Tiny Glitches: A Magical Contemporary Romance (45 page)

“I can’t do this without you,” she said. A dark black collar circled her neck, too.

“Don’t bother lying to us, Eva,” the man said. “Jennifer already told us you’re the key to re-creating her first success, and the traitor can’t lie. Get up and get to work. You have exactly one minute to prove you’re on task or”—he tapped a small object in his hand—“you’ll get a reminder jolt.”

My hand drifted to the shock collar around my neck.

“Ah-ah.”

I lowered my hand and looked for a door. This couldn’t be happening. Both ends of the long, narrow room had a floor-to-ceiling seam in the middle with no obvious handle. I was sealed in this box with three mad scientists, and one of them already knew about my curse. With the collar strapped to me, all three would know soon enough.

Sweat broke out down my entire body, chased by a shiver. I struggled to my feet, using a counter to support myself until my rubbery legs solidified. One bare foot rested where I’d lain, and the smooth floor felt shockingly warm against my sole. A quick inspection confirmed I wore yoga pants and a T-shirt, an outfit I’d chosen in a different lifetime.

The walls wavered in my vision, and I shoved my panic down deep beneath a blanket of desperation and disbelief. Jenny knew I couldn’t do anything for her. All I knew about the life-lengthening formula was what she’d told me. So what was her game?

“Are you paying attention, Hiroki?” Jenny asked. “This is where you get it wrong every time. You try to force the RNA to use the wrong strands.”

The man stepped to Jenny’s side, peering at the computer screen where Jenny pointed.

“This is your computer station,” the woman said. I stared at the keyboard and screen she indicated, afraid to touch anything. “Get to work.”

“Jenny?”

Jenny’s dark eyes turned to me. “Use your mutation and get us out of here. I’m re-creating everything for these Adorable Creations fools as slowly as I can, but please hurry.”

I gaped at her. Beside her Hiroki laughed and pressed a button on the small device in his hand. Electricity sparked from two metal points on Jenny’s collar. She stiffened. Her head fell back on a high keen, and a glass vial fell from her spasming fingers to shatter against the floor. I jumped, hand twitching toward my collar. The woman beside me huffed and grabbed a sponge to wipe up the mess. Jenny sagged into the counter, silver scissors cutting the air around her and dirty Coke-bottle glasses covering her eyes.

“I told you we need to ask more questions,” the woman said.

“I know what I’m doing, Yuri.” Hiroki turned to Jenny. “Tell us how she’s going to get you out of here.”

“She’s going to kill the electricity and buy us time until the FBI finds us.”

“How’s she going to do that?” Hiroki’s dark eyes watched me. My feet had taken root, and blood roared in my ears.

“Jenny, don’t tell them,” I said, speaking with oxygen-deprived lungs.

“She can do it with her mind.”

“With her mind? Interesting.” Both scientists studied me with identical sinister sparkles of curiosity in their eyes.

“She’s insane,” I said. “She’s cracked under the torture. You can’t believe what she’s saying.”

“You told us Eva Parker was the key,” Hiroki said.

“She is. Without her, we all die. She’s the only one who can prevent this catastrophe.” Jenny gripped Hiroki’s sleeve, and he shook her off.

“Why are you telling them this?” I demanded.

“Amobarbital.” Jenny pointed to her arm with that sickening, serene smile. A square plastic bag filled with clear liquid was taped to her shoulder, and a slender tube ran down to a needle puncturing her arm. The needle was also taped in place, the skin around it red and puckered. “It’s very freeing, really. It’s a truth serum. Because otherwise, Hiroki and Yuri are too dumb to know if I’m faking the science.”

Hiroki depressed the remote and Jenny convulsed.

My heart sank. I was screwed. My captors believed the words of a crazy woman, assured by science, paying no attention to logic. They should have dismissed her wild claims. Instead, both Hiroki and Yuri eyed me with predatory hunger.

“Jenny’s lying. She doesn’t know what she’s talking about. I swear, I can’t do—” A jolt of electricity speared through me, leaving me panting and clutching the counter for support when it receded. Pain fuzzed my thoughts.

