Tiny Glitches: A Magical Contemporary Romance (31 page)

“Who’s that?” Atlas yanked a pistol from the small of his back and aimed it at the clown. Ironically, an apparition identical to Dempsey’s outfit covered him.

“Dempsey,” I said. “She saw the kidnapping.”

“I don’t like clowns.”

“I get that a lot.” Dempsey eased behind me. I sidestepped out of the line of fire, then circled the front room to stand near Hudson, with the couch in front of me.

“You shouldn’t wave that around,” Edmond said. “What if it goes off?”

Atlas’s eyes flicked toward Edmond, and Dempsey darted behind a love seat.

“Where’d she go? Shit! There’s a clown on the loose.” Atlas twisted left, then right, gun swinging wildly. Clown makeup smeared his face in an impossible-to-misinterpret apparition of his fear. He fired two shots into the wall at Dempsey’s shadow. I dropped to the floor and covered my head with my hands. Hudson fell on top of me. Everyone was yelling, Atlas loudest of all.

“Give it back! It’s still out there!”

“Shut it,” Edmond bellowed, his deep voice reverberating through the house. “It’s okay, guys. I have the gun.”

Hudson stood and I crouched, not entirely reassured by Edmond’s announcement. Edmond opened a drawer in the kitchen and dropped the gun in with the silverware. Atlas backed up against a wall, eyes wide.

“It’s not okay. Clowns are not okay. They’re—” Atlas squeaked when Dempsey peeked around the arm of the love seat, then marched into the open.

“Why did they take my aunt? What are their demands?” I stood up fully, arms crossed.

“They took her for leverage. They weren’t able to get what they wanted out of my lab at Adorable Creations, so they’re trying to get it out of me.”

“And they’re going to. No more games, Jenny. This is my
aunt’s life.
”

“I can’t—”

“What’s an elephantini?”
Dempsey shouted.

Jenny pinched her lips and glared at the clown. A quiver of arrows appeared near her right hand, and one by one, they shot across the floor, just as they’d done in the trailer toward me. The final one shot through Dempsey’s beaded breastplate apparition. Jenny came to the same conclusion I had: Dempsey had seen the elephantini; there was no use pretending Kyoko didn’t exist. “It’s a miniature elephant,” she said.

“Like a miniature horse?” Dempsey asked.

“A crass correlation, but it’ll do.”

“Damn, you regular-sizers are obsessed with all things small and cute.” Dempsey fluffed her green hair and shot Atlas a coy smile. Atlas flinched and slid behind Edmond. I drummed my fingers on my forearm. Any more delays and I’d pop out of my skin.

“Tell us what you saw,” Jenny said. “What did the thieves look like?”

“Like all you regular-sizers, but with masks. You know, the bank-robber kind.” We all waited for more details. Dempsey threw up her hands. “Okay. I didn’t actually get a good look ’cause everyone around here is so obsessed with privacy. And they think hiring a clown is the same thing as hiring a babysitter. I’m the entertainment, folks, not your maid or your nanny or your child’s servant. Anyway, I was hiding in the upstairs bathroom and I saw an elephant—excuse me, an
elephantini
—crammed into a cage by two people. I hightailed it down here as soon as the parents weren’t looking. How come I’ve never heard of an elephantini before?”

“Jenny made it,” Edmond said proudly. “Intero Europo—”

“In utero,” Jenny corrected.

“She’s made miniature cats and dogs and bunnies and—”

“What? Where?” Dempsey marched across the front room.

“I need to check . . . There could be . . . Tiny clown,
tiny clown
!” Atlas pushed along the wall until he cleared the front room. He made an effort to recover his dignity and slowed to a fast walk through the kitchen, but then his running footsteps echoed through the foyer and the front door slammed behind him.

“He’s fun,” Dempsey said with a grin made more evil by her face paint. She pointed a stubby arm at Edmond. “Tell me about the other miniature animals. Where are they? Are they crushed in cramped prisons, too?”

