Another chime.
“One minute to curtain, Cee Cee!” Johann’s voice announced, with a touch of panic.
“Coming, coming!” Circe picked up her top hat, pulled a business card out of a pocket, and handed it to me as we walked towards the side door. “Dora lives high atop a mountain north of a place you call ‘Taos.’ Giving you her address isn’t the difficult part. Getting there…well, it shall be up to you, of course, but I have three magical items that you shall need.”
I nodded as we came up to a pair of brightly lit doors. One was marked Backstage, while the other was labeled Lobby Service. She showed me over to the latter one.
“I’m grateful for any help,” I said honestly.
“Allow me to finish this performance, and then return through these doors. I apologize for showing you out, but for the show’s duration, my dressing room is going to have to hold a lot of men and animals.” She chuckled. “Men and animals…oh, there I go again, repeating myself!”
And with that, she pushed through her door, her face aglow with a stage performer’s smile. I shook my head and turned the knob on my own exit. I stepped into a wide, empty lobby that smelled ever so slightly of cigarette smoke. Plush green carpet and crystal chandeliers framed fine oil paintings and a triple set of closed doors off to one side. A crystal display above each door read: Performance In Session. From behind those doors, I heard the applause of a large, enthusiastic audience.
I felt a presence nearby. I turned. My stomach went into a triple-axel spin.
My husband stood a few yards away, dressed in an elegant white tuxedo and crisp bow tie.
“It’s good to see you again, Cassie,” he said, with an air of quiet menace. “It’s time that I took you back home.”
Chapter Fourteen
Mitchel had found me. Finally caught up to me.
His razor-sharp cheekbones and taut, sun-bronzed skin looked the same. But his eyes were those of a predator. Like a snake that had locked onto its prey.
Cue the musical sting.
Freeze Frame.
What did you ask, therapy buddy? ‘What’s a sting?’ Oh, let me explain.
A sting is a short bit of music that filmmakers use to ‘punch up’ the mood of a scene.
Which kind of sting are we talking about here?
Well, it sure as hell wasn’t the ‘wha-wha-wha’ that’s used to punctuate a pratfall.
If Mitchel had been standing over me with a knife, ready to do his version of the shower scene in Psycho, then it’d have been one of those hair-raising glissandos done on the violin. The kind all the hack directors use when the serial killer’s about to pounce on and fillet the young couple making out in the cabin by the haunted lake.
“Cassie,” Mitchel said, “let’s talk first. We’ve got things to discuss.”
Okay, no string-shrieks, then.
Mitchel sounds like he’s about to reveal something new and possibly unsavory. So we need the sting used when the plot’s about to thicken: Dun-dun-DUN!
Mitchel approached me slowly, hands out, as if he were approaching an easily startled animal. But as he came within arm’s reach of me, I took a step back. I honestly don’t know if it was a conscious thing, or my nervous system had been hot-wired by my recent experiences to stay the friggin’ hell away from him. He saw my movement, sighed, and put his hands down by his side. He still spoke in the rich tones of the Lexus and whiskey ad pitchman, this time tempered by a slight tentativeness in his voice. The sound of a reproachful, sorry husband.
The question remained: was any of it real?
“Cassie,” he began, “I’m glad that I found you. I’ve been worried.”
“I’m sure you have,” I said flatly. “How did you find me?”
“I didn’t bug your car, if that’s what you’re thinking. Nor did I set up surveillance cameras in secret,” he said, alluding to what I’d done back at our condo. Yeah, like I was going to feel the slightest bit guilty about that. “Since our marriage, we share a bond. My family and you. It pulls at us, directs us to one another over time.”
I remembered how I’d felt some kind of bond, like a little filament of fishing line, tugging like an invisible leash at my neck. It made me shudder to think about it. Mitchel must have seen the dismay on my face, for he quickly moved to smooth that part over.
“It’s a very subtle thing,” he said soothingly. “It’s not like your species’ GPS, after all. It won’t tell me or my brothers exactly where you are. I came across your scent in Burbank, of all places. Knew you’d been to see the Sphinx. Since Circe’s long been her closest friend, it was logical to try and find you out here.”
