I Married the Third Horseman (Paranormal Romance and Divorce)

by Michael Angel

  I Married the Third Horseman

  Michael Angel

  Smashwords Edition

  Copyright 2013

  Michael Angel

  ISBN: 9781301073245

  Includes a sneak preview of

  Michael Angel’s bestselling

  Fantasy and forensics novel

  Centaur of the Crime

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except in the case of a reviewer, who may quote brief passages embodied in critical articles or in a review.

  Trademarked names appear throughout this book. Rather than use a trademark symbol with every occurrence of a trademarked name, names are used in an editorial fashion, with no intention of infringement of the respective owner’s trademark.

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  I Married the Third Horseman

  Chapter One

  You know, when other women realize that their marriage just isn’t cutting the wedding cake, they go get a quickie divorce. Wham, bam, thank you man, and don’t forget to send the alimony check on time.

  Not me.

  Oh, no, I couldn’t just get something as simple as a divorce from my husband. I needed a friggin’ exorcism.

  And that fun little errand had brought me four thousand feet up into New Mexico’s rugged Sangre de Cristo Mountains. Up onto some godforsaken plateau covered in scraggly pine trees. To add to the surreal look of the place, a couple dozen pebble-sized stones, spaced along an abstract pattern, emitted faint light as if they’d been dipped in cheap Day-Glo paint.

  I faced a roaring campfire, sitting on a log that had been split in half to make a crude bench. The rough ridges of the wood threatened to tear right through my thin blue jeans. I looked truly pathetic.

  Last time I’d checked myself in a mirror, about three hours ago and four thousand feet lower down, my eyes were sunken in and dark enough to do a raccoon justice. My straw-blonde hair looked no better than a rats’ nest. One that had been condemned by the rats before they moved out.

  My teeth chattered like a matching pair of porcelain-veneered castanets. I pulled the Navajo blanket more closely about my shoulders. The blanket was a garish thing, decorated with red, yellow, and green squares and whorls and probably some kind of Aztec god that ate people’s hearts at the local Waffle House. Of course, all I cared about right now was that the damned thing kept me halfway warm.

  Dora, the shaman performing the sacred rites for me, didn’t look anything like I’d imagined. Say ‘female shaman’ to the central casting geeks at Paramount or Warner Brothers, and see what you get. They would’ve sent over someone old, wizened, with great facial lines and a kind expression. Maybe who managed to pull off the vibes of Wes Studi crossed with Maya Angelou.

  No, Dora looked more like one of those tawny-skinned, impossibly fresh-faced teenage girls in jeans-and-silk tops that women’s magazines were always trying to pass off as self-actualized housewives. Women say that they hate the girls in Playboy who display cellulite-free butts and triple-D silicone implants. Nuh-uh. The girls we really love to loathe are the ones in Ladies’ Home Journal or Good Housekeeping who pretend that they’ve blown past 35 with nary a wrinkle to be seen.

  Dora began a liquid, repetitive drone of a chant that rose and fell with the wind. She raised her delicate arms and began to move. The gestures, as elegant and fluid as the motions of the models I’d once filmed in Mapplethorpe’s studio, gracefully turned into some kind of interpretive dance.

  I shouldn’t have jinxed myself right then and there, but I did. I thought for a split second that hey, maybe this is actually going to work. Maybe I’d be free and gloriously single again.

  Stupid, stupid Cassie.

  A low growl came from just beyond where the firelight danced at the edge of the clearing. I opened my mouth to say something, anything, but I really didn’t need to. Dora had heard it too.

  She stopped her dance. Turned so that her back was to the leaping yellow flames. Slowly, she dropped into a defensive crouch.

  Dora held her ground as the shining white bear-tiger thing that had stalked me all the way from California slipped out from between the trees and stood, completely unafraid, in the open space of the clearing.

  It looked like my husband had decided to show up.

