“You okay, Missy?” Pa asked.
“I’m fine now,” I said, keeping it light as I got back in my car. “Just a mild attack of agoraphobia, that’s all. See you ‘round.”
Four more hours on the winding loops of highway. The landscape got rougher, the mountains got higher, and the air got drier. Dry enough that my old habit, thinking of sunscreen, sunscreen, sunscreen, nagged me throughout the entire afternoon’s drive. But I didn’t have any on me, and after Pueblo, I didn’t dare stop again.
The sun began to sink in the west as I turned off the freeway north of Taos and bumped along a country road pockmarked with hubcap-swallowing potholes. The GPS flashed ‘You have arrived at your destination’ as I pulled up to a pair of weather-beaten wooden posts. One had been sawed off at waist level. Atop it sat a jumbo-sized residential mailbox, complete with a thumb-sized door hinge and a badly corroded padlock.
The other post held a collection of signs. From top to bottom they read:
TRONDHEIM (~7,579 KM)
OSAKA (~9,905 KM)
ATHENS (~10,251 KM)
THEBES (~10,700 KM)
NINEVEH (~11,307 KM)
JERUSALEM (~11,418 KM)
HEAVEN – OLYMPUS – ASGARD (followed by an upward-pointing arrow.)
HADES – ASST. UNDERWORLDS (followed by a downward-pointing arrow.)
Finally, at the bottom, a longer note written with impeccable printing:
TRESPASSERS
WILL BE TURNED TO STONE,
PULVERIZED INTO GRAVEL,
AND USED AS CHEAP FILLER
TO PAVE MY DRIVEWAY!
In spite of myself, I grinned at that part. Nice.
The ‘driveway’ was more of a beaten path among the tall grass. I winced as I followed its trail up, up, and further up into the Sangre de Cristo Mountains, cutting long switchbacks along the slope until it disappeared into dark, brooding copses of pine trees.
A cold wind gusted past me as I contemplated the way. Then a stray cloud flitted over the sun, throwing everything into shadow. This felt foreboding. This felt like THE END.
“Don’t be ridiculous,” I said to myself. “Maybe we’re at the final reel, that’s all. Get hold of yourself, ‘Dancer of the Sun’!”
So I did what every person does at the start of a long journey: I put one foot onto the path. Followed it with the other. Step-one, step-two, and so on, ad infinitum. In no time, I’d crested the first rise and looked back down on the bright silver shape of my car.
That whole ‘the end’ thing did chill me, though. I’d never envisioned my life as a damned adventure serial. Tune in again next week, to find out how Cassie, our plucky heroine, escapes the marriage trap this week!
This was going to end. One way or another, this evening would close everything out, for good or ill.
I knew it in my bones.
Chapter Thirty
Supposedly, the rugged peaks of the mountain range I now trudged through were called the Sangre de Cristo, or ‘Blood of Christ.’
Sangre de Cristo, my fanny.
More like Sangre de Freezo.
The stiff breeze I’d felt about a thousand feet lower down the mountain redoubled its effort now. It ripped the heat from my body like a cosmetologist at a salon, tugging back a layer of warm wax. And even though there was no hair removal involved, it still felt like it carved its signature into my flesh with a multitude of little knives.
I did my best to ignore it. Head down, keeping my pace up, until I reached the first gnarled, twisted thickets of scrub pine. Soon, the thickets grew taller and denser, shielding me from some of the awful wind. My teeth began to chatter. I mean, I spotted pockets of snow snuggled up to the trees, that’s how cold it was.
Freeze Frame.
Look, I need you to cut me a little slack here.
The profiles I’ve seen on the Audience-O-Meters (or whatever the suits from marketing call it these days), say that people like a certain kind of protagonist:
One who takes action to handle their situation.
(Okay, check, I got that.)
One who they can relate to.
(I think I have that one down. Not many people out there marrying supernatural creatures, I know. But at least a few must’ve gone out with a creep/stalker/crazy-ex-from-hell before. So I’ll score myself a gimmie on that one.)
Ah, and here’s the kicker: One who is sympathetic.
Therapy buddy, nobody is going to keep following this story if I lose their sympathy. And the quickest way I can think of for doing that is if you hang out, watching Poor Little Miss Blonde Woman whine her way up the mountain for the next hour. So, let’s just hit the FAST-FORWARD button on this thing.
Okay?
There goes Cassie, shooting up the mountain in wonderful 4X fast-forward. Watch…as she takes the hairpin turns of the switchbacks at breakneck speed! Marvel…as she fights with the tangles of her long blonde hair getting blown into her eyes and mouth! And then follow along as she shuffles at the quick-step up and down the last roll of the land, emerging from the pine forest to see…
…and, let’s switch back to PLAY now.
From the woods at my back, a pack of coyotes set up a chorus of yips and howls, as if celebrating my arrival. But I ignored them as I stepped out onto a wide, open plateau. A bare, gravel-strewn expanse the size of a football field stretched ahead of me, up to a gentle rise covered with a strange collection of trees.
