The Triple Goddess

by Stephanie Hudson

  “Well thank you, I appreciate it.”

  “Wow you are easy to please, you’re happy that we’re feeding you?!” She burst out laughing and starting piling another plate with sandwiches for me. That, combined with the cake, cheese and crackers, fruit and lots of blue frosting, and I was fit to burst!

  “Honestly I think you deserve a gold star for the feeding human game,” I said leaning back and unbuttoning my coat.

  “Goodie, so does this mean the next time you see Vincent you will tell him that…he scares me!” I bolted upright at this.

  “What do you mean ‘he scares you’? Vincent is harmless!” And lovely and sweet and oh, don’t even go there!

  “Ha! You really don’t know the Dravens like the rest of us do. They are rulers for a reason and Vincent is the only Commander of the King’s armies. He has legions upon legions like no other from the Heavens and rules his men with a fair but iron fist. He also happens to be the only one that has ever knocked Lucius on his ass in the ring, although Dominic has never fought him.” I must have had my mouth open for every word she said. Vincent, a Commander of Heaven’s armies? Now that was crazy. To me he was just Vincent, quiet and reserved but as sweet as the Angel he looked…Wow…just wow!

  “You sure do know a lot about them?” I said hoping for even more information. It was like Pip had now become my dealer and this junkie needed another Draven fix and bad. So if info was all I could get, then that would have to cut it.

  “Well I did used to live with them all. I was on the Council along with Adam and Ruto. I miss Sophia.” She said looking down in her tea cup looking sad.

  “Ok, so let me work this out…up until Lucius and Draven started this feud you all were on Draven’s Council?”

  “That’s what I’m saying. But since then we had to split, we made our choices and all had to pick a rollercoaster. Adam picked Lucius because of his loyalty to him so I followed but I do miss my friends.” I felt so bad for her I nearly got up just to give her a hug but she started concocting again so I hung back.

  “You can’t see them?” I asked.

  “The whole ‘side against side’ kinda puts a stop to that and Adam would never leave Lucius.”

  “Why not, if you wanted to then…” She started to shake her head before I could finish.

  “No, Adam can’t be left without me, that would be…dangerous.” She shuddered and this had me wondering what the hell it was about Adam anyway?

  “I don’t understand?”

  “I know and for that you would have to know my story and how it was Lucius that saved both of us.”

  “He did… but how?” Pip gave me a little smile and her little tongue swept out and licked at her lip ring.

  “You ready for story time, Toots?” She said and when I nodded she clapped her hands and said something that gave me the shivers,

  “Time for some stronger drinks, I think.”

  Oh, this was going to be so bad.

  Chapter 20

  Number of the Beast

  “Ok, so here I was, with this right Asshole boyfriend when the shit hit the fan and I got sent down for his crime. I mean, how was I supposed to know what would happen after putting a couple of rats from China on a ship to London. The bastard told me they were lucky rats and that he wanted me to have lucky pets for our new home in England. I mean sounds harmless right but noooo, the rats wouldn’t listen to a regular Demon, only a stupid ass Imp that asked them nicely to survive the journey and come home with their new mummy. I mean the beating he gave me when I asked if this was a good idea should have been a clue but he was a good looking mother foo so I did what he said and maybe, just maybe, might have caused a little epidemic that might have caused a few deaths.” She took and sip of her drink and looked over the cup’s brim with guilty eyes.

  “He beat you! Ok wait…what date was this and how many deaths are we talking about?”

  “Umm I think it was sixteen and a small number, maybe three, yeah the year was 1603 because that was the first time I bought a capotain…ooo, I think I still have it somewhere.”

  “A capotain?” I knew this story would eventually get off track.

  “Oh yeah we don’t have them anymore, well it was this tall-crowned, narrow-brimmed hat, usually black but I had a purple one and it went perfect with this lace…”

  “Pip, focus. How many people did it…” I paused as it slowly started to seep in. That date and my history loving brain started to fit the cogs in the right place, when it finally started to turn again I knew the horrifying answer.

