Tiny Glitches: A Magical Contemporary Romance (2 page)

Technically, I wasn’t cursed; my gift simply required fuel. Unlike my body, which ran on water, food, sunlight, and good sex, the nonstop apparitions ran on electricity. What little control I’d mastered over my body’s passive consumption of electricity deteriorated in proportion to my emotional distress; the stronger my emotions, the faster I sucked in electricity and the more numerous and elaborate my divinations.

Pushing from the door, I thumbed through the leather satchel on my shoulder. Organized inside its plethora of pockets and pouches were the tools of my trade as a feng shui consultant. The bag also contained the flotsam of a woman who never knew where her curse would strand her next.

It was a big bag.

I pulled out a packet containing photographs and information on all the stolen paintings and placed it in the center of Gabriel’s spotless desk. The police had already received their own copy. Sadly, hand-delivering the paperwork was the extent of my usefulness.

I reached for the door, then paused to give myself a quick pat-down. Seeing Hudson had done wonders for restoring some of my calm. A little light flirting was just what I needed to shake my lingering irritation before the bus ride home. I pulled my mussed hair back into a high ponytail; then I applied a fresh layer of pink lip gloss. Some redheads are summery and freckled. I’m pale. A kind ex had called my skin alabaster. It sounded better than fish-belly white. With the right makeup, I could pull off exotic; without makeup, I looked like a ghost in a wig.

I emerged from the hallway in time to see Hudson bustle into the back room carrying a ladder and a tool pack. The door closed behind him and I sighed. So much for this morning’s silver lining.

“Please let your aunt know I’m taking every precaution to make sure this doesn’t happen again,” Gabriel said, wringing his hands. Iridescent peacock feathers were braided through his hair, and a comfy green armchair trailed his heels like a puppy. “Ms. Sterling’s work is so uplifting. People are going to be
terribly
disappointed. Our Twitter feed has been flooded with fans tweeting about her show, and the click-through rate on our ads featuring her work were phenomenal.”

He spoke a form of gibberish I’d heard often enough to grasp the gist of, but I wasn’t fluent enough to attempt to respond in kind. As a computer’s archnemesis, I possessed only peripheral awareness of all things Internet.

I left without promising anything on my aunt’s behalf. I wasn’t sure I could—or wanted to. Sofie wasn’t going to be pleased Gabriel was only now making efforts to protect his gallery from thieves.

The bright midmorning Los Angeles sun warmed my legs when I stepped outside. Sundress weather in April—I lived in the perfect city. The light breeze carried the smell of hot asphalt and exhaust, and the only clouds in the sky were plane contrails.

With the sun’s rays soaking into my skin, my frustration evaporated to genuine calm. Sofie’s plane would touch down in a few hours, so I had time to burn. I turned right, following the delicious cinnamon smell wafting from a nearby café. If the café sold cinnamon rolls, maybe they also sold coffee cake.

Behind me, the gallery doors jingled open and someone called my name. I turned to see Hudson rush out, wearing a ship captain’s hat this time. My stomach fluttered. I pivoted to face him, fighting to keep my eyes on his face and not scan down his body as he jogged toward me. The breeze pushed his blue company T-shirt against his chest, and my fingers tightened around the strap of my bag.

“Hey, Eva, I wanted to assure you that after I get done today, no one will be able to steal from Galileo Gallery again,” he said when he caught up to me. “Not that it’s much of a consolation, I guess.”

“It’s good news for the rest of the artists, but I won’t be happy until the bastards who did this are caught.”

The conversation stalled, but Hudson’s dimple rooted me in place, and his heavy eye contact suggested he hadn’t chased me out of the gallery just to brag about his job skills. Plus, while I didn’t understand the emotional significance of his changing hats, I thought I could accurately read the butterfly-size sharks circling through his midriff as nerves. I smiled and felt only a smidge guilty to capitalize, however remotely, on my aunt’s misfortune.

“Would you like to get lunch with me sometime? I’ve got this thing.” Hudson gestured back toward the gallery with a boyish grin. “Otherwise I’d suggest right now.”

