Tiny Glitches: A Magical Contemporary Romance (41 page)

“Drop it,” he said. His voice was barely a whisper, but it carried the command of a police chief.

Dempsey set Attila at her feet.

The skip tracer’s left leg disappeared. It wasn’t simply blocked by an apparition; it vanished. I could see the carpet behind him and the bottom shelf of the bookcase, complete with swirls of dust and grime. He didn’t topple. He didn’t even notice. The leg reappeared, but his torso disappeared, leaving a nauseating view straight through him to a slice of the front windows half hidden behind a bookcase. His torso solidified; then his left arm vanished. Spinning golden clockwork gears anchored each missing body part, first circling his hip, then his waist, then his shoulder. Through it all, the gun barrels never wavered.

I stared at the body parts as they disappeared and reappeared, and terror crawled up my throat. Or maybe that was my heart, trying to beat its way to freedom. This wasn’t how divinations worked. Apparitions were objects with an emotional meaning to each specific individual, a symbol to express what they were feeling. They were always
something
. How could an emotion be
nothing
? Was this what it was like to encounter a sociopath? A psychopath? I always got the two confused, but I was willing to bet the retrievalist’s picture would be found under both definitions in the dictionary.

“Through the door,” he said in that soft, commanding voice. “You, then you, then you.”

The guns reinforced the order with little ticks. Hudson, then me, then Dempsey.

With an electric eel wrapped around his torso like an anaconda and hands raised like mine, Hudson complied. I followed, watching the eel strobe in blinding flashes, and a scorpion-like stinger struck Hudson’s heart with every beat. My stomach churned, Hudson’s fear feeding mine.

Dempsey stumbled into line behind me, a skyscraper springing up beside her, its peaked top complete with an extra-long antenna adorned with a flashing red light. The whole construction came to Dempsey’s eye level, making her look like a safari parody of Godzilla.

I followed Hudson through the door, and Dempsey was right on my heels. I knew the retrievalist stepped in line behind her, but the man moved on silent feet, and he didn’t speak again. He didn’t need to. As Dempsey would say, his guns were doing the talking for him.

The ninjas didn’t see us right away. Four rows of industrial shelving stood between us and the loading bay where the main action was. Hudson glanced back for confirmation from our psychotic leader, then shuffled toward the women.

Beyond the shelving, the warehouse had twenty or so feet of open floor, now crowded with three ninjas, a caged elephantini, and a bound woman.

The ninjas were relaxed. One with spiky silver-tipped hair sat on a stool by a normal door just to the right of the large, closed bay door. The second stood, arms crossed, near the middle of the room. The third loomed over Jenny, her booted foot on Jenny’s stomach. Yuuka, Nanami, and Miyu—I recognized them from Sofie’s drawings.

A thin cord bound Jenny’s ankles to her hands behind her back, and her body contorted in a painful bow. Bruises discolored her jaw, and blood smeared down her chin from her lips; Jenny’s time with the ninjas had not been as comfortable as Sofie’s.

Jenny and the ninjas saw us at the same time. The one in the middle of the room, Nanami, shouted and sprinted for us.

“Run! Get out!” Jenny yelled.

The crack of gunfire deafened me. I flinched and grabbed for my head—a reflexive move both too late and pointless. Blood sprayed from Nanami’s leg, and she dropped between one step and the next.

Yuuka, the ninja with spiky hair by the door, jammed her hand down a boot.

The retrievalist said something in Japanese, his voice raised just enough to carry to Yuuka. She froze, then straightened, and two knives dropped from her hands to the scuffed concrete floor. Another soft command, and Miyu raised her hands high, stepping away from Jenny. She skirted her fallen comrade and sulked across the warehouse to Yuuka. Yuuka kicked the knives, and they skidded toward us.

“Move to the side,” the retrievalist ordered in English. The three of us complied, lining up along the same wall as Miyu and Yuuka, though several feet separated us. “Don’t move again.”

He kicked the knives out of our reach, then crossed the warehouse to Kyoko’s side. Those cold eyes never stopped moving, and his guns were steady, shifting immediately to aim at anyone who twitched. He stopped behind Kyoko’s cage, where the elephantini provided protection for his lower body. Then he rested an arm on the cage, keeping one gun leveled on Yuuka and Miyu. The other, he pointed at Nanami.

