“Hang on. I need to think.”
“There’s nothing to think about. I’m going to rescue that elephantini.” Dempsey tucked Attila close to her body and marched toward the empty bookstore.
“Wait!” I ran in front of her and put a hand on her shoulder.
“Don’t try your regular-sizer tactics on me. I know how to break your kneecaps.” Dempsey angled the butt of the gun toward my knee.
“No. Just, just . . . let me think.” I backed out of her range.
I didn’t need to think; all my doubt crumbled beneath one simple fact: Jenny had sacrificed herself to save my aunt. What I needed to do was make sure we didn’t get caught. I paced to the pole holding the camera and loosed my emotions—my disbelief that I was going to go through with this, my fear of the ninjas, my fear of being arrested, my fear of being killed—I had a lot of fear. Why had disabling the FBI van and Miriam’s car seemed like such a good idea earlier? I’d cut us off from everyone who could rescue us from our own impulsive stupidity. It’d been reckless of me and out of character. I blamed my curse, and like always, my censure changed nothing.
Dempsey waited, hand on her hip. Hudson watched me with narrowed eyes. His divinations flashed between the sombrero, the silver terrier, and a yawning black abyss. He was suspicious and afraid, but the sombrero meant he wasn’t going to back away from our plan. Dempsey’s divinations were rock solid, the bead breastplate and the crest of flaming red hair never wavering.
“Let’s go,” I said. If I hadn’t killed the camera with my escalating fear, nothing would. Tension knotting my stomach, I marched past Dempsey and Hudson, straight for the bookstore’s doors.
“What was that all about?” Dempsey asked.
“Contemplating my priorities.”
“Now?”
“Seemed important.”
“Huh.” She tucked Attila tighter against her side and jogged to keep up. Hudson let out a pent-up breath and stepped in stride with me.
“You guys will have to shield me while I get the lock,” he said.
“Me? Shield you? I know it’s PC to pretend we’re all the same, but that’s just stupid. I’m half your height. It’s like you trying to hide an elephant behind your body—a regular elephant.”
“You got a better idea?”
“I’ll pick the lock. You giants shield me.”
“You can pick locks, too?” I asked.
“You can’t?” Dempsey looked to Hudson for confirmation. “Where’d you find this girl?”
“An art gallery.”
“Oh, hoity-toity.”
“I’m not hoity-toity. I’m normal.” Mostly.
“What world do you live in?” Dempsey asked.
The real world. Or I used to.
“Hold this.” Dempsey stopped in front of the double doors and thrust Attila into my hands. I grasped the shotgun between my thumb and forefinger, resting the butt on my toe. Dempsey snorted. “She doesn’t bite.”
“She—it—is a gun. It does worse than bite.”
Dempsey pulled several slender metal tools from one of the pouches on her vest and bent her knees slightly to align her eye with the lock. Hudson shuffled closer to me, and we both made a miserable performance of looking nonchalant, an impossible task while holding a shotgun and shielding a burglar. It was even harder while trying to keep an eye on the parking lot and the interior of the store at the same time.
“Come on, baby. Don’t resist. Show me how you like your buttons pushed,” Dempsey whispered.
Hudson caught my eye, and absurdly, I had to fight off a smile. When he waggled his eyebrows at me, I giggled. Hysteria tinged the sound. I could feel it, just beneath the surface of my projected calm, and I anchored myself in Hudson’s bright blue eyes. His lips quirked in a sexy half smile that I returned. His eyes dropped down my body, sliding a shiver of heat along my skin.
“Geez, down, girl. Now is so not the time.” Dempsey snatched Attila from my hand and eased the front door open.
“Shows what you know,” I whispered, and kissed Hudson hard before squeezing myself through the narrow opening. Hudson followed, but his grin disappeared the moment he crossed the threshold.
The sounds of traffic and people cut off with the closing of the door. Heavy silence and still, stale air enveloped us. I padded across the tiled entrance to the industrial carpet that ran through the rest of the store, feeling like I’d been pinned with a spotlight and everyone in the parking lot was watching, pointing, and calling the cops. When I glanced outside, the only people in the lot were a pair of hassled parents loading four young children into a minivan, and no one looked in the direction of the vacant bookstore.
I scurried through the pyramid shelves toward the taller stands at the back of the store. Health and Medicine the shelf placard read. We crouched there, as far from the front door as we could get and as close to the back door as we dared go. Beyond Health and Medicine, we ran out of cover.
We all jumped when someone spoke.
The voice was muffled through the back door, which I could see now was a galley door, made to swing both directions. It had a square window about five feet up. I couldn’t see anything through it but empty warehouse shelving. The door was loose-fitting, with a slender gap around the top and bottom, but what the voices filtering through those tiny openings were saying was a complete mystery since they were speaking Japanese.
“What now?” I whispered.
Jenny’s voice rose above the others, also speaking Japanese. We shared wide-eyed glances. We’d found Jenny, too. The only thing that could make this better would be if—
Kyoko bugled.
Yep, the whole gang was here.
“Now we let Attila do her thing,” Dempsey said.
If only we could send Attila in alone.
Hudson mimed sneaking up to the side and looking through the window. Pac-Man chomped up his jean-clad leg, then down the other, an electronic block of cheese on a mission. Dempsey pointed two fingers at her eyes, then at Hudson’s eyes, then scanned the room beyond the door with them, then pointed back at her eyes. Hudson nodded. What was this, the Navy SEALs? Hudson pointed at me, then at the opposite side of the door. I nodded.
My heart thundered in my ears. Even so, the distinctive click of a gun being cocked behind us was unmistakable. We froze in unison. The hairs on the back of my neck tingled. With infinite deliberation, I lifted my hands toward my ears and twisted on a heel.
There would be no escaping criminal charges this time. We were trespassing. They could add breaking and entering to the charges, and I was pretty sure having Attila loaded and with us would make everything worse.
I was expecting the FBI. If not them, the police, and if not them, the strip mall’s security officer. It took three jerky breaths for me to drag my gaze from the gun’s muzzle to see the man holding it. Surprise jolted me.
It was a plainclothes stranger.
My brain hiccupped and spit out the logical answer: I was staring at the retrievalist.
* * *
He was Hudson’s height, with similar lean muscles, but where Hudson looked like the boy next door, the skip tracer looked like a scrappy fighter, only one with no tattoos or scars, no distinguishing marks at all—the quintessential average-looking man, if you didn’t count his cold, flat brown eyes. Those eyes didn’t stop moving between the three of us, evaluating but not expressing anything. Dead eyes. The eyes of a murderer.
My gaze went back to the gun in his left hand. Then to the gun in his right hand. They were short, square guns, matte black, not a lot bigger than his hands. They should have looked unthreatening compared to Attila. But I didn’t need to know a lot about guns to know that two small guns pointed at me were more threatening than one large gun pointed at the ground.
“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 sim
ply 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. Whe
n 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.
Tiny Glitches: A Magical Contemporary Romance Page 30
