“You didn’t take her handbag?” one of the guys asked the other. “Goddamn it, Bill, I thought you were smarter than that.”

The recipient of the scolding, a smallish man in a vampire mask, stiffened. “You used my name. Now she knows my name.”

The other one, demon-guy, snorted. “Yeah, because there’s only one guy named Bill in the whole country. Come on, Einstein, let’s get her inside.”

Darcy tried to scramble away from her kidnappers, but as she was already in a back corner of the van, there was nowhere else to go. They half carried, half dragged her into what looked like a large warehouse.

She did her best to fight, lashing out at them with her feet. The action caused them to hold on tighter to her upper arms and made her break a heel on her new sandals.

Now she was mad, she thought as they put her into a straight-back chair and began tying her down. They’d screwed with her day, bruised her, thrown her around the inside of a disgusting van, scratched her new leather bag, and ruined the black sandals she’d just bought after waiting four weeks for them to go on sale. There was going to be hell to pay.

She told them so, although the tape on her mouth interfered with the intensity of her message.

“I don’t think she likes us,” Bill said, stepping back as she tried to kick his shin.

“Gee, I wonder why. Most people love a good kidnapping.”

With that, the two men walked off. Darcy tried to hold on to her anger by reminding herself how much the sandals had cost, even on clearance, and how little money she had coming in these days. It worked for nearly a minute, then the fear set in. What were they going to do to her?

She told herself that torture was unlikely. Either they wanted money or something they thought they could only get from the president of the United States. Unfortunately that was a big pool of possibilities, everything from sovereignty to nuclear weapons.