Tiny Glitches: A Magical Contemporary Romance (47 page)

Maybe we were, because this feng shui consultant had the advantage of sight.

Sight wouldn’t allow me to run up to the retrievalist and disarm him—even my electricity-addled brain saw the problems in that strategy. But if I could find something to throw, I might either fool him into wasting all his bullets on decoy sounds, or I might be able to bean him and knock him out. All of which depended on my finding something in the enormous empty space around me, and from how far I’d traveled unhindered, the stretch near the wall was swept clean.

Stepping away from the wall and any potential doorways connected to it was the hardest move I’d ever made. On jerky, hesitant steps, I walked toward the last obstacle I remembered, hoping to use whatever the mysterious object was as additional cover. I moved with my hands splayed and slowly swirling the air in front of me, and I used my toes to quest in wide sweeps for possible projectiles.

My fingers hit a corrugated wall, and it moved, screeching on unoiled hinges. The retrievalist spun, arms raised. I threw myself left, landing on my stomach as a bullet ricocheted against the metal. Sparks flashed lightning fast, illuminating nothing but leaving a false dancing light on my retina.

I scrambled to my feet and ran toward the retrievalist on an angle, slowing after a dozen steps as my hearing recovered. The retrievalist pivoted to aim behind me but too close for comfort, and I fought the urge to curl into a ball on the floor and play dead. I was too exposed. I needed cover.

Fighting a panicked need to continue running, I forced myself to resume a slow search for something to throw. Every shush of cloth against cloth, every soft scrape of my feet against the floor, every breath I exhaled, I expected to give away my position, and my legs shook under the tension.

The retrievalist fractured into a hundred pieces, and I swallowed a gasp. Black lines skewed in dozens of directions, bisecting his schoolboy uniform, but behind the lines, his shape remained intact. Cautiously, I continued to move, and my breath eased out. This wasn’t a new apparition or a failure of my curse; I was seeing the retrievalist behind a holey object. With each step forward, the gaps widened in the black lines until I looked at the man trying to kill me through hand-width slats.

My fingers grazed the obstacle, encountering a sharp point, and I stopped. I’d cut the distance between us in half, putting me close enough to see the pattern on the school uniform tie. Far too close for safety. Crouching, then standing, I watched the retrievalist’s apparition through the slats, and it was like viewing him through venetian blinds. Barely breathing, I leaned to one side, then the other, determining the object was hardly wider than four or five feet. If the lights came on now, I’d be exposed, and this holey thing wouldn’t be much protection from bullets.

Tentatively, I reached for the object. Rough wood rasped against my flesh. Eyes so wide they hurt, I monitored the retrievalist for the slightest twitch toward me, then reached slowly into a gap. Maybe I could find something in these cracks—even something small that I could throw across the room to fool the retrievalist would help. The top and bottom of the opening were covered by slats of wood as deep as I could reach. A solid board bisected the opening, and splinters caught at my flesh, but I didn’t feel anything loose. Pulling my arm free, I tested the next opening, finding exactly the same thing.

Pallets. Wooden pallets stacked—I stretched to feel—a little taller than me.

The wood creaked, and the retrievalist spun my direction, army knife extended. The gun remained invisible, but I knew exactly where it pointed—straight at my forehead.

Crouching, I shuffled a few steps back. The retrievalist stalked forward, feet silent. If I couldn’t see pieces of him, I wouldn’t have known he moved. With uncanny precision, he closed the gap between us, locked on my last heard location. I held my breath and listened to my pulse rattle against my eardrums.

The retrievalist halted less than five feet from me. His gun hand swung left and right, the incongruous lollipop protruding an extra two feet. His soft exhale raised the hairs on my arm. Slowly, on muscles nearly too tense to function, I straightened. The lollipop shifted to point straight at me and I froze. Three-fourths of his body disappeared, and the retrievalist eased forward two steps, disembodied gold gears churning in the black nothingness. If he stretched, he’d touch me.

