Pallets. Wooden pallets stacked—I stretched to feel—a little taller than me.
The wood creaked, and the retrievalist spun my direction, army knife extended. The gun remained invisible, but I knew exactly where it pointed—straight at my forehead.
Crouching, I shuffled a few steps back. The retrievalist stalked forward, feet silent. If I couldn’t see pieces of him, I wouldn’t have known he moved. With uncanny precision, he closed the gap between us, locked on my last heard location. I held my breath and listened to my pulse rattle against my eardrums.
The retrievalist halted less than five feet from me. His gun hand swung left and right, the incongruous lollipop protruding an extra two feet. His soft exhale raised the hairs on my arm. Slowly, on muscles nearly too tense to function, I straightened. The lollipop shifted to point straight at me and I froze. Three-fourths of his body disappeared, and the retrievalist eased forward two steps, disembodied gold gears churning in the black nothingness. If he stretched, he’d touch me.
I didn’t blink, didn’t breathe. My entire body screamed for me to run, but doing so would give me away. If I could have done so quietly, I would have lowered onto my belly and slithered away from the retrievalist. Instead, I bent double and shifted my weight, slinking to the side, away from the barrel of the gun. One step. Two—
The retrievalist jerked my direction and fired. I dropped to all fours, but anticipating the agony of being shot made me slow to move farther, and the retrievalist closed the distance between us in sure strides. I stared at a giant gear shifting and spinning at my eye level, close enough to count the golden sprockets. If he took another step, I’d get a knee to the rib cage.
Dempsey’s threat to smash my knee with Attila flashed through my thoughts, reminding me that short had its advantages. I curled tight and kicked the gear with enough force to knock my arms out from under me. Beneath my heel, the retrievalist’s kneecap crunched. He fell with a roar, gun firing deafeningly.
I surged to my feet and ran around the stacked pallets, expecting a bullet in my back. He fired another shot, and I hunched against the slatted wood. I should have kept running, but I couldn’t tear myself from the negligible safety. Through the slats, I watched the retrievalist stagger to his feet, crouched. Cussing, he spun unerringly toward me. I threw myself against the pallets. They creaked and rocked. He fired a shot, and wood splintered. Fire speared my collarbone, but I backed up and rammed the stack again. Wood cracked, then toppled.
I ran blindly, then threw myself to the floor and covered my head with my arms. My skin crawled, waiting for the next bullet that’d end my life. Each breath sawed my throat, dangerously loud, but I couldn’t quiet myself. When no shots rang out, I hazarded a peek.
Faint triangles and stripes of khaki and white cluttered a patch of floor. It took me a long moment to realize what I was seeing: the retrievalist, buried beneath the pallets.
I jerked and clamped a hand over my mouth to hold in a scream when a new apparition manifested on the floor beside the pallets. A small, elderly man knelt before a car’s bumper, and a gun fired soundlessly into his chest. He toppled backward. The scene reset and the man’s murder repeated. Like a movie reel stuck in a loop, the scene replayed again and again, no less horrifying for its lack of sound.
I stared, dumbfounded. Apparitions didn’t work like that. They showed an emotion, not a scene.
The stack shifted.
My heart plummeted. I’d hoped I’d knocked the retrievalist unconscious. A pulse of fire ignited in my shoulder when I uncurled, and I patted my shirt. My hand came away sticky with blood, and fresh fear washed down my spine.
The floor vibrated, and a loud screech echoed through the enormous room. A shaft of light cut through the wall behind me. I lifted a hand to shield my eyes, thought better of it, and ran to huddle against a wall.
The diffuse light illuminated my prison, shaping it into a gargantuan rectangle large enough to make the shipping containers scattered across the holey metal floor appear small. I wasn’t cowering by a wall, I realized, but by one of the freestanding containers, maybe even the one holding Jenny. The retrievalist’s black-clad shape twisted in fragile angles beneath the weight of the pine pallets.
I pulled on the reserves of my physical energy, searching for a place to hide, my options as limited as my time: a few barrels, a tractor, a pile of tie-downs. The closed boxy metal shipping containers.
Footsteps pounded on metal, and deeper, the muted heavy chop of a helicopter thumped against my eardrums.
“FBI! Hands in the air!”
My knees gave out and I slid down the corrugated metal of the container.
