Tiny Glitches: A Magical Contemporary Romance (33 page)

“Let’s go,” I said. I popped the tailgate and Dali jumped into the truck.

“Whoa. I’m not your chauffeur.”

“We can take our—”

“What about the curse?” I asked, shutting Hudson down. “Come on, we’re wasting time.” I slid into the cab, banging my knees on the dash. The bench seat hunched as close as it could get to the dash, which meant my knees pressed to the radio knobs. Hudson climbed in next, his silver terrier disappearing into the truck’s motor. He scrunched to the side and yanked the door shut, squishing us together. Dempsey climbed atop a booster seat and settled her feet on the extended pedals.

“
Now
this looks like a clown truck.” Dempsey cackled as she peeled out of the driveway.

* * *

Dempsey drove like flames were licking the tailpipe. Under different circumstances, I would have been scared, but knowing we were racing against my curse and on our way to rescue Sofie made the succession of broken traffic laws and close calls irrelevant. After the second abrupt lane change, Dali hunkered down in the back and only whined when a sharp turn sent him sliding across the bed.

For the first time in my life, I wished my curse on Sofie. If she’d had it, she could have stalled her kidnappers and improved the odds of our rescue. Instead, I was stuck with the debilitating curse and the stupid mental block preventing me from turning it off, and my lack of control was endangering all our lives.

I blamed Annabella. My working theory was that my mother had me too young, before her gift and curse had fully developed, and she hadn’t passed on the gene that would give me control of my gift. The kind of woman who abandoned her child to be raised by her sister seemed like the kind of woman who would fail to give her unborn child working DNA so she could live a normal life.

Thinking about my curse or Annabella—especially Annabella—wasn’t going to help Dempsey’s truck, but it was better than giving rein to the horrific images of the ninjas torturing Sofie that kept pushing to the forefront of my thoughts.

“I’m sure your aunt is okay,” Hudson said, wrapping an arm around me. “They don’t want to jeopardize their chance of getting Jenny’s information.”

His words were meant to be soothing, but they fueled the panic clawing at my skin from the inside.

“She’s more than my aunt,” I said, as much to distract myself as to make Hudson understand. “Sofie raised me. She’s more a mom to me than my mom.”

“Your mom is . . . alive?”

I snorted. “Yes. Alive. Off globe-trotting as we speak.” Too busy following her dreams of travel and fame to spare a thought for me. “I was a teenage oops, one she didn’t want to derail her life to deal with.” It came out as bitter as I felt, but I was too wrung out to censor myself. “Sofie was supposed to be temporary assistance, helping Annabella until she graduated high school. But then there was acting school. In New York. Because LA doesn’t have any good schools, right?” How had Annabella explained it to me when I was three?
All of the greats trained at the Lee Strasberg Theatre and Film Institute. You want Mommy to be great, don’t you?
She hadn’t liked my response, either. I’d said no, that I wanted her to be with me. But she’d already known my answer. That was her gift: The divinations Annabella saw around people showed what they wanted
right now
. It hadn’t mattered; she’d gone anyway.

“Annabella? As in the name of the
family friend
whose backyard now looks like a bulldozer rampaged through it?”

“Yep. The same one who now has bullet holes in her living room and Lab hair all over her designer wardrobe.” For a moment, the corners of my mouth curled up.

“Damn. I thought I had some mom issues because I wasn’t allowed to date until I was sixteen,” Dempsey said, barreling through a corner gas station when traffic backed up at a red light. “Boy did that backfire. I had to make up for lost time. I dated five guys my senior year, Tom and Kevin at the same time. Take that, Ma!” She floored it through a yellow light. The engine whined and clacked ominously.

When we hit residential streets, Dempsey gunned it through stops signs, yelling, “We’re coming for you, Aunt Mom!” Sharks circled through the truck, and I twisted to look at Hudson. He was pale, one hand gripping the seat back behind me, the other the handle above the door. A minivan braked ahead of us, and Dempsey swerved around them, hanging out the window to shout, “PETA elephant rescue in progress!”