Edmond eyed the small finger with trepidation. Dempsey came up to his waist, and he could probably pick her up one-handed, but he backed up when she rounded the sofa. A rolling pin appeared in one of his upraised hands, a whisk in the other. Pies rained from the sky, their centers undercooked craters.

“I don’t know where—”

“Don’t give me the runaround. I have the backing of the entire PETA commission. All I have to do is press one on my phone, and you’ll be—”

Jenny tilted her head toward the back door, and the three of us slipped out while Dempsey was distracted. I rounded on Jenny the moment we cleared the threshold. “Where. Is. My. Aunt?”

“I don’t know. The note doesn’t say.”

“They want information, though, right? The information for Sofie. Where are you keeping it? Let’s go get your notes and do the exchange.”

“I think you forget—” Jenny began.

“I’ve forgotten nothing,” I interrupted. “I’m through. You lost whatever leverage you had when they
took Sofie.
I don’t care how you threaten me or if you follow through on it. I’m done. We’re doing whatever it takes to get my aunt back.”

Jenny’s almond-shaped eyes studied me, then Hudson. “It’s more complicated than that.”

“There’s nothing—”

“Kyoko’s more than an elephantini.” Jenny glanced toward the front of the house, where Atlas cowered out of sight beyond the fence. Inside, Edmond was doing a lot of open-handed arm waving, as if he were fending off blows, and Dempsey wielded her index finger like a sword. “Follow me.”

Jenny marched across the pockmarked lawn to the glass-topped wall. A few feet beyond the wall, the cliff side dropped to the ocean. She peered uphill toward the house Dempsey had come from. A corner of it peeked through the cultivated flora. Farther away, several more houses rimmed the curving beach. A similar view curved in the other direction.

“The first elephantini lived two days,” Jenny said. She stared out at the ocean as she spoke, eyes narrowed against the bright sun. I focused on her face and ignored her overactive apparitions. “The second lived almost a week. There were a lot more complications with elephantinis than with other species. I was hired to fix the problems. But it wasn’t only the growth genetics that were flawed. Our changes had cascading effects throughout the elephantinis’ molecular structures. Other systems failed almost at birth, and I realized they weren’t just not working—they were aging at such an accelerated rate, it looked like they never worked at all.”

“No one asked for your memoir. I want Sofie—”

“I didn’t plan on making the discovery I did,” Jenny said, speaking over me. “It was an accident. I was experimenting with a series of DNA strands that control cell division rates, and then . . .”

“Then?” Hudson prompted. My hands twitched to grab Jenny’s shoulders and shake her.

“I created an elephantini that could live well past her twelfth decade. The average life span of a full-size Asian elephant is only seventy years.”

“Naturally, that’s when you decided to throw away the whole experiment,” Hudson said, silver top hat glistening in the sun, half a bed-size Monopoly board spread beneath our feet.

“That’s when I realized I’d created something far more valuable than Kyoko. I’d been too focused on the elephantini. I hadn’t thought about why Evolution Solutions wanted me spying on
this
project in particular, a failing R and D dead end. The market for miniature elephants is minuscule.” She shook her head. “I assumed they planned to sell them to the über-rich. The ultimate pet.”

“Wrap it up, Jenny. What
exactly
do we need to do to get my aunt back?” Only my fear of making things worse prevented me from sprinting to the nearest neighbor’s house and calling the FBI. Once I had the facts, then I’d act.

“Evolution and AC—and Foreseeable, too—they were never after the elephantini,” Jenny said. She hugged her arms to her torso, and they disappeared behind a straitjacket. “It’s the formula keeping her alive they want. And I created it. I created a life-lengthening formula. One adaptable to any mammal’s DNA.” A pyramid of naked, writhing babies piled between the three of us—Jenny’s fear, swelling to fill the empty space.

“So you could make people’s pets live longer?” Hudson said. “And endangered species? And . . . humans?”

“With specific modifications to an embryo’s DNA, I can change a human’s life span from eighty or so years to one hundred eighty.”

Goose bumps washed over my scalp and shimmied down my body. The elephantini had been science fiction enough for me. We’d breached the threshold of apocalyptic thriller territory.