I tried to find my voice, to comply, but I’d run out of juice. With a heavy sigh, I fumbled for my mental shields and put the lid on my curse. It slid on with the ease of flicking a switch. I hunted for a description of the sensation. Full. I was full.
I’d just turned my curse off.
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
A pirate. A general. President Lincoln. A doctor. A horse. Wonder Woman. A two-story dragon. I’d been rescued by a costume party. They carried an arsenal of guns, bristled with knives, and a few breathed fire. They brought with them a hurricane of objects, most animated and bizarre. A baby doll crawled out of a waste-high Ming vase. Atop a flying UFO, a foot-tall Jesus smiled and waved at a man-size, machine-gun-toting robot. Twin Siamese cats played chase around an ice sculpture fruit bowl. A whale swallowed me whole and kept swimming.
Apparitions. How long had I amped my curse? How much electricity had I drained? The divinations were so strong I couldn’t distinguish the real people beneath them.
“Over here!” Bright beams of flashlights sliced through the circus.
“Hands where I can see them!”
I raised shaking hands, the sticky wet fabric of my bloodied shirt pulling against my collarbone, and I winced as pain in my left shoulder halted the movement. Superman, a Roman gladiator, and She-Ra circled the buried retrievalist, ignoring me. I started to lower my hands when a light flashed across my face, blinding me; then a short woman in standard FBI SWAT gear stopped in front of me. Pinned to her Kevlar vest was a badge large enough to use as a riot shield, and a whip longer than a fly-fishing pole cracked the air beside her. I never thought I’d be so happy to see Agent Coutu.
“Eva Parker. Why am I not surprised to find you here?”
“Jenny’s here. In one of these containers.”
Sharp brown eyes narrowed on me. “Which one?”
“I don’t know. It was dark.”
“Who else is here?”
“Him.” I pointed to the retrievalist. Coutu didn’t turn. “And two scientists trapped in the same container with Jenny. They’re dangerous.”
Coutu spoke into her headset mic, then focused on me again. Behind her, a bear, a tank, a werewolf, and a gigantic gun lined up along the edge of a shipping container, and the bear undid the locks. In a rush, they threw open the doors and entered the container.
“Let me take a look at that.” Coutu holstered her gun and crouched in front of me, blocking my view of the rest of the vast room. She peeled the collar of my shirt away from my neck. I hissed as fresh pain burst across my shoulder. “That scratch looks deep. You’ll have a scar, but you’ll live. Any other injuries?”
I released a sigh of relief, having feared a gunshot wound. On my exhale, my buffer of adrenaline ebbed away, and a dozen injuries awoke in response to Coutu’s question. My feet were cut, my knees bled beneath the thin material of my pants, and scratches oozed blood on my forearms, plus a headache burst to life in the back of my skull, but I shook my head in answer to Coutu’s question. I stilled almost immediately when the movement stretched my shoulder’s wound. “Where am I?”
“A container ship. How did you get here?”
“A ship?”
“In Long Beach harbor.”
“Long Beach?” That meant either the retrievalist had moved my unconscious body from one car to another, becaus
e a car would never normally survive the early-morning commute from my apartment to Long Beach with me as a passenger, or traveling unconscious had dampened my curse. It wasn’t important now, but my brain couldn’t move past the picture of being defenseless and vulnerable in the retrievalist’s hands.
A chorus of shouts announced the discovery of Jenny, Hiroki, and Yuri. Coutu ordered me not to move, sicced a junior agent on me to stand watch, and jogged to the red-paneled container. The junior agent trotted to stand beside me, the person’s light steps belying the sumo wrestler image I saw. A golden ladder rose beside the agent, sinking into the floor as a tiny gerbil-like creature leapt up each rung, never achieving a height above the sumo wrestler’s shoulder. I closed my eyes to block out the apparition bombardment, only to snap them open a moment later when latent panic bubbled through me.
Shouts echoed through the ship’s vast storage room as each shipping container was declared clear of danger. I watched as the retrievalist’s gun was kicked aside, then bagged, and the pallets were lifted from his body while three agents kept him at gunpoint. He didn’t move during the process, and I might have worried I’d killed him if not for his shifting apparitions. I knew the moment he regained consciousness: Gears winked out and the schoolboy’s outfit clung to his body. The old man’s murder on a loop solidified, as did a new looping scene of a young schoolboy sitting on a three-story tiled roof, shooting spitballs on a crowd of kids below.
