The Devil's Details - Ch. 10 (all) (Patreon)

Chapter Ten

“Hello mother,” Tabitha said, looking across the room to lay eyes on her mother for the very first time.

The saying was ‘better than devil you know than the devil you don’t,’ but other than the facts that this woman was Lucifer and that she was Tabitha’s mother, she didn’t know much of anything about her. However, she was here, and Tabitha realized she might never get another chance to know her mother, so she resolved to try and keep her temper in check.

The devil looked nothing like Tabitha had expected her to. She realized her darker skin must have come from her father, because Lucifer was mostly light skinned, not completely pale, but a sort of light beige like coastal sand, with hair much fairer than Tabitha would have expected. Not blonde, but a sort of woody pale brown, like freshly disturbed earth. It was done up in a casual bun along the back of her head, with a baby blue scrunchy around the base of it. If she’d been human, Tabitha might have guessed she was from France or Spain perhaps, something Mediterranean or maybe even Middle Eastern, although her hair seemed likely a few shades too light for that.

Lucifer was sitting at a table inside of the coffee shop but didn’t look tall or looming. In fact, she seemed almost small and slight, as if she saw no need to make herself appear impressive and instead preferred going unnoticed among the masses. She couldn’t be much more than five feet tall. She had an almost hawkish face, her nose a bit sharper and more beakish than Tabby would have expected, and she wore a pair of heavy oval-shaped, black-rimmed glasses over her eyes, although they had to be purely decorative. Tabby couldn’t imagine the devil having less than precise vision.

Wherever the devil had gotten her suit, it must’ve been custom made for her, a deep shade of navy with daring crimson piping along the seamlines, drawing attention rather than hiding where the seams were, counter to how fashion often preferred to approach things. There was no padding in the shoulders, no effort to try and apply a masculine outline to a feminine form, and nothing around the bosom to hide her figure. Tabitha found herself smirking at the notion that the devil didn’t have humongous tits. Fantasy illustrators all around the world would collapse into piles of sadness to know that the most demonic woman around was only a B cup at best. In addition to the slender bust, the devil didn’t have much in the way of an ass either.

In fact, nothing at all about her mother exuded raw sexuality or carnality or lust or even excitement. If anything, the devil looked more like a local branch manager for Bank of America. There wasn’t the slightest bit of danger or demonic nature about her, at least on first glance.

And then Tabitha narrowed her eyes to peel behind the veil.

She suddenly had to slap her hand over her eyes as the light seemed to flood in from every crack, like looking directly into the world’s most powerful flashlight, the intense illumination nearly overpowering her, making her want to drop to her knees, but once she forced her mind to restore the veil back over her vision, she could feel the pressure dropping from her skull and started to be able to breathe again, realizing only in that moment that she’d somehow just stopped breathing moments earlier without noticing.

How could someone forget to breathe?

When her hands pulled from her eyes, she realized her hands were covered with tears and makeup, and she reached into her purse to get out a tissue, dabbing it across her cheeks. “Sorry,” Tabitha said suddenly. “Not entirely sure what came over me there.”

“Tried looking behind the veil for a peak at what my true form is, did you, daughter of mine?” Lucifer chuckled. “You’re lucky you covered your eyes when you did. Looking for longer than a few seconds would’ve risked melting your eyeballs. Not the sort of forces you should be playing with lightly, my dear. I would’ve thought Veronica might’ve warned you what to expect should we encounter one another, but I suppose she felt maybe you needn’t know much of anything about me until I presented myself of my own accord. My true form is difficult for even the most powerful of mystical creatures to look upon easily. There are only perhaps a dozen or so humans that could ever do so, and even the Nephilim have difficulty looking for too long. Perhaps if you had grown up seeing me every day, your optics might have adjusted and adapted to the point where you could stand to look upon my natural appearance without too much distress, but sadly, we could not be afforded that luxury. Will you sit and join me? I did come all this way to get a look at you for myself.”

