“They must consult an awful lot, if their jobs take them into those spots.”
“You could say that.”
We finally got to our table, where he poured me a glass of fizzy champagne.
“To us, Cassie.”
Well, shoot, why not? I deserved a little bit of happiness after I’d been brushed by the hand of death.
“To us, Mitchel.”
The party swirled about us, but I could only see him. Mitchel. The man I was certainly in love with by then.
I’ve got two more things to say about all of this, and the first is that when I look back on things, I must’ve been abuzz with enough NRE (New Relationship Energy, also known as infatuation) to light up the Hollywood sign. The second thing I have to say is that the courtship was dreamy, Harlequin novel material, where Mitchel either gave me the space I needed, or hit the sheets with me whenever I hinted at wanting a little action in bed.
Mitchel arranged our wedding with a private service. We left as man and wife in a stretch limo that whisked us off to the airport, where we hopped a specially chartered jet for our honeymoon, off to a no-way-for-real private tropical island off the coast of Bali. It was a paradise made up of an oval expanse of sugar-white sand, coconut palms straight out of Gilligan’s Island, and a fully modernized cabin rigged up to look like a Polynesian grass hut.
Three weeks to spend doing absolutely nothing. Nothing except having sex, drinking strawberry daiquiris, having sex, cuddling together in a hammock strung between a pair of palm trees, having sex, wandering hand-in-hand on the coral-pink beaches, having yet more sex…
You get the idea. But you know what?
That’s when the strange and weird Twilight Zone style crap started happening around us. When everything in my perfect, happy-ever-after ending of a life that Cinderella herself would’ve pawned off a glass slipper for started going straight to hell.
Chapter Seven
I’d long been used to sleeping by myself. Sweet, deep slumber that only babies and grandmas seem to be able to get at a moment’s notice. It took me a while to get comfortable sleeping with a man.
But once I got used to having Mitchel’s big, warm male body lying next to me in bed, it was like my own internal thermostat got reset. I’d wake up a couple of hours later, cold and trembling if he wasn’t there. His side of the bed would be cool, if not cold. I’d normally go back to sleep, of course, and wake up in the morning with him dozing at my side. I began thinking I was simply dreaming the entire thing.
After about a week of this, I decided to grab a book and try to stay up to see when he came back. It wasn’t exactly like he was cheating on me – we were the only damned people on the island – but I wanted to see if he was a chronic sleepwalker.
It took a few hours, but as the sky outside the window of our cabin grayed towards dawn, something strange happened. I could’ve sworn that I heard animal sounds. First the sound of a horse’s hooves plodding through sand, followed by the tread of something wide and heavy outside the cabin door.
My skin goose-pimpled like nobody’s business.
I heard the doorknob turn with a click and I relaxed. Unless lions or tigers or bears (oh, my!) had figured out how to use the doorknob, it wasn’t like I was going to be eaten up anytime soon. Mitchel appeared in the door to the bedroom wearing a freshly pressed pair of shorts and tee-shirt, looking as calm and relaxed as ever, though he frowned when he saw I was awake.
“Something wrong?” he asked. “I was just out on the beach for a few minutes. Wanted to get some air.”
“No, I got up a couple minutes ago. Needed to use the little girl’s room.”
“Well, then…” He sat on the bed and stroked my leg from shinbone to thigh with his warm, strong fingers. “Since we’re both up and about, perhaps we can make use of the time.”
Strange, now that I think about it. Not twenty minutes later, I dug my fingernails into his shoulder blades as he drove into me, cried out his name in ecstasy as I climaxed. That’s when I realized something. We hadn’t even come off the honeymoon yet.
And we were already lying to each other.
The next day’s picnic on the beach was interrupted when a little green and white cutter putt-putt-puttered up to the one usable dock of our island. Mitchel and I put some decent clothes on and came to meet the man who’d disembarked. He wore a neatly starched naval uniform with the red and white Indonesian flag stitched across one chest pocket. He introduced himself as Captain Patika, and then explained that he was here to ferry us to the airport in Jakarta.
“Whoa, slow down there. That can’t be right,” I protested. “We’ve still got a week left on our rental.”
