Kingdom of Lies (Imp Series Book 7) (21 page)

“Hope he stops by the pet store first.” Nyalla dug around in her pocket and pulled out her cell phone, typing blindly as she scanned for the kitten.

A friendly sounding meow came from our left, and I cringed. “What the fuck kind of cat throws appliances at angels and sets undergarments on fire? Does it shoot lasers from its eyes? Cause houses to levitate?”

“Probably.” Nyalla glanced down at her phone and tapped a button. A red dot appeared on the floor. “Cross your toes and hope for the best.”

“It’s cross your fing—” I only got the first syllable out before a gray ball of fluff streaked across the floor, blasting chunks of concrete and mannequins out of the way. I caught my breath and went to grab Nyalla, who was paying more attention to the red dot of light her phone projected on the floor than Destructo Kitty.

The cat banked left, its claws gouging long marks into the floor as it navigated the turn. Yellow-green eyes were fixed with obsessive attention on the dancing red light.

“It works!” Nyalla squealed.

I was amazed. What a clever girl! Although, we could hardly stand around forever making the cat chase the cellphone app version of a laser pointer, but it might hold us off long enough for Gregory to show up. He knew about drop bears. He probably knew about whatever the fuck this thing was, too.

Although with my luck, Nyalla’s cell phone battery would die. Or... .

The cat turned, ignoring the little red dot and focusing on Nyalla’s phone. I caught my breath. Right before the kitten launched, the thought flitted through my head that this animal was smarter than the average domestic short hair. Much smarter.

I didn’t have time for further thought. The cat sprang. I grabbed Nyalla and teleported.

Thank the fates that Gregory had forced me to hone this skill, although, this time it shouldn’t matter where we ended up as long as we were away from this cat; Tasmania would do just fine. At the last moment, I remembered Nyalla wanting to keep an eye on the cat. I thought about what would happen if this thing got out of the mall—a tiny kitten would find a million places to hide, and who knows how high the death toll would climb before we managed to track it down. So I squeezed my eyes tight and willed myself to stay within the mall. Preferably in a really cool store.

My stupid internal GPS worked. I didn’t teleport us to a cool store, but we found ourselves about a hundred feet away on the opposite side of the cat. Destructo Kitty might be smart, but he’d clearly not had much experience with teleportation. The fur ball skidded to a stop and jerked his head back and forth. Thankfully, he lacked the ability to spin his head around
Rosemary’s Baby
style, or we would have been screwed.

Nyalla gripped my hand tight, holding her breath. I followed her lead and remained completely still. It was as if we were the only two mannequins in the store that remained upright and in one piece. After another quick scan, the kitten visibly relaxed. Then he sat down and groomed himself.

“What the fuck do we do now?” I muttered. How our roles had changed. I was asking a twenty-one-year-old girl who had spent most of her life as a slave to the elves performing menial labor what to do about Destructo Kitty. Weird, but I figured she knew more about this little monster than I did.

“We wait for Beatrix. She’s trying to find the nearest pet store.”

Did they sell bear traps at the pet store? I certainly hoped so, because that was the only thing I could think of that might allow us to capture this kitten. And, in all honesty, I was beginning to lean toward blowing the thing up rather than capturing it. I know Gregory frowned on my habit of killing stuff, and for all I knew, this kitten was under some angelic protection. I had enough four-nine-five reports to do without trying to complete an impact analysis on some otherworldly monster cat.

We held still. When you want to remain motionless, that’s when your nose itches, you need to sneeze, and bugs land on your neck. I tried to ignore it all and failed miserably, taking the chance the kitten was too busy licking his balls to notice me scratching my nose. Hopefully he was also too busy to notice Nyalla slide her cell phone from her pocket and check the screen.

“She’s here,” she whispered as she typed a response to the text. “I’m letting her know where we are.”

I saw a brief flash of white, and Beatrix stood near the mall entrance, several bags of what appeared to be oregano in her arms. Destructo Kitty saw her too and abandoned his self-fellatio to shoot a laser beam from his eyes at the gate guardian.

“See?” I was feeling rather smug. “Next he’s gonna levitate a house.”

Beatrix spun out of the way. The laser ripped through the top of one of her bags then tore through a kiosk backdrop and exploded a support pillar.