“Okay, you were right,” I shot back. “Good for you. You get a gold star. So what?”
“So what? Cassie, I want you back. In a way, it makes me glad that you did see Circe, that you talked with the Sphinx.”
“Oh? Why?”
“Because now you’ve met others of my kind. The eternal. The immortal.”
“Only because I forced the issue, Mitchel!”
“I know, and I’m truly sorry.”
I let out a snort, crossed my arms and turned my back on him. Mitchel crossed the gap between us and laid his warm, strong hands on my shoulders. I closed my eyes. Smelled his familiar, reassuring, masculine scent, the light musk of the cologne he used each and every day. His hands felt perfectly, utterly human.
“I am sorry, Cassie, and I promise never to hold back something like that, ever again. I was…” Here, he paused as his voice caught for just a split second. “I was worried that if you knew what I was, that you’d have never understood, that you’d have run in terror.”
“I wasn’t exactly happily strolling away the last time we parted,” I said, though my own words lacked the angry conviction of earlier.
“What I do isn’t pleasant,” he agreed mournfully. “I can only hope that you’ll accept me again, in time, as a husband. I cannot help what I am. Think of me as a…well, as a force of nature.”
Mitchel’s words made sense, in a way. His words were like a siren song to me. He didn’t choose to be born to his job, after all. Really, how could he help what he was?
“I don’t know, Mitchel. What you do…how can I love someone who does what you do? It feels like…I don’t know, like I married the King’s Royal Executioner or something.”
“Don’t feel that way. I can take care of you, your friends, your family. I can keep them safe from harm. Be with me, Cassie. You’ll never have to worry about so much in this world, ever again.”
I screwed my eyes shut, tried to sort out the swirls of emotion within me. I thought of his warm body next to mine. His gentle touch. The times he’d come out to be with me on each of my film shoots, seeing me through all the things that the world had thrown my way before we got engaged…
Something went CLICK as the projector bulb went inside Miss Slow Learner’s brain.
I reached up and brushed Mitchel’s hands off my shoulders with twin slaps. I turned, and I swear that my eyes could have burned a hole in him. I had to work to unclench my jaw, work against the rising riptide of anger I felt.
I should have known. Should have sussed it out. At the very least, I should have figured it out once the judges for our divorce started coming down sick, each and every time our hearing date came up.
“If you can do that, if you can ‘protect’ me and those I hold dear?” I gritted, “Then you’re not a force of nature, not entirely. You can control this power of yours.”
My husband’s expression remained locked in a poker-faced grin as I went on.
“And if you can control this, then you brought disease and death, to each and every country that I visited. You purposely ruined my film career, made it so that I couldn’t find work after we were married!”
“You just have to see,” he said, almost cooing. “I had to, Cassie. I had to. Because you had to realize that there was a better way. To be under my protection. Dependent on me, not by the sweat and toi
l of your own brow. That’s what it means to be my wife. To embrace your femininity. So tell me: do you finally understand?”
Chapter Fifteen
Do you finally understand?
My husband, this thing I married, had finally revealed what he thought of our relationship. About my part in this ‘divine union.’
I stared at him like he was a completely new kind of loathsome, alien thing.
“You didn’t want me to depend upon the ‘sweat and toil’ of my brow? Mitchel, that was my life! My ability to...to create, to bring my art, my visions into the world! We are through! I’ll walk through fire to get my divorce from you!”
I turned away from him, tears of anger flooding my eyes, stalked towards the doors that led into the main theatre. Through my blurred vision, I saw that the Performance In Session display was still lit, but I hardly cared anymore.
That said, the little blonde hairs on the back of my neck all prickled and stood at attention as I heard my husband’s voice rasp out in something just over a growl.
“Don’t you turn your back on me, Cassie! You are mine!”
I risked a glance back. Wished I hadn’t.