  “Wait! You are not telling me…oh please don’t be telling me…You caused the Black Death to come to London?!” At this she cringed.

  “Umm…kind of,” she said taking another sip as she kept her guilty eyes still in place.

  “PIP! Bloody hell Squeak that caused over 40, 000 deaths!”

  “38, 472 deaths actually but one of those had a bad heart anyway so he doesn’t count.”

  “Oh shit, so what happened?” I had opted for gulping my drink now as opposed to Pip’s sipping hers.

  “Ah, well see the ‘powers that be’ didn’t think too kindly on my circumstances and it went to trial but I…um…kind of…didn’t show up.”

  “What! You didn’t show, why not?” She popped a sugar frosted berry in her mouth and shrugged her shoulders like this was nothing.

  “What can I say, I was busy hunting.”

  “Hunting? Like fox and hound type of stuff?” At this she laughed, but then started to choke on her second berry. I was about to help when she simply put a fist to her chest and hit it hard with the flat palm of her other hand like she had done this type of thing before. She cleared her throat before continuing.

  “Fuck no! I love those little guys and hate the bastards that hunt them! Have you not seen their cute bushy little tails?”

  “Then I don’t get it, what were you…?”

  “I was hunting the asshole of course! I knew I was getting sent down without his sorry carcass to give them but what do you know, he thought it was a great time to disappear and took a vacation.” She gritted her teeth at the memory and it was the first time seeing Pip angry at someone. Even when she had talked to Klaus she had still done so in a joking, ‘you’re gonna die soon’, kinda way.

  “So where did he go?”

  “Shit I don’t know, Aruba for all I knew but the point is as I was hunting him, they were hunting me and I know I’m only little but I’m not invisible!”

  “So I gather they found you?” I asked hating the idea that poor little Pip was being hunted over something she wasn’t fully responsible for doing.

  “Oh man did they find me! And the Fires of Hell don’t really mix with a little Shadow Imp like me”

  “Shadow Imp?” I asked needing some explanation on this.

  “Well you get lots of different types of us, like my friend Forester, he’s an Imp of…”

  “Let me guess, the forest?” I said making her look at me with confusion.

  “No, why should he be? Oh you mean the name, no Tooty Toots, that’s just his name. No, he’s the Imp of the Lost. He can take his power from the confused but instead of leaving a Being weak it will give them strength to see through the confusion…which is win, win if you ask me. But me…well, what can I say, I can manipulate the shadows and one’s mind is full to the coffee brim of shadows.” She said raising her eyebrow as if waiting for my next question.

  “I don’t understand Pip, so you’re gonna have to help me out with this one…people have shadows in their minds?”

  “But of course they do, or where else would all the new info go, Dudette? But I can fill those shadows with whatever info I like or I can simply take them away. Ok, put another way, let’s say I shaved all your gorgeous locks off with a meat cleaver and with not only all your hair missing but a few missing pieces of scalp as well, now that would be a shitty hair style wouldn’t it?”

  “Focus Pip!” I said and she laughed at my screwed up face, t
hanks to the vivid picture she just described.

  “Well anyway, I could take out that memory and make it into a shadow, another empty space ready to be filled, so in other words I could rather leave it blank, so you would wake up thinking you always had a scalp that resembled a butchers block or I could plant the image of that butcher doing it to you, not me. You wouldn’t remember me.” She said with a blue lipped grin.

  “That is one scary thought Pip.” I couldn’t help but feel a chill at the idea of someone playing scrabble with my brain.

  “I know right, but lucky for most I like to feed from happy emotions so I prefer letting people feel like they have won the lottery or something…ooo, but one guy I made him think he always wanted to be ballerina and then wouldn’t you know, he got accepted as lead in Coppelia, you know the ballet? Well anyway, when he thought he got accepted he started doing pivots round his living room. The funniest part was… and you’re gonna love this… he was a hairy fat trucker from Minnesota!” We both gave each other a look and burst out laughing until tears appeared my eyes.

