Tiny Glitches: A Magical Contemporary Romance (46 page)

I stood in the foyer of Sofie’s house, my stubby four-year-old fingers clinging to the handle of my mother’s suitcase. “Don’t go, Mommy. Please don’t leave me.” Sofie pulled me into a hug, and I kicked and screamed while my mother walked down the front path and got into a taxi with a wave and a blown kiss.

I rocked in a seated fetal position, chin on my knees, next to Sofie’s broken-down Mercedes beside the freeway, stomach hollow with fear and self-loathing. I’d killed her car. I could have killed us both. Something in me was broken.
I
was broken and dangerous, and I knew with absolute certainty I would never, ever have a normal life.

I lay by Sofie’s pool, listening to Ari’s accounting of her family’s summer trip to Italy, and envy ate through my thoughts, leaving tunnels filled with self-hate and bitterness.

I sat at Nana Nevie’s breakfast counter the morning after a fickle teenage boy had broken my heart. While I swiped tears from my chin, she explained the impossible: that I was lovable when even my father and mother both wanted little, or nothing, to do with me.

I glared across a front room at my first lover, hands curled into fists, soured love turned bitter in my stomach, wondering if I was no better than my mother, unable to be selfless enough to make a relationship work.

The lights in the lab flickered and died, and unrelieved darkness smothered the room. My breathing cut harsh and loud through the abrupt silence, riding the edge of hyperventilation. I’d done what Jenny wanted; I’d killed it all.

A bloated pink tutu wormed on the floor, covered by monstrous frogs. Fireworks popped and towers of naked babies spilled across the tiny room. A handful of ribbons with golden disks looped around an invisible neck near the floor.

Lit by the magic within me, the apparitions shone in the pitch-black lab. Surprise bubbled through panic. Had I always been able to see apparitions in complete darkness?

I blinked and waved a hand in front of my face. Even the rapid movement was invisible in the inky room. No light filtered through a crack or seam, and no backup lights kicked in to point the way to the exit.

Hiroki screamed for help. I jerked at the sound. The baby pyramid wobbled away from me, morphing into a bullet train helmed by a pile of babies. It barreled through the lab, eight feet of its length visible as it endlessly flew along an invisible track. Abruptly, a rectangular black box obscured the center of the train, unmoving while the train’s speeding cars zipped through it. Or behind it.

Kyoko’s cage. Jenny was hidden behind the elephantini.

“Help! Fucking imbecile! Can’t you hear me?” Hiroki screamed, banging against the floor. “You’re dead, Jennifer. He’ll kill you. As soon as he gets here, he’ll kill you both.”

I didn’t need Hiroki to spell it out for me. I knew exactly who
he
referred to, and I wasn’t waiting around for him to show up. I spun and slammed my hands on the metal doors. Clawing along the seam, I searched for a latch, a bar, a notch—anything I could pry or push.

The metal vibrated beneath my palm, and a muted crack resonated through the door. I jumped to the side. A panel swung outward with a suction of air, opening on an equally dark exterior. A clockwork monster stepped into the container. Gears and levers rotated around legs and torso and one extended arm and wrist. The other arm pressed against the wall, visible where it ended in an overblown Swiss Army knife. Dozens of blades fanned along its length. A giant clock face swiveled left and right, looking straight at me for one heart-stopping moment.

The retrievalist.

I didn’t need light to know his extended arm held a gun. I’d had it pointed at me before, and I would take that experience to my grave.

I didn’t think. I didn’t hesitate. I shoved the retrievalist with every ounce of strength I had. He crashed into the wall with a curse, and I darted through the opening and out of the lab, running blind with my hands extended.

Five disorienting steps, ten. Nothing impeded my progress. Where was I? How big was this vast empty darkness? I pivoted on a step and hurled myself in a new direction.

A gunshot deafened me, and something sparked in my periphery. I tripped and collapsed. Burying my mouth in my shirt, I tried to muffle my gasps. I couldn’t hear anything over the ringing in my ears, but I couldn’t rely on the retrievalist being equally deaf. When no shots followed, I slowly raised my head and peeked around.