I pushed back against the container wall and shoved to my feet. I couldn’t face the retrievalist sitting down.
With practiced efficiency, the agents handcuffed the retrievalist and lifted him to his feet. He swung his head to look at me. Flat brown eyes bored into me with cold hate, and I fisted my hands at my sides to hide their quivering. She-Ra jerked the retrievalist around and marched him toward the ramp leading to sunlight.
“He’s not a fan of yours, is he?” The high-pitched voice coming from the sumo wrestler surprised me. Beneath the apparition stood a petite woman, and if I squinted, I could make out her green eyes under a black helmet. She held a long gun across her chest with relaxed confidence, and her eyes never stopped scanning the ship.
“It’s a mutual feeling,” I said. Though I doubted the retrievalist would have nightmares about me.
A crowd of people rushed into the ship, pushing past the retrievalist and FBI like they didn’t exist. A baker, God from Michelangelo’s Sistene Chapel painting, an enormous cherry with arms, a pharaoh, the grim reaper—they each carried bags with bright green Evolution Solutions lettering. They stampeded past me to the container with Jenny, only slowing to let the officers leading Hiroki and Yuri in handcuffs pass.
“Bring it out, and I’ll need to speak to Jennifer, too,” a pregnant woman in sorcerer’s robes demanded.
Scientists elbowed into the container and returned pushing Kyoko’s cage. They pulled bolt cutters from a bag and snapped the lock, then opened the cage. Between the divinations and people, I couldn’t see the elephantini.
I swallowed hard, but the bitterness remained. I’d endured it all for nothing. Five days of blackmail and kidnappings and crime, lying to the FBI, my ransacked apartment, Sofie’s kidnapping and trauma, and today’s nightmare—all was for nothing. Evolution Solutions had Kyoko. They’d gotten their life-lengthening formula, and I’d prevented nothing.
A pair of officers escorted Jenny out of the container. Her hands were cuffed in front, and behind her, a writhing heap of naked babies swelled around the shipping container. I forced my eyes to focus on Jenny’s face. She looked calm and remarkably sane, and I wondered how much truth serum still muddled her thoughts.
Anger fluttered and died in my stomach. I didn’t have the energy right now to be mad at Jenny’s manipulations.
“I’m not getting a pulse!” someone shouted.
“She’s dead,” Jenny said. “The elephantini is dead.”
Her words were directed at the pregnant woman giving orders, but they pressed loud against my eardrums.
“What?” A hand clamped down hard on my bicep when I started toward Jenny. The sumo wrestler had acquired brick skin, and she didn’t relax her hold until I stepped back against the container wall. I strained to see through apparitions and people to catch sight of Kyoko, but the area was too cluttered.
When the pregnant woman in charge turned, I realized I knew her. She was the woman who had been in the FBI interrogation room, asking about the baby elephant. Now her belly swelled and shrank nauseatingly, but at Jenny’s announcement, a gold-plated courtyard unfolded beneath her feet straight from the Inca history books, and a knot of rattlesnakes spilled from a dry fountain to repeatedly strike her feet.
“She didn’t make it,” Jenny continued. “She was weak. I thought she was the one. The sequencing I’d created worked, at least at first, but by the time I got it stateside, its cells were aging too fast again.” She lifted bound hands to point at the destroyed lab. “None of this mess helped.”
“We’ll talk about it later, Jennifer,” the pregnant woman said. She clapped her hands and addressed the rest of her employees. “All right. Move it back to the lab.”
The scientists leapt to obey.
Jenny was serenity embodied when she met my gaze, if you discounted the swell of babies. I waited for a wink or signal from her that everything was really okay with Kyoko, but there was no subterfuge in her gaze, just pain and disappointment.
Sucker-punched by defeat, I allowed the sumo wrestler to lead me across the huge ship and up the ramp into the dying rays of the sunset, tears blurring my vision.
The dock sat so far below us that I got vertigo hobbling down the long ramp, and the riot of activity at the bottom didn’t help either, but at least the long walk gave me a chance to process the chaos.