“That is up to you and your travel agency,” Patika said, almost apologetically. “You must leave with me now. The government has declared a state of emergency and will shut down the airport for a month or more by tomorrow morning.”
“What on earth for?”
“A new kind of influenza has been identified on the island of Sumatra, ma’am. Very deadly, very dangerous. Unless you wish to stay here and take your chances.”
“I’m sure we’ll be fine, but I’d prefer not to be stranded here,” Mitchel said quietly. I stared at him, but he shrugged and went to get our things together.
We caught the last flight out of the Jakarta airport, where everyone in the terminal was glued to the television screens. It did look bad, I have to admit that. Over ten thousand infections reported already, fifteen hundred dead, and more cases cropping up every hour.
It helped me put things in perspective, but any way you slice it, I was pretty damned well put out by the time we landed in Sydney. Mitchel took it in stride. He wired more money from his accounts in Salt Lake City so we could finish out our honeymoon.
And would you believe it? Four days later, after yet another night of sleepwalking (as best I could figure it), the Down Under news equivalent of CNN reported a terrifying new outbreak of something called dengue fever. The city shut down services right and left to implement emergency mosquito spraying.
The hits just kept on rolling along, too. After we got back to the States, I got called in to do a shoot for some campy vampire flick set in Veracruz, Mexico. Everything went well until Mitchel came to visit. Another sleepwalking event. And two days later, malaria devastated the entire region, leading to hundreds of deaths.
I pulled up stakes and went to Beijing to do a commercial for the tourist industry. “Come to Beijing – it’ll take your breath away!” Yeah, great jingle. Right up to the point where Mitchel visited me on the set. A new outbreak of SARS ripped through the country, filling the hospitals with people who drowned in their own sticky, coffee-colored phlegm.
It didn’t seem to matter where I went. A documentary in Seoul, Korea was followed by an outbreak of hemorrhagic fever. That oddball strain of flu that shut down Jakarta hit Madrid when I went to do a music video. And the day after Mitchel stopped by to see me film a commercial in South Dakota, would you believe that Sioux Falls suffered a major outbreak of venereal disease? It was as if – overnight – everyone in the whole damned city had forgotten how to use condoms!
Look, I know that I’m not the sharpest grain of film in the camera, but for the life of me, I couldn’t figure out why or how these horrible things were happening. I only knew that when Mitchel showed up to visit me on the set, bad news was to follow.
And that was driving my cash flow down to zero. No finished projects, no more money. Sure, Mitchel had enough cash to spare for both of us to live any way we pleased, but that wasn’t the friggin’ point.
So that reptile brain, the one which had been whispering disturbing things in my ear for some time now, hijacked my thoughts and made me do a little extra work. Simple, really. I borrowed some surveillance cameras and set them up all around the interior and exterior of the condo in Malibu.
Things went fine for a week or so, and then Mitchel pulled his vanishing act again.
I acted as if everything wa
s normal the next morning. Mitchel said he had things to take care of downtown, so we breakfasted on a wonderful stack of pecan pancakes smothered in rich, sweet maple syrup. I kissed him on his firm, cool lips as usual when he went out the door.
I held a radiantly warm mug of coffee between my palms and closed my eyes as I heard his car start. I waited until the engine noise faded away as he drove off. I showered, changed from my silk pj’s into some jeans and a tank top, and then went upstairs to my editing office.
Whenever I worked from home, this was my retreat. The walls are lined with creaky walnut-wood bookshelves, jammed with digital drives. A white-trimmed bay window with a rusty crank opener in the corner overlooks the Pacific.
On the left, by the door, is a king-size desk made of coffee-stained teak. Perched atop the desk is a 32-inch color monitor that hooks into the top-of-the-line Macintosh. And it was all linked to my little spy cameras.
I typed in a few commands to download the night’s surveillance video. The footage that scrolled across my screen looked like that grainy, gray stuff that you always see on the ten o’clock news. You know, the ‘secure-cam’ footage of the wannabe gangsters knocking over the local 7-11 in South Central Los Angeles.
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.
Chapter Eight
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, stea
lthy-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.
Chapter Nine
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.
I Married the Third Horseman (Paranormal Romance and Divorce) Page 3
