I hate cats. I try to tell myself that it’s because of their contemptuous attitude, or their sneaky manner, but in reality it’s probably just that I can’t control them. Demons I can bind, humans I can outrun with spells, dogs I can call and they come, but cats …

The tinny sound of something metal crashing on Mrs. Marsh’s patio startled both of us. Our heads whipped around in unison toward her backyard.

“It’s outside on my patio,” she whispered loudly.

We walked past the rusted grill and slowed at the corner of her house. I held my hand up to tell her to halt while I peeked around the corner. My eyes scanned the night shadows made by the oak trees; they cast a black, lacy pattern on her lawn until they ended abruptly at the small, yellow circle of light that radiated out from the bug light at her back door. Her green city-issued garbage can stood inside the yellow circle.

An empty can of cat food came to a slow, rolling stop on the cement patio nearby.

The sooner this imp was gone, the sooner I could get some sleep. I unrolled the worn canvas square, revealing a small circle bordered by runes and symbols that had been stained into the cloth with a mixture of red ochre and pig’s blood. No, I did not kill the pig, thankyouverymuch. I bought a small jar of blood from a local occult shop that gets their supply from a slaughterhouse across town. Working with animal blood isn’t something I savor—I’m sure there are plenty of things about your job that you don’t enjoy—but that particular kind of circle requires it.

Triangles are commonly used to bind, but the circle on my canvas has a little something extra. Once charged, it creates a generic gateway leading into the Æthyr. A quick, one-way portal back home, otherwise known as a banishment.

She who summons must banish. That’s the unchangeable cosmic law that applies to most anything summoned from the Æthyr. If a magician summons any demon from one of the hundreds of Æthyric classes, that very same magician must send it back. No one else can step up and do the job for you. That’s why there are so many Earthbounds running around the States these days. Some idiot magician working for Queen Elizabeth summoned a group of lower-echelon Æthyric demons and trapped them in human bodies, thinking they’d make pliable subjects when America was being colonized. However, the newly invoked Earthbounds lost their ticket home when the magician died of smallpox before he could send them back. A few hundred years of breeding, and here we are. At least, that’s how the story goes.

Imps, though, are different.

The cockroaches of the supernatural world, imps slip in and out of the Æthyr at will. Since no one summons them, anyone could banish them; they’re fair game, and my spiffy canvas portal worked like a charm. Sure, the imps that I trapped could still come back to earth on their own, but not for several days—or weeks, depending on the strength of the charge that I gave the circle—because my portal left an imbedded blocking spell on the imps. It took me several years of experimentation to find the right combination of sigils that would accomplish this, and I was damn proud of my ingenuity.

I tiptoed around the corner, staying in the shadows as I approached the patio, then laid the entrapment canvas on the cement in front of me. A single scratching noise emerged from the garbage can several feet away. Maybe this would be easy.

I retreated back to Mrs. Marsh again and reached for her cat.

“No!” she whispered. “Not Tiddlywinks!”

“I need bait, Mrs. Marsh. He won’t be hurt, promise.” Well … hopefully.

She reluctantly handed over the cat, which I held at arm’s length in front of me like a baby with a dirty diaper. Tiddlywinks began growling at me, so I rushed to put him down near the canvas portal before he tore my eyeballs out. After sniffing the canvas and retreating a few steps, he settled down and began licking his butt without a care in the world. Plumped with cheap cat food and content to live his life in a near-coma state, Tiddlywinks barely had a pulse; with any luck, he’d stay put.

Mrs. Marsh and I stood together behind a bush and waited, our eyes fixed on the garbage can. Come out, little imp. Get the nice kitty cat. After a few seconds, I thought I spied some movement behind the garbage can, then a clammy chill ran up my arms. I looked down as Mrs. Marsh yelped, only to see the wispy trail of an imp dart out from between my legs.

“Motherfucker!” I yelled. Tricked again. For a brief moment, I pitied the people on Paranormal Patrol. I ran after the imp, rounding the corner of the house with as much speed as I could manage wearing flip-flops. Tiddlywinks was in a compromising position, with one leg up in the air, paused midlick. His ears were cocked in my direction as I ran toward him at top speed. Then I realized the imp was stopping in front of the cat. He wasn’t going to bail; he took the bait.

I slid across the damp grass. To avoid running into the imp and the cat, I half fell, half lunged near them in an awkward dive. I tried to pull an action-movie stunt roll. Big mistake. My upper arm hit the edge of the cement patio. As I cried out in pain, the caduceus flew from my hand and landed somewhere in the shadows. Smooth move.

I curled up into a ball on my side. When I glanced toward my feet, I was surprised to find Tiddlywinks still there, ears flattened and the hair on his back standing on end. The imp was circling the cat like prey. Only a couple of feet tall and mostly transparent, he was tubby, with rolls on his arms and legs like a pudgy baby. He had a bulbous nose and floppy ears, one of them torn, as Mrs. Marsh had noted.

Ignoring the pain in my arm, I reached for the canvas entrapment portal, grabbed the edge of it, and slung it over the imp. And the cat. I couldn’t help it; he was in the way.