  “Anyway I got my thrill and left him thinking he got laid by a supermodel, so another win, win.”

  “So where does making my soul visit Draven come into it?” I couldn’t stop myself from asking after I took a sugar berry that she offered from a skull bowl that opened at the jaw, where a berry was waiting for me to pick.

  “Ah…well now, that’s a tricky one and usually I need added juice but I can also detach a soul…all the shadows if you like, and pin point it all to one location, without the need for a body. It not easy and I’m a little beat after it, you know…the longer you’re gone but it’s still do-able if the receiver is strong.”

  “Ok, explain that bit…the receiver?”

  “It’s like this, if I had a puppy and I went on holiday, I would have to leave it with someone to take care of it, you know someone responsible, someone I know that would care for it…like if I left it with some homeless guy that couldn’t even feed himself and thought one of his own arms was a snake, he was that jacked up, then it would no doubt end up one dead dodo…right?” I nodded but she could see I was still a little hazy on the edgy details.

  “Right well, it’s the same with a soul. I couldn’t leave it with just anyone or it would try and run away, like a puppy trying to find its way home.” Ah, it was starting to click.

  “I’m the puppy?”

  “You’re the puppy Toots and may I say, what a cutie you are but I doubt you had chance to go at any Draven bones if ya know what I mean?” She waggled her eyebrows at me and I rolled my eyes at her joke.

  “I don’t know about a Shadow Imp, more like a Nympho Imp!” She winked and I threw a sandwich at her making her flick frosting at me. We both giggled like drunken teenagers before composing ourselves.

  “So, Draven is your puppy carer?” I asked and she nodded, making all her hair shake in loose waves.

  “Sure is Honey Bee, although his brother has got some serious juices flowing for the Tootinator! I think he must have been thinking about you hard girlfriend ‘cause your soul shot straight to him last time! Methinks you have yourself some big, tough as nine inch nails, army commander, Angel admirer in Vincent.” I made a snorted gurgled laugh while Pip smiled a cunning and mischievous little smile.

  “I don’t think so,” I said with burning cheeks.

  “Oh my god, Toots! You didn’t tell me you had glasses, what happened to them, did they smash them when Klaus hit you?” She then added, to her amusement, by pretending to have lost her own glasses and was patting the ground like they were around somewhere.

  “Ha,ha, I’m serious Pip.”

  “Yeah, me too because you must be blind not to know Vincent’s wayo mucho got the hot sauce for some little Electus chica.” I shook my head which she copied.

  “He has not and we’re now going to drop that not existent subject and focus on what happened to you.” At saying this she made a cat noise and scratched her nails in the air.

  “Ok, fine by me Angel hottie ass, no need to get prissy!” She said slapping out at me with a non-existent handbag before carrying on. I just laughed.

  “Right where were we before you found out Vincent’s in love with you?”

  “PIP!” I reprimanded but the Demon in her just smiled.

  “Ok, ok, got the memo, received the telegraph and am reading the writing on the wall, so totally got ya. Right well, I think I was at the point where they hunted me down to drag my Impie butt back to the Mountain of Fire and Brimstone.” She thumbed the ground and I swallowed hard.

  “What! Tell me you didn’t get sent to Hell…did you?”

  “Sure did Kiddy Winkle.” She nodded while checking out a watermelon on her nail, then she licked it as if it was a watermelon.

  “For how long?” I asked, hating the idea that my little friend had been sent to Hell as punishment.

  “About a year.” I let out the breath I was holding until she carried on.

  “That’s about the equivalent to a hundred of your human years.”

  “What! You were there for a hundred years? Oh Pip.” I said shaking my head and being close to tears at the idea.

  “Hey, in the end it turned out as a good thing, being punished ending up being not so bad. I was lucky really ‘cause at first they wanted me to be food for a bunch of crappy hellhounds but in the end they needed a snack to keep Abaddon happy.” At this she kissed her tattooed knuckles on the hand that spelled out ‘Adam’.

  “So did Adam save you?” At this she burst out laughing until tears appeared.