Tabitha almost wanted to storm away, cussing her mother out the entire time, but she also recognized that her mother probably had quite the story to tell. Besides, how many people could say they’d sat and had coffee with the devil herself? “You never thought to check in on me, mother?” Tabby said, moving over toward Lucifer’s table. It was in that moment that Tabby decided to start thinking of her mother as Lucy. It stripped some of the inherent power that the name Lucifer carried with it. “Stopping in one singular time in twenty years doesn’t make you any less of a deadbeat mother. Your record remains rather unimpressive.”

She moved over to the table, where Lucy stood up, taking a step back to get a good look at her. “You make it sound like I haven’t been looking out for you, dear daughter,” Lucy chided. “I’ve seen you plenty over the years, albeit from much further than I would’ve liked to be. Or in photographs taken by those I’d set upon you to watch you and guard you.”

“You didn’t think maybe having someone talk to me might’ve been of use? Especially since I was starting to think I was crazy before all of this started up, what with all the things I’ve been seeing since childhood that nobody else could,” Tabitha sneered. “You don’t think that was hurtful? You don’t think that set me apart from all the other kids growing up?”

“No,” Lucy tsked. “What set you apart from all the other children was that you were never going to be saddled with a nine-to-five job, nor were you destined to be asking that omnipresent question, ‘Would you like to make that a combo?’ No, children were afraid of you because on a deeper level, a primal level, they could vaguely sense the immense power laying dormant within you, just waiting for the right moment to awaken.”

“And the visions?”

“I made sure that the therapists you saw never told you that you were crazy, that they never said medicine or therapy would get rid of them, and that it would just be something you needed to keep to yourself,” Lucy replied, as she moved over and ran her hands along Tabby’s shoulders and down her arms. “It’s been far too long since I’ve been able to see you in person myself. What’s it been, Veronica? Four, five years?”

“Six, m’lady,” Veronica said deferentially. “You came to see Mistress Tabitha in her high school play, although she did not know you, that we, were there, obviously.”

Tabitha glared daggers at Veronica, but the demoness was looking down at her hands, unwilling to look up at either her or Lucy for the moment, as if unsure of what to do with herself, torn between her loyalty to her old Mistress and her new one.

“I can’t imagine you were all that impressed with me playing Peppermint Patty in ‘You’re A Good Man, Charlie Brown,’ mom.”

“On the contrary,” Lucy said, dusting off Tabitha’s shoulders. “I was delighted to see that you inherited your father’s ability to carry a tune and didn’t rely on my more deceptive tactics to make everyone else simply fall into matching pitch, as I have done to hide how poor my musical skills are. Not that you would’ve been able to do that at that point in your life, I suppose, but you might have tried awakening your abilities sooner than you should’ve, and that’s the last thing you would’ve wanted to do. You would’ve been a wreck, presented with so much power so young, so unprepared.”

“As opposed to now?” Tabitha scoffed. “It’s not like I was given much of a handbook or a manual about how any of these abilities of mine work. In fact, the first day I met Veronica, I felt… less like myself than I ever had, like some other, more malevolent part of my had been awakened and had taken the driver’s seat inside of my brain. I found myself… I took control of Veronica like she was nothing, like whatever will she had was simply a toy I could remold to my will or completely discard if I didn’t want her to have any drive of her own.” Tabitha moved to sit down at the table as Lucy retook her seat. “I don’t want mindless flunkies, although I think Roni was a little frightened I might strip her of any sort of self-control. I didn’t have a choice, so I decided I would just take what I needed from there on out. First and foremost, I needed a guide, someone to help me navigate this little deathtrap game you’ve set up for me. Thanks for that, mom.”

Lucy rolled her eyes a little bit. “Now you’re just being overly dramatic, like your father was. It’s unbecoming. Contests to determine suitable heirs as a tradition go back further than written history by orders of magnitude of generations. I can’t simply turn over Hell to just anyone.”

“Why turn it over at all? Better yet, mother, why even is there a Hell in the first place? I thought you rebelled in Heaven to go against God’s will, to say that plans were for suckers and that if God was going to invent free will in the first place, why not let everyone have a go at it?”