I didn’t blink, didn’t breathe. My entire body screamed for me to run, but doing so would give me away. If I could have done so quietly, I would have lowered onto my belly and slithered away from the retrievalist. Instead, I bent double and shifted my weight, slinking to the side, away from the barrel of the gun. One step. Two—

The retrievalist jerked my direction and fired. I dropped to all fours, but anticipating the agony of being shot made me slow to move farther, and the retrievalist closed the distance between us in sure strides. I stared at a giant gear shifting and spinning at my eye level, close enough to count the golden sprockets. If he took another step, I’d get a knee to the rib cage.

Dempsey’s threat to smash my knee with Attila flashed through my thoughts, reminding me that short had its advantages. I curled tight and kicked the gear with enough force to knock my arms out from under me. Beneath my heel, the retrievalist’s kneecap crunched. He fell with a roar, gun firing deafeningly.

I surged to my feet and ran around the stacked pallets, expecting a bullet in my back. He fired another shot, and I hunched against the slatted wood. I should have kept running, but I couldn’t tear myself from the negligible safety. Through the slats, I watched the retrievalist stagger to his feet, crouched. Cussing, he spun unerringly toward me. I threw myself against the pallets. They creaked and rocked. He fired a shot, and wood splintered. Fire speared my collarbone, but I backed up and rammed the stack again. Wood cracked, then toppled.

I ran blindly, then threw myself to the floor and covered my head with my arms. My skin crawled, waiting for the next bullet that’d end my life. Each breath sawed my throat, dangerously loud, but I couldn’t quiet myself. When no shots rang out, I hazarded a peek.

Faint triangles and stripes of khaki and white cluttered a patch of floor. It took me a long moment to realize what I was seeing: the retrievalist, buried beneath the pallets.

I jerked and clamped a hand over my mouth to hold in a scream when a new apparition manifested on the floor beside the pallets. A small, elderly man knelt before a car’s bumper, and a gun fired soundlessly into his chest. He toppled backward. The scene reset and the man’s murder repeated. Like a movie reel stuck in a loop, the scene replayed again and again, no less horrifying for its lack of sound.

I stared, dumbfounded. Apparitions didn’t work like that. They showed an emotion, not a scene.

The stack shifted.

My heart plummeted. I’d hoped I’d knocked the retrievalist unconscious. A pulse of fire ignited in my shoulder when I uncurled, and I patted my shirt. My hand came away sticky with blood, and fresh fear washed down my spine.

The floor vibrated, and a loud screech echoed through the enormous room. A shaft of light cut through the wall behind me. I lifted a hand to shield my eyes, thought better of it, and ran to huddle against a wall.

The diffuse light illuminated my prison, shaping it into a gargantuan rectangle large enough to make the shipping containers scattered across the holey metal floor appear small. I wasn’t cowering by a wall, I realized, but by one of the freestanding containers, maybe even the one holding Jenny. The retrievalist’s black-clad shape twisted in fragile angles beneath the weight of the pine pallets.

I pulled on the reserves of my physical energy, searching for a place to hide, my options as limited as my time: a few barrels, a tractor, a pile of tie-downs. The closed boxy metal shipping containers.

Footsteps pounded on metal, and deeper, the muted heavy chop of a helicopter thumped against my eardrums.

“FBI! Hands in the air!”

My knees gave out and I slid down the corrugated metal of the container.

I tried to find my voice, to comply, but I’d run out of juice. With a heavy sigh, I fumbled for my mental shields and put the lid on my curse. It slid on with the ease of flicking a switch. I hunted for a description of the sensation. Full. I was full.

I’d just turned my curse off.

CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

A pirate. A general. President Lincoln. A doctor. A horse. Wonder Woman. A two-story dragon. I’d been rescued by a costume party. They carried an arsenal of guns, bristled with knives, and a few breathed fire. They brought with them a hurricane of objects, most animated and bizarre. A baby doll crawled out of a waste-high Ming vase. Atop a flying UFO, a foot-tall Jesus smiled and waved at a man-size, machine-gun-toting robot. Twin Siamese cats played chase around an ice sculpture fruit bowl. A whale swallowed me whole and kept swimming.

Apparitions. How long had I amped my curse? How much electricity had I drained? The divinations were so strong I couldn’t distinguish the real people beneath them.