  The man – the man-thing – that I’d dated, taken to bed, cuddled between my legs, and promised marriage vows began to pace back and forth. As if trying to decide the best way to attack its prey. Dora didn’t take her eyes off of it. Neither did I. But as that dark-humor-part of my brain caught up with what I was seeing here, I let out a bubble of a laugh, something that would’ve done justice to a Girl Scout who’d gone boy watching for the first time.

  That thing, that Mitchel-thing I’d slept with?

  I’d actually walked down the aisle with it. Taken marriage vows with it. For richer or for poorer. For better or for worse.

  And for sickness and in health.

  Oh, that was just too friggin’ much.

  Mitchel’s bear-tiger form let out a roar that must’ve shaken the window fixtures on houses as far away as Santa Fe. I felt the very air itself recoil from that savage sound.

  And I could smell his breath now, in his beast form. Unpleasant, burning bacon on hot copper kind of scent.

  He could see that the only way to me was through Dora. Fangs glistened in the moonlight. He leaped at her. Ebony claws thrashed the air. Like some kind of horrific threshing machine come to life.

  Freeze Frame.

  Hey, hold up for a moment. This is me, Mrs. Cassie Thantos. Formerly Miss Cassie Van Deene of Chatsworth, California. I’m sorry to interrupt your reading enjoyment just as it’s getting good.

  I know, I know. This is the part where, if this was a feature-length motion picture, that the F/X budget would be kicking in. Some cool CGI to show the creature-thing I married, maybe some high-flying wire-work that would show Dora doing a triple-flip karate kick that would flatten Mitchel’s ball sack.

  I’m stopping the story for a moment to ask you to please take this seriously. This really, really happened to me. And before anyone out there starts making blonde jokes, don’t think that I wouldn’t have noticed that my husband went around on all fours and wearing a Day-Glo tiger pelt instead of a European-cut Armani jacket with French cuffs.

  Believe me, he was a lot better dressed at the start of all this.

  I want to start us there.

  I need to start us there.

  If it helps put you into the scene of events, then that’s all well and good, you know. But it’ll help me a lot more if I just get it out of my system, off my friggin’ chest, and onto the page.

  So think of it as being my therapy buddy.

  Stick with me, okay?

  And…jump to Scene 1, Act 1. Way before Dora and I met the creature of the Shaggy White Lagoon on a mountaintop north of Taos.

  Chapter Two

  Where I grew up, in one of the sundrenched suburbs of Los Angeles, you have to think sunblock, sunblock, sunblock all the time. At least, I thought of sunblock all the time. I wanted to be in the entertainment biz, and they wanted f
resh, not leathery, wrinkled faces.

  Sixteen years ago, looking sweet and innocent and totally do-able as all get-out, I’d taken first place as Miss Topanga Canyon. Newsflash to anyone who needs to buy a clue: you don’t win that by writing essays on solving world hunger.

  Ten years ago, I decided I wanted to make small, independent films. I wanted to win more trophies. Be invited to those special parties down in Hollywood, you know, where the guys all look like they’ve had their jaw lines carved from Trevino marble.

  Artistic guys, ones that appreciate a woman who can wring tears from an audience by pulling a wide-angle dolly shot. And most importantly, sensitive guys, ones who somehow just know how to make a woman feel special when they hold open the door of the Ferrari or Bentley or the Gulfstream private jet for you.

  I put up with the smart-aleck comments that I picked the wrong side of the camera to be on. Ha, ha, ha. Jerks. I soldiered on, doing films that appealed to the direct-to-video crowd. A biography on Millard Fillmore for the A&E channel. A crapload of commercials touting food products that I wouldn’t feed to my dog, let alone children.

  Yes, I know what you’re thinking. Why do it? It paid mucho dinero. It was grist for my mill, as far as I was concerned.

  Life planted a big, fat, open-palmed smack! on my cheek right then. Mom had a fatal heart attack while out to dinner with some guy she’d been dating after she’d split from Dad. I’d been in Oregon, doing an ad for some damned chowder house out on the coast, but the way I heard it, she went quietly and passed out in the middle of a plate of veal picatta.