We spun into the Clover Park parking lot and, brakes squealing, squeezed into a spot between a sports car and a flashy SUV. Dempsey turned the engine off, and the truck hiccupped in place, clattered as if a troupe of flamenco dancers and their castanets were trapped under the hood, and died with a long, hissing sigh.

Hudson popped open his door and half fell out of the truck, catching himself against the SUV. The car’s alarm blared, and I jumped, scraping off a layer of skin on the dash. Trying to hold my ears, I squirmed out of the truck and planted my hands on the screeching SUV.

Sofie. Please be safe.

The alarm petered out on a whine, leaving my hands tingling. With ringing ears, I helped Dali out of the truck and jogged toward the park with the devoted Lab pacing by my side. Dali seemed to pick up on my mood and scanned the park like he knew we were looking for Sofie, completely ignoring other dogs walking by.

I was on the sidewalk before I realized what I’d done: I’d intentionally used my curse. Not like I had in the ninjas’ van or Edmond’s car, where I’d ramped up my emotions and waited. In that second, leaning against the blaring car, I’d pulled on the car’s electricity.

That wasn’t how this familial curse-gift thing worked, and I wondered what Sofie would say.

A fresh surge of anxiety bulldozed my surprise, and I focused on the busy park. Electricity from Dempsey’s truck and the SUV had boosted my gift, notching the apparitions setting from intrusive to overwhelming.

“Looks like Edmond beat us,” Hudson said. He pointed to the parking lot where a familiar green Tercel was parked. It was empty. “I bet Jenny’s already here, too.”

“What now?” a tiny medieval warrior demanded. Dempsey’s beaded breastplate had grown to coat her body, now in a modified houndstooth pattern with tiny black and beige shotguns instead of teeth. A bazooka peeked over one shoulder and a bronze compass circled her feet. Hudson was no better. An abyss at his feet swam with horrors from the depths of the ocean, but he wore his tarnished knight’s sword and was orbited by spinning Rubik’s Cubes.

“Come on,” I said. I jogged along the concrete walkway between the picnic tables and landscaping building, dismissing the teens making out under the canopy of trees and their apparitions of basketball trophies and stilettos, a yeti, and an endless waterfall of eggs cracking over their heads, yolks running down their bodies. “Check over there,” I told Dempsey, pointing to a rolling grass area and its miniature forest of trees that could be hiding a phalanx of ninjas. I skimmed over the tanned volleyball players but slowed to scan the playground. Clusters of adults chatted at the benches or hovered near their toddlers on the play set. Children darted through the jungle gym, plagued by angels and ice cream and blobs of color. A dog-size dragon swiped at kids exiting the slide, and a swarm of bees attacked a group of parents, but Jenny was nowhere in sight.

The squeal of children was dampened by the roar of an engine, pulling my gaze up. At the far end of the park, past the tailfins of private airplanes, a small plane launched off the runway of the airport beyond the fence line, and I remembered why I had stopped coming to this park. Open places were rare in LA, and I often took advantage of the low-electricity zones of parks to relax my perpetual stranglehold on my curse. At worse, I sucked up the electricity of a few cell phones and pointless gadgets normal people seemed incapable of leaving at home, or a water fountain would malfunction or lamp fail to click on at dusk. Clover Park, however, butted up to the Santa Monica Municipal Airport. No matter how slim the chances of my curse affecting the airplanes, after I’d killed my first car when I was ten, I refused to come back to the park.

I scrabbled with mental fingers to pull my curse in and contain it, but it was as if I were trying to collect air with my hands. Fear had demolished a lifetime of control, and I couldn’t waste precious seconds grounding myself. Achieving any sense of calm was impossible.

Dempsey circled the volleyball game, huffing and puffing as she ran as easily on her five-inch wedges as I did in my flats. “Not . . . there,” she said.

I fought to focus my vision and not give in to the blur of panic. The exchange was happening now, and I didn’t trust Jenny to do it without me; she cared far more about Kyoko than she did my aunt.

