Chapter 4

CHAPTER FOUR

Gideon took a look at the food and gagged—didn't even attempt to hide it. I bit down on my bottom lip to keep from laughing. Hurting Tim's feelings wasn't on the table. I agreed with the Grim Reaper's opinion of the dish Tim had created, but it was funny to see the Demon look as if he was going to lose his cookies.

With everything spiraling into I didn't even know what, it was nice to have a moment of levity.

"Everyone be seated, please," Lilith directed as she moved to the bay window and stared out into the yard. My mother had been otherworldly beautiful as an Immortal. As a human, she was no less stunning. Her posture and grace were quietly commanding even without magic. With her back to us, she continued to speak. "In the beginning, Pandora was good—as good as a Demon could be. We were both flawed and inexperienced as Goddesses. We leaned on each other for support."

I scanned the room. Surprise, matching my own, showed on each face present except for Gideon's. My guess was that he'd been alive since the beginning.

Lilith continued. "The catalyst as to why we're here now is that the Higher Power gifted Pandora a box and to me, It gifted a key."

"Literally?" Tim asked.

My mother shook her head then turned to face her audience. "No. The key was words. But the box… was indeed a box. It was ornate and lovely—made of delicate ivory and priceless jewels."

"Ivory from an elephant's tusk?" I asked. I knew it had to be a long time ago. Long before elephants.

"It was more likely made from a mammoth tusk," Tim said. "The species existed as far back as six-point-tow million years ago and only went extinct about three thousand years ago."

"Who knows the way of It? It works in mysterious ways. But that's not the point." My mother paused and sighed. "I was jealous. I wanted the box, but it wasn't to be. Pandora was the favored Goddess. She knew it, and I knew it. The only rule she had to follow was never to open the box." Lilith sat and pressed her temples. "It was my self-imposed mission to make her open it. I wanted the Higher Power to love me more that It loved her. It became an obsession."

"Holy fuckballs," Candy Vargo muttered.

Lilith glanced sharply at the Keeper of Fate and gave her a tight smile that didn't reach her eyes. "Pandora wouldn't open it. Oh, she wanted to, but she wanted the love of the Higher Power more."

"But she did eventually open it," I stated.

Lilith nodded. "She did."

"Why?" I pressed. It would save a hell of a lot of time if Immortals just put their cards on the table. It sucked that this was the first time the story was being revealed. It might have helped earlier in this deadly game. Whatever. I realized that wasn't how they operated. It was maddening. Note to self: Ask pointed questions, and don't accept non-answers.

Lilith glanced at her brother. He nodded curtly with very little emotion showing on his face.

"When I spoke of Pandora's lover…" Lilith ran her hands through her hair and sighed dramatically. It seemed as if she wasn't going to add anything else. However, the next part of the sordid story hit me in the head like the plot of a shitty TV movie.

I wasn't having any of it. The beating-around-the-bush crap was getting old. "You slept with him."

She nodded slowly.

I took a semi-educated guess since I'd done my fair share of crappy TV. "Pandora was pissed you slept with her man and opened the box to punish you, unleashing a whole lot of shit on the world."

"In the short version, yes," Lilith stated. "I won in my quest to make her open the box, even though that hadn't been my intention at the time. It was a good million years after she'd received the box. I'd long given up on tricking her into opening it."

"Did you love him?" I asked.

"Who?" she questioned, truly confused.

I squinted at her in disbelief. "The guy you banged. Pandora's lover."

"No, I didn't. Honestly, I don't even remember what he looked like, let alone his name."

"How is that possible?" I shouted. Was everyone crazy, or was it just me? Glancing around the room, it was clear I was the only one perturbed. Daisy appeared to be perplexed, but she was also fairly new to the insanity.

"Cecily, try to understand this. It will be difficult as you are so young, but do please try," Lilith pleaded, sounding older than time. She stood ramrod straight, and her eyes held a faraway look. "When one lives forever, the centuries blend together. Time ceases to have meaning. Things that might have once seemed important tend to fade into an obscurity-laden malaise. Beauty becomes monotonous. Intimacy means little to nothing. Food is eaten simply to sustain life. Pleasure of any kind holds no value—one millennium bleeds into the next." She crossed the room and cupped my cheek in her hand. "The only thing that one who can no longer find joy in living desires is love—not necessarily physical. Just love. It's the only emotion that can begin to give meaning to an unending existence. I've always done my job as the Goddess of the Darkness. I've protected and taken care of my people. However, I didn't start living until I met your father." She tucked my hair behind my ear as if I were a small child. "Understanding love was foreign. Your father, and then you, helped me feel love for the first time in my endless immortality. It was, and is, the greatest gift of my life."

