Tiny Glitches: A Magical Contemporary Romance

by Chastain, Rebecca

  Hudson broke our staring match and ran his hand through his spiky hair.

  “The skinny one,” he finally answered Matvei. “But, honestly, they’re not a concern. Just let me know what you find on them.”

  “Oookay.” Matvei glanced at me, then back at Hudson. “What about the FBI? Do you know about them, too?”

  I shot Hudson a glance. A sombrero replaced the top hat, and the little green army men lined up along the rim.

  “I don’t know what you guys are into,” Matvei said, “but the feds rolled up this morning about a half hour after the Tercel, and they haven’t left yet.”

  Jenny’s parting words surfaced in my memory. Don’t screw up with the FBI; tell them nothing.

  “Jenny,” I said. “The background checks.” My voice sounded hollow.

  Or the FBI knew about Kyoko. My stomach chilled and I set down the coffee cake.

  “Do you think they know?” I asked.

  Hudson paced, tapping a finger against his chin as he thought. A Rubik’s Cube twisted in the air in front of him, the grids turning and flipping, aligning and misaligning colors with each twist. The sombrero remained, but the army men disappeared. A jagged-toothed fish flickered in and out of existence, gnawing at his stomach.

  “No. Not about Kyoko,” Hudson said. “If they did, they wouldn’t be out in their car.”

  I nodded in agreement. They’d either be in here arresting us, or they’d be at Annabella’s. Neither of us said that aloud, though. Not with Matvei listening.

  “We could tell them about the ninjas,” I said.

  “The ninjas?” Matvei echoed.

  “How would we explain it?” Hudson asked.

  “We don’t have to explain anything. They’re the ones who attacked us.”

  “Do you remember anything about them?”

  “I know where their van is broken down,” I said.

  “It’s probably gone by now. Besides, the feds will want to know why we were selected as targets.”

  “Random act.”

  “And when they start digging?”

  I sighed. “What about the cousins? Can we at least tell them about Atlas and Edmond?” I knew it was wishful thinking before Hudson shook his head.

  “The less we tell them, the better.”

  I liked law enforcers. They had a tough job, and I appreciated their dedication to keeping everyone safe. A plan that included lying to them made the coffee cake squirm in my stomach.

  “Unless you want to tell them everything,” Hudson said, giving me an unreadable look. I did my best to not show the whiplash of fear his words elicited. Telling the FBI everything might mean we’d reduce our sentences for our involvement with Kyoko, but it would also mean the end of my life. The moment we handed Kyoko over to the FBI, Jenny would expose my curse, and I’d be whisked off to some high-security facility for detainment and endless testing.

  I shook my head and looked away from Hudson’s piercing gaze. “What do you think they’re waiting for?”

  “Are you guys going to tell me what’s going on?” Matvei asked.

  “No,” Hudson said.

  “Then you might want to brush your teeth and grab something to eat, because if they’re waiting for something, permission or information or confirmation, the office opens in”—he checked his watch—“twenty minutes.”

  Cussing, Hudson stalked from the room. Matvei quirked an eyebrow at me.

  “You sure you don’t want to tell me?” he asked.

  “Are you sure you want to know?”

  Matvei glanced toward the master bedroom. “What turned our easygoing Hudson into such an ass? Yeah.”

  “I don’t know.” I raised my voice. “Perhaps you should ask all the women he slept with before me.”

  “Not going to let that one go, huh?” Matvei asked.

  “You’re kidding, right?”

  Matvei grinned.

  I grabbed my duffel rather than rooting for my toothbrush in front of Matvei, and stalked down the hall.

  I rounded the corner of the bedroom and ran into Hudson. He grabbed me by the shoulders and backed me into the wall. Anger and another emotion I couldn’t identify tightened the corners of his eyes and set his mouth in a hard line. When he swept in for a kiss, his lips pressed hard, almost painfully, against mine and my body responded instantly. I dropped my bag and fisted his shirt in one hand, holding tight to his shoulder with the other.

  He pulled back until a few inches separated our panting breaths.

