Tiny Glitches: A Magical Contemporary Romance (25 page)

“That’s the Four-oh-Five. We’re near West Olympic.”

“Shit,” Hudson said for both of us.

I didn’t know the bus routes here, and I guessed we were too far from Hudson’s place to walk. I glanced up and down the street. Somewhere out there were three crazed ninja women. I didn’t relish the idea of walking these deserted streets looking for a taxi with them lurking about.

“How did you find us?” I asked. “How do we know you aren’t working with the ninjas?”

“Like I told you, we’re following you. Jenny’s orders. To keep you safe.”

“Safe? Where were you when they stuffed us in there?”

“There was traffic,” Edmond mumbled.

“You’re a really hard person to track,” Atlas said. “We lost you completely today. Had to wait around at your place for you to return. Man, I don’t know who you are,” Atlas said to Hudson, “but you drive like Jason Bourne. I had you this morning until you took that left on South Robertson. Then you disappeared, like,
poof
.”

“I don’t like this,” Edmond said. “We shouldn’t hang out here.”

“Give me a cell phone,” Hudson said, holding out his hand. “I’m calling the cops.”

“No can do. That’s not a good— Damn it, Ed, what’d you do that for?”

Hudson snatched Edmond’s phone from his hand and pressed a button. The screen lit up, then dimmed to black. Hudson jabbed the phone a few more times. The stone cherub appeared, looming large enough to give Atlas’s wings some competition. Hudson slapped the phone back into Edmond’s hand.

“Hey! What’d you do to it?” Edmond prodded the flat surface. Atlas watched, then pulled out his own phone. He pressed buttons, but nothing happened. At least, not to the phone. Emotionally, his gold-plated wings turned to paper clips and cascaded to the pavement in what I decided equated to Atlas losing his savior superiority and plummeting back on level with us mere mortals.

“Of course,” Hudson said. “Of course. Just my fucking luck. Stupid fucking elephant curse.” He ran his hand through his hair, wincing when he hit the cut on his forehead, and paced in a tight circle.

“Seriously, we should go,” Edmond said, eyeing the shadows—and Hudson—warily. “I don’t want to be here when those ninjas come back.”

For once, I agreed with him. Which was how I ended up climbing willingly into the back of my former abductors’ vehicle. “I’ve got to be mental,” I muttered.

“What was that?” Atlas asked. He scooted his seat forward a few clicks, but Hudson’s knees were still squeezed to either side of the seat to fit. I squished behind Edmond, my knees propped against his canted seat, my feet dangling.

“Edmond, you better not have had any bacon today,” I growled.

Edmond’s eyes skittered away from mine in the rearview mirror.

“Are you okay?” Hudson asked. The marble cherub disappeared and sharks circled him, swimming through the tiny Tercel. A giant creepy fish with long, thin teeth and flat, disgusting eyes attached itself to his abdomen. I flinched and forced my gaze to Hudson’s face.

“You’re bleeding,” I said.

Hudson dabbed at his forehead and then looked at his wet finger. “Barely.” He touched the air above my nose. “Do you need a doctor?”

I assessed my body. My stomach felt bruised, the bridge of my nose raw. My hands had a rash from the sidewalk, and every muscle in my legs, arms, and back radiated abuse like I’d run a marathon without any training. But it’d take a lot more damage than this for me to consider endangering a hospital with my presence.

“No. Do you?”

Hudson shook his head.

“Where is Jenny?” I asked Atlas. “I’ve more than kept my end of this ‘bargain.’ I want out. Now—” The phantom cord of the bag tightened around my throat, cutting off my air supply. I clamped a lid on the emotions and shoved them into a padded box in my mind. I’d strand us again if I didn’t get control. “I’m done, okay? She needs to take her elephant back and leave me and my family and friends alone. You tell her that for me, okay?”

“No need. You can tell her yourself.”

“You know where she is?” The car’s locks snapped shut in unison and the dash’s lights died.

“Sure,” Atlas said. “We’re taking you to her now.”

“We go by my car first,” Hudson said.

“But—” I protested

“My car has my keys in it and your purse. We left it with the doors wide open. Jenny can wait two minutes.”