  I can think of worse ways to die.

  At least now, being married to Mitchel, I really can.

  But at the time, understand that I’d never had so much as a pet goldfish belly up and die on me. So Mom’s passing sank me down into a well of depression, where one moment I blamed myself for not being there, the next I would be thanking God that she didn’t suffer much, and then the next I’d be bawling my eyes out and stuffing my face with chocolate éclairs to dull the pain.

  But like any good artist, when life gives you lemons, you go out and make a boatload of lemon-drop martinis. I did just that, and when I woke up at a friend’s house, naked and in bed with a producer I sorta-kinda-knew on one side – and his girlfriend on the other – I knew it was time to do something more productive.

  So I flat out dumped every single conventional idea I’d had, chucked out everything in the old film can of the mind, and headed out to Guatemala with four shoulder-mounted Cinegraf cameras, a trio of cameramen, two sound guys, and a partridge in a friggin’ pear tree.

  I had gritty thoughts on the brainpan. I’d been filming stuff that had been controlled. Fake, in the sense that it was all so very sanitized and safe. If I’d been making Mexican chalupas, they’d have tasted like someone had made a run to the local Taco Bell down the block. Mom’s death shook that out of me, I think.

  The little corner of Latin America I’d plunked myself down in was reaping a bumper crop of unpleasantness called Machupo. For those of you who don’t know what Machupo is, it’s the local, Latino variant of a nasty virus you can find in Africa called Ebola. Different name, same fun way for everyone who got the bug to check out: vomiting until your stomach burst, or leaking blood from every orifice until you ran out of enough human-juice to carry oxygen to your brain.

  We filmed an outbreak of our little vomit-and-bloody death pal in Chiapas City. Chiapas sits in a valley, a steamy, tropical hellhole that makes the rest of Guatemala say, ‘Amigo, I hear you saw Chiapas. Ayyo! Maybe next time, you visit someplace on the nice side of the tracks, por favor?

  The paint peeling off the stucco and laterite walls throughout the city looked a million years old. The effect through the camera lens was awe-inspiringly awful. Post-apocalypto-tropico, I dubbed it. When you combined the peeling paint with the scum-tinted sunshine and the crumbling, mildewed edges of the buildings, the city itself looked like it had contracted a fatal case of leprosy.

  We took some horrible risks doing the film. Things I can’t say I’m all that proud of.

  Like bringing the entire film crew out to a field hospital that’d been hacked out of the trackless green jungle. Abandoned by the local doctors and nurses out of fear of El Machupo. Filming people who’d died not more than an hour before. The smell of gangrenous meat hanging in the air like a curtain. Eyes sightless, fly-covered and staring at the ceiling like gluey marbles.

  But enough about that.

  Suffice it to say that I got the macabre footage in the can. I brought it back to a studio in Burbank, locked myself in a basement room with an editor who smoked like a chimney with a jammed flue, and chopped it into a film that I titled, in a momentary flash of artistic genius, Machupo.

  And the work really was friggin’ brilliant. I can say that without sounding like an uppity bitch, because we took it to the Sundance Film Festival out east of Salt Lake City, Utah.

  It rocked Sundance.

  Hell, it rocked Robert Redford.

  He gave me that warm smile that had always made my Mom’s knees buckle, shook my hand, and said, “If it didn’t make me feel like losing my lunch, I’d be asking for a role in your follow-up.”

  I think that meant that the Sundance Kid liked it.

  Three days later, after all the film crews and their hangers-on had upped stakes, I was still staying at the Gower Gulch, one of the town’s better ranch-style hotels. People from Los Angeles love to bag on places named things like ‘Gower Gulch’ – calling it kitschy, overdone. But I liked it.

  Well, maybe putting the gold-foil wrapped chunk of jerky on the room pillow instead of a mint was a little much.