Golden gears spun around limbs I couldn’t see, and the Swiss Army knife had gained a giant red lollipop. The edge of a pink tutu cut by a razor-sharp black line defined the opening of the lab’s doorway. The retrievalist stood to the side, far too close to me for my comfort. The hands on his clock face spun backward; then the clock fell horizontal and shrank to a tight collar around the man’s neck.

If he could see me, I’d have already been dead. I pushed to the balls of my feet, bracing myself on my hands. My finger slid into a hole in the floor and I squeaked and jerked. The clockwork monster spun in my direction, arms lifted so a dozen knives and the lollipop pointed straight at me. Barely breathing, I patted the floor. The hole was large enough for two fingers to slide in. Praying for a hatch to open in front of me, I plunged a finger into the opening. Smooth sides stretched farther than my fingertip, like a pipe opening flush with the floor. My heart plummeted. Careful investigation of the ground revealed evenly spaced holes a foot or so apart in neat lines. Each hole felt the same. Where the hell was I?

The retrievalist turned and crouched, and metal clanged on metal. He’d shut the lab. My heart tightened. Any hope of Jenny taking down the retrievalist vanished. The reverberation of sound died quickly; wherever I was, it was a lot larger than the lab. Maybe a warehouse. One with a door leading outside.

“Eva Parker. I could have told them we shouldn’t have brought you in.”

My muscles seized. I stood on one foot, the other inches from the ground. My heart lifted to my throat, and I willed it back into my chest. That voice—normal, not too deep, flat through the vowels—would give me nightmares if I made it out alive.
Don’t fight it, Eva.
With shaky control, I lowered my foot in the next step, then stilled. My muscles twitched with suppressed energy, and it wasn’t completely from my need to run. Out, out, my curse quested for new electrical sources, unchecked and free. It gathered power and poured it into the cavern where my control used to exist. It sloshed and vibrated and fed my second sight—and it gave me an advantage. Hope surged in me, mixed with something that felt a great deal like bravery. I wasn’t hiding who I was. I wasn’t denying pieces of myself. For the first time in my life, I was whole. It only took being kidnapped, tortured, and hunted to make it happen.

Giddy or dizzy—the difference seemed unimportant in the disorienting darkness—I reached through my curse and pulled in more electricity. I’d take out the whole building, or maybe the whole block. I’d make it as difficult as possible for whoever ran this horrific facility to operate. I was no one’s lab rat.

“There’s nowhere you can go. You’re only making it worse for yourself.”

Discordant echoes twisted the retrievalist’s words. I swallowed hard and forced myself to take another step out of his crosshairs. A round opening in the floor bit into my heel, scraping away flesh when I lifted my foot. I bit my lip and pressed on, each barefoot step whisper-quiet against the cold floor.

Since it didn’t matter if I watched where I was going, I kept the retrievalist’s gears and Swiss Army knife locked in my sights, making sure I moved in a diagonal line away from him. I kept my arms extended and carefully felt with each foot before taking a step. Though I wanted to flail with my arms, I kept my movements smooth and slow. If I encountered something, I couldn’t chance making noise.

The retrievalist acquired a schoolboy’s uniform. It popped in and out of existence on his body parts, each joint spinning with gears, enabling me to see him almost as clearly as if the lights were on. All I had to do was keep my head and I could get out of this alive.

Another step, and he disappeared altogether.

Icy dread cracked over my head and ran down my spine. I grabbed for my curse and gulped electricity through it.
Don’t you dare fail me now, curse!
I couldn’t get enough air, and I pressed trembling fingers to my mouth to hold in a scream, dropping to crouch in a ball. I rocked in place, drowning on panic.

“This power outage won’t last forever, and if I have to hunt you down then, I won’t be happy.”

I lifted my head. The darkness remained empty. My thoughts slowed and took form. Fighting instinct, I turned and slunk back the direction I’d come. The retrievalist reappeared, khaki pants, white button-up, red tie, golden gears, Swiss Army knife, and all. Shifting my weight, I leaned to the side and watched the monster disappear behind a solid curtain of black.