I felt like I’d stumbled onto a movie set. This was too incredulous. A bleeding, shot woman lay on the floor in front of me, her face pasty and her hands clenched around her leg. The bullet had gone through the meat of her thigh. It must have missed any major arteries, because blood welled from the wound and soaked her pants, but it didn’t gush.

The retrievalist said something in Japanese, his voice still soft. Nanami looked up at him, and I didn’t need to understand the language to translate the defiance. The words she spat at him had zero effect on his expression. His gun dipped, and he said something else. Nanami’s lips tightened. She was breathing hard, like she’d been running. After a brief hesitation, she nodded.

Very slowly, she reached into her left sleeve and withdrew a knife with a long, slender blade. Just as slowly, Nanami half crawled, half dragged herself to Jenny.

It was hard to tear my eyes away from the action, but I forced myself to look around. Miyu glared at the retrievalist with a strength that should have paralyzed him, anger twisting her lips into a snarl. However, her hands stayed perfectly still, clamped behind her head as the retrievalist must have instructed. Beside her, Yuuka was stony faced. Her body language was relaxed, and her eyes revealed nothing as she watched her injured partner smear a swath of blood across the warehouse floor as she pulled herself to Jenny.

Jenny was the hardest to look at. Guilt made me want to drop my eyes. It wasn’t my fault she was here, but I felt like it was. It could have been my aunt bleeding and bruised on the floor—it would have been, but Jenny exchanged herself for Sofie’s safety. The fact that Jenny had gotten us all involved in her mess in the first place didn’t make me feel better.

The scientist projected every scared divination I’d seen. A straitjacket cinched her body. Tiny baseball-size naked babies formed a pyramid on her side, arms and legs flailing in a massive, mutated lump. The top babies tumbled to the floor, were replaced by new babies that welled up from within the writhing center of the pyramid, and fell again. Enormous dirt-coated Coke-bottle glasses snapped in and out of existence over Jenny’s eyes whenever she looked toward the retrievalist. The ninjas scared her; the skip tracer terrified her.

Nanami sawed through the bindings on Jenny’s feet, then the ones on her hands before tossing the weapon down an empty aisle. A command from the retrievalist held Jenny in place while Nanami retied the scientist’s hands in front of her and fixed a cord shackle to her feet. Jenny would be able to walk, but her steps would be stunted and running would be out of the question.

My fingers tingled, and I wriggled them behind my head. Hudson shifted his feet, and the retrievalist’s right gun swung to point at him. We both froze.

It took forever for Nanami to crawl back across the floor to her cohorts. After a brief exchange of words, Nanami tied Miyu and Yuuka’s hands together with leftover rope from Jenny’s bonds.

Kyoko twisted and turned in the tiny cage, trying to get her trunk around her side to snuffle the retrievalist. When that didn’t work, she poked it up through the top to prod the gun. He shifted out of reach, and she bugled her disappointment.

The retrievalist spoke to Jenny in Japanese, then switched to another language, neither English nor Japanese, and Jenny’s head jerked up and down. Another sentence and Jenny shook her head. She fumbled to her feet, shooting me hot, indecipherable glances. If she was trying to tell me something with her gaze, I needed an interpreter.

Jenny shuffled to the ninjas, where she tested and tightened their bonds. When she was done, the rope bit into their flesh, but their expressions said they felt nothing. Then the retrievalist tossed her a zip tie to bing Nanami’s hands. When she was done, she stood and stumbled to the bay door, the straitjacket in place, babies tumbling around her feet. There, she used a chain to roll the door up into the roof, opening a gap no taller than Kyoko’s crate. When Jenny crossed the warehouse to Kyoko and leaned against the cage to get it rolling on the tiny wheels beneath the elephantini’s feet, I thought she might try something. She was close to the retrievalist, and he was watching the ninjas more than her. It would be a perfect time to catch him with his guard semi-down.