  I’d come out on the second-story balcony, which was made of wide, straight lengths of polished redwood planking. I took a deep sip of coffee (two sugars, two dashes of real cream, because I’d decided that calories weren’t going to count today) and rested my palm on the moist, dewy railing. The glorious, snow-capped Wasatch Range made up the backdrop. The mountains were tinged blue by the distance, which added to their almost unearthly charm. Sunlight slanted in from the east, which lit up the mountains with an expectant sense of drama.

  And right then, that’s when I first saw Mitchel. When I first met him.

  Oh, God.

  Give me a moment, okay? It just sounds so corny, but the way he looked, the way he stepped into the mise en scène of my life, he really looked like he was the answer to a woman’s dreams.

  Chapter Three

  Like a knight of old, Mitchel rode up towards me on a white horse. I’m not making that up. Literally, a big white stallion with an ivory-colored mane, silver-tinted bridle, and a set of muscles that bulged under the horse’s skin like bunches of that hemp rope they use to keep ocean liners tied to the dock.

  What’s more, Mitchel wore a white ribbed sweater with a cream-colored shield on his lapel. Printed on the shield was a golden crown and longbow. It made him look both like a medieval herald, and a present-day Ivy-league guy gone west. A Connecticut yuppie in King Arthur’s court, that sort of thing.

  I mean, if I’d filmed it for a commercial or something, even the studio suits – a bunch of people who don’t know decent art product from their left nut – would have rolled their eyes and said ‘Don’t you think that’s a wee bit clichéd?’

  As for the rest of him, he had clean, sharp features and stubble-free cheeks. He looked like the man they cast for the Old Spice after-shave commercials in the 70’s, only with a neat wave of ebony-colored hair. Mom’s knees wouldn’t just have buckled, they’d have crumbled to dust.

  Eat your heart out, Robert Redford.

  I remember sighing a sigh that should have been followed by a line like ‘Romeo, sweet Romeo, where art thou? For I’ve been freezing my butt off on this balcony for more than an hour, you slacker.’

  But what actually went through my mind was: Wow. I’d sure like to meet a man like that. If only he’d ride up to me and call me by my name.

&
nbsp; And right then, right as the thoughts had done no more than pop into my brain, he did just that. Abso-friggin’ amazing. He galloped straightaway up the emerald swath of field, reined in his horse, and looked up at me.

  His eyes were the exact shade of blue that practically leapt off the spring vests hanging in the shops on Rodeo Drive. Something inside me went zing! and melted.

  “You must be Mrs. Van Deene,” he said, with a smile. His voice was deep, full, and perfectly pitched, like a properly tuned bass bassoon. If we’d been chatting within an hour of Los Angeles, I’d have sent him over to a voiceover studio to earn some extra money touting Lexus luxury sedans or Tennessee whiskey, stat.

  “Actually, I’m not Mrs. Van Deene,” I replied. “You’re thinking of my mom. I’m just Cassie.”

  He nodded, as if to store the knowledge in some kind of inner storage bank, which made me smile. I couldn’t help myself, for he was such a beautiful man. It sounds kind of odd, I guess, to describe a man as ‘beautiful’, but his looks really did fit the word. And I guess I was a little giddy, having done so well at Sundance, processing the horrors I’d seen in Central America, short on sleep, long on coffee, all those things.

  Of course, it could have just been that I hadn’t really had a man between my legs in a while to ride and be ridden. Could’ve been that part of my anatomy that spoke up loud and clear. But let’s just put that aside on the shelf next to the preserves and the sugar-free sweeteners for the moment.

  “My apologies, Miss…Cassie. I saw you standing on the balcony as I came in from the trail, and I wanted to meet you.”

  “That’s flattering. You’ve got good eyes if you could see me from out there.”

  “It’s not as far as it looks. But I recognized you from the awards ceremony last night. My brothers and I don’t watch much live entertainment, normally. But we do like to go to the Sundance Festival, since it’s down the road from our family’s ranch.”