I wondered if the roof was going to come down on us then recognized a familiar scent amid the smell of burning plywood. “Does she have
pot
in those bags?”

The cat stomped a little fuzzy paw, sending floor tiles flying up in a wave extending outward from him. The building shook, and we were blinded from the dust and debris raining down on our heads and rising from the bits of flooring flying about. Someone screamed. It wasn’t me; I swear it.

Then everything stopped. Froze. Like someone hit the pause button on the remote. And that someone was an angel.

“’Bout time you got here.” I still couldn’t see him, since the dust and chunks of drywall were suspended midair, but I could feel him, opposite Beatrix, near what used to be the lingerie section.

“I landed on top of the gate guardian out in the parking lot. Once we managed to extricate ourselves from the refrigerator, I assisted her in locating a pet store.”

I was less interested in Gregory’s story about shopping for hamsters and more interested in this demonstration of his power. The cat, Nyalla, Beatrix, everything in the mall as far as I could see was locked in place. “Fuck me with a salami, how did you manage this? How far are you freezing time?”

“It’s a bit excessive, but I didn’t have the luxury of calculating area of effect.” I heard the strain in his voice. “Is there more than one? And where is it?”

I swallowed hard and walked toward him, feeling the crush of air molecules against my skin. Carefully I shifted the dust from the air to give Gregory a clear view of the kitten. After our intimate moments on Uranus, after the time-freeze with the troll in Pennsylvania, I was fully aware of how incredibly skilled my angel was. Each atom I moved had to be accounted for, shifted then held in place in connection with others. I was doing the best I could to help him, but my efforts were nothing compared to the power and ability it took to hold everything safely as I moved, unfrozen, among it all.

“Right here.” I pointed.

“I’m going to reduce the area of effect to free Nyalla and the gate guardian.”

It was then I wondered why
I
hadn’t been frozen in place. I’d been within the ‘zone’. Beatrix got caught in it, her face stuck in a hysterical ‘oh shit’ expression. If it worked on another being of spirit, why not me?

“You are a part of me, little Cockroach,” Gregory said as he carefully reduced the area held in stasis. I heard the thunk of ceiling tiles and light fixtures hit the floor. “I can’t lock myself in time. That would create an untenable loop, therefore I can’t freeze you either.” He smiled. “Although I doubt I could do this to any of the more powerful angels. They’d fight it, and we’d have a catastrophe on our hands.”

Cat-astrophe. I snorted at the unintentional pun. Slowly, carefully Gregory restored movement in every area except a few feet surrounding the kitten.

Nyalla exchanged a nervous glance with Beatrix. “Hope this works,” the gate guardian said, walking tentatively toward Destructo Kitty and ripping the top off one of her plastic bags. She upended it, causing a layer of dried green leaves to hover a foot above the kitten. Then she did the same with the second bag, keeping half of the leaves.

“Okay. Let’s do this.”

Gregory raised his eyebrows at her. “Wouldn’t it be prudent for you to step back, perhaps behind something fireproof?”

Beatrix shook her head. “Nah. If things go bad, I want to be close enough to throw more of this on it, or whack it with a two-by-four or something.”

Better her than me. I retreated, ensuring Nyalla was a safe distance away. I also made sure we were behind Gregory. I didn’t trust this was going to work any better than the laser pointer app, and I’d rather this cat have to go through two angels before trying to take me, or my girl, out.

Gregory released his hold, and a shower of drywall and green leaves rained down upon the cat. It gave a surprised yowl then went silent. When the dust cleared, amazingly, the kitten was stretched out on the floor, flexing his paws and rubbing his face gleefully in the leaves.

“Catnip.” Nyalla crossed her arms in front of her and grinned at me. “Best feline sedative ever.”

I approached and peered hesitantly at Destructo Kitty. “He’s stoned out of his mind.” I turned to Gregory. “What is this thing, and where is it from? I’m assuming there’s a gate nearby we need to stuff this kitten through and seal up?”

The angel shrugged. “I’ve never seen anything like it before. From what I can tell, it’s a domestic cat. Felis catus.”

“Domestic cats don’t shoot lasers out of their eyes, or any of that other stuff.” I waved a hand around at the damaged mall. “It’s got to be an alien cat or something.”