“I like your enthusiasm.”

“Wait, you don’t have a boyfriend, do you?”

“Nope.”

The sharks disappeared and formal navy dress whites covered his jeans and T-shirt. The captain’s hat tucked under his arm didn’t move when Hudson reached into his back pocket and pulled out his phone. “So that’s a yes, right?”

Gravity got a little lighter as we grinned at each other. “Yes, when—”

A hand clamped on my arm and spun me around. I yelped in surprise.

“Eva? Eva Parker? What a surprise to find you here.”

I leaned away from the short black woman who squeezed my arm in a vise grip. Her large eyes showed too much white around the brown irises and focused on me with an unnerving intensity. She smiled a quick flash of teeth behind full lips. Racehorse blinders sprouted next to her temples, intensifying her stare.

“It’s Jenny,” she said. “Jenny Winters. From Santa Monica High.”

“High school?” I couldn’t remember any high school friend or acquaintance named Jenny. I tried to gently extract my arm, but she dragged me forward a step.

“We had a class together. Honors English. Junior year.”

“Right. Overachievers unite. Look, it’s great to see you again—”

“Yes, how the years have flown by. Isn’t it amazing? Can you believe it?” Jenny recited the platitudes in a flat voice, the words fast.

“I really can’t.” I dug in my heels and yanked my arm free, wondering if she’d left bruises. Jenny glanced behind us, then peered into a nearby narrow alley. A warning tingled in my spine, and I eased back a few steps. “Are you okay?”

“Perfectly fine.”

The dark circles under her eyes, the dirt-smeared khaki pants, and the waist-length jacket on the balmy day all gave lie to her claim.

“I’ve been looking for you, Eva. You’re a hard woman to find. I wouldn’t have known where to look if I hadn’t remembered Arianna da Via.”

Dirty Coke-bottle glasses dropped onto her face, obscuring her eyes. She lunged for my arm again, and I stumbled out of her reach and into Hudson. He steadied me with a hand on my hip, and the heat of his palm rushed through me. I glanced up at him; then my gaze dropped to his full bottom lip.

Wait, Jenny had been looking for
me
? And she had tracked me down through my best friend Ari?

“What does Ari have to do with anything?” I straightened, focusing on Jenny. Ari would have mentioned chatting with a crazy woman from our past, and she definitely wouldn’t have told her where to find me.

Jenny clamped a light brown fist around my wrist and jerked me between two parked cars and into the road. “I need to show you something. It’s urgent. We need to cross.” Jenny yanked, and my arm strained in its socket. A car horn blared and I jumped half a foot, planting my free hand on the car’s bumper to steady myself. Crap! She’d almost gotten me run over.

“Let go of me!” My skin burned when I attempted to twist out of her grip.

“Hurry!”

“Let me go!”

Jenny wrenched me forward, and against my will, I ran across the remaining three lanes of traffic, opting to extricate myself from the safety of the opposite sidewalk. Heavy footsteps followed, then Hudson caught up to us.

“Who are you?” Jenny demanded, glaring at Hudson.

Hudson draped a warm, muscular arm across my shoulder, trapping my free hand against his side when he squeezed me to him. “Eva’s boyfriend.” His fake possessive maneuver forced Jenny to release me.

She eyed him up and down. “Fine. Actually, that’s better. We’re going right in here.”

Jenny popped open the latch on the back of a horse trailer parked next to the curb. Hudson kept his arm around me like he belonged there. Jenny leaned around the side of the trailer to check up the sidewalk, then behind us, before scanning the rooftops.

I remained frozen in place. For a second, when Hudson had made his ridiculous statement, a straitjacket had engulfed Jenny’s torso. It vanished just as fast, replaced by a bundle of arrows piercing her rib cage directly through her heart. Not good. Definitely not good.

“Come on,” Jenny said. She pulled the trailer door open and slipped inside.

“Any idea what’s in there?” Hudson whispered, dropping his arm.

