Tiny Glitches: A Magical Contemporary Romance (26 page)

“I’m so thrilled I fit your criteria. Lucky me. Now, take her back.”

Edmond ambled in, carrying my overnight bag and satchel. My hand lifted to my shoulder. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d forgotten my satchel anywhere. When Edmond set the bags down, I quelled the urge to rush across the room and hug my satchel. Ari was right; it was my security blanket. If only it could offer protection against blackmail.

Edmond glanced around the tension-filled room. “What’d I miss?”

“There’s a
real
elephant,” Atlas stage-whispered.

“A real one? But she said it was an elephan
tini
.”

“It
is
an elephantini,” Jenny said. “One Eva and Montague’s amateur sleuth tactics have put in danger.”

“Eva and who?” Edmond asked.

“Elephant, elephantini. I don’t care,” I said. “She’s all yours. Let’s go pick her up right now. Then you won’t have to worry about us endangering her anymore.”

“It’s not that simple. I need Adorable Creations to believe she’s dead. With the ninjas in play, it’s more important than ever.”

“You’re trying to fake the baby elephant’s death? Why?” Hudson asked.

“I told you, she’s not a baby elephant. She’s an elephantini, the first of her kind.”

“And I told you, I don’t care,” I said.

“That’s what Adorable Creations does,” Jenny continued. “They genetically modify domesticated animals to create miniature pets. They’ve been perfecting chromosomal alterations on cats and dogs for years, but I was brought on to work in the wildlife division. Kyoko is the result. She’s a full-grown elephantini.”

“You shrunk an elephant?” Hudson asked.

“I didn’t shrink anything. I reset the genetic markers that control growth. She was never a big elephant. And she never will be.”

“Cool,” Atlas breathed.

I would have gone with
creepy
or
unnatural
or
bizarre
. Hudson wore his silver top hat again, canted at a precarious angle. The silver terrier stood on the jail square. He was as frustrated and suspicious as I was.

I paced across the room and propped myself, arms crossed, on the edge of a barstool at the high counter leading into a stark kitchen. Distance would help prevent me from throttling Jenny. “Congratulations. You stunted an elephant’s growth. But I don’t care how special she is—we’re done watching her.”

“There’s more. My real job is with an American company, Evolution Solutions. I’ve been working for them since my junior year of college. They needed an inside eye at Adorable Creations, so I went.”

“An inside eye,” Hudson repeated flatly. “You’re a spy. A corporate or a scientific or whatever you want to call it spy.”

“Yes.”

“Get out!” Atlas said. “I always thought you were just a nerd, and this whole time you’ve been all James Bondette.”

“So give Kyoko to this American company,” I said.

“I can’t.” Jenny’s blinders disappeared, replaced by thick, dirty glasses I couldn’t see through. “They need to believe she’s dead and the experiment failed. Everyone does. Otherwise she and a whole lot more elephantinis will spend their whole lives isolated in labs, and that’s not fair to them. Elephants are wild herd animals.”

“You’re not making sense,” Hudson said. “Why would you take the job if you didn’t want elephantinis to exist?”

Jenny ignored him, focusing on me. Her expression looked calm and her body language relaxed, but her apparitions hadn’t gotten the memo. Hummingbirds buzzed back and forth through her body, and the blinders swelled in size until they blocked both sides of her face from view.

“No part of our arrangement involved you investigating me, Eva. Your job is to keep Kyoko safe and hidden. That’s it.”

“We don’t work for you and—” Hudson began, but she cut him off without even looking at him.

“That house you so cleverly found? The house I abandoned months ago? It was being watched—by the FBI, by the ninjas, and for all I know, by the retrievalist. You don’t know what you’re up against, and your incompetence is endangering everything. The ninjas found you; it’s only a matter of time before the FBI finds a reason to question you, too. Stop trying to find me. Stop looking into my past. You’re going to contaminate everything I’ve done and ruin more than you can imagine.”

“My bad. I didn’t know you had a master plan,” I said with as much sarcasm as I could muster. “There’s a real easy solution here: Take the goddamn elephant back!”

