Tiny Glitches: A Magical Contemporary Romance (48 page)

“It’s a mutual feeling,” I said. Though I doubted the retrievalist would have nightmares about me.

A crowd of people rushed into the ship, pushing past the retrievalist and FBI like they didn’t exist. A baker, God from Michelangelo’s Sistene Chapel painting, an enormous cherry with arms, a pharaoh, the grim reaper—they each carried bags with bright green
Evolution Solutions
lettering. They stampeded past me to the container with Jenny, only slowing to let the officers leading Hiroki and Yuri in handcuffs pass.

“Bring it out, and I’ll need to speak to Jennifer, too,” a pregnant woman in sorcerer’s robes demanded.

Scientists elbowed into the container and returned pushing Kyoko’s cage. They pulled bolt cutters from a bag and snapped the lock, then opened the cage. Between the divinations and people, I couldn’t see the elephantini.

I swallowed hard, but the bitterness remained. I’d endured it all for nothing. Five days of blackmail and kidnappings and crime, lying to the FBI, my ransacked apartment, Sofie’s kidnapping and trauma, and today’s nightmare—all was for nothing. Evolution Solutions had Kyoko. They’d gotten their life-lengthening formula, and I’d prevented nothing.

A pair of officers escorted Jenny out of the container. Her hands were cuffed in front, and behind her, a writhing heap of naked babies swelled around the shipping container. I forced my eyes to focus on Jenny’s face. She looked calm and remarkably sane, and I wondered how much truth serum still muddled her thoughts.

Anger fluttered and died in my stomach. I didn’t have the energy right now to be mad at Jenny’s manipulations.

“I’m not getting a pulse!” someone shouted.

“She’s dead,” Jenny said. “The elephantini is dead.”

Her words were directed at the pregnant woman giving orders, but they pressed loud against my eardrums.

“What?” A hand clamped down hard on my bicep when I started toward Jenny. The sumo wrestler had acquired brick skin, and she didn’t relax her hold until I stepped back against the container wall. I strained to see through apparitions and people to catch sight of Kyoko, but the area was too cluttered.

When the pregnant woman in charge turned, I realized I knew her. She was the woman who had been in the FBI interrogation room, asking about the baby elephant. Now her belly swelled and shrank nauseatingly, but at Jenny’s announcement, a gold-plated courtyard unfolded beneath her feet straight from the Inca history books, and a knot of rattlesnakes spilled from a dry fountain to repeatedly strike her feet.

“She didn’t make it,” Jenny continued. “She was weak. I thought she was the one. The sequencing I’d created worked, at least at first, but by the time I got it stateside, its cells were aging too fast again.” She lifted bound hands to point at the destroyed lab. “None of this mess helped.”

“We’ll talk about it later, Jennifer,” the pregnant woman said. She clapped her hands and addressed the rest of her employees. “All right. Move it back to the lab.”

The scientists leapt to obey.

Jenny was serenity embodied when she met my gaze, if you discounted the swell of babies. I waited for a wink or signal from her that everything was really okay with Kyoko, but there was no subterfuge in her gaze, just pain and disappointment.

Sucker-punched by defeat, I allowed the sumo wrestler to lead me across the huge ship and up the ramp into the dying rays of the sunset, tears blurring my vision.

The dock sat so far below us that I got vertigo hobbling down the long ramp, and the riot of activity at the bottom didn’t help either, but at least the long walk gave me a chance to process the chaos.

FBI, SWAT, and police vehicles and personnel cluttered the pavement, and though for the first time in my life I’d switched my curse truly off, not merely repressed or slowed it, twenty minutes later, the apparitions hadn’t gotten the message. Two real helicopters circled the dockyard, alternately passing through a fake Statue of Liberty and an antennae tower covered with moss. A single-person-size tank scuttled at the civilian perimeter, holding back gawkers. The center of the action swelled with impossible beings: an overgrown troll chatted with an electric angel near a forest where two ghostly people dug a small grave; a racecar plowed harmlessly through a cluster of eagle-men; a bloated, six-foot parfait cup waded through a river of beetles; books fluttered on hardback wings, spewing black letters like rain atop a spinning tractor wheel; lightbulbs strung on elaborate wire tiers spun atop a clown’s head; and running and jumping and flying and crawling and swimming around the entire lot was a menagerie of phantom animals and garage-sale items.