  “I’m pissed as hell at you, but that doesn’t mean I don’t like you, and it doesn’t mean I want you running off into danger, okay?” he said. “We’re in this together.”

  “I don’t go ‘running off into danger.’ I’m not some dim-witted damsel in distress and you’re not my white knight. I’m very good at taking care of myself.”

  “So you don’t need my help? Is that what you’re saying?” His expression turned stony.

  “No more than you need mine. Like you said, we’re in this together. It’s not ‘Hudson Single-Handedly Rides to the Rescue,’ okay? It’s not ‘Protect Eva from Harm and Herself.’ And while we’re clearing the air, I don’t mess things up with my feng shui ‘crap.’ I fix things. That’s my job; I make people’s lives better. Open your thick head and look around, Monty. Your problems are obvious. You’ve got a stagnant career that feeds your bank account but not your heart. Women leave you because they’re never fully welcome in here”—I prodded his heart—“or here.” I waved toward the bedroom. “People trust you, but I bet you’re having a hard time convincing your boss you’re worthy of that next level of responsibility, the one that would boost your salary. The helpful people in your life—your mentors and your repairmen and the customer support people—they’re hit or miss, right? And I don’t even want to touch on your family. That’s a tidal wave of baggage and buried emotion. You should be thanking me for what I did in your office . . . even if it wasn’t my place.” The halfhearted apology came out stilted.

  Hudson fell back a step, and he stared at me with wide eyes.

  “How did you . . .”

  “It’s all right here.” I circled a finger in the air to indicate his whole house. His slack-jawed expression eased the last of my anger. I stood on tiptoes and kissed him gently. “Stop discounting what you don’t understand.” I picked up my bag and walked to the bathroom, then turned back. “And I like you, too, even when you make me so mad my hair curls.”

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  “How well do you both know Ms. Winters?” FBI Agent Coutu asked. Hudson and I were settled on the couch. Coutu’s partner, Agent Sevallo, had taken the recliner. Coutu remained standing, though she was short enough that if she did attempt to intimidate with her height, it wouldn’t work. Then again, I was being questioned by the FBI. I was already intimidated.

  “Not at all,” Hudson said.

  “I went to high school with her.”

  “What did you talk about outside Galileo Gallery three days ago? Jenny seemed agitated.”

  My stomach went weightless, but the appearance of a ham sandwich on the folder Coutu held distracted me. I’d seen the divination before. Recently. Where had it been?

  “Hang on,” Hudson said. “Have you been spying on us?”

  Short of vaulting the back fence, there’d been no way to avoid the FBI agents. Minutes after Matvei had left, they’d pounded on the front door and politely requested a moment of our time. We were past introductions. We were solidly in the acting phase of this conversation, where I pretended I knew nothing and suffered no guilt or nervousness. I had my fair share of lying experience, but I’d never pitted my skills against people trained to detect deceit. Already I felt like fidgeting.

  Coutu’s gaze never settled, always flicking back and forth between us, reading our body language and watching for clues. The agent came up to my shoulder, had soft dyed-red curls that didn’t touch her suit jacket’s collar, and looked to be in her late fifties. An apparition of an
FBI badge clung to her gray jacket over her heart. Very literal. I could appreciate that. Literal was much easier to interpret than her ham sandwich or the rotten banana slices now dripping from Hudson’s chest.

  Sevallo’s eyes landed on me more often than not. At least two decades younger than Coutu and almost two feet taller, he had short, thick black hair and a slight Asian cast to his Caucasian features, and when he looked at me, pink rose petals scattered across the coffee table between us. I didn’t think Sevallo was having strictly professional thoughts about me. Fluffy socks draped over his arm, flickering in and out of existence with every glance my way. Finally, he scowled, and the socks disappeared along with the rose petals.

  “We’ve been keeping an eye on Ms. Winters,” Sevallo said. “Ms. Parker, please, answer the question.”

  “She was in a hurry,” I said, glancing at Hudson. “And you know how it is when you run into someone you haven’t seen in years. You think there’s so much to catch up on, and then you realize you actually have nothing to talk about.” I cringed inwardly at not providing the whole truth, but then I thought of Jenny’s threat. A few carefully worded answers were going to have to weigh on my conscience.

