Page 28 of Catnapped

“Me, too. But when the Devil gives his word, he means it. Even if we botch this, he’s got something up his sleeve in terms of protecting your cat. It might mean he works with the assholes we’re taking down, but if it protects your cat, I don’t really care if he jumps teams.”

“I have no problems with him jumping teams if it means my cat gets out of this unscathed. However, I will make his entire existence miserable for a while if he makes it harder for me to rescue him.”

“As he’s smart, I doubt that. He’ll just secure his safety, I think. The Devil’s end goal is to get you to work for him, and making it harder to retrieve your cat won’t help him reach his goal. Really, you have the advantage, so take him for all he’s worth. If you need help, we’ll ask my dad for advice. He’s good at that sort of thing.”

I bet Belial could give me some damned good advice if I asked for it. “Think he’d help with the game plan to totally destroy this outfit behind the theft of my cat?”

“I think we’d be opening Pandora’s box if we did that. If my father joins in? We might end the world. Literally. It’s safer for the world if we handle this ourselves.”

“They can’t be that bad, Darian.”

“I love both of my fathers, but they can absolutely be that bad. Let’s not end the world unless it’s absolutely necessary.”

I drove for a while, considering his words. “Do you think it’ll be absolutely necessary?”

“Considering these assholes weren’t bright enough to look into who they were stealing a cat from first, I’m not sure, and honestly? That concerns me. If they were after you, they would have left a note, called you, or otherwise found some way to contact you to ransom your cat. They also would have ambushed you and taken you along with your cat.”

“CDC employees are sometimes kidnapping targets,” I admitted. “Especially people like the executive secretaries. We know a lot, our bosses tend to value us, and we’re easier to grab than the executives. They tend to have high magic ratings to go with their job positions.”

“I’ll admit, I was surprised how far up the chain you are considering your lack of a known high magic rating.”

“I’m decent at my practitioner tricks. I’m not sure if I outclass your mother, but it’s entirely possible.”

“You’d have to be able to summon Lucifer to outclass my mother, Diana.”

I smirked.

“You think you can summon Lucifer?”

“No, Darian. I know I can. I am just smart enough not to. And really? Summoning Lucifer is easy. Just spell his name wrong in some glitter and do a little dance while singing from a musical. That gets his attention every damned time, and he likes me too much to kill me.”

“I will pay just about anything to watch you do that,” he admitted.

“Don’t tempt me. I just might.”

Eight

I opted against heaving my most dramatic sigh.

Four hours after leaving Redding and taking a twisting, narrow road north of Dinsmore, we arrived at the ghost of a nameless town, hidden off a dirt road the rental could barely traverse. Time, fortunately, hadn’t had much way with the path yet, although I spotted signs of nature reclaiming the place. “This wasn’t what I had in mind,” I confessed.

Somebody had hauled in a bunch of trailers and mobile homes, creating a little community. The overgrown brush implied at least several years had gone by. I’d had Mr. Flooferson for almost two years, and the decay matched roughly when he’d been sent to the shelter. Some cars remained, and I parked, got out of the SUV, and armed myself one of the cheaper cameras, taking pictures of everything. Darian joined me, and he carried my purse along with my new tablet, which he’d set up while I’d been driving.

We hadn’t switched drivers, as he’d expected a farther drive, and I’d enjoyed navigating the scenic and somehow desolate route.

“This wasn’t quite what I had in mind, either. That said, I’m not all that surprised. The place was probably a lab town; everyone here was part of the lab ops, and when it got busted, those who could ran—the rest would have been arrested. And since this town isn’t on the map, I’m betting they didn’t own the land.”

“Which makes us trespassers.”

“Crap. The permits.” Darian checked his phone and chuckled. “By some miracle I refuse to question, I have a single bar. Let me get our permits.” He dialed a number and held it to his ear. “Hello, my most wonderful father. Do you have good news for me on the permit front? I’d really like good news on the permit front. I have been driven to a secondary location, and I don’t want my kidnapper to get ideas because I failed to present a permit to her promptly.”

Unable to help myself, I grinned. Before I had a chance to do more than raise a brow at the tall, dark, and handsome I’d be tempted to kidnap under other circumstances, his archangel of a father popped into existence in a flash of golden light. Raguel hung up his cell phone, and it vanished in a second flash of golden light. “You’re going to have to try harder than that if you want to tempt her into kidnapping you, and should you tempt her into kidnapping you, you will find yourself the captive of a very methodical being. The kidnapping would be quite orderly, you would be tricked in such a way you would not realize you were being kidnapped until it was too late, and I do not believe she will be at all inclined to return you. I recommend you leave a schedule out, so she can appropriately plan your kidnapping, as doing anything unscheduled, frankly, is rather against her nature.”

Laughter bubbled out of me before I could stop it. “It’s true. This is about as far outside of my comfort zone as I go. Even when one of my bosses needs me for an unexpected business trip, I usually have a day of warning and time to schedule it. Then, as my job involves sticking to schedule, I work hard to make sure everything gets done in a timely fashion. I’m not sure where I’d fit a kidnapping into my current schedule, really.”

“You might want to take on the role of the kidnapper,” the archangel advised his son. “As I’m a loving father, I’ll even help you plan it so you don’t completely ruin her schedule. Ruining her schedule would create certain pitfalls you would not enjoy.”

“Why are we discussing kidnappings, anyway?” I asked.