I Married the Third Horseman (Paranormal Romance and Divorce) (5 page)

The cameras covering the front door and the
driveway didn’t show anything. Then I switched to the one I’d set
out on the balcony. Nothing happened for a good long while. My
condo’s white stucco walls took on a ghostly, cadaverous sheen in
the pale moonlight.

Then, something appeared on the tape. It was
a shimmer, like one of those heat-wave mirages you get above road
asphalt on a sticky-hot summer day.

A
big
shimmer.

I screamed in horror at what I saw next.

It was a grade-A scream.

If any one of the horror-schlock directors I
knew had heard me, they’d have turned to their sound guy and
demanded, “Did you get that on tape?
Tell
me you did!”
Because when I’m startled, I can let out a scream that would do
justice to the prom queen in a slasher flick.

I thought I had things pretty well under
control when Mitchel got back. I heard the high-pitched whine of
his sleek black Lexus pull up in the driveway, the slam of the
front door, the tread of his steps as he came upstairs. He saw me
sitting, face as grim as death, in front of the computer. I’d
freeze-framed the most interesting part of the tape.

Where Mitchel had simply
materialized
on the balcony, astride the great white stallion I’d seen at
Sundance. His ribbed sweater had elongated into a flowing ivory
cloak. The skin on his face had pulled back, retracted so that he
looked like a dead-white skull with bulging, bestial eyes.

I was the soul of eloquence that day.

“What. The. Fuck.”

He sighed and leaned up against the desk.

“My brothers and I could never get a handle
on technology,” he said. “You
moderns
simply innovate too
fast.”

“Uh-huh. Tell me what I’m seeing here.”

“That’s me, astride my magical stallion,
Bane.”

“Magical.”

“Oh, yes. There’s no other way to keep up
with the job that I do.”

Part of my brain fairly screamed inside my
skull.

Walk away, walk away! Leave it be, you don’t
want to know!

But curiosity could kill the cat, and maybe
Miss Topanga Canyon, if this got ugly. As if it wasn’t ugly enough
already.

“Tell me exactly what your job
is
,
Mitchel.”

He shrugged. “I kill people. Lots and lots of
them. Billions, if you count back far enough. Each of my brothers
do. It’s what we were created for.”

I must have made some ‘go on’ gesture that
made its way through my shock, because he went on talking. All I
know is that my butt stayed glued to the chair. My feet felt like
lead weights. And the taste at the back of my throat definitely
held the vomity goodness of bile.

“We are the Four Horsemen, Cassie. Those four
riders mentioned in the Book of Revelations, if you read your
Bible. The ones who, at the end of times, are destined to bring
about the Apocalypse. We’re the mystical incarnations of the basic
forces that humanity deals with on a daily basis. And I assure you,
we’re quite good at our jobs.”

And with the
click
of a lock’s
tumblers falling into place, all of the little things I’d wondered
about suddenly jumped into sharp focus.

“You said your oldest brother, Raphael, was
doing extra duty in the Middle East. He’s War, I suppose.”

“So far, so good. Go on, Cassie.”

“Uri hangs out in Africa and India. That’s
horseman number two, Famine. You’re the third one in the bunch.
Pestilence. Disease.” I shook my head, felt my brain swimming in
its own fragile shell. “Jesus friggin’ Christ on a stick.”

Mitchel just watched me as the blood drained
from my face. I felt cold all over as I realized something
else.

“And your youngest brother, Gabriel,” I
whispered. I thought of the L-shaped knife on his shield. Not a
knife. A scythe. A
sickle
. I couldn’t bring myself to say
the obvious. “Gabriel’s…the fourth horseman?”

“Of course he is, Cassie.” He crossed his
arms as he added, “You really should thank me for keeping him away
from you. I know you found him attractive – just about everyone
does. But really, it’s a bad idea to flirt with Death.”

I jumped to my feet. My breaths were coming
in short gasps, as if the room’s temperature had leaped up fifty
degrees. I pushed my way past Mitchel and ran downstairs, taking
the steps two at a time. He came out of the study, stood at the top
of the stairs, and shouted in a voice that was half-human, half
something else. Something dark and feral.

“Where are you going?” he demanded. “You know
that no one will ever believe you, Cassandra.”

My fear slipped, temporarily, into anger. I
grabbed my own set of car keys and shouted back up at him.

“I don’t give a crap if anyone believes me,
Mitchel! I didn’t marry a man, I married a
thing
.”

My hands trembled as I turned the key in my
car’s ignition. The Porsche Boxster’s fat tires squealed as I threw
it into gear and shot down the Pacific Coast Highway like a silver
bullet. I didn’t waste a single minute: I drove into the first
attorney’s office I saw in Santa Monica and filed papers for a
no-fault divorce.

In retrospect I should’ve seen what was
coming, but hindsight’s always 20-20, isn’t it? The divorce never
made it to court, though not for lack of trying. Mitchel was going
to contest the divorce. He didn’t retain an attorney, he never
replied to requests for mediation or conciliation or deposition or
any of the other lawyerly things requested.

Maybe that was a good thing, because the idea
of being in a tight little deposition room with that skull-headed
thing I’d seen on the video simply creeped me the friggin’ hell
out.

In the end, I simply ran out of judges. Every
single time the case got put on the docket, guess what? The judge
would come down with something. Sometimes it was comical, like
mumps or shingles. Other times, it wasn’t so funny.