Portable lights illuminated the fantastical scene as the sun sank below the ocean’s horizon, and beyond the chaotic pavement, the rest of the dockyard remained shadowed. Had I killed the power in the entire dockyard?

When I eventually reached solid ground, the sumo wrestler pulled me to the side of the ramp out of the way of traffic. I turned to look back at the ship. It towered over five stories above me and stretched twice the length of a football field. That fit with my imagination’s re-creation of the space where I’d spent those endless dark minutes—hours?—hiding from the retrievalist.

A door slammed close by, as loud as a gunshot, and I flinched.

“We’ll take her from here,” someone said. A hand brushed my forearm and I flinched again. “Ms. Parker, please come with us.”

I blinked into the face of Batman.

“She’s in shock. Eva, can you hear me?”

I turned and the world blurred. An Amazon warrior stood beside Batman.

“Come on, let’s get you taken care of,” the Amazon said.

She and Batman produced a stretcher and a blanket, both real, and the fuzzy outlines of blue paramedic uniforms peeked between the seams of their apparitions. Once I was lying down—and made it clear I would
not
be belted down—they pushed me through the maze of the shipping yard. I don’t think I would have made it on my own. Discounting my exhaustion, wounds, and bare feet, the apparitions would have incapacitated me. In the crush of people, divinations overlapped in a hazy, nauseating mishmash of colors and shapes, and even lying down, the vortex of unassociated movement disoriented me. The Amazon asked me questions, but her words washed over me. Finally I gave up, closed my eyes, and wept for Kyoko.

I didn’t open my eyes until the stretcher halted at the perimeter of the madness. The paramedics checked my pulse, my pupils, my feet, and my shoulder.

“You’re going to need stitches, probably a tetanus shot. Don’t worry; we’ll be giving you a ride to the hospital any minute now,” Batman said.

Normally I would have protested the hospital, but with my curse full, I wouldn’t be a danger to others.

On my other side, the Amazon spoke with an unfamiliar FBI agent, and when I turned to eavesdrop, I came face-to-face with a great white shark. It swam through me, jaw agape, while I strangled my scream. Luminous jellyfish mobbed the shark, circled by deep-sea monsters.

Hudson.

He stood a few away, hands in fists at his sides. A sinkhole opened beneath his feet, swallowing the ground in a twenty-foot radius. I struggled to sit up, heart hammering. He didn’t move closer, didn’t say anything, and I couldn’t read an emotion on his face either, just his montage of fear apparitions. Was he afraid for me? Or
of
me?

“Hudson.” My voice came out breathy, so soft I barely heard it. I tried again. “Hudson!”

He jerked forward two steps, then stopped, not quite close enough to touch. I finally untangled myself from the blanket and sat up despite Batman’s protests. I was through with waiting, through with caution.

“I love you,” I said. I thought I’d used up my quota of fear for the next ten years, but my palms instantly grew clammy and my stomach took a nauseating dive into my belly. Hudson’s expression didn’t flicker, but the sinkhole disappeared, replaced by cowboy boots and the blue sombrero with dingly balls, both dwarfing his body. I sucked in a breath and plowed on. “I’m not normal, and I never will be. I accept it, and damn it, you’re going to have to accept it, too, because I love you.” Saying it the second time was easier. “You’re kind and smart and resourceful and hot as hell. I want you in my life. I shouldn’t have let you walk out on me. You’re worth fighting for. This”—I tapped my chest, where my heart was trying to break through my rib cage—“this is worth fighting for.”

Sirens wailed, people yelled, the helicopters circled, but all I heard was my heavy pulse in my ears, all I saw was Hudson’s unchanged expression. He shook his head, and my heart faltered, my hand falling to my side.

