Tiny Glitches: A Magical Contemporary Romance (50 page)

“What was it?” I asked.

“Gobbledygook she might need later. Only she didn’t say ‘gobbledygook,’” Atlas said. “She used some long scientific word.”

A word that was the name of the drug she planned to use on Kyoko before Evolution Solutions got their hands on the elephantini. She must have first planned to use it when she was rescued from the ninjas—using me as bait—but she’d had to wait when Hudson, Dempsey, and I had botched those plans.

Later, while I’d been hunted and nearly killed by the retrievalist, she must have injected Kyoko with the mystery drug hidden in her clothing, slowing the elephantini’s vital signs to an undetectable level.

Caught up in my apparition nightmare and mourning Kyoko’s death, I hadn’t noticed Atlas or Edmond in the chaos of the parking lot. Per instructions, they’d stuck to Hudson, following him in the Evolution Solutions company van straight to the crime scene, then blending in with the other Evolution Solutions employees to slip past the police. Just as Jenny predicted, her boss had whisked Kyoko’s lifeless body into their van before news crews could get wind of the real story, and all Atlas and Edmond had to do was drive away with her. Ostensibly they were returning a failed experiment to Evolution Solutions lab for dissection. Instead, they headed to my mother’s house.

“I got a package, too,” Dempsey said, taking over the story. “The package was on my porch when I got home from the FBI. Suckers!” Her package from Jenny had included a large metal biohazard box, an unlabeled syringe of liquid, and a cryptic note:
In exchange for a sizable donation to PETA. Try not to scare the world.
“I called Atlas the next morning, but he didn’t have a clue what was going on either, so he and Edmond were just following Hudson.”

“Took you long enough to realize Eva had been kidnapped,” Atlas said.

“Maybe if you’d told me that was Jenny’s plan—”

“Then it hit me,” Dempsey said, bellowing over the burgeoning argument. “‘Try not to scare the world.’ It wasn’t referring to the elephantini. Nothing about a miniature elephant would frighten anyone.”

Hudson and I shared a look but said nothing. Dempsey, Atlas, and Edmond remained in the dark about Kyoko’s life-lengthening alterations and the true danger she represented to the world.

“But you know what does scare the world? Clowns!” Dempsey feigned a lunge at Atlas, and he flinched. “And one particular world, or should I say
Atlas
, was quite scared of me when we met.” She grinned evilly. “So I grabbed everything Jenny sent and drove right over to your mom’s, Eva. I broke in—she really should get better locks—and found the rocket launcher. You should have seen that bad boy. It made Attila look like a peashooter. If I could have lifted it . . .”

Yep, there’d been a rocket launcher in my mother’s backyard. Along with the illegal genetically modified elephant, it didn’t seem worth mentioning to her. How Jenny had acquired a rocket launcher, no one knew.

Following Jenny’s final instructions delivered at the dockyard while her coworkers loaded Kyoko into the van, Atlas and Edmond barreled up to my mother’s house less than an hour before dawn the morning of the rescue and found Dempsey waiting, syringe ready. They’d revived Kyoko, dragged her limp, weak body into the backyard, and Atlas and Edmond fled, taking the rocket launcher and biohazard box with them.

“I peeked,” Dempsey said. “I mean, it was heavy and said
biohazard—
of course I looked. You want to know what was inside? Elephant flesh! Sheets of it, like mutated paper, with hair and everything. And little squishy pink things. I think they were organs. And bones, too. It was a little kit of live elephant parts. Some assembly required.” Dempsey cackled.

“Go ahead and laugh,” Atlas said. “You weren’t the one who had to assemble it. It was disgusting.”

I gave up on finishing dinner and pushed my plate away.

“Don’t even,” Edmond said, his deep voice cutting through Atlas’s continued complaints. “You got to shoot a rocket launcher. You said it was the best day of your life.”

“I bet,” Dempsey said dreamily.

Per Jenny’s instructions, the cousins had layered the body parts—real, lab-grown elephantini parts—in the van where Kyoko had lain, then had blown the whole thing to smithereens with the rocket.

Dempsey didn’t waste any time after Atlas and Edmond left my mother’s, either. With the help of a few well-placed PETA brethren, Dempsey “emancipated” Kyoko from Annabella’s backyard and rushed her to an undisclosed location.