A wall. He hadn’t disappeared; he’d been blocked from view. I turned and hurried in my original direction. I had to be close. I pictured a hallway with a door at the end. Freedom. Escape. Safety.

When the retrievalist reappeared before I found a door or even an edge of this vast room, tears leaked soundlessly down my cheeks. Whatever stood between us wasn’t a hallway, just an object in the vast room.

My front hand encountered something cool and solid. A wall! I groped in both directions. A metal pipe stretched both ways at waist height. It wasn’t flush with the wall but suspended at least a foot from it, tunneling through evenly spaced beams. I rested a hand on the pipe, turned to put the retrievalist on my right, raised my free hand to feel in front of me, and started walking. Eventually I’d encounter a door.

Hope devoured electricity; from where, I couldn’t imagine, but I could feel it flutter inside me. It felt different than before—softer, like it danced beneath my skin. Like champagne bubbles.

With my emotions wide open, the memory of Hudson in my loft flashed through my mind like a bolt of lightning, illuminating a new truth: I’d fallen in love with Hudson when I first saw the bubbles lifting from his skin, but I’d ignored my emotions and willfully misinterpreted them solely as physical attraction. Forty-eight hours I’d known the man, and I’d fallen in love. Nana Nevie would be proud.

It’d taken me days longer to act on my infatuation and confess my dark secret to Hudson, and even then, I hadn’t admitted to myself that I was in love. Now, slinking through the dark, with a murderer stalking my movements, I couldn’t lie to myself. Embracing my curse had illuminated the truth—even as it had scared Hudson away.

My fear of forming a true attachment and opening myself to the painful vulnerability of love welled out of the memory of last night and Hudson’s final farewell. I didn’t shy from the emotion, just tucked it in with the rest of my terror and refocused on the vast emptiness around me.

The flutters of hope faded after a dozen steps in which I encountered nothing. I couldn’t look away from the retrievalist, afraid he’d sneak up on me. As I tiptoed along the endless wall, irregular shapes, small and large, appeared as black objects in front of the bright apparitions highlighting the retrievalist, proving there was a lot more than the lab in this enormous building.

In my imagination, gigantic puzzle blocks dotted the room, two-dimensional and the texture of air, each a horror waiting to be touched to unfold. The holes in the floor, the box lab sequestered within this warehouse, Hiroki and Yuri and their shock collars, the retrievalist—each patch of darkness could be its own torture chamber.

“Where are you, Eva? You can’t hide forever.”

My heart hammered like I was sprinting rather than barely moving. Fear-soaked adrenaline pumped through my veins, setting my entire body on edge. Any second I’d run into something, make a noise, and the retrievalist would put a bullet in my back. I embraced the fear, and it splintered into a dozen forms: slipping on rocks at a cliff’s edge, throwing my heart at Hudson’s feet, crashing my bicycle, turning away from a life with Antonio, feeling the bag tighten around my throat as the ninjas tossed me in their van. Waking in the lab.

I savored each heart-pounding memory, piling them atop my current fear, reveling in the full sensation without the need to suppress. All my life I’d held myself back, but not now. If I was going to die— No. If I was going to survive, I would do so as a fully feeling, whole person. No more denying pieces of me, not even my curse.

With my surrender, a rush of energy filled my body, and my thoughts crystallized around my options. There were only two: I could escape and leave Jenny to her fate, or I could stop the retrievalist. There wouldn’t be time to escape and return for Jenny with the police. The retrievalist would kill her first, or move her and finish forcing her to re-create the life-lengthening process, then kill her. Which meant I really had only
one
option.

I balked at my own logic, knowing it was faulty. I wasn’t in any shape to rescue anyone, but maybe it wasn’t the curse dampening my normal life-preserving inhibitions; maybe my emotionally unrestrained self was far braver than I gave myself credit for. Or maybe I was a fool at my core.

Either way, logic said that if the retrievalist had backup, they would have come by now or they were on their way. My best opportunity to act would be right now, when it was me against one person.

Sure, I’ll be fine. I’ll just pit my feng shui skills against this skip tracer and his kidnapping, gun-wielding skills. I’m sure we’re evenly matched.