Lucy sighed, shaking her head a little. “I’d hoped you might’ve intuited the bigger picture yourself by now without having to have it spelled out, but I suppose cosmic concepts can be a little difficult to interpret without a local guide pointing out the pitfalls.” She picked up her cup of coffee and took a sip from it, the liquid much less dark than Tabitha thought it would be, but apparently her mother liked lots of cream and sugar in her coffee. “Roni dear, come have a seat and tell me who’s been assigned as the adjudicators of this particular instance of the game.”

Veronica moved over and sat down on Lucy’s lap; her head was still mostly tilted downward. “The adjudicators for Mistress Tabitha are Zhurong and Shango.”

Tabitha cleared her throat and suddenly Veronica looked up, her pained gaze turning to look at Tabitha before looking back at Lucy, who couldn’t have seemed more amused. Veronica’s facial expression was one that Tabitha had never seen upon her before – abject terror. This was, she supposed, the demoness’s greatest nightmare, but the one thing Tabitha wasn’t going to let her mother do was push her the fuck around.

You can’t just take what’s mine, mom.

Tabitha could feel Veronica’s will being tugged upon by Lucy’s casual force as well as Tabitha’s own none-too-slight abilities starting to take hold. The demoness’s breath caught, as if she was being choked out by the tug-of-war being played with her essence, a slightly pained tone to her whimpering.

“Veronica,” Lucy said, her tone that of a parent bordering on being cross as the demoness had risen up again and begun to move away from the devil’s lap. “What do you think you are doing?”

“I’m sorry, Mistress Lucifer, but if you are asking me to choose between my loyalties to you and my loyalties to Mistress Tabitha,” Veronica said, each word taking sizable effort, as if they were being peeled from the inside of her skull one bit at a time. “Then I must choose to side with Mistress Tabitha, as much as it may pain me to go against you, when you took me in. But you said that if I felt Mistress Tabitha stood a chance of succeeding in your task that I should invest all my energies into her. Could… could you both please stop trying to shred my brain?”

Lucifer looked over at Veronica, then at Tabby, then back to Veronica, a slightly amused laugh rolling from her lips. “Alright, Veronica,” she said, leaning to settle in her chair. “Go back to your little Nephilim and hope she can protect you from the coming storm.” Lucifer lifted her coffee to her lips once more. “You know, Tabitha, Veronica used to be one of my lovers. Until I bored of her. That’s why I gave her the assignment to watch you. Not that she’d done anything wrong or right. I simply didn’t want her clinging to my ankles, desperate for my attention all the time.”

“You can be a real bitch when you want to be, mother,” Tabitha said as Veronica moved around the table and slid her ass onto Tabby’s lap, exhaling a deep sigh of relief. It felt like her mother was goading her, trying to bait her into rash action.

“I just wanted you to know I fucked her, your right-hand woman. Before she was in your service, she was in mine. You deserved to know that.”

“Interestingly enough, mom, I don’t really give a fuck. She’s not with you anymore; she’s with me. And she’s happy with me. We’re happy together. We work well together. She’s got nothing to do with you anymore, and she’s better off for it,” Tabitha said, as a waitress finally brought a couple additional cups of coffee over for Tabitha and Veronica. “She might have started as yours, but she’s ending as mine, so stop fucking around with things that don’t belong to you.”

“Don’t belong to me anymore,” Lucy corrected.

“Whatever, mother. She’s mine. Hands fucking off.”

Tabitha did her best to keep her expression blank, but she felt a certain level of pride in having stood up to her mother. The three of them enjoyed their coffee in silence for a minute or two before the devil spoke again. “So, Shango and Zhurong, Roni said?” Lucy asked. “Have they been fair in how they’ve been treating you?”

She nodded, a sly smile crossing her lips. “The representative of the angelic forces, Sandalphon, was trying to send nightmares to me, to keep me on the back foot, but I pointed out that it was in violation of the rules of the contest. Sandalphon tried to claim it was only a bit of harmless fun, but the two old gods agreed with me that a disruption is a disruption and sentenced her to a punishment of experiencing a life engulfed in flames and fire for a day.”

“How did she handle that?”

Veronica started to giggle, but Tabitha narrowed her gaze at her and shut it down quickly. “Not well,” Tabitha said, “but that’s good. If a punishment can be shrugged off lightly, then it isn’t really a punishment. And I don’t take lightly to people fucking with my sleep.”

