Page 13 of Catnapped

“Are you implying my cat might trigger an unexpected End of Days?” I blurted. The End of Days came up often at the CDC, as the organization wanted to keep everything from being wiped out, but everyone came to the same general conclusion: the CDC couldn’t do a lot to prevent it beyond confer with the Christian pantheon and hope for the best.

“No, I’m implying you might. That’s the fun of mortals. You change everything, for better or for worse.”

True to the Devil’s prediction, it took an hour for the cops to clear out, and Darian spent the entirety of the time in my bedroom sorting through my laundry. I had no idea which of his parents held responsibility for his inclinations, but he’d organized every piece of clothing I owned into piles. The largest of them contained the clothes he deemed unfit for salvaging.

A startling number of panties and bras had made it to the folded piles organized by color and type on the shredded ruins of my bed, which he’d put back where it belonged. Had I thought the cops cared about me or my cat, I might’ve been upset over the destruction of evidence, but they couldn’t care less even if they tried.

They had more important and glamorous things to worry about in the city.

“Not all of the cops are like that around here,” the Devil scolded.

“Those ones are, and those are the ones I got stuck with.”

“All for the better, as if you’d gotten the more attentive ones, you’d be staying here far longer.” Striding into my bedroom, Lucifer considered Darian’s neat piles of laundry. “That must be your angelic side. I would never create a devil so fixated on generalized perfection.”

“Have you met my father? The one that’s one of your generals? You created him, and he’s definitely fixated on general perfection.” Darian snorted and shook his head, waving his hand at clothes. “This is, unfortunately, a triple dose of parental influence, unless my mother is off her meds, in which case she fully embraces chaos and sows it whenever possible. I don’t have my mother’s chaotic tendencies, and I take after my fathers a little more than I appreciate some days. As such, I tend to be thorough when I decide to do something. Once I got started, I saw no need to skimp on the whole task, and I had an hour to work with anyway. So, that’s the junk pile. The tears are in places that just wouldn’t be easily mended without a huge amount of effort, and it wouldn’t look good once done, not without paying a professional an obscene amount of money. It’d be cheaper to buy new ones.” He pointed at a second, smaller pile on the floor. “Those ones are questionable. Someone with skill with a sewing needle might be able to repair them to be serviceable, although I wouldn’t wear any of it to important business meetings.”

I took aim at the pile, wound up, and kicked, sending it scattering to the larger pile. A few kicks later worked out most of my nerves. I went to work nudging the scattered garments into the main pile. “My entire life is basically a string of important business meetings.”

“I had noticed a startling lack of casual clothes.”

“What are casual clothes?”

Both Darian and the Devil stared at me.

Great. I’d managed to confound the ruler of the many hells and the son of a triad. At the rate I was going, I’d flabbergast the entire Christian pantheon. “I just see no need to wear anything other than pajamas while in my home, and why go through the hassle of changing out of my work clothes to run my errands in the evenings?”

Darian scratched his head. “Have you ever gone bar diving?”

“No. I deal with enough men leering at me during work hours. I don’t want to deal with it when said men are drunk.”

“Hobbies?”

“I read books and pet my cat.”

“Pajamas are good casual clothes for that,” he conceded. “Traveling?”

“I just wear the clothes I have. I’m comfortable in them. They’re what I’m used to.”

“When was the last time you wore a bathing suit?” Darian prowled around me, and he looked me over. Having worked with every species under the sun, including lycanthropes, I recognized when he’d gone from generally harmless to a predator on the prowl. Considering I’d tormented the poor man with lingerie for an hour, I accepted my role in his current state, chuckling over the emergence of his more devilish side. “I couldn’t find a single one in that mess.”

“I can’t swim, so never as far as I can recall. Maybe my parents tossed me into a bathing suit as a baby, but I developed a healthy fear of the water by age five. I have zero interest in drowning.”

Darian straightened, and the predatory edge faded to surprise and a more general interest. “You need to learn how to swim.”

“No, I don’t.”

“Yes, you do. You could trip and fall into a fountain or something.”

“I have never, not once in my life, tripped and fallen into a fountain. Are fountains even deep enough to drown in? Is there a reason I can’t just stand up if I fall into a fountain?”

“Fine. You could trip off a pier and land in the water.”

“The chances of me going anywhere near a pier is zero.” I generally refused to go within a quarter of a mile of the water when at all possible. “No.”

“Someone could pick you up and throw you into a pool.”

“I will struggle and scream, after which I’ll probably drown unless someone rescues me. This is a fair point, but it doesn’t mean you’re getting me anywhere near a pool without the struggling and the screaming happening.”