“So your car broke down, and they grabbed you, and then their car broke down? What are the odds?” Atlas said.

“Not odds. It’s a curse. But at least it’s not just me.” Hudson sounded moderately cheered by the realization.

Hudson’s car and all our belongings were untouched. The same deserted street that had made it so easy to kidnap us had also hidden the car from casual theft. I grabbed my bag from the trunk and my satchel from the backseat while Hudson tinkered under the hood and tried turning the car on. Even though it felt like hours since the ninjas attacked, it hadn’t even been a half hour—far too soon to expect the car to have recovered.

I trudged to the Tercel’s trunk. Fatigue, thick and cottony, cocooned me. It wasn’t a physical exhaustion—aside from the panicked flailing in the ninjas’ van, today had been a low-activity day for me. This had to be the emotional drain of having the contents of my home destroyed and then being kidnapped by professionals. Or it was shock. The world had receded a step, sliding a cozy blanket between me and reality.

“Open up,” I said, knocking on the trunk.

Atlas whirled toward me. Golden sand dunes unfurled, sweeping over the two cars and burying Hudson and me. Atlas’s skin melted, grotesquely disfiguring him. “No! Ah, no. The trunk doesn’t work.”

What the hell?
What was in there?
No, don’t think about it.
Except I couldn’t not think about it, not with Atlas’s terrified reaction. Was it a bomb? A body? I leaned close and sniffed. Oil. Exhaust. Dust. I rested my ear to the dirty surface and listened.

“What are you doing?” Edmond asked.

“Seeing if someone’s in there.” The words popped out uncensored, and I had to stifle the urge to giggle. Yep, shock. I’d run out of give-a-damn rope.

“Why would someone be in the trunk?” Edmond shuffled over, eyeing the trunk like it was going to burst open and the ninjas were going to leap out. His apparitions remained food-centered, but a stork-size needle and syringe hovered over his neck, poised to plunge into an artery.

“No one’s in the trunk. The damn trunk doesn’t work,” Atlas said. “Remember?”

Edmond looked at Atlas and visibly relaxed, the syringe disappearing and a waterfall of chocolate cascading down his chest. “Right. Don’t worry, Eva. No one could have gotten in there.”

I was more reassured than I should have been by his apparitions, thanks to the soft buffer of fatigue.

“Where’s Jenny?” I asked Edmond.

“Hudson’s house.”

“What!” Hudson shot up from where he’d crouched over his engine, knocking his head on the hood. Rubbing the spot, he rounded the car and glared at Edmond. “How does she know where I live?”

Edmond shrugged.

“How do you know she’s there?”

“We called her when the ninjas got you. She said she would meet us there.”

“How did she know you would rescue us?” I asked.

“That’s what we do,” Atlas said.

“So what was the plan?” Hudson asked, rounding on Atlas. “If the van hadn’t broken down, what were you going to do?”

“Pretty much the same thing. We had a gun. They had kung fu. Gun wins every time.”

Hudson shook his head. The sharks still circled him, but the silver terrier stood guard at his leg now. Atlas’s apparitions flickered nauseatingly, and when he mentioned the gun, a bright white halo floated above his head—false advertising, if I ever saw it.

“Let’s go,” Hudson said. He slammed the hood closed and locked his car; then we squeezed into the back of the Tercel again. I hugged my bag on my lap.

Edmond drove to Hudson’s house without any prompting from Hudson. I clamped down on my emotions so tightly my mind numbed, but I couldn’t tell if it had any effect on my curse. I’d spent more time in cars in the past three days than I had in the previous three months. I wasn’t used to restraining my emotions for such long stretches, especially not under such extreme circumstances. My thoughts kept bouncing from my violated apartment to the terror of masked attackers to the panic in the back of my van, and each time a thought surfaced, I shoved it back down and replaced it with a memory of Dali playing in Sofie’s yard or Chatter’s crazy antics on a walk. I felt like a mental patient.

I held together pretty well until Hudson covered my hand with his. A tremor vibrated my body. The dam burst on my emotions, and I couldn’t breathe through the onslaught of fear and anger and adrenaline and relief. When exhaustion swaddled me again, I welcomed it.