  “Yet she left her truck with you,” Coutu said. “A truck we later found off West Pico, abandoned. It looked like she’d been hauling livestock. What do you know about that?”

  “The truck broke down. We had to leave it there.”

  “The truck works fine,” Sevallo said. Hudson tensed beside me, but he didn’t say anything about his elephant-curse theory. Sevallo acquired a Santa’s hat. It sagged to the left, the white fluff at the tip of the hat dangling to touch his shoulder. “We think Jenny asked you to move the vehicle and dump it for her.”

  “No. She just wanted it moved, but then it broke down. And the trailer got a flat when we exited the freeway.” All true, but even I didn’t believe me. “I never imagined I’d be talking to the FBI about it. We didn’t do anything illegal, did we?”

  “Why did she need it moved?”

  “I don’t know. I was just doing her a favor. You know, good karma.” God, I sounded inane.

  “What about the next day? Did she ask you to break into her house?”

  “I didn’t break in,” I protested. Again, not a lie, but I teetered on a razor’s edge. Hudson had been the one to do the breaking in.

  “What were you there for?”

  Hudson crossed his arms over his chest. “Where is this going?”

  “Just trying to put the pieces together, Mr. Keyes,” Sevallo said. I couldn’t look at him, not with his dunce-like Santa’s cap.

  “The truck,” I said, pouncing on the first plausible answer. “I didn’t have her number, but I wanted to let her know about the truck.”

  “Did you find her?”

  “No.”

  “Do you know where she is?”

  “No.”

  “Tell us about your phone call, Ms. Parker. To an Arianna da Via.” Coutu opened the folder, its pages sliding through the sandwich. I remembered where I’d seen the ham sandwich: in the car parked near Jenny’s house. It’d been Coutu, watching the house. Watching us slip into the backyard, then leave a few minutes later. Watching me get into Ari’s car and drive off.

  I consciously did not wipe my hands down my pants to dry my sweating palms. My face felt like it’d transformed to cardboard. I wanted to pat my cheeks to make sure they weren’t doing something strange, but I was afraid if I moved so much as a twitch, the truth would spill out. It turned out I really sucked at lying to law enforcers. Lying about electricity I could do all day long, but this was bigger, more important, and had real and severe punishments. I wasn’t cut out for this type of lying.

  “‘Midnight, pink,’ and the address,” Coutu said. “What sort of code is that?”

  “A childhood one, something we came up with as teens.” I couldn’t have made myself look more suspicious if I tried. Coutu waited, and I added, “I don’t like talking on the phone.”

  “You know, in our line of work, what looks fishy, is fishy,” Coutu said. She shifted back on her heels and stared at me with a flat expression that missed nothing. “You’re fishy, Ms. Parker. You don’t have an ATM card or a credit card. You pay for everything in cash. You travel like a CIA operative. You associate with known criminals.”

  “I what?”

  “You checked her financials? On what grounds?” Hudson demanded.

  “As part of this investigation.”

  “This doesn’t sound like a routine investigation to me,” Hudson said.

  “Jennifer Winters is involved in some suspicious activities. And now it looks like you both are, too.”

  “Like what?” Hudson demanded.

  “How long have you been working with Grant and Zambo?” Coutu asked.

  “Who?”

  She lifted a picture from her folder and slapped it down in front of me. The shot had been taken with a zoom lens. It showed me running up a street with the Tupperware of cupcakes in my hands. The plastic container blocked the handcuffs from sight.

  “I don’t ‘work with’ Atlas and Edmond.” Annoyance crept into my tone. Where had the FBI been when the cousins had stuffed me into that Tercel? “I didn’t even know their last names. They gave me a ride—”

  “You should never get into a vehicle with someone you don’t know,” Sevallo said. “Once you’re in a moving car, you’re captive to the driver.”

