Page 4 of Catnapped

Even Lucifer behaved at the first sign her attention would fall on him.

How interesting.

The young man with them did take after his mother, and he gave Lucifer a run for his money in the tall, dark, nicely tanned, and handsome department.

Damn.

I pinched the bridge of my nose and questioned my life. It’d been so long since I’d been on a date that I couldn’t remember what I was supposed to do when a tall, dark, and handsome crossed my path. If the tall, dark, and handsome kept his mouth shut, spending two hours with him a day would not test my patience in the slightest.

Unfortunately, I’d learned long ago that the tall, dark, and handsome men of the world tended to talk, and their often inane prattling rendered them tall with deliciously dark hair but otherwise removed their appeal.

No, his hair wasn’t just deliciously dark. It was pitch black, long and thick enough I could tangle my fingers in it.

How dare the Devil bring temptation into my home when my cat was missing?

“Next time, I’ll listen when you warn me about something, Lucifer,” I said instead of a proper greeting.

He understood me, even when I abandoned being polite in favor of not strangling someone.

“You look fine.” Lucifer stepped into my house, clucking his tongue at the wholesale destruction of just about everything I owned. “It’s not like you could have changed into other clothes with your place like this anyway. You weren’t kidding. They tore everything apart.” Without bothering to ask for permission, he headed for my bedroom. “Not even your panties escaped unscathed. How utterly tragic.”

“Yes, Lucifer. I’m aware.” My panties had been flung across the entire room, and a fortune of lace, satin, and silk would need to be replaced. Did I even need to replace them? Why had I thought it was a good idea to buy panties that often cost twenty dollars a pop, and the less actual fabric used, the more it cost? Oh, right. I’d been thinking I might want to show them off to some man. In reality, my schedule didn’t have room for a man in it, and I wasn’t sure where I’d find two hours every day to spend with the tall, dark, and handsome son of a triad. “After I got off the phone with you, I saw my bedroom, sat on what is left of my mattress, and cried. For at least ten minutes. I spent the rest of the wait contemplating murder. I’m paid well, but I’m not paid well enough to replace my entire wardrobe in one fell swoop.”

The woman in designer clothes checked out my bedroom, crossed her arms, and tapped her foot. “While you’d told me there’d been a robbery and a stolen cat, you had not told me how severe the situation truly is, Lucifer.”

“I’d been too busy coming to see you to poke around to see the level of damage, and I didn’t want Diana calling Darlene or Kanika. She would, too. I thought you’d be happy with me for a change. I’m giving your son a chance to finish paying his part of that bargain he struck with me, and I’m not even doing anything terribly nefarious. I could have done something far more nefarious than make him do a good deed.” The Devil made a show of shuddering. “I’m going to have to go corrupt my soul after being involved with the doing of a good deed. My reputation might be ruined. Me, the Devil, doing a good deed? Impossible.”

I rolled my eyes at the ridiculous number of lies the Devil told in such a short period of time.

“I find that to be disturbing,” the woman admitted, and she shot a glare at her son. “You and I will be discussing why you’d entered a bargain with the Devil. You could have at least bargained with your dad instead.”

My unwanted partner shrugged, and his grin had a crooked edge to it. “I could have, but talking to Lucifer made my father go home for a while. That let Dad go home for a while, too. I was being a good son for a change. That plus Lucifer suggested it was a good idea for Father and Dad to head home for a while. Don’t even try to lie, Mom. You enjoyed having the house to yourself for a few weeks.”

“God, yes,” the woman replied. “That’s the only reason you’re getting away with that stunt. I like these louts too much for them to become sickly because they hadn’t gone home for a while. I’m banned from both the heavens and the hells because you all think I’ll take over.”

Lucifer chuckled. “You would try, and I don’t want you fighting with Darlene. It’s bad enough Darlene goes upstairs often. One of these days, she’ll tell me she’s taking it over, and then we’ll have to rewrite how the world ends. There has to always be an End of Days on the horizon, else we screw up the universal rules. And at least our End of Days has a new beginning at its conclusion. The other options lead to nothing.”

The woman shrugged. “Introduce us, Lucifer. Let’s see what I have to work with here.”

Dealing with the rich and influential on a daily basis made me well aware I courted trouble with the woman. Considering she had an archangel and a devil up her sleeve, I would need to step lightly. “I’m Diana. I’m a secretary.”

“She’s employed by the CDC, and she works for the upper management dealing with interspecies monitoring and evaluation. In her case, they make her work with the various species as a representative as much as a secretary, as she’s naturally talented at resisting various influences. As such, your husbands and son won’t bother her. Diana, this is Claudine. She’s a high-level practitioner, and she wanted to tame a demon, but she accidentally summoned Belial instead. Then she panicked, and because she didn’t know what to do with a devil, she made the same mistake twice, thus summoning Raguel. She then decided she wanted to keep both of them, and every time they left, she summoned them again until she convinced them they should stick around,” the Devil informed me.

For someone dubbed the Lord of Lies, the Devil often spoke the truth, and I considered Claudine with interest. “How do you accidentally summon a devilish general? The circles used to summon demons are drastically different from the ones you would use to summon a devil. Also, it’s just better to call in favors if you want a demon or a devil. They’re readily accessible nowadays. Calling them doesn’t run the risk of sudden and unexpected death like performing a circle summoning.” Was the woman a genius? An idiot? A little of both?

I had several summoning circles up my sleeve, and I’d even created one with the potency to summon Lucifer if needed. The Devil’s amusement at my daring entertained us both, and I figured he liked audacious go-getters around rather than sheep ripe for the picking.

“I really do,” the Devil agreed.

Claudine shot the Devil a glare. “Could you not snoop on people’s thoughts for a single conversation?”

“I possibly could, but that day is not today. Diana might take over Earth if someone isn’t keeping an eye on her. She really does love her cat. Anyone fortunate enough to earn her affection gains an unparalleled ally.”

“If the Earth can’t defend itself from a crazy cat lady, it deserves to be conquered. Anyway, I have ADHD, and I got bored partway through making the circle, so I changed it, and then the next thing I knew, I’d summoned Belial.” The woman shrugged. “I was off my meds.”

“Please stay on your meds unless I need a summoning done,” I informed the woman, who laughed.

While I wouldn’t act on it, I acknowledged my curiosity over which one of us could make the better circle. For her to have accidentally summoned Belial, she’d honed her practitioner arts. I’d honed mine, too—but I had made certain to cover my tracks better.