“We’re here,” he said.

I blinked. We’d parked in a minuscule driveway in front of a generic single-story house lit by a yellow porch light. Edmond and Atlas had already gotten out, and I scrambled after them.

“Where’s Jenny?”

“She’s inside my house, isn’t she?” Hudson said. He pushed past Atlas and Edmond and marched up the short walkway. The doorknob twisted and the door opened without him unlocking it first. The sombrero topped his spiky hair, and instead of fuzzy balls hanging from the rim, tiny metal cities glinted in the porch light.

I rushed through the doorway a step behind Hudson. The lights were on in the front room, and Jenny sat on a worn sofa, a notebook open on her lap. She glanced up and smiled at me.

“Oh, good. Atlas caught up with you. I need to talk with you, Eva.”

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

“Do you know the
hell
we’ve been through because of you?” Hudson asked. He didn’t raise his voice, but his neck flooded scarlet and a vein throbbed at his temple. He clenched and unclenched his hands.

The smile on Jenny’s face, as if we were buddies happy to see each other, not blackmailer meeting blackmailee, sliced through the last of my cotton buffer. I’d kept my end of our fragile bond. I’d found Kyoko a hidey-hole—two, actually. I’d kept Kyoko safe; Jenny was supposed to do the same for me. She’d failed me twice in the same day.

“Please sit. I need to tell yo—”

“Sit? You want me to sit? Do you see this?” I pointed to the abrasion on my nose. “What about that?” I gestured to the blood crusted on Hudson’s forehead. “We were kidnapped. By ninjas! So, no, I don’t think I’ll sit.”

“If you would listen, there are things I need—”

“We’re through with listening,” Hudson said.

“There are things
you
need?” I yelled, my voice reaching a glass-shattering octave. “Someone
trashed
my house. They broke
everything
.” I stomped into Jenny’s personal space and shoved a finger in her face. “You’re going to—”

“You didn’t have information there about where you’re storing Kyoko, did you?”

My jaw worked but no words formed. Clamping my mouth shut, I inhaled and exhaled noisily through my nose. Slowly, I lowered my hand and clenched it into a fist. No one spoke or moved. I started to walk away, then whirled back to face her. “What’s with you and your family handcuffing me?”

“That was a misunderstanding.”

“Really? In the trailer? Were you having an out-of-body experience when you cuffed me inside with an elephant?”

“Wait, there really is an elephant?” Atlas asked, coming up behind me.

“What if Hudson hadn’t been there, Jenny? How was I supposed to get out?” The question had niggled my thoughts the last few days, a plus one in the Jenny-is-crazy column. “Anything could have happened to me! Then who would have hid your stupid elephant?”

“You could have called—”

“I don’t
have
a cell phone.”

Paper clip snakes writhed up Atlas’s arms and he sidled away from me. “No cell phone?”

Jenny blinked owlish eyes at me, then racehorse blinders dropped into place on either side of her head. When she looked back down at the notebook, I couldn’t see her eyes. “It all worked out.”

“I don’t know how you got it, and I don’t care. I don’t care who you’re hiding it from. I want that damned cursed elephant out of our lives,” Hudson said.

“Cursed, Montague? That’s an . . . unexpected correlation. But, no, the elephant stays with you.”

“Montague?” I repeated.

“It’s my first name. That I never use.” Hudson swiveled his glare from Jenny to Atlas, who covered his grin with a hand. “Which means, Jenny, you’ve been checking up on me.”

“Of course. All my research on Eva showed her single right now.”

“Research on
me
?”

“I didn’t pick you at random to take care of Kyoko. Aside from your
special
assets”—she gave me a hard, warning look—“you had a variety of necessary key factors.” Jenny ticked a finger for each point. “No children. Flexible job. Limited friend network. Wealthy enough to get things done but not so wealthy that you think your money can solve any problem. And most important, you’re exceedingly difficult to track. I needed someone Adorable Creations could never connect back to me. And transferring Kyoko to you at the gallery was completely untraceable—until you started playing detective.”