Escape. I had to get out. There had to be a way. The scientists would leave eventually—for food, for a bathroom break, for sleep. I could wait, bide my time, and ignore the pain.

I heard my own lie. If I waited much longer, my curse would give itself away. The collar would die first, arousing suspicion. Then the appliances and equipment in the room would die, one by one. Then what? Would they move us again? They’d have proof or enough evidence to lock me in a new lab and begin experiments on me. There’d be more shocks. More pain.

The only element in my control was time. I could speed the whole process and openly wipe out all the electricity in this room under the keen observation of two scientists whose ethics already proved they were okay with kidnapping and torture. Either way, my secret would be out, but if I purposely drained the power, at least I would have the element of surprise.

I flashed on a memory of Hudson’s angry face. I’d tried owning my curse and sharing my secret, and it’d backfired. But that had been my love life. This was my
life
. Full stop. Every minute I waited to act, Jenny gave the evil scientists more of the horrifying formula they wanted, and the more pain we both endured.

I sought out Jenny’s gaze, ignoring the dirty glasses and enormous needle overlapping the one already in her arm. “You can’t lie?”

Jenny shook her head.

“Are we going to die?”

“Once we finish, yes.” Jenny turned back to her computer, clicking away.

“If Eva’s no use in the experiment, we don’t need her conscious. We’ll look into this supposed electrical control later,” Yuri said.

Hiroki nodded and pressed the remote controlling my collar.

CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

My legs gave out. Pain circled my throat and dove through the nerve network of my spine until I couldn’t differentiate myself from raw, unending agony. The room darkened, and I fought to keep conscious. With my last coherent impulse, I loosed my hold on my curse.

It unfurled inside me, sucking down electricity, and in gradual increments, the pain drained from my body.

It felt like hours had passed, but it couldn’t have been long because everyone stood in the same spot. I sucked in a full breath and tried not to whimper on the exhale. Sweat rolled off my forehead to the floor, and the thundering of my heart interfered with my oxygen consumption. I rolled to my side and threw up.

Swiping the back of my hand against my mouth, I lifted my head and fought for a brave expression as I reached for the collar. Hiroki depressed his remote button. Nothing happened. My fingers fumbled around the strap until I found a buckle. He pushed another button on his remote, and Jenny convulsed. I clawed the strap through the buckle, and the collar fell free with two painful rips where the metal stubs tore free of my flesh.

Rage shook my insides, white-hot and consuming, a raw energy that I’d never allowed myself to feel. I screamed and threw the collar. I aimed for Hiroki’s head, but he ducked, and it struck the wall with a metallic bang. The plastic battery box shattered. Kyoko’s ears twitched, and she opened a groggy eye.

“How did you do that?” Hiroki demanded.

“Destroy everything,” Jenny panted. Hiroki shocked her again.

I planted a hand on the computer in front of me and
pulled
on my curse. I would not be caged like an animal. I would not be a lab rat, and neither would Kyoko.

A crackly vibration shimmied beneath my skin, spiking inward from my fingertips. I’d been alarmed by the feeling when I’d done the same thing to the FBI van, but now it reassured me: I
felt
the electricity entering my body. The computer crashed. Above me, two bars of fluorescent lights popped and died, throwing the back third of the lab into shadows.

“How is she doing that?” Yuri asked. “Implants in her brain?” She lifted her tablet, pointing the tiny camera at me. Recording the freak show. Putting my curse on record.

The hairs on the back of my neck stood on end. The need to run, to stampede, shook my body. I’d severed all other options. If this didn’t work . . . If I didn’t escape . . .

I pried the walls around my curse wider, and the next panel of lights died. Frogs hopped around Hiroki’s feet. Enormous gold coin awards draped Yuri’s coat, and a samurai sword slashed through the air. Had it been real, Hiroki would have been decapitated a dozen times over.