FBI, SWAT, and police vehicles and personnel cluttered the pavement, and though for the first time in my life I’d switched my curse truly off, not merely repressed or slowed it, twenty minutes later, the apparitions hadn’t gotten the message. Two real helicopters circled the dockyard, alternately passing through a fake Statue of Liberty and an antennae tower covered with moss. A single-person-size tank scuttled at the civilian perimeter, holding back gawkers. The center of the action swelled with impossible beings: an overgrown troll chatted with an electric angel near a forest where two ghostly people dug a small grave; a racecar plowed harmlessly through a cluster of eagle-men; a bloated, six-foot parfait cup waded through a river of beetles; books fluttered on hardback wings, spewing black letters like rain atop a spinning tractor wheel; lightbulbs strung on elaborate wire tiers spun atop a clown’s head; and running and jumping and flying and crawling and swimming around the entire lot was a menagerie of phantom animals and garage-sale items.
Portable lights illuminated the fantastical scene as the sun sank below the ocean’s horizon, and beyond the chaotic pavement, the rest of the dockyard remained shadowed. Had I killed the power in the entire dockyard?
When I eventually reached solid ground, the sumo wrestler pulled me to the side of the ramp out of the way of traffic. I turned to look back at the ship. It towered over five stories above me and stretched twice the length of a football field. That fit with my imagination’s re-creation of the space where I’d spent those endless dark minutes—hours?—hiding from the retrievalist.
A door slammed close by, as loud as a gunshot, and I flinched.
“We’ll take her from here,” someone said. A hand brushed my forearm and I flinched again. “Ms. Parker, please come with us.”
I blinked into the face of Batman.
“She’s in shock. Eva, can you hear me?”
I turned and the world blurred. An Amazon warrior stood beside Batman.
“Come on, let’s get you taken care of,” the Amazon said.
She and Batman produced a stretcher and a blanket, both real, and the fuzzy outlines of blue paramedic uniforms peeked between the seams of their apparitions. Once I was lying down—and made it clear I would not be bel
ted down—they pushed me through the maze of the shipping yard. I don’t think I would have made it on my own. Discounting my exhaustion, wounds, and bare feet, the apparitions would have incapacitated me. In the crush of people, divinations overlapped in a hazy, nauseating mishmash of colors and shapes, and even lying down, the vortex of unassociated movement disoriented me. The Amazon asked me questions, but her words washed over me. Finally I gave up, closed my eyes, and wept for Kyoko.
I didn’t open my eyes until the stretcher halted at the perimeter of the madness. The paramedics checked my pulse, my pupils, my feet, and my shoulder.
“You’re going to need stitches, probably a tetanus shot. Don’t worry; we’ll be giving you a ride to the hospital any minute now,” Batman said.
Normally I would have protested the hospital, but with my curse full, I wouldn’t be a danger to others.
On my other side, the Amazon spoke with an unfamiliar FBI agent, and when I turned to eavesdrop, I came face-to-face with a great white shark. It swam through me, jaw agape, while I strangled my scream. Luminous jellyfish mobbed the shark, circled by deep-sea monsters.
Hudson.
He stood a few away, hands in fists at his sides. A sinkhole opened beneath his feet, swallowing the ground in a twenty-foot radius. I struggled to sit up, heart hammering. He didn’t move closer, didn’t say anything, and I couldn’t read an emotion on his face either, just his montage of fear apparitions. Was he afraid for me? Or of me?
“Hudson.” My voice came out breathy, so soft I barely heard it. I tried again. “Hudson!”
He jerked forward two steps, then stopped, not quite close enough to touch. I finally untangled myself from the blanket and sat up despite Batman’s protests. I was through with waiting, through with caution.
“I love you,” I said. I thought I’d used up my quota of fear for the next ten years, but my palms instantly grew clammy and my stomach took a nauseating dive into my belly. Hudson’s expression didn’t flicker, but the sinkhole disappeared, replaced by cowboy boots and the blue sombrero with dingly balls, both dwarfing his body. I sucked in a breath and plowed on. “I’m not normal, and I never will be. I accept it, and damn it, you’re going to have to accept it, too, because I love you.” Saying it the second time was easier. “You’re kind and smart and resourceful and hot as hell. I want you in my life. I shouldn’t have let you walk out on me. You’re worth fighting for. This”—I tapped my chest, where my heart was trying to break through my rib cage—“this is worth fighting for.”
Tiny Glitches: A Magical Contemporary Romance Page 35