Jenny paced away from us, then back, for the first time showing visible agitation—to those not privy to divinations. “The moment I realized what I’d created, I destroyed everything. All my notes, incinerated. I went through all the electronic backups and changed notations. I altered the results of Kyoko’s tests and switched them with different elephantinis. Everything—I did everything I could to make sure no one knew what I had made.”

“If you really created a life-lengthening formula, you would be the richest person in the world. You’d get a Nobel Prize. You’d be famous. You expect us to believe that you destroyed it all?” Hudson asked. The waist-high silver terrier transposed over the pyramid of babies.

“It was the only logical solution. Think it through. Every possible outcome manifests a new nightmare. The few who could afford the life-lengthening formula would hold unreasonable power over everyone else. What if they controlled a government? Imagine a Hitler or Stalin with a two-hundred-year life span. Or if it
was
disseminated to the masses, can you imagine the impact of the next generation on the environment? On the planet’s resources?”

“You’ll be dead by then. What do you care?” Hudson asked.

“I’ve studied evolution on a micro and macro scale. As a species, we’re not ready for an evolutionary jump of these proportions. As individuals, we’d self-destruct in catastrophic ways.” The stacked babies disappeared with the straitjacket. A bullet train shot through Jenny and I stumbled back a step.

“If you were so intent on destroying all evidence, why is Kyoko still alive?”

Jenny pressed her lips together and released a long exhale through her nose before answering. “If I’d killed her at Adorable Creations’ lab, an autopsy would have been done, and I’d have been discovered. Plus, at the time, I’d planned to take her to Evolution Solutions. While in hiding, I had time to process the ramifications of Kyoko’s existence.” She looked away, not meeting our eyes as she confessed, “And I grew attached to the damn creature.”

“Attached?” Hudson crossed his arms.

Jenny spun back to face him, eyes blazing with intensity. “Fine. She’s my greatest creation. Even if I’m the only one who ever knows. I’d sooner kill myself than destroy her!” A scalpel slid into Jenny’s chest, and layers of flesh fell away to reveal a beating heart inside a crushed rib cage. I jerked to look toward the ocean, hand over my mouth.

Hudson scrutinized Jenny’s expression. “Why isn’t the world looking for Kyoko? An elephantini with a life-lengthening formula in her blood should warrant more than a few ninjas and a couple of FBI on your tail,” Hudson said.

“There’s the retrievalist, too.” Jenny shuddered. “But you have to consider, no company wants to draw attention to their hunt. Right now, three companies know of Kyoko’s existence and the
possibility
of a working life-lengthening formula. If any company gets too visual or vocal about searching for Kyoko, it will rouse suspicions in a lot of competitors. Currently, AC is looking for an employee who stole from them. Evolution is looking for an employee that can’t claim they hired to be a spy, so they’ve branded me a traitor. And Foreseeable is doing what they always do—trying to steal what they didn’t have the intelligence to create. If anyone makes a fuss, the competition to find me will skyrocket. Everyone’s scared. They need patents to secure their ownership of the formula. They need Kyoko and me. I can’t let that happen.”

“Tough.” As fascinating as I was sure all of this could have been, none of it mattered while Sofie was in danger. “Hand over the formula and bring me back my aunt, or I’m heading straight to the FBI, and damn your complicated plan.”

“You can’t.”

“Why not? You’re going to stop me?” I spun and marched toward the house. I would find Sofie without Jenny’s help.

“The note. It says if we involve anyone—and that means the FBI—they’ll kill your aunt.”

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

I studied Jenny’s apparitions. A straitjacket engulfed her from neck to knees, and the baby pyramid towered beside her. She was scared, but if she was lying, I couldn’t tell.

“You’d better have a plan I like the sounds of, or . . .” I didn’t have an end to the sentence. Once again, Jenny had all the power. Only she could translate the note. For all I knew, it could have been a birthday party invitation. Or Jenny could be telling the truth, and any action on my part could endanger Sofie.

Acid burned in my throat, and I swallowed hard.