“I can’t tell you who has her or even where she is, but I have a few pictures,” Dempsey said. She excused herself from the table and returned with her purse. She pulled out three photos. In the pictures, Kyoko played with a beach ball, touched trunks with a normal-size elephant, and took a bath in a natural pond. I’d cried at the sight of the happy little elephant, starting Sofie’s waterworks again, too.

“How are you going to explain her size?” I asked, blotting my face with my napkin.

“I already did. I told the nice hippie people where she’s staying that she was stunted from malnutrition. They have a reputation for not asking pesky questions, too, or I would have chosen somewhere else.”

Knowing Kyoko was alive and safe had gone a long way toward my recovery. My only regret was that I’d never get to see her again; I’d grown fond of the elephantini during our brief interactions.

Jenny, on the other hand, I would be happy to never see again. Out of guilt or hubris, she had contacted me twice since the kidnapping, the first time in the form of an envelope stamped CONFIDENTIAL shoved under my door almost two weeks later. The envelope contained the summary of the private investigation Evolution Solutions had launched regarding the mysterious destruction of the van carting Kyoko’s remains—an explosion that had received a remarkably small amount of press. The report concluded the attack originated from one of the company’s competitors and had included copy of a memo that stated, “Regrettably, due to the destruction of the cadaver, irretrievable research on the suspension of cellular degeneration has been lost. All attempts to replicate the former research will be undertaken immediately.” The memo was signed by Jenny, now working in the Evolution Solutions U.S. office, and sent to a list of directors and supervisors.

Considering the lengths she’d taken to ensure no company, including her own, got their hands on Kyoko, I was sure Jenny’s replication efforts would perpetually fail.

I received a final envelope from Jenny the day before the art show, this one taped to the door of Sofie’s pool house. It contained a wad of hundred-dollar bills that more than covered the expenses we’d incurred while caring for Kyoko. I pocketed a few thousand for new furniture and repairs to my loft, then divided the rest between Sofie and Hudson. Sofie took it upon herself to schedule new landscaping for Annabella’s when she booked services for her own yard, plus she hired a carpet cleaning service and someone to do drywall repair to disguise the bullet holes in my mother’s front room. I wouldn’t have bothered.

The lights in the gallery flickered and surged back to life, pulling me back to the present moment.

“That’s my cue,” I said.

Hudson wrapped an arm around my shoulders. A piece of coffee cake floated toward me from Sofie’s hand, then disappeared. Finger puppets replaced the wand, and I knew her meddling face when I saw it.

“Good night, Sofie,” I said firmly.

“Your apartment is looking so lovely these days,” she said out of the blue. “So charming, especially the back-right section: It’s so full of possibility. What is that section of the bagua, Eva?”

It was the love and marriage section, and she knew it.

“Yes, I’m very happy with my front room,” I said flatly.

“I’d say it’s positively glowing.” She looked significantly over my right shoulder, as if she were staring at a bagua map behind me. Maybe she was.

“As are you,” Hudson said, oblivious to the undercurrents of our conversation. “I look forward to pancakes at your house this weekend, Sofie.”

My aunt beamed. I gave her air kisses and hissed, “Behave.” We said our good-byes before Sofie was whisked into another conversation with eager patrons.

Sofie and I hadn’t yet discussed the fact that I’d drained two miles worth of electricity. Hudson accepted it as no more miraculous than killing a car, not knowing enough about the family curse to recognize the absurdity of my accomplishment. I think Sofie was waiting for me to bring it up. Maybe this weekend. Plus I wanted to discuss the looping apparitions. I didn’t see them as frequently as typical emotional divinations, but they hadn’t gone completely away since the night of my rescue, either. If nothing else, I wanted Sofie’s take on the porcelain figure of myself that strutted across Hudson’s chest at the oddest times.

“You know,” Hudson said, after we were in the cool, fresh air outside, “there’s something called a faraday box. It can block whatever is inside from electrical pulses. I wonder if something like that would work for you.”

“You want to put me in a box?”

“No. But it would be nice if I had somewhere to store a cell phone when I was at your place.”

“Hmm. Planning on staying over, are you?” I asked.

“As long as you’ll let me.”

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