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