“I’m an ass, Eva.” Hudson stepped up to the gurney and framed my face with his hands. I forgot how to breathe. Holding me as if I might break, he brushed my lips with his. I grabbed his forearms when he tried to pull back, and his serious eyes held mine. “I think I fell in love with you the first moment I saw you.”

My heart floated, lifting me with it. I slid my fingers into his hair and tugged him back for another kiss, this one infused with joy and hope and lust. I wasn’t gentle. When he pulled back, a horse-fur star rested in the middle of his forehead. I jerked when something moved at eye level across his chest.

Small and doll-like, walking across the air in front of his pecs was a woman with wavy red hair in a bright purple dress with white flowers. Her skin shimmered like porcelain, flawless and sunlit despite the nighttime sky. She smiled, blue-gray eyes literally sparkling. My mouth fell open when I realized I was looking at a representation of myself. Apparition-me was cartoonish in her perfection, her full lips and big eyes an exaggeration of the real thing. Over and over again, she walked the air from the left side of his chest to the right.

I’d never seen myself in a divination before, not even on Sofie. I didn’t know what it meant or why, of all Hudson’s apparitions, she was the most transparent.

A flurry of dandelion puffs burst from Hudson’s chest and landed on me. They should have floated through me, but they reacted as if they were as solid as me. Again, I was at a loss to explain it.

I would figure it out. Later. I slid my hands down Hudson’s arms, smiling for the first time since I’d told him about my curse.

“So you believe me?”

“I should have seen it earlier, but what you do is—or should be—impossible. But, well, Occam’s razor and all that. So, yeah, against all logic, I believe you. Plus, I trust you.”

It was more than I’d dared hope for. “You’re amazing, Hudson.”

“So are you. Your special . . . gift is how they found you.”

“What?”

“I had a hunch when all the power went out in a two-mile radius. The docks were the epicenter. It just took a while to convince the FBI.”

“
You
convinced them?” I squeaked.
Two miles?
Holy crap.

“They suspected it was a terrorist tactic. There’s been talk that Jenny was involved. She’s suspected for treason, after all.”

“She couldn’t—”

“I know. They’ll work it out. She’s no longer our problem.” Hudson squeezed my hands.

My euphoria faded. “Kyoko . . . Kyoko’s dead,” I whispered.

Hudson’s face fell and he pulled me to him. I clung to his shirt as tight as my cut shoulder would allow, eyes closed, breathing in his scent.

“Maybe that’s for the best,” he said softly.

I nodded, though I didn’t agree. I didn’t think Hudson believed it, either. The tiny elephant had deserved a real life free in the wild, not shuffled from cage to cage, poked and prodded by scientists bent on self-aggrandizement.

“Come on, we need to get you to a doctor. Then I’m taking you home—my home—where I can take care of you.”

“That sounds nice, but . . . two miles? Are you sure?”

“Yep, no power for two miles.”

“No. About me. To your home.”

Hudson peered into my eyes. “You mean, am I sure I want to take you to my house?”

I nodded.

“Eva, you don’t scare me. The only thing that scared me was when you went missing. I’m not letting you out of my sight. You got that?”

I brushed tears from my cheeks. “Thank you,” I said.

“For this?” He gestured to the cop cars and helicopters, SWAT team, and general mayhem operating around us. “That’s all the FBI, not me.”

I shook my head. “For not abandoning me.”

I wanted the words back the moment I said them, hearing the little girl discarded by her mother and father in my statement. I wasn’t her anymore. I was stronger. But she was still a part of me.

A new cloud of dandelion puffs shot from Hudson’s chest and spiraled around us faster than a flock of hummingbirds.

“I’m not going anywhere.”

CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

Galileo Gallery was breathing room only, the crush of well-dressed and wealthy aficionados mingling with the casual but curious general public. S. Sterling’s stolen artwork was on exhibit for the first time since its anonymous return, and the art world was abuzz. The gorgeous oil paintings had been given pride of place on the main wall, highlighted by a string of spotlights. My aunt’s artwork filled the rest of the gallery, too, and from the looks of the tiny markers beside the descriptive plaques, more than half had already sold.