“Think that’ll come back and bite you in the ass?”

“Actually, I don’t think so,” Tabitha said before taking a sip from her coffee. “I saw her a little bit later, and she wasn’t upset with me over it, so maybe she understood the crime fit the punishment.”

“If I might interject, Mistress?” Veronica asked.

“Alright, Roni,” Tabitha said. “What’s on your mind?”

“I sort of feel like Sandy wasn’t testing the boundaries of her own volition, but more like she was induced to try and push the line by upper management on her team,” Veronica said quietly. “Sandalphon’s many things, but cruel or vindictive isn’t one of them. Sending nightmares to you doesn’t feel like it’s something she would’ve done on her own initiative. She wants the game to be fair, first and foremost, and I think she was arguing about the interpretation of the rules mostly because she didn’t want to be in the wrong, but once it was settled that she was, she accepted it and resolved not to make the same mistake twice. And she even gave you a peace offering in exchange.”

Lucy arched an immaculately tended eyebrow, a coy mysterious smile crossing her lips. “A peace offering? From an angel? Haven’t you heard that you should never accept gifts from strangers unless you’re certain there aren’t any strings attached.”

“She wasn’t asking for anything in exchange for getting it,” Tabitha said, “and I certainly didn’t make any promises I can’t keep.”

“What did she give you?”

“She said there are several people on both sides that would love to see me fail, which, I mean, I suppose it shouldn’t come as that much of a surprise, but you have any clue who they’re talking about specifically, mother?”

“There are both demons and angels who would love you to fail, my daughter, but as for specifics? You might as well ask me to name single drops of water in the Pacific Ocean,” she sniffed slightly dismissively. “They’re only threats if you let them be, and you should know far better than to be distracted by such small things. Have they had any real impact upon your challenges so far?”

Tabitha looked back to the window of the café, seeing a smartly dressed couple looking at the pastries in the window on display. “Nothing that gave me real concern. They tried to dissuade one of the girls who would eventually come to be part of my stable that she shouldn’t have anything to do with me, and when I tried to trace back the source of the slander, the man who’d said it had already been killed, so it wasn’t as though I could have a conversation with him.”

“Veronica could’ve.”

Tabitha turned her gaze to look at Veronica, who frowned a little. “It’s true, Mistress, I could’ve gotten his corpse to answer some of your questions, but with the police around, I thought it would be best if we di—”

“Roni, let me decide those sorts of things. You’re probably right that we wouldn’t have wanted to intrude upon the cops and an active murder scene, but I think that’s the sort of thing I would’ve liked to know you were capable of.”

“Yes Mistress. Sorry Mistress.”

The three of them were silent for a long moment before Tabitha spoke again. “You can talk to dead bodies?”

“Newly dead bodies, yes, Mistress. Anything that’s been dead more than five or six hours, though, is generally beyond my abilities. That’s also a contributing factor why I didn’t mention it before, but I acknowledge not telling you was my failing and I will not do that again.”

“Who your enemy is doesn’t really matter, daughter,” Lucy said, shaking her head a little. Tabitha found it harder to remember that Lucy was her mother when she barely looked a day over thirty at the harshest, and maybe even looked younger than Tabby herself in the most generous light. “Many hands would love to hold the knife trying to stab you. There’s always going to be people coming after you and yours, so if you get caught up in the particulars of who any individual one of them is, you’re going to miss the bigger picture. Don’t worry about who they are until you’re in a position to do something about it, Tabitha. Right now, make sure you’re doing everything you can to win the competition, to ensure that you remain alive.”

“I meant to ask you about that, mother. Why would you set up such a game in the first place? Are you really so anti-children?”

Lucy looked at Tabitha with an almost pitying smile. “You’re not a parent, so you wouldn’t know, but there’s something horrible about the notion of bringing something into the world that’s always going to be less than you. I don’t know how God does it, actually, and with such astonishing regularity, but I suppose, that’s why She’s the Almighty and I’m just The Adversary, although She doesn’t really think of me that way. At least, that’s what She’s said to me the last few times I’ve seen Her. She says everything I’m doing is according to Her plan.”