“There!” Hudson pointed toward a two-story mesh-enclosed spiral staircase and lookout tower that resembled a child-size version of an airport control tower. An enormous misshapen wedding cake and a paper clip angel filled the top of the tower. Exiting from the bottom were three women. Jenny was impossible to miss in her familiar straitjacket and racehorse blinders. The other two women were short, with dark hair and slim bodies. A mountain peak flowed beneath one woman’s steps, and the other was adorned in jewels and snakes.

I tripped over a pile of shoes, scattering them, before I realized I was running again, Dali galloping at my side. Hudson was a half step behind us. The snake lady spotted me, said something to her companion, and they both grabbed Jenny’s elbows. Jenny twisted to look over her shoulder. When her eyes met mine, a pyramid of naked babies swelled between us. She spun forward and began to run with her captors. My heart lurched, then plummeted to my toes.

“Jenny!”

They had a head start, but I might have caught them before they got to the street and the van parked at the curb if I hadn’t spotted the wolf. It snarled, teeth bared beside an oblivious woman seated on the concrete bench in front of the metal control tower. The woman needed an ambulance. Deep, oozing claw marks cut across her arms and neck and disappeared under her T-shirt.

Sofie
.

CHAPTER NINETEEN

“Sofie!” The raw scream startled me even as it burst from my lungs. I fell when I tried to turn too fast, scrambling on hands and knees until I got my feet under me again. Dali spotted Sofie and barked, racing ahead of me. Sofie didn’t react. She stared somewhere between me and the escaping ninjas, body stiff, hands on her lap under a folded sweater. Unfamiliar enormous black shades covered her eyes.

“Sofie?” I grabbed her arm and she flinched, swallowing a whimper. The wounds on her arms were all apparitions, and they morphed into thorns that projected from her flesh as much as they pierced it. “It’s me, Sofie. It’s okay. You’re safe.”

She twisted away from me, and her auburn hair fell back to expose a bright orange earplug and a black strap wrapped under her hair. Tucked under the glasses was a thick mask. The ninjas had left her blind, deaf, and vulnerable in a public place.

Fury and relief made my hands shake as I gently slid my fingers through her hair. She shuddered and then stilled when I grasped the earplug. I pulled it free.

“It’s me, Sofie. You’re safe.”

The wolf grew leopard spots, and the locket it always wore around its neck turned into a puffer fish. Rose blooms unfurled, replacing the thorns.

“Eva,” she whispered, lips trembling.

“It’s okay. They’re gone.” I reached around her and took out the other earplug, then slid the glasses off. She reached up to push the mask off, revealing hands bound by a thick plastic zip tie.

“Where are we?”

“Clover Park.”

Dali, who had planted his butt in front of Sofie, wriggled forward and licked her fingers.

“Dali?” Sofie’s voice broke, and tears slid down her face. She buried her face in Dali’s neck and he let out a sigh of contentment. I wrapped an arm around Sofie and held her.

“Is this”—pant—“Aunt Mom?” Dempsey barreled up to the bench. Sweat gleamed on her forehead, and her warrior apparition was shackled to old-time prisoner ball weights. “Where’s the elephantini? You hide it in that thing?” Dempsey pointed toward the tower just as Atlas—the paper clip angel—trotted out. He faltered.

“Holy shit! Are you the clown?” Atlas asked.

“You think Eva rounded up a second short hottie?”

Atlas looked at me, then back at the tiny blond Barbie. “But . . . but, you’re not disfigured and you don’t look like a perv.”

“Catch me. I’m gonna swoon,” Dempsey said.

“Hey. You work as a clown. What’d you expect me to think?”

“That I like kids.”

Atlas shuddered. The wings disappeared and a heavy dog collar choked him.

Sofie sat up and swiped tears from her face. Dali pressed up against her legs and rested his head on her knee. My aunt’s gaze bounced from person to person, scanning their apparitions, and she clutched my hand.

“They took Jenny?” she asked.

“Yes.”

A lopsided wedding cake squeezed down the stairs of the mesh tower and pried itself free of the open doorway just as Hudson jogged back across the lawn. Unlike me, he’d continued to chase Jenny and her captors—without success.

“They got away?” Wedding Cake Edmond asked.

“They got away,” Hudson said.