Mitchel’s form melted, like runny wax from a candle held under a blowtorch. It was horrific and eye-popping at the same time. Even more so because I knew it was real. His body shifted, changed into something with a toothed snout and taloned claws like a shambling grizzly bear the size of a bulked-up Chevy Suburban. His tuxedo vanished, replaced by a coat of shimmering, shiny white fur slashed through with black stripes.
I stared for a moment. I’d rocked the bed with that creature so damned hard that the creaky box springs under the mattress had out counted the beats. Mitchel reared up and let out a roar that put the tiger in Circe’s bedroom to shame.
What did I do?
Let’s just say that Mama Van Deene didn’t raise her daughters to freeze up.
I followed it up with a rather dainty (by comparison) scream of my own and ran as fast as I could. Arms outstretched, pure terror threatening to overwhelm me, I burst through the theatre doors.
I almost tripped over my own two feet as I dashed down the crowded theatre’s main aisle. A few people in the audience let out startled gasps or cries of amazement as I passed by. Most turned to look at me, but without any special alarm. I’m pretty sure that Mitchel’s roar, not to mention my entrance, was assumed to be part of the act.
The rows of plush red theatre seats, packed almost solid with patrons, sloped down to a stage decorated around the sides with carvings of olive trees. Circe, resplendent and glittering like a multi-faceted diamond, stood in the center spotlight. She paused in the midst of her act, which involved her standing atop a huge white Siberian tiger. While surrounded by a ring of tawny male lions. Who were themselves surrounded by a ring of bright orange tigers.
The doors I’d come through exploded in a rain of wood and plaster as Mitchel’s shining white bear-tiger form tore through the too-small entrance. Predictably, the audience dissolved into a chaos of screaming, running people. I fought my way through the crowd that seemed to instantly materialize in the aisle as people jumped from their seats and ran for the side exits.
Circe, to her credit, merely frowned, as if she were annoyed that someone had stolen her Oscar-worthy moment of glory. Her eyes gleamed as she raised one hand, pointed at the Mitchel-creature, and spoke a single sentence to her big-cat entourage.
“Take care of that ruffian!”
A chorus of snarls rose from the stage. I shrieked as I fell to one knee. Felt the swish of air as Mitchel’s forepaw grasped where I’d stood a moment ago. In unison, the lions and tigers (no bears, oh my!) leapt from the stage and piled on Mitchel, tearing and snarling!
The mass of animals rolled to one side, crushing theatre chairs and tearing up wide swathes of carpet. A howl of pain from Mitchel. A lash of one mighty paw, and a pair of lions went flying. The big cats hit one of the second-story viewing boxes, splintering the olive-tree designs, and landed with a crunch. The animals shimmered into the still forms of two of Circe’s men.
I rolled, pushed my way through the last people fleeing from the carnage. Circe came to the edge of the stage, grasped my hand, and hauled me up. A whimper, followed by a crash, and a tiger landed in an unconscious heap on the boards next to us. Circe pulled me backstage as the tiger turned back into a broken, bleeding man. Mitchel roared again, smashing yet another lion to the floor with a bloody, oversized paw. Clearly, Circe’s animal-men weren’t going to hold him back much longer.
She didn’t hesitate as she took me around to the private lipstick-red elevator that had brought me to her backstage demesne in the first place. We got inside and she pressed the button marked GARAGE. The doors closed with a ding, and as we began to move, she slid open a compartment below the buttons. A tiny touchpad folded out; Circe placed a fingertip to the sensor, which glowed green. I heard a click, and the compartment hummed as it extended a case the size and thickness of a Gideon hotel-room bible.
“Take this,” she said, and I grabbed it, stuffed it into my now stuffed-to-bursting handbag. Said handbag’s handles were now twisted into a pretzel shape around my shoulder, but at least I hadn’t lost the damned thing when Mitchel had pounced after me. “It contains an atomizer filled with the water of the River Mnemosyne. Quite powerful. Whatever you spray it on, it will make others forget that the item even exists. You’ll also find a compact, but I wouldn’t use it for your makeup. Medusa’s last gaze is contained within the compact’s mirror.”