“Over here!” Bright beams of flashlights sliced through the circus.

“Hands where I can see them!”

I raised shaking hands, the sticky wet fabric of my bloodied shirt pulling against my collarbone, and I winced as pain in my left shoulder halted the movement. Superman, a Roman gladiator, and She-Ra circled the buried retrievalist, ignoring me. I started to lower my hands when a light flashed across my face, blinding me; then a short woman in standard FBI SWAT gear stopped in front of me. Pinned to her Kevlar vest was a badge large enough to use as a riot shield, and a whip longer than a fly-fishing pole cracked the air beside her. I never thought I’d be so happy to see Agent Coutu.

“Eva Parker. Why am I not surprised to find you here?”

“Jenny’s here. In one of these containers.”

Sharp brown eyes narrowed on me. “Which one?”

“I don’t know. It was dark.”

“Who else is here?”

“Him.” I pointed to the retrievalist. Coutu didn’t turn. “And two scientists trapped in the same container with Jenny. They’re dangerous.”

Coutu spoke into her headset mic, then focused on me again. Behind her, a bear, a tank, a werewolf, and a gigantic gun lined up along the edge of a shipping container, and the bear undid the locks. In a rush, they threw open the doors and entered the container.

“Let me take a look at that.” Coutu holstered her gun and crouched in front of me, blocking my view of the rest of the vast room. She peeled the collar of my shirt away from my neck. I hissed as fresh pain burst across my shoulder. “That scratch looks deep. You’ll have a scar, but you’ll live. Any other injuries?”

I released a sigh of relief, having feared a gunshot wound. On my exhale, my buffer of adrenaline ebbed away, and a dozen injuries awoke in response to Coutu’s question. My feet were cut, my knees bled beneath the thin material of my pants, and scratches oozed blood on my forearms, plus a headache burst to life in the back of my skull, but I shook my head in answer to Coutu’s question. I stilled almost immediately when the movement stretched my shoulder’s wound. “Where am I?”

“A container ship. How did you get here?”

“A ship?”

“In Long Beach harbor.”

“Long Beach?” That meant either the retrievalist had moved my unconscious body from one car to another, because a car would never normally survive the early-morning commute from my apartment to Long Beach with me as a passenger, or traveling unconscious had dampened my curse. It wasn’t important now, but my brain couldn’t move past the picture of being defenseless and vulnerable in the retrievalist’s hands.

A chorus of shouts announced the discovery of Jenny, Hiroki, and Yuri. Coutu ordered me not to move, sicced a junior agent on me to stand watch, and jogged to the red-paneled container. The junior agent trotted to stand beside me, the person’s light steps belying the sumo wrestler image I saw. A golden ladder rose beside the agent, sinking into the floor as a tiny gerbil-like creature leapt up each rung, never achieving a height above the sumo wrestler’s shoulder. I closed my eyes to block out the apparition bombardment, only to snap them open a moment later when latent panic bubbled through me.

Shouts echoed through the ship’s vast storage room as each shipping container was declared clear of danger. I watched as the retrievalist’s gun was kicked aside, then bagged, and the pallets were lifted from his body while three agents kept him at gunpoint. He didn’t move during the process, and I might have worried I’d killed him if not for his shifting apparitions. I knew the moment he regained consciousness: Gears winked out and the schoolboy’s outfit clung to his body. The old man’s murder on a loop solidified, as did a new looping scene of a young schoolboy sitting on a three-story tiled roof, shooting spitballs on a crowd of kids below.

I pushed back against the container wall and shoved to my feet. I couldn’t face the retrievalist sitting down.

With practiced efficiency, the agents handcuffed the retrievalist and lifted him to his feet. He swung his head to look at me. Flat brown eyes bored into me with cold hate, and I fisted my hands at my sides to hide their quivering. She-Ra jerked the retrievalist around and marched him toward the ramp leading to sunlight.

“He’s not a fan of yours, is he?” The high-pitched voice coming from the sumo wrestler surprised me. Beneath the apparition stood a petite woman, and if I squinted, I could make out her green eyes under a black helmet. She held a long gun across her chest with relaxed confidence, and her eyes never stopped scanning the ship.