Page 3 of Generally Hospitable
I wasn’t having it with her shitty attitude. The hope I’d seen earlier in her expression had taken a vacation. “We firebomb it.” I gave her aduhlook. “Remember?”
She scowled at me. “Still doesn’t solve how we get through it and into the throne room, Bitch.”
“Well…” I said in the most condescending voice I could muster. “That’s why it’s called an ass plan. We pull it out of our asses as we go, Stinky Whore. You cool with that, or should I just leave you here while I go it alone?”
“And let you have all the glory?” she said. “Hell to the no on that, Cecily. I will not let you beat me again.”
I’d had it. “What the hell are you talking about? We’re supposed to be in this together, asshole. It’s not a competition.”
“Everything is a competition in the Darkness,” she said coldly. “Learn that now, or else it will come back to haunt you.”
“This is not a game, Pandora,” I ground out through clenched teeth. “It’s not a one-upmanship contest between you and me. The fate of our entire realm...hell, the entire world as we know it,everything,” I emphasized, “is on the line. Quit being such a scared, selfish piece of shit. It’s not about you. It’s not about me.”
“Screw you, Bitch Goddess Cecily,” she said with a vile laugh that chilled me to the bone.
Unfortunately, she sounded like the Pandora of old. The one I remembered killing my mother. I didn’t like her one bit.
“Tell me what you want,” I shouted.
“I don’t know what you mean,” she yelled back.
My instinct was to electrocute the living daylights out of her. Right now, my instincts were not my friend. Pandora wasn’t my friend either, but I needed her. I needed her just as much as she needed me. Why couldn’t she get that through her head? Running my hands through my hair and coming out with green gooey guts all over my fingers, I sighed. “I don’t understand you.”
“How could you?” she asked, sounding bone tired. “I’ve been alive for millions of years. You’ve been alive for forty. When you live forever, nothing, and I mean nothing, has meaning—not love, not sex, not interaction with others. It all blurs together. It’s an unending stream of days that turn into weeks, then years… then centuries.” She stared at her hands before closing her eyes. “So, the answer to your insipid question is I don’t know. Sometimes, I want everything. Sometimes nothing. I’ve had to come to terms with the fact that existing is the best I can hope for.”
“That’s sad.”
She laughed. The sound was hollow. “Talk to me in a million years.”
“Won’t be able to,” I told her.
She raised a brow in question. “Why. Are you going to be dead?”
I rolled my neck to release some tension then looked her straight in the eye. “We’re all going to be dead if we don’t end Chub Chub Wang.”
Pandora looked startled.
I didn’t care. “You done with the tantrum?” I extended my hand to help her up from the ground.
She smiled. It was real this time, reminding me of the newer, less horrid Pandora I was coming to know and care about. “How are you wiser than me?” she asked.
I shrugged. “Maybe because I haven’t lived forever yet.”
“Maybe,” she said, taking my hand. “Let’s go kill that fucker.”
A surge of optimism renewed my determination. “Sounds good to me.”
Hand in hand, we walked through the tunnels. The two Goddesses of the Darkness with the same goal… this time. It wouldn’t always be that way, and I wasn’t fool enough to believe we could truly be friends. But we could be allies—allies when it counted.
Today was one of those times.
“There!” Pandora shouted. She pointed up at a gold, ornately carved hatch that was no bigger than a breadbox. “That has to be it.”
No wonder we’d struggled to find it. The damn thing had been hiding in plain sight. “I won’t be able to get a foot inside that thing, let alone the rest of my body.” I was having seriously nightmarish flashbacks to when skinny jeans were trending. “We don’t need a staircase,” I huffed. “We need Alice’s drink-me potion of psychedelics to shrink ourselves small enough to fit inside.”
Pandora chewed her lower lip for a moment. “If this was my castle, I’d know what to do, but this was Lilith’s, and she had her own rules.”
“That’s it.” I resisted the urge to kiss her. “ThiswasLilith’s castle.”