“I know about that one,” I said, my breath puffing from my lungs as if I’d just run a marathon. “I saw Clash of the Titans. The original, the re-make, the re-imagining of the re-make, the re-boot of the re-imagining…”
“Then I believe that shall do. And finally, there is a parchment, contained in a silver scroll tube. Please do your best not to lose it, darling. It contains the only known copy of the instructions of a ritual. Specifically, the ritual by which the union of a mortal and an immortal can at last be dissolved.”
“I won’t lose it.”
“I should hope not. Dora must get these instructions, to perform this ritual before your husband or his brothers get their claws back on you. If they recapture you, I suspect that they will find a way to make your enchantment unbreakable, even by a fellow immortal.”
The elevator slowed, and the doors slid open. Outside, the quartet of security guards snapped to attention as their employer appeared. A bestial bellow from far above. The scrape and squeal of bending metal. A twang, and the car shuddered as we stepped off of it.
“Get going!” Circe shouted. “We shall buy you as much time as we can!”
I squeezed her arm in thanks and ran for my car. My shoes clacked and scraped on the rough concrete as I skidded to a stop. Groped for my keys. Threw the door open and my handbag in the passenger seat.
A series of snap-crackles. I got in, shoved the key home and turned it as I watched Circe use a wand she’d pulled out of her jacket pocket to transform her guards. When the men had stood a moment before, a pair of tigers, a sleek puma, and a midnight-black panther ringed the elevator’s exit.
I winced as a boom echoed through the garage. A pair of hellishly long taloned hands tore the elevator’s roof wide open. In a flash, Mitchel erupted from the hole. A roar, and his bear-tiger form smashed his way out of the cramped confines of the elevator car and into the garage.
Chapter Sixteen
I threw my Porsche into reverse as Circe’s man-animals flung themselves onto Mitchel’s body. Swung the car around, shifted into drive. The sorceress looked up at me, mouthed ‘go on!’ and plunged into the fray, emerald beams of energy shooting from the tip of her wand like an Old West six-shooter.
I floored the gas pedal. Shriek of rubber on concrete. The lung-choking smell of burning tires flooded the garage as I accelerated up the spiral ramp and out into the night.
After that, I think I just went into autopilot mode. For the life of m
e, I can’t imagine how I got out of the city without a) being stopped for speeding, b) running over someone, or c) getting nabbed by a supernatural tiger-bear nightmare of a husband. All I know is that I came to my senses sometime later, when a truly wicked cramp shot up my calves and wrists. From driving the past forty, fifty minutes gripping the wheel and keeping the pedal close to the floor. From the fear which had kept my muscles tense enough to bounce a quarter off of.
I looked around. The highway was well and truly black with the fall of night, and it would have been generous to say that the road lighting was sparse. Eventually, I passed a road marker. No listing of nearby exits or towns. Only a metal rectangle and shield that said: NORTH – INTERSTATE 15.
I pulled over at the next highway rest stop. The place was reasonably well lit, and a crisp, refreshing night breeze had picked up. I usually didn’t chance taking a break at a rest stop, especially after dark. Something definitely unsavory about places like these for a single woman on the road.
But the half-dozen or so parking spaces were empty. And as far as I could see into the three hundred and sixty degrees of blackness, I didn’t spot so much as a porch light on a distant house. If anyone was waiting to grab me in the public restroom, they’d have had to cross a couple dozen miles of desert to get there.
The most pressing business, shaking the dew off the lily, got taken care of first. Then I spent a little time removing the makeup from my face. Something told me that I wasn’t going to going anywhere glamorous from now on.
My stomach remained in knots, so I avoided the junk in the vending machine and went back to my car. I cracked the windows open and savored the sweetness of the night air. So clean and dry that it tasted metallic on my tongue.
Circe’s package lay jammed in the bloated mass of fabric I called a handbag. I didn’t want to even think about messing with its mystical contents until the morning. But I pulled the card she’d given me from out of my jacket pocket and gave it a look.
I Married the Third Horseman (Paranormal Romance and Divorce) Page 6