  “Thank you for the public safety announcement,” Coutu said, shooting her partner a quelling glance. A riding crop appeared and disappeared from her right fist. I would have bet last month’s profits that Coutu was breaking in the younger agent, teaching him the ropes. Her divinations were so literal! Which meant the ham sandwich probably wasn’t ham; it was a bologna sandwich, as in, she wasn’t believing a word out of my mouth.

  “We think this was a drug deal that went south,” Sevallo said.

  I couldn’t help it: I laughed. I heard my nerves in the sound and cut it off. “I’ve never been part of a drug deal in my life. That”—I pointed at the Tupperware in the picture—“is filled with cupcakes. Edmond wants to start a bakery.”

  “Atlas Grant has been brought up on minor possession charges twice,” Coutu said. “Zambo once.”

  Coutu and Sevallo waited, as if expecting me to fill the silence. I stared at the picture and tried to remember if I’d seen anyone with a camera. I would have to be more alert if I was going to keep my possession of Kyoko a secret. However, I was positive now that if they knew about Kyoko, they would have mentioned her already. They were fishing. I’d simply added to their confusion.

  “If everything was all hunky-dory here, and you left your friends on good terms, why are you running? Why do you look so scared?” Coutu searched my face.

  “I was running because I was late. Edmond’s car broke down, and I didn’t have time to wait. That look—” I studied the raw fear on my expression in the photo, then made myself shrug. “I’d have to go back to that day. I had no idea I could make that face.”

  Coutu snorted. The bologna sandwich grew six inches. “I understand your apartment was broken into yesterday.”

  “Yes.” My fists clenched in my lap.

  “It sounds like they really trashed your place.” Coutu consulted the paperwork, then pinned me with her steady brown stare. “You didn’t report anything missing. Can you tell us why someone would ransack your home? From every indication in the reports, it wasn’t a random crime. They were looking for something.”

  “I have no idea what.”

  “Does it seem odd to you that you did Ms. Winters a favor a few days ago, and then your apartment was tossed yesterday?” Sevallo asked.

  “I guess. But I met Hudson not long ago. By that logic, the break-in could be connected to him, too.”

  Both agents regarded Hudson with expressionless faces, and I regretted my words.

  “Do you think someone’s targeting me because I helped Jenny?”

&
nbsp; I didn’t have to fake the chill my own words gave me. The ninjas were still out there, and they’d found and captured us once already. If I believed Jenny, the mysterious retrievalist had his eyes on me. And now, of course, so did the FBI.

  “I sincerely hope not, but unless you cooperate, we can’t guarantee your safety,” Sevallo said. Pink rose petals fell through the air between us.

  * * *

  “Do you think we’re being followed?” I asked Hudson an hour later as we drove to Ari’s. We’d taken a taxi to Hudson’s mechanic. Once again, nothing had been wrong with his car. Hudson had taken the news almost calmly.

  “We’re persons of interest in an FBI investigation, so, yeah, I’m pretty sure there’s someone tracking us.” His silver terrier perched on the dash, life-size and staring out the front windshield.

  “You were quiet in there,” I said.

  “I don’t like aiding Jenny. I don’t know what she’s got on you. And I don’t expect you to tell me. I get it. Whatever secret is big enough for you to do this for her is probably too big to share with someone you just met, despite all we’ve been through together. Or, shit, maybe I don’t get it. But I’m not going to push you to tell me. I just . . . I don’t like lying to the feds.”

  I opened and closed my mouth, swallowing knee-jerk lies with a chaser of toxic guilt. The urge to tell Hudson the truth—to tell him about my curse and my fears and how Jenny was leading me around by them—almost overwhelmed me. Almost. A lifetime of self-preservation kept me from speaking.

  “Whatever it is she’s got, it’s a well-buried secret. You seem innocent, in real life and on paper.”

  “You checked on me?” The question came out high.

  Hudson glanced at me. His knuckles whitened around the steering wheel. Apparitions cropped up with alarming speed around him—black-frame glasses, a toddler-size marble cherub flapping in the backseat, and rotten banana slices pooling around his waist. On the dash, the terrier doubled in size atop a Chance square. “Yeah, I checked on you.”