Los Angeles shut down its entire court system
and had biohazard teams combing the Hall of Justice for clues.
Civil suits had to be moved to Oregon, Nevada, anywhere a free
courtroom could be found. Criminal cases were the only things heard
in California anymore, and they only managed to do
that
by
setting up a tent city in the high desert.

I felt like I was coming apart, little by
little, every day. I could feel some kind of bond, like a little
filament of fishing line, tugging like an invisible leash at my
neck. It would lead Mitchel to me, I knew. I uprooted myself every
week, sleeping in sleazy motels which rented beds out by the
hour.

I didn’t dare go to my friends. I liked them
too much, and the last judge willing to hear my case had come down
with bubonic plague.

Then, as summer turned the corner into fall,
I pushed my luck and stayed for ten days in a ratty,
down-on-its-luck rural hotel on the outskirts of Bakersfield.

I woke up to a cold, moist, gray dawn, just
as the sun crested the horizon. I’d heard a low, stealthy-sounding
thump from outside. I froze, but the noise didn’t repeat.

I smelled something which chilled me to the
core. It wasn’t a horsey scent.

It was the smell of wet fur.

A
lot
of it, too.

When I opened the motel door (after spending
ten minutes just getting up the courage to look through the damned
peephole), I got another shock.

Planted in the fresh sod outside the room was
a pair of giant paw prints. Whatever had made those prints, it had
claws. Big ones, like grizzly-bear sized.

I slammed the door and collapsed in a corner,
crying my eyes out.
Trapped, trapped, trapped!
I had nowhere
to go, nowhere to run.

Nowhere? Wait a minute...

I forced myself to focus by gulping great
gasps of the cold morning air. There was one place I had left to
go. That is, if I hadn’t finally lost all of my marbles.

Dora’s column, the one that had allowed me to
make what was probably the worst marriage decision in history, had
said: “Dancer of the Sun, proceed with caution. Live, do not be
afraid of love, and return to the beginning when all is lost.”

Return to the beginning...

I thought of the morning I first met
Mitchel.

That was the day I’d read Dora’s column.

It took me forty minutes of driving around
each and every damned strip mall in Bakersfield in the early
morning to find a newsstand that carried a paper with Dora’s
column. I eventually found a coin-operated machine that no one had
gotten around to vandalizing yet. Even better, it was right outside
a coffee shop.

I shoved a handful of coins into the machine,
grabbed a very-much-needed caffeine transfusion, and commandeered
an empty table for myself. I took a couple long, unladylike slurps
from my extra-large caramel macchiato (extra shot of caramel, extra
shot of cream, because I sure as hell wasn’t counting calories
today) and spread the paper out on the table’s polished surface. I
rolled the warm, buttery-sweet taste of my drink over my tongue and
swallowed as I read the column.

It was completely unlike any of Dora’s
missives before. Rather than rambling on for a full page about who
was boffing who in their sacred chakra, it was relatively short,
sweet, and to the point.

The hair on the back of my neck stood on end
as I read it.

“Dancer of the Sun,” it began, “you know the
doom which stalks you now. Return to where one lives on the castle
hill. Return to the place where forty dreams live at a time. Enter
the space that none dare speak of by name. The mother of all
riddles will help you. See you on the green.”

“Oh, shit,” I said, and for emphasis, I
added, “Shit, shit and shit!”

A businessman in a rumpled suit looked at me
from across the shop with a disapproving frown. I mouthed a ‘sorry’
back at him and his eyes swiveled back to the sports section of his
own paper.

No, I hadn’t been cursing because of the
creepy-cool nature of the riddle. I’d cursed because it wasn’t a
riddle at all to me. It was as if Dora knew that I was going to
read that column, that she’d sent out a radio signal into my brain
at just the right frequency, using just the right words that I’d
know.

It did occur to me that I was totally losing
it. That my brain had finally gotten fried between lack of sleep,
stress, and the syrupy sweetness of the caramel. Maybe I’d finally
crossed over into that never-never land where you’d be catching the
former Miss Topanga Canyon yapping away at parking meters and
spotting Elvis’ face on pieces of freshly made French toast. I
pressed my nails into the sides of my temples and forced myself to
inhale the blessedly caffeine-infused fumes of my drink until the
wave of panic subsided.

Hell of a ‘Dancer of the Sun’ I made.

That brought a snort of laughter out of me.
I’d ended up married to one of the Horsemen of the friggin’
Apocalypse, and now I was worried about losing it over seeing a
personalized message in an advice column?

It looked like marriage really
had
changed my perspective on things.

I chewed my lip as I read the message again.
Yeah, I was the Dancer of the Sun, and I sure knew the ‘doom’ that
stalked me. Intimately, as a matter of fact. As for returning to
‘where one lives on the castle hill’…that was a bit of trivia I’d
known since I was a kid. The Old English word for that kind of
place is
Burbank
. And Burbank, California was where most of
the studios I’d worked for were located.

Of all the studios in Burbank to choose from,
the place I’d edited
Machupo
had – get this – forty
different sound stages, each filming separate television shows,
pilots, sitcoms, or movies. Forty different dreams being turned
into reality at any time. Yes, there were forty stages, but
forty-one
buildings. Way out on the rear lot was a lonely
outlying building that no one ever used. I’d driven past the place
many times on my way to prop storage. It was an isolated Quonset
hut of a building, a silvery arch of metal that sat shimmering in
the sun at the base of the San Fernando foothills.