Atlas and Edmond flinched back a few steps in my peripheral vision. I didn’t look away from Jenny—I couldn’t. A pyramid of squirming, naked newborns piled at her feet, five on the bottom row, the pinnacle baby reaching her waist. The babies writhed, one enormous fleshy pink and brown creature with a sickening number of arms and legs. I fell off the barstool and caught myself against the counter.

“The ninjas work for AC’s rival, another genetic company in Japan.” Only Jenny’s apparitions belied her serene tone and posture. She appeared as oblivious to my outburst as Hudson’s, as if she couldn’t hear disagreements. “They’ve been hunting for Kyoko since she was just a DNA sequence, and they’re ruthless. Thanks to your bumbling, they figured out you know something about Kyoko, too—hence, tonight’s abduction. They’ll be back, so don’t be stupid. And don’t screw up with the FBI; tell them nothing.”

“What makes you think we’re not going directly to the FBI?” Hudson demanded.

“You won’t.” Jenny locked eyes with me as she stood.

“Hang on. You’re not going anywhere.” Hudson grabbed Jenny’s arm.

A metallic click froze everyone in place. I glanced past Hudson’s shoulder at Atlas. He held a small black gun and aimed down his straightened arm at Hudson.

“And you wonder why I don’t trust you,” I said. Atlas shrugged.

“Don’t breathe a word about the elephantini,” Jenny said. The babies convulsed and grew by three layers, almost obscuring her.

The insane scientist eased around Hudson, who pivoted, hands raised, to get Atlas in his sights. I lunged around him, desperate to keep Jenny there. I needed off this crazy train.

Atlas shoved the gun’s muzzle to my forehead. I stopped short and glared down the barrel into his wide eyes.

“Whoa. Easy.” Hudson pulled me a step back and slid in front of me. I’d been too slow, anyway. Edmond had already whisked Jenny out the door, and Atlas followed, backing out, his gun centered on me until he slipped through the door. Enormous red velvet curtains pulled closed on either side of him, framing him. A bright spotlight illuminated his gun. He tossed me a wink, then shut the door just before the curtains snapped closed.

“Goddamn it!” Hudson slammed his flat hand into the wall. He stomped to the door and put his eye to the peephole, then slammed the dead bolt home. “She’s full of it.”

“There must have been some truth in there. But what?”

He ran his hand through his hair and released a long breath. “I don’t know. A spy? It’s so Hollywood.”

“Her fear seemed genuine.” I shuddered. The pyramid of babies topped the list of creepy apparitions. “Either way, we’re stuck with Kyoko still.”

I flopped onto the couch. Its worn cushions embraced me. Hudson dropped into the lone recliner. My heart twisted with worry for Sofie. The ninjas had found me; it wasn’t a stretch of the imagination that they would find her house, too. Thankfully, we’d moved her this morning. If the ninjas or the mysterious skip tracer thought to check out my aunt, they wouldn’t find her. No one would connect me with my mother. Annabella didn’t go to great lengths to acknowledge my existence, and I returned the favor.

“I don’t like this,” Hudson said. “I don’t trust Jenny. I want to call the police. But . . .”

“But we can’t,” I said.

“You’re sure?”

I looked away from Hudson’s probing gaze. He wasn’t an idiot. He knew I had a reason for going along with Jenny’s mad plan. But since I couldn’t tell him the truth, I couldn’t give him an explanation.

“I’m sure.” My stomach growled.

Hudson sighed and pushed up from his chair. “I can at least solve one of our problems.” He ordered pizza, then opened his microwave. Inside sat a bakery box. He pulled it out, grabbed two forks from a drawer, and set the box in front of me on the coffee table. “This should help.”

It was coffee cake, an entire loaf.

“You had coffee cake?”

“I was optimistic this morning.”

The whole world got a little brighter. I grabbed a fork, then pulled him to me for a kiss.

“Thank you.”

“This isn’t exactly how I pictured the evening going. I thought we’d be enjoying this after hot monkey sex.”

“I’m listening.” Memories of last night made my body tingle and helped me focus on something other than my sore body.