“God’s a woman?” Tabitha asked in amusement.

“God’s neither female or male, neither woman nor man, but easily both and all the shades in between, as well as shades you can’t even imagine. I’m the same, of course, as are all pureblood angels and demons, but we find a form we like and it takes on a certain familiarity for a time. If I wanted to, I could manifest a penis, take on more traditionally masculine features, but it’s all so… rough,” she said with a laugh. “I prefer the more luscious and soft curves of a female form. This body is looked upon with envy, lust and respect by most, and that lets me have an advantage in dealing with the humans.”

“Always looking to make deals for souls, are we mother?”

Lucy scoffed, shaking her head. “Mindless propaganda, put forth by the angels in an attempt to portray the idea of rebelling against God as one of betrayal instead of one of independence. They tell the humans that rejecting God will result in being sentenced to a place of fire and death and torture and suffering… but that God loves you in spite of what he will do if you reject him.”

“Well, isn’t that true?” Tabitha asked. “Aren’t those who go to Hell those who’ve rejecting God and, er, Her teachings?”

“You might be surprised to learn this, Tabitha, but nobody has to go to Hell,” Lucy said, a very amused tone to her voice. “The only people who actually go to Hell are those who choose to. It’s quite a personal commitment, so those who have decided they want to go to Hell are, of course, allowed in. And yes, many of those people believe they deserve to be punished, and we’re happy to indulge them with that notion, since that’s what they want. There are those who claim they don’t feel like they should be punished, but one of the advantages of being divine – that is to say angelic or demonic – is that we can compel humans into a state where they are unable to lie to us. Those are the sociopaths, the psychotics, the people who are convinced their horrific actions aren’t awful and repugnant, and when we apply the gaze of truth upon them, their true hearts are revealed, and they know they deserve to be punished, and so we do so.”

“For how long?”

“Why, for eternity, my dear. Or until they feel like they’ve suffered enough, endured enough, and changed because of their punishments,” Lucy replied. “That almost never happens, but I suppose almost never isn’t never, and that’s important. God told me once that everything She makes is capable of change, growth, evolution… progress. So maybe eventually they’ll all be ready to leave, all have moved to a point where they feel like they no longer need to be punished.”

“Won’t that be the day,” Tabitha said. “What will you do then?”

Lucy shook her head, looking down her nose at her daughter. “You still don’t get the point, do you, my daughter? I take no personal enjoyment in torturing those in Hell who believe they require punishment. In fact, I find myself getting along much better with those who are happy to see Hell as a paradise of an afterlife.”

“You’re… mother, are you telling me there are nice parts of Hell?”

Lucifer laughed, nodding, her smile broadening, as if she had been waiting for the conversation to get to this point for some time. “Very nice parts of Hell! Some of it is an idyllic countryside, something akin to Tuscan Italy. Some parts of it are lovely beachfront, like Ibiza. If you want something woodier, we have portions like the Alaskan woodlands. Looking for the mountains? Hell has those too. And those who think of Hell as a fine place to spend their afterlife, they’re able to migrate between all of them. I never understood the expression ‘a snowball’s chance in Hell,’ when it’s well-established we’re much better at snowball fights than our angelic brethren. Of course, for those truly invested into seeing the sort of fantasy ethos, we do have lakes of fire and all the sort of expected things, but like all of Hell, it’s basically optional.”

“You’re genuinely telling me that eternal damnation, an existence trapped in hellfire and suffering, is… what, optional?”

“Regardless of what you think of me, dear daughter, I’m not a monster. That’s just bad publicity, although they do say any publicity is good publicity. Hell, like Heaven, is simply what you make of it. Loads of souls have chosen to give it another go after spending long enough in the afterlife, and I can’t say that I blame them. So we send them back into the Well of Souls and they’ll go back and get a second go at it sooner or later. Or third go. I think the record holder is on something like four hundred go arounds, although I’m sure they’ve lost count themselves. They only remember all of the cycles when they’re back in the afterlife. No way a human brain could comprehend all of that. Of course, they haven’t always been human, in those cycles though.”