Her words gave me a heck of lot to mull over. Truly understanding was impossible. But if I was being honest with myself, I couldn't recall what I'd eaten last year, even last week. Memories from my childhood were either the super happy ones or the ones that left some kind of scar. The rest was a blur. In a screwed-up way, it made sense that Lilith would have forgotten who Pandora's lover was. A million years is a long freakin' time. Hell, I'd never had a relationship that had passed the three-year mark.

A gamut of emotions raced in my mind. Sadness was at the forefront. The thought that one day I would have a million years behind me was nuts. Would Abaddon still love me? Would I love him? Would I even remember him after a million years? The icky and heartbreaking possibilities were endless.

I pushed the horrible random thoughts away and did my best to stay in the present. "Okay," I whispered, placing my hand over my mother's. I would leave the past where it belonged. It was smart to know the background of what had happened, but it was immaterial to what was going down now. "I kind of get it. It might take me a few centuries to comprehend it. But I'm sorry for judging you."

Lilith smiled. "There's nothing to be sorry for, Cecily. My regret is that my interaction with a man whose face I can't remember caused Pandora, who had once been my friend, to do the one thing she was forbidden to do. That's on me."

"Bullshit," Candy Vargo grunted. "You didn't open the fuckin' box. Ain't none of us here, except maybe Daisy and Cecily, who don't have a shady background that should stay in the past."

"Mine's rather clean," Tim announced. "As an asexual being, I don't have a lot of bodies in my closet. Of course, my desire to father a child has yet to be accomplished. However, since Heather and her partner Missy don't have penises, I've volunteered my sperm so we can have a baby."

Well, that was a whole lot of something I probably didn't need to know.

Heather winced and Candy Vargo shook her head. "Don't wanna hear about your little swimmers, jackass. Keep your pecker in your pants and your mind on the shitshow we're discussing."

"Will do, friend!" Tim saluted his buddy. "Shall we discuss the box?"

Sucking my bottom lip into my mouth, I scrunched my nose. I hoped the box wasn't a euphemism for Heather or her partner Missy's lady parts.

"Pandora's box," Heather said quickly, obviously relieved to change the subject. I was delighted to be wrong. "Was it truly filled with the components that Hesiod wrote of in the Greek poem Works and Days?"

"It was," Lilith confirmed.

"But Hesiod wrote the poem around 700 BC," I pointed out. "Millions of years later. It's a myth."

"Trillions," Gideon corrected me.

It wasn't possible for me to take that number in. It still didn't make sense. "Wait. Is… was Hesiod Immortal?"

"Nope," Candy Vargo said. "But stories have a way of sticking around."

"Like the Bible," Cher added. "Probably some truth to the myth, but mostly not."

"There is some truth," Lilith said. "In the poem, swarms of evils were unleashed—disease, envy, greed, pain sorrow and many others. However, that's where the similarity ends."

" Please , do not be cryptic," I said, raising a brow at my mother.

"I won't," she promised. "All of the miseries in the box were absorbed into Pandora. Therefore, she became the box. The theory had always been my guess until recently. Because she was consumed with the vile wretchedness, she was the one who spread it to the world through her people."

The silence in the room was loud. I broke it. There was more to be learned and discussed.

"And I used the key—the words—to release her from the box. Shit." My stomach clenched, and I wondered if there was any way to reverse what I'd done.

"I think it's far more nuanced than that," Gideon said. "The only gift that was left in the box—if we're to believe Hesiod—was hope. I believe you released the hope."

"Okay." I twisted my hair in my fingers and tried to form my thoughts. "I'd like to believe that—really, really like to believe that. However, why am I housing Pandora if all I did was let the hope out?"

"That's the fuckin' question for the Higher Power," Candy Vargo said.

"Awesome," I said sarcastically. "I guess I'll go have a chat with a smoking mirror and we'll work this crap out."

Cher and Candy Vargo laughed. I did not.

"Yes and no," Lilith said. "You will be able to commune with the Higher Power as the Goddess of the Darkness."

"Wait. Hold up." These people talked out of both sides of their mouths. My hands doubled into fists at my sides, but I kept my tone calm and reasonable. "Is the Higher Power actually a person? Someone or thing that's tangible? All of you guys keep saying It's an entity… you can't see It with your eyes. Bottom line, I'm fucking confused. How can you talk to something that's been described to me as an elusive light?"