  “Oh my, you are a funny Toots. No he didn’t save me from Abaddon, he is Abaddon.”

  “Ok, now I’m really confused, he wanted to eat you and how is it that this Abad…something or other, is Adam?”

  “Ok, here’s the thing, first you have to understand what Abaddon is. See, Lucifer needed to beef up his armies right, so he decided to try and create the ‘The Great Beast’ from the twisted souls of lost warriors and such that had been trapped in the seventh circle.”

  “Seventh circle…as in Hell… as in Dante’s Inferno?” I interrupted.

  “Yeah well good old Dante boyo was a Demono and got drunk one night trying to write something of a stage act and ended up just writing the truth…idiot! But anyway ‘The Divine Comedy’ which is his work on explaining the 9 Circles of Hell is quite accurate. The seventh is Violence, and even then there are bloody different rings to it. Like that matters, if it was me I would just throw the whole shitty lot in a room and let them fight it out! But no, Lucifer doesn’t think that the outer ring of petty violence against people and property would get on well with the middle ring of sad souled suicides. And well, the inner ring bastards don’t respect anything, not even the Gods, that’s where most of the warriors are.” I think she decided to mix another drink as a chance to give me a minute to process and bloody hell did I need it, no pun intended.

  “Right, so Lucifer snapped on his experimenting gloves and merged selected souls in the flaming river of Phlegethon and tried to create ‘the Mighty Beast’ he called Abaddon, which means ‘Destruction’ in Hebrew by the way.”

  “Ok, destruction, got it…so what happened next?” I felt like a child being told horror stories around a camp fire. Ok, so there was no fire but we were outside.

  “Where was I… ah yeah there. So, Lucifer was trying to make this mighty beast but shit kept going wrong, right. I mean they kept dying being either too weak or way too strong that they would just rip themselves apart with a rage far too great to be contained. So it got recommend, ever so delicately…” She leaned forward and added behind a hand,

  “Lucifer can be a tad bit touchy but it was the King Asmodeus of the second circle that offered to try and add some lustful souls to the mix. His idea was that lust can make any creature desire, which could give a sweet big ass Abaddon a reason to live through the rage. So after the 616th try the only Abaddon was born from the souls of the damned. Not a smidgen of fairy
dust in sight.” No and it didn’t sound like it. Man, this stuff was heavy and I knew from the way she stretched out her slim, little legs that she was getting comfy and ready for the rest of the tale.

  “And it really fries my noodle when people think the number of the beast is 666, ‘cause they would be so wrong. It’s clear as day in the Revelation in the 66th vol. of the Oxyrhynchus series has the number of the Beast as 616, but no, everyone wanted to make it look even but you know the fluffy little white rabbit sometimes just ain’t that white, you know what I mean?” I nodded but to tell the truth, no… I really didn’t know what she meant but when did I ever?

  “So trying to get things straight once more, you’re telling me that Abaddon, who is also Adam, and also Hell’s destroyer, which is Lucifer’s personal army’s beefy pet, is made from the souls of pissed off men?”

  “And a few lusty ones,” she added nodding.

  “And a few lusty ones, is also the reason every being knows that 666 is the number referred to the Devil?” I raised my eyebrows in waiting.

  “Pretty much, but of course the number’s wrong and it doesn’t actually refer to the big boss man downstairs but to my big boss man upstairs.” She leaned back and looked like the Lion that found himself in a raining meat storm!

  “Alright, now you have to explain how that relationship happened ‘cause I take it he didn’t eat you?” She gave a naughty wink and I knew we had very different ideas about that whole ‘eating you’ comment!

  “Ah, now this is the best bit. But first you have to picture this point in my life. I had just been sent down and even though I received a warm welcome it wasn’t the kind you would want! All those toothy bastards laughing their high pitched squeals and making bets at how long I would last before I became spit roast Pip. Ha, well I had the last laugh on that one, shit heads!” She said glugging back her drink before just grabbing the striped milk jug and chugging it down. I think that one contained straight Vodka.