I launched for the tablet, knocking it from Yuri’s hands. It smashed to the floor, the screen cracking. I stomped my heel onto it, sucking down the meager power it contained. Hiroki grabbed my arm, shouting for Yuri to do the same. Nails scraped gouges down my arm, and an elbow knocked the air from my lungs before powerful hands yanked my arms behind my back.

Handcuffs. They were going to handcuff me. Not again.
Never again.

A white berserker sheen fell over my vision, and I flailed, clawing and kicking blindly. My fist closed around something round, and I smashed it into the nearest body.

The glass beaker shattered over Yuri’s head, and she crumpled. I jumped back in shock. Hiroki leapt over his fallen companion, hands extended to grab me, but I backpedaled, slamming against the metal doors.

A bullet train tackled Hiroki from behind.

“I am not your toy!” Jenny screamed. She kneed him in a kidney, and they both went down. Hiroki depressed the remote, and Jenny convulsed. Hiroki grunted as the electricity pulsed into him, clamping his finger onto the remote. I shoved from the door and grabbed Jenny’s ankle, pulling the electricity from her, and her twitches subsided to a limp sprawl atop Hiroki. The scientist’s eyes rolled back into his head, and he didn’t move.

I fell back on my heels, listening to my harsh breathing. The silence ratcheted the tension in my muscles. When Jenny shifted, a startled scream strangled in my throat. She rolled from Hiroki, fingers fumbling at the collar. After a few tries, she undid the strap and yanked the collar from her neck, then popped the needle from her arm.

“Help me.”

She shoved Hiroki’s side, trying to roll him over. I reached across him with shaking hands and grabbed his belt, pulling him toward me. His dark eyes rolled down to rest on me before his face hit the tile. Drool slid out of his mouth.

“We need to get out of here,” I said.

“We can’t. Not yet.” Crawling across Hiroki’s body, Jenny grabbed one of his splayed arms and pulled it behind his back. I steeled myself and lifted his other wrist toward Jenny. She slid the collar around both his wrists and tightened the buckle in a makeshift handcuff.

“Kill it. Kill everything,” she said. Jenny staggered to her feet and grabbed the test vials lined neatly inside a glass-fronted mini-fridge. She threw two handfuls against the wall, and glass rained to the floor, leaving smears of blood running down the walls. Her gaze landed on Yuri, and Jenny rushed the woman. In a few harsh jerks, she tugged Yuri’s white coat down her arms and used the sleeves to secure the unconscious scientist’s wrists. With even less care, she rolled the woman under the counter and out of the way. Then she went back to the mini-fridge and grabbed another handful of vials.

“Get busy, Eva.”

Hiroki lifted his head. I scrambled backward until I pressed against the door. A pink tutu engulfed his lab coat, and the frogs circling him began to devour his ankles.

Pushing to my feet, I scanned the floor behind Hiroki, looking for the tablet. Had I completely drained it? When I smashed it, had that destroyed the record of the video, too? I couldn’t leave a scrap of evidence.

“Jenny, the tablet—”

She scooped the slender computer from the floor and brought it down hard across the lip of the counter. The device cracked and flopped into two pieces, one a flimsy screen, the other a flattened piece similar to the weird green miniature cities with gold streets that occasionally appeared in Hudson’s apparitions. Jenny threw both to the floor, then dumped a beaker of liquid on top of them.

“Now get to work.” Jenny circled a finger in the air like a frantic traffic cop. “Destroy everything.”

I stutter-stepped to comply, brought up short by the shard-strewn floor and my bare feet. None of the remaining electronics were in reach.

Good thing I didn’t need to be right next to electricity to kill it.

The thought almost made me laugh. Before Jenny had sucked me into her crazy world, I’d never thought of my curse as good in any way.

Clinging to the cold, unyielding door, I burrowed into the mental fist containing my curse. Pushing with unfamiliar muscles, I stretched its tiny container into a cavernous well hungry for more energy. The last of my hard-won and long-maintained barriers toppled. My curse burst free, unrestrained. Once out, it quested, drinking down wisps of electricity, chasing goose bumps up my body.

Emotions bubbled out of the well and crashed through me.