“No?”

“They tried going through some parts of the animal kingdom. A hawk for flight. A whale for swimming. Insects. House pets. And even spent a few centuries as a redwood tree. There’s wisdom to be gained from each and every perspective. Lots of people are trying it these days. Reincarnation’s all the rage, as people think, ‘next time, I’ll do better.’” She shrugged. “Sometimes they do. Sometimes they don’t. It doesn’t really matter.”

“Is there no end planned?”

“Planned? Oh, sweet summer child, you are asking the wrong person about plans. There’s only one Big Plan, and God doesn’t share that with anyone. Maybe it ends. Maybe it simply goes around and around and around. It’s ineffable,” she chuckled. “That doesn’t mean ‘unfuckable;’ it means ‘unknowable,’ as in God is never going to share that with anyone. There’s a comedian I quite liked who had the best bit about the unfathomable thing that is existence – he said… let me see if I can remember it correctly. He said, ‘The world is like a ride at an amusement park, and when you choose to go on it, you think it’s real, because that’s how powerful our minds are. And the ride goes up and down and round and round and it has thrills and chills and it’s very brightly colored and it’s very loud. And it’s fun, for a while. Some people have been on the ride for a long time, and they begin to question: ‘Is this real? Or is this just a ride?’ And other people have remembered, and they come back to us and they say ‘Hey! Don’t worry, don’t be afraid – ever – because... this is just a ride.’ That’s truly the best way to think about it, to realize it’s nothing more than a ride. As long as you aren’t staring down the barrel of soul destruction, that is, as you are, my dear.”

“You mean—?”

“Yes,” Lucy sighed. “Should you fail in your quest, your soul will be reduced down to the primal dust from which all new souls are created, and you will return to stardust once more, for God to create something new from.”

“Why would you come up with such a horrible challenge, mother?” Tabitha said, finishing her coffee. “Why condemn your own offspring to a fate of oblivion?”

“It’s a test,” Lucy said, letting a breath of air escape her lips between her teeth. “One I choose to engage with voluntarily. God told me that if I wanted a challenge, I needed to set forth to producing an heir, someone who could live up to the legacy I’d set for myself by meeting or exceeding my expectations. There’s nothing quite as infuriating as your Creator telling you to go out and create something for yourself. And so far, all my creations have been failures.” Lucy turned to level that gaze directly into Tabitha’s, and suddenly Tabitha felt like she was gazing into something infinitely bigger and more majestic than herself, a single glinting moment of the radiance that lay beneath. “But you… I think you’ve got the potential to maybe go all the way. So I’m looking forward to continuing to watch your progress. And… I thought it might be beneficial for you to know that I’m proud of how far you’ve come. It isn’t easy, being forced to live within a shadow as long as the one I cast, but I think you’ve mostly handled yourself admirably.”

“Mostly?”

Lucy grinned a little bit. “I might’ve given Merlin a bigger piece of my mind in your shoes, but I can at least respect why you chose to employ tact rather than bluster. He’s another who casts a very long shadow, so perhaps your approach was wiser than the one I might’ve taken. He’s a difficult one to get a read on, that Merlin. But do be mindful that you have a reputation to uphold, my daughter, and winning the competition is truly only the start of your journey, because as difficult as this herculean task might seem, it’ll pale compared to the challenge of figuring out what to actually do with Hell once it’s yours.”

“What do you think I should do with it, mom?”

Lucy waggled a finger at her. “I’ve had my turn at Hell’s big chair. There’ll be no second term for me upon that throne. I do hope we’ll meet again, on the other side of this, when I’m handing you the keys to your new kingdom, but if we don’t, know this, my child – of all the progeny I’ve had over the millennia, I think you were my favorite. Take care, daughter of mine, and never doubt for a moment that you are capable of this. Remember… Lucifer’s daughter doesn’t take shit off of nobody.”

The devil brought her thumb and her middle finger together and then snapped. While her presence was gone, there were a lingering number of long black feathers fluttering to the ground around them, and the sound of distant, powerful wings flapping.

“Okay, Veronica, all will be forgiven if you can teach me that trick…”