“No, it’s just a cat,” Nyalla chimed in. “Just a helpless little kitten caught in a spell.”

Oh no. No fucking way. “An elf or a demon? Which idiot came here and wasted one of the gem charges on a
kitten
?” And how the fuck did that even work? The gem was supposed to enhance the
caster
, not turn a furry mammal into the monster in a B horror movie. Damn Gareth. If the gem did this to a kitten, what would it do to a demon? I knew he’d told some falsehoods regarding this magical item, but I never envisioned the stolen gem had this sort of power.

“It wasn’t the elf.” Nyalla’s expression was grim. “It was a demon. We were watching for the elf, so we didn’t take as much notice as we should have. He bespelled this kitten, and when it went crazy and started trashing the place, he went through the gate.”

It still didn’t make sense. “He wasted a charge of the gem to cause a distraction? What kind of demon is this?”

Imp. It had to have been an imp. But how would an imp have had the money to buy the gem from Swifty?

“Mid-level greed demon,” Beatrix spat out. “I hate those things. Illusions, deceptions, and they always have a good grasp on the human form. They’re hard to catch and even harder to kill.”

Greed demon. Mid-level. I remembered what the gargoyle had told me in Dallas and felt sure it was the same demon, even given the distance between Texas and Maryland.

“And to your other question,” Gregory said, eying the purring kitten. “If you had purchased a gem in a back-alley transfer from an elf, would you risk yourself before testing it on another?”

Yeah, right. I gave him one of those ‘significant’ looks that he was so good at, and he sighed.

“Of course
you
would, but would any demon of reasonable intellect with a modicum of self-preservation?”

“Okay, I get it,” I replied. “But why a cat?”

“No need to restrain them or attempt consent. A cat isn’t liable to hunt you down and enact revenge if the effect isn’t as promised and it survives.”

Made sense. I put myself in the demon’s place and winced. “He went through the gate to Hel. Whatever he plans to do with the gem, it must be there.”

Not that here was any better than in Hel, but here I had angelic backup. Gregory and his crew couldn’t cross the gates to Hel, which left me, myself, and I. No one else in Hel would give a shit about what this demon was doing. It was every demon for himself over there, and the only people who’d fight him were those in the household he was attacking. A greed demon. They each had quirks, particular areas they obsessed over. If I could find out who this demon was, I could determine who, or what, he would be going after first. And hopefully get there before he used the gem on himself.

“Can either of you describe this demon?” It was a long shot, but I was hoping Nyalla or Beatrix would relay identifying characteristics, and I’d have an ‘aha’ moment.

Beatrix replied. “Male human form. Six-feet tall, pale with close-cut light-brown hair. Pug nose, full face, receding chin. He licked his lips a lot more than normal. Left eye was slightly drooped compared to the right. Protruding mole on his jaw, left side.”

That was way more detailed than I’d ever expected. “Ewwww. Did it have hair growing out of the mole?”

“No.”

Beatrix knew her shit. Unfortunately I didn’t recognize her description. Either I didn’t know the demon or had never seen him in this particular form.

I turned to Gregory. “Can you let me know if any of your angels find that elf? I’ll send Nyalla back to my house to coordinate. Call her if he’s found and she can contact me in Hel.”

“I can’t spare my Grigori for much longer. I’ve got to deal with all the creatures coming through the gates. I want to help you, but this is more important.”

True, but I had a bad feeling about this gem and decided it needed to bounce back up my priority list. I doubted if this greed demon used the gem on himself, he could be subdued with catnip. This might go from bad to worse real quick.

“Nyalla, can you help your brother with the creature sightings? I’ll call Nils back from wherever he is and have him help track down the elf.”

“Got it.”

I winced. She was taking this all in stride—enthusiastically even. Damn, I’d never get her to go into a career as an insurance adjuster now.

“Beatrix, can you call Nyalla if you see an elf? And let her know if any more Destructo Kitties show up.”

The gate guardian blinked at my use of her name. “What shall we do with the cat? Eventually he’s going to come out of his catnip stupor and start blowing stuff up again.”

Damn. It wasn’t like with the harpy or other creatures we could send back home. This cat had no home. He’d been changed, and I wasn’t sure when the effect would wear off—if ever.