But since this wasn’t a novel and Jenny wasn’t suicidal, she docilely shoved Kyoko out the loading bay door and into the back of the waiting van, squeezed into the back with the elephantini, and pulled the doors shut from the inside. The retrievalist barked an order to the ninjas, and Miyu awkwardly retrieved the van’s keys from her pocket and tossed them at his feet. He picked them up without looking, then backed toward the loading dock, tucked a gun into a holster at his hip, yanked the chain for the door, and ducked out before it crashed down.

At the last minute, he tossed something under the door, and the small device caused all three ninjas to shout and the two standing to whirl into crouches, while Nanami rolled and tucked. Seconds later, the device exploded with a flash, and a deafening bang slapped my eardrums. I reeled, hands clasped to my ears, my vision filled with an afterimage of the bright light. My legs sagged, and I grabbed for a shelving unit to stay upright.

Sound slowly penetrated the ringing in my ears: shouts between the ninjas checking on each other. I looked up in time to see Yuuka and Miyu stumble across the warehouse toward their knives; then Hudson grabbed my elbow.

“Come on,” he said, though I read his lips more than heard him.

A child-size skyscraper darted past me. Across the warehouse, the ninjas sawed through their bindings, and once they were free, they’d come for us. I whirled and raced for the swinging door, but the world tilted beneath my feet, and my sprint turned to a stagger as I clung to the bookshelves and fought vertigo to stay upright. Hudson moved on equally clumsy feet, half falling behind me. I reached for him and we clutched each other, gaining momentum.

The galley door slammed inward, and men in head-to-toe black with enormous guns boiled through. I spun around. More men flooded the room behind us, rushing through the back door.

The lights crashed. Everyone was shouting, but I couldn’t make sense of the words. In the noise and panic, someone grabbed me from behind and slammed me to the floor. My arms were wrenched behind my back, and for the fourth time in five days, I was handcuffed.

CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

“Where are you hiding Jennifer Winters?” Coutu asked.

“I already told you: I’m not hiding her.” I wanted to put my head in my hands and close my eyes. I was handcuffed to a table in an interrogation chamber, where I’d been for an eternity along with my similarly shackled partners in crime. Sevallo stood with his hands braced on the table in front of me, his back to the large, one-way mirror. He wore a Santa hat, and fuzzy socks lay in front of him. I still couldn’t figure out those fuzzy socks, and frankly, I was too tired to care.

Coutu was seated, a folder open in front of her. A riding crop dangled from a wrist strap on her right arm and a judge’s gavel floated in her left hand. I appreciated the translucency of her apparitions: She wanted to beat the information out of me, and she was going to be the judge of everything I had to say.

Standing quietly in the corner was an unfamiliar woman who had yet to speak. Five-ten, rail thin, and dressed in the most expensive suit I’d seen outside of a Hollywood premier, she didn’t look like an FBI agent. She didn’t even appear interested in the interrogation. She looked like we were wasting her time. I’d have been happy to get out of her hair, but Sevallo and Coutu had just settled in to question us after leaving us shackled and alone for an endless hour, and neither agent seemed to be in a hurry.

In the chaos after the SWAT team had stormed the building, I’d lain stunned, facedown on the concrete—as instructed by a woman with a no-nonsense drill sergeant voice—overwhelmed by despair. Jenny and Kyoko had been right there, within our reach, and then they’d been taken. Again. The authorities had arrived too late. The retrievalist had disappeared, escaping all detection. Unless Hudson had some magic up his sleeve, we had zero leads and no way to track the invisible man. All the threads of information that had gotten us this far had been played out.

We’d failed.

Jenny and Kyoko would be shipped back to Japan, where they would be tortured and dissected to get the life-lengthening formula, and I was going to be arrested. My thoughts bounced between fear for humanity’s future and Jenny’s, and fear for my own.

I’d rested my cheek on the grimy floor and fought back tears.

It wasn’t until the yelling had died down and I was in the quiet interior of the patrol car that I began to formulate a strategy. It would not do Jenny or humanity any good to keep the life-lengthening formula out of the U.S. government’s hands, only to have it used by the Japanese. We’d exhausted our meager abilities, resources, and luck; it was time to bring the FBI up to speed. But maybe I could control the information and still help Jenny.