“Hold that thought.”

Hudson went back to the kitchen to call a tow truck. I paced myself, breathing between bites of the delicious cake, letting the brown sugar and cinnamon mask my problems. When he hung up from the towing company, he placed another call.

“Matvei, I need a favor. It’s personal . . . Nope, not like that. I need you to watch my place tonight.”

I turned to look at Hudson over the back of the couch. The sofa wasn’t positioned well. I would have shifted it to the right, moved the TV to a different wall, and opened up the room.

“I don’t know who I pissed off,” Hudson said after a pause, “but I need to know it’s safe for me to sleep tonight. Can you keep an eye on things?”

The coffee cake in my mouth turned dry and tasteless. Tonight’s sleeping arrangements had nothing to do with exploring my relationship with Hudson, no matter how much I’d prefer to pretend it did. I’d been chased from my home, hunted down on the streets, and now abandoned again by Jenny with more questions than before. Memory flashes of the ninjas leaping from the van and rushing us choked me. I set my fork down and grabbed my duffel. Doing something, anything, helped push the panic back.

Following the dark hallway toward the master bedroom, I put as much distance between myself and the phone as possible. I might luck out, and Hudson’s hot water heater might run on gas, but I didn’t have more than another hour or two of working lights in his house.

Like the front room and kitchen, Hudson’s bedroom was minimalist. The California king had matching nightstands on either side, though only one had a lamp. The bright sky blue comforter with an enormous silver oak tree embroidered on it lay smooth across the bed. I smiled at the sight: Hudson really had been optimistic this morning. From the state of his jumbled closet, which he’d forgotten to shut the door to, he wasn’t normally the kind of guy to make his bed.

I froze in horror on the threshold of the master bath. The tiny room contained a sink, a toilet—and a shower stall. The stall was square. It had a three-inch lip at the bottom with a glass door. There was no tub. How did a person survive without a tub?

I thought about my oval oversize tub and bath salts and scented candles, then about the disaster zone of my loft. If I could have driven myself, I might have left right then, ninjas or no ninjas. Sighing, I tossed my duffel bag onto the toilet lid, pulled out my shampoo and conditioner, then fiddled with the shower’s knobs.

The hot water stung my wrists, where I’d abraded the flesh against the zip ties, and the bridge of my nose, which had a bright red rug burn from the sack. My ribs and stomach were mottled purple over tender tissue, but no skin was broken. I closed my eyes and leaned against the wall, losing myself in the warm spray until I heard Hudson moving in the room.

The shower door opened and closed. I turned my face up to the spray, then used my hands to slick the water off my face.

“Exquisite,” Hudson said, his voice husky and his drawl pronounced. “Except for these.” He brushed my side with gentle fingers.

“I could say the same of you.” I shifted so the water sprayed over my shoulder and hit Hudson’s abdomen. I tracked the rivulets down his stomach, bypassed Mr. Happy, and pointed to a purple bruise the size of a softball gracing his outer thigh. More bruises marred his shins, and a faint discoloring had blossomed to the right of his six-pack.

“Come here.” He slid his hands around my waist and pressed against me. He kissed the tip of my nose. “Let me make things better.” He kissed my right bicep and a bruise I hadn’t noticed, then both my wrists.

He winced when water hit the cut on his forehead. I grabbed a washcloth he’d draped over the top of the door and sudsed it up. Then I circled him against his gentlemanly protests and forced him to stand in the spray. With gentle dabs, I cleaned the wound.

“How’s it look?” Hudson asked, eyes closed as soap ran down his face.

“Not bad. Most of it was blood.” A short cut and scrape remained, both fortunately shallow.

He leaned into the spray and rinsed away the soap, then turned back to me. His arms circled me, pulling me into the warm cascade of water. Dipping his head for a gentle kiss, he ran his hands softly over the curve of my waist, my butt, my hips, then back up. I traced my fingers up his back, running my nails lightly through his hair. Each tender touch, bestowed and received, mended the raw edges carved through me by tonight’s violence. Caress by caress, kiss by kiss, Hudson restored my equilibrium.