Candy Vargo blew a loud raspberry from her mouth. "Shit's hard to comprehend," she admitted. "Don't help all that fuckin' much that you're only forty years old."

"I'm also forty," Daisy reminded everyone. "I stand with Cecily on this line of questioning. She and I have accepted a lot in a short amount of time. The Higher Being is difficult to swallow. Not to mention, Cecily has to deal with It. Soon." Daisy stood up, crossed the room and stood next to me.

I wanted to hug her, so, I did. She hugged me back and kissed my cheek.

"Newbies have to stick together," she said with a smile. Shifting her attention back to the occupants of the room, her expression went hard. "Enough of the vague bullshit. If no one here knows what they're talking about, admit it. Give the Bitch Goddess Cecily the respect she's due. All of you are old enough, and I do mean old enough , to acknowledge if you have no clue how to explain this."

The room was silent. Glances were exchanged. I could feel my heart pounding in my ears. Not too long ago, I was blissfully unaware of the Immortal world. I'd been thrown into it against my will. And due to Pandora killing Lilith, I was now one of the leaders. It was a job I had little to no qualifications to perform. I was an actress for the love of everything absurd. Doing sitcoms, dumb movies of the week, and infomercials was my forte—not leading Demons. But par for the course of the insanity that had become my life, I had Pandora stuck inside me and a room full of old and powerful Immortals who were of no help whatsoever. Part of me wanted to just leave for the Higher Power's plane and go in blind. I'd just wing it with some improv. The less crazy part of me decided to hear them out.

Gideon was the one to speak first.

Bowing his head in respect to both Daisy and me, he smiled apologetically. "As usual, the Angel of Mercy speaks with common sense that us older people seem to have forgotten how to use. Sometimes to make clear what is muddy can verge on impossible."

"Nothing is impossible," Daisy reminded the man she loved. "You just have to believe."

He chuckled. "Fine. The Higher Power is whatever or whomever you see It as."

I rolled my eyes. "Soooooo, if I want Tim to be the Higher Power because he's really nice then he becomes the Higher Power?"

Tim giggled. It made me giggle. "Oh my! What a lovely compliment, Bitch Goddess Cecily! But alas, no. It doesn't work that way."

"Lemme give it a shot," Candy Vargo said.

"Be my guest, friend," Tim told her.

"Alrighty then," she said, splaying her hands out in front of her. She began to shimmer and her knotted hair floated around her head. It was a scary look coupled with her mismatched sweats and sandals. "Pretend you're on the Higher Power's plane."

"How did I get there?" I asked.

She hissed at me. "That don't matter right yet."

I took a healthy step back. "Got it," I replied, keeping my distance.

"Just envision what I'm fuckin' sayin', Badass," she instructed.

I nodded and played along. I had nothing to lose and, hopefully, something to gain with this game of make-believe.

"You're just fuckin' walking along and minding your own business, and then BAM! You feel It. Your blood runs cold, and you sneeze like a motherfucker. All of a sudden, the wind kicks up and the trees uproot—screamin' in agony as they break in half like they were twigs. The animals begin to screech, and the air smells of death. You close your eyes, and all of a sudden Mr. Fucking Rogers is standing there with Mr. McFeely. You're pretty sure that Pee-wee Herman is nearby since his bike is hanging from one of the trees."

Candy Vargo was batshit crazy.

"Oh my God. STOP," Heather snapped. She was glowing, and her magical tattoos raced along her arms and neck. "With all due respect, what in the actual fuck are you talking about? Not real sure this is helping."

Candy raised her hands to electrocute Heather. Heather was ready to go back at the Keeper of Fate with her hands held high. Abaddon stepped between the women and growled. If I hadn't been in danger of losing my house to crossfire, I would have taken a moment to point out how sexy he was.

"Stand down," he ground out. "Violence is not what is needed. Do you understand or shall we take this outside so I can help you understand?"

Both women dropped their arms. I heaved a sigh of relief.

Lilith began to laugh. It sounded unhinged, but it was definitely laughter. "Hang on, please. I have to disagree with Heather. Candy Vargo has made a fine point—rather bizarre, but not unhelpful."

Everyone stared at Lilith.

"Keep talking," I told my mother.

"Open the door and let Pandora join the conversation," she instructed. "But give her a warning that the door can be bolted shut again as easily as it was unbolted."

It was my turn to blow a big raspberry. Listening to Pandora lose her shit wasn't what I needed right now. Or maybe it was… only one way to find out.