to take off. So why was she worried? The guy was a grown-ass man. Leave him alone.
A vision of Gale standing at the end of my driveway in a wash of yellow streetlights came to me. The forlorn look on his face. The long-distant stare. The torture in his eyes. The thunderstorm inside him called to me on a subsonic level.
I’d spent the past five days trying not to think about Gale Windrow and the strange connection we’d shared. It had taken far too long to effectively knock him from my system, but one phone call from Olivia brought it all back. My skin itched and buzzed. I peered down the street in both directions, unsure where to put myself.
I had the sudden urge to call him, but I didn’t have Gale’s number, let alone an excuse for making contact. Besides, if he wasn’t answering calls from his twin sister and his father, why would he answer a call from a practical stranger?
Upon replaying the conversation with Olivia a second time, I was convinced the only reason she was pissed was that without her brother, the Wind Riders didn’t have enough members to qualify for Charles’s show. He could easily decide to revert to his original plan and skip the whole competition. He’d wanted Twisted Fates from the beginning, and Olivia knew it.
“Hey, Ozman,” Lex called from inside the garage. “Elliott thinks we should pack our gear and hit the road tomorrow. Want to offer some input?”
Wednesday morning, we hit the road, landing in Newton, a small town north of Wichita, by midafternoon. The storm cells we’d been tracking were the perfect mix for production and were anticipated to roll through the area about fifteen miles north of our location the following day in the early evening.
We rented adjoining rooms at a Comfort Inn. Vern and I took one, and Elliott, Lex, and Noah took the other. Vern and I used our room for the base of operations, since we had fewer people. The second we secured keys, we organized the computers and hung paper maps on the walls. In unfamiliar areas, we studied road maps, carrying them with us in case we lost satellite reception and couldn’t rely on Google. We liked having a vague idea of the layout of the land and didn’t have time to get lost on a chase.
Vern held a GoPro and had been recording since we got out of the car, narrating every step for a future audience. We’d become desensitized to having a camera in our face. Privacy was a thing of the past. All our thoughts and actions were recorded. Noah applied minor edits, despite CineVision’s threat to give us a proper camera crew if we didn’t provide raw footage. We took the risk, and I suspected Charles wouldn’t care. He was on our side.
Although Noah had more skill with videography, we saved him for chase days. Otherwise, he would never get screen time. Therefore, the rest of us took turns filming the mundane, in-between stuff.
“I’m going for food,” I announced as everyone shuffled around, talking on top of one another. “I saw a Mexican joint the next block over.”
“Can you get me—”
I held up a hand, cutting Elliott off. “Do not shout orders. I’ll get a smorgasbord we can share.”
“Keys are in my bag.” Lex pointed to the joining room.
“I’m going to walk.”
Lex wasn’t a huge fan of letting others drive the bug on chases, but any other time, he didn’t care. Since we’d spent over four hours on the road, cramped in the back like sardines, I wanted to stretch my legs.
“Get a receipt,” Elliott said before I left. “CineVision is covering expenses, remember? Food is an expense when we have to travel.”
Elliott was our self-appointed accountant and handled donations and the subscription fees we collected, ensuring they were allocated for proper use. He was more than happy to submit the expenses to CineVision, since they had agreed to cover the bill.
The spring air blew warm against my cheeks, and I tipped my head at the overcast sky, studying the cloud patterns. A wash of iron-colored vapors made the sunlight thin and hazy as it tried to penetrate the veil. Although I understood most formations, what caused them, and what they meant for the forecast, I was shit at remembering their scientific names.
Storm season was upon us, and we were ripe for activity as colder, drier air from Canada collided with warmer, moister air rising from the Gulf of Mexico. It was a recipe for disaster of the best kind.
I reached the restaurant in under ten minutes and went inside to place an order. It was going to take thirty minutes, so I told the guy working that I’d wait outside. I found a wooden picnic table near a dumpster, where I assume staff went for smoke breaks or lunch. I sat and studied my surroundings. I’d never been to Newton. It was a quaint town, slightly bigger than Elk City.
On first inspection, the inn seemed to be across the street from a trendy park. The foliage and groundwork looked well-maintained, and the abundance of trees offered plenty ofshaded areas, but as I peered into the distance, lines of stone monuments spoke of its true nature.