I shook my head and examined the trailer. It was large and dark gray, with suspicious stains smeared across the bumper beneath the swinging door. And it smelled. Bad.

My imagination conjured up plenty of graphic possibilities of what an insane woman would stash in a trailer: an injured horse, a sick person, a dead horse. A dead person?

I shivered, missing the warmth of Hudson’s arm despite the eighty-degree heat and the sun on my shoulders. I couldn’t walk away and leave some creature—human or otherwise—at this crazy lady’s mercy. Gingerly, I pulled the door open wider. My heart pattered in my chest, and I tensed to run as I peeked inside.

“You have an
elephant
!”

Hudson yanked the door wider and stared over my shoulder.

“Shh, keep your voice down.” Jenny stretched to her tiptoes to peer out the high windows on the side of the trailer. “Come inside and close the door.”

Against my better judgment, I stepped into the trailer. Hudson eased in behind me and pulled the door shut.

The elephant was small, no taller than my waist. Its wrinkled gray skin was crusted with dried mud and peppered with long wiry hairs. A stubby trunk the length of my arm curled back over its head. I amended my statement. “You have a
baby
elephant?”

“Basically. Her name is Kyoko,” Jenny said.

The elephant didn’t look injured. It looked perfectly healthy, if wildly out of place in a horse trailer in the middle of Los Angeles. The stench had to be emanating from the greenish brown piles splattered against the edge of the trailer. I craned to look up and down the sidewalk through the tall windows on the side of the trailer. “Do you have its mother around here somewhere?”

“No. Listen up. I need you to keep Kyoko for a few days.”

“What!”

The elephant shifted, and the entire trailer shuddered.

“For optimum success, here are the parameters,” Jenny said, her earlier agitation gone, replaced by a calm, almost clinical tone. She ticked points off on her finger as she spoke. “Kyoko doesn’t like loud noises, so no more yelling. She needs company; you can’t abandon her by herself. You will go to prison if you’re caught transporting or possessing an endangered species.” She flipped her hand to point at the elephant. Its long eyelashes blinked over large golden-brown eyes. “Don’t get caught.”

Rapid-fire, the arrows shot from her chest and studded the floor in a straight line from her feet to mine. Even knowing they were insubstantial apparitions, I flinched and swallowed a scream. The remaining arrows burst from her chest and peppered the trailer’s walls. Had they been real, Hudson would have been dead.

“Hold up.
I’m
not getting caught, because
I’m
not in possession of an elephant.” I waved my hands in front of me in the universal this-isn’t-my-problem gesture. “I don’t know what you’re involved in, Jenny, or why you think I would help—”

“I chose you because of your”—her eyes flicked to Hudson, then back to me—“special relationship with power. It makes you unpredictable. I noticed it in high school. I watched you, studied you.” Hard brown eyes met mine. “I know several people in the government who’d be interested in my observations.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” I said through numb lips. Hudson’s curiosity bore into my flesh. His eyes darted between Jenny, me, and the elephant. I should have already been walking—running—away, but my feet had welded to the trailer.

“Five computer lab crashes,” Jenny said, ticking off points on her fingers again. “Byron Davy’s spate of dead car batteries after prom—”

He’d deserved every single one of them, the two-timing bastard, but I couldn’t summon my usual vindictive satisfaction. Each finger tick doubled my heart rate.

“Twenty-two classes with no power. Three school brownouts—”

“What are you saying? That you think . . . That you’d . . .” I couldn’t finish the sentence, but I needed to make her stop talking in front of Hudson. Somehow, this woman I didn’t know or remember had figured out my curse. She’d freaking
studied
me. The thought of one stranger knowing about my curse limned my veins with icy foreboding. Her threat to tell other people, to make me a helpless lab rat, overwhelmed rational thought.

“All I need is for you to take care of Kyoko for a few days.”

“I can’t.” I lifted a feeble hand in protest. Jenny snapped something cold and hard around my wrist. Metal clanged on metal, and I was handcuffed to a steel brace on the side of the trailer.

“If you don’t help her, they’ll kill her,” Jenny said. She darted out of the trailer.