Those trees grew more and more curious as I crossed the gravel and drew closer. There were some pine trees, yes, but interspersed with those were trees I thought liked warmer temperatures. Cypress, oak, and…it even looked like a couple fruit-bearing olive trees had been thrown into the mix.
Beneath these trees, the grounds had been as carefully manicured as the pages of a New Age magazine’s spread on the latest ‘rustic’ day spa. Roughly hewn tables, lawn chairs with plush cushions, and a Santa-Fe style fire pit and hearth. And thank you, whoever watched over semi-frozen film directors, because I also spotted a cozy little cabin.
The building looked like it had been hewn from trees cut down from when dinosaurs still roamed the world. Green and purple lichen splotched the walls, verdant vines trailed along the roof. A round door of the kind that Bilbo Baggins would’ve recognized punctuated the side of the building.
That door opened, and a young woman with an olive complexion and a tight coil of shiny black hair stepped out onto the wooden porch. She wore jeans like mine, a blue cotton blouse, and a dun-colored deerskin jacket.
“Hello, Cassandra,” the woman said, kindly. “I’m Dora Pahnn, and I’m truly glad that you made it this far. Especially since I couldn’t use my column to guide you anymore.”
I blinked. I suppose that I shouldn’t have been surprised, given all the whacked-out crap that I’d been seeing as of late. But somewhere deep inside, I supposed that I’d been expecting something…I don’t know, something more.
The way that the Sphinx, Circe, and Gabriel had spoken of her – with something between reverence and awe – I was expecting someone who lived in a temple done up with Greek columns. Someone who wore a skin cap with antlers on their head and shot lightning from their fingers, or something. Not someone who could’ve graced the cover of the Italian edition of Better Homes and Gardens.
But at the present, the only thing that came out of my mouth was a request.
“Do you have…anything warm…to drink?” I asked, between the clackity-clackity spasms of my teeth chattering.
She gasped, as if just becoming aware of my shivering, bedraggled appearance. Dora reached inside the door and brought out a garishly colored Navajo blanket. In no time, she’d swept me up in it and then coaxed me over to the nearly empty fire pit. She sat me at one of the split-log benches and then pulled a pair of stones the size and shape of plum tomatoes from her pocket.
Dora knelt by the pit, knocked the stones together, and tossed them onto the remaining pile of half-charred wood.
With a whoosh, f
lames leaped out and blossomed into a deliciously warm fire. I tried to keep from doing more than bugging my eyes out. Neat trick, that. The Sharper Image catalog would’ve paid a pretty penny for a pair of those rocks.
“Wait right here,” she instructed me. I nodded, focused on thawing out before anything I valued on my body suffered freezer burn, until she returned and handed me a small, steaming mug of something that smelled like a rich, dark tea.
“Oh, thank you,” I said, carefully slurping a tiny bit. The tastes of cinnamon, cloves, and alcohol rode herd on the tea flavors as everything went down in a nice, comfy waterfall of warmth.
“Go ahead, get as much of it down as you can. It won’t burn you. It’s a special blend of mine. Black tea mixed with spices, ancient restorative herbs, and a dash of Bailey’s Irish Cream. Makes it go down smoother, I’ve found.”
“Mmm…” I said appreciatively, as I finished the mug in a trio of gulps. Already, I felt a little firmer on my feet. “You and Circe ought to set up shop. You’d put the energy drink guys out of business in months.”
“Cee Cee can do anything that she puts her mind to. And I want to hear more about how my favorite old-school sorceress is doing. After we settle what brought you here. Gabriel has kept me posted about your marital troubles. He says that you also managed to bring the ritual by which your union can at last be dissolved.”
“Yes, I have it,” I said, feeling the reassuring weight in my jacket pocket. “You know them, then? The Thantos brothers?”
“I suppose you could say that they are long acquaintances of mine, yes,” she intoned. She was quiet for a moment, and I got the distinct impression that she was surveying me. Luckily, I also got the impression that she approved of what she saw. “I take it that you want to annul your marriage to Mitchel Thantos? Finally, permanently, irrevocably? Because there’s no going back.”
I nodded firmly.
“Then come with me,” she said, getting to her feet. “We have little time before he arrives, and we have a lot to do.”
Chapter Thirty-One
“May I have the scroll container, please?” Dora asked, holding out one delicate, olive-skinned hand.
I put the blanket aside, and then fished the cylinder out from my jacket. She took the object from me and studied the complex patterns of beaten silver. Her dark eyes shone in memory and recognition. She nodded to herself, as if she’d come to a conclusion.
Then she dropped the container into the flames of the fire pit.
I let out a sound like a squawk from an angry bird. Before I could do something as dumb as actually reach into the fire, she deftly blocked my move with an outstretched arm.
“It’s all right,” she said. “Bide a moment.”
Dora bent down, grabbed a nearby branch, and used it to nudge the now-blackened cylinder out of the flames and onto the stones that ringed the pit. She motioned for me to pick up the smoldering container.
“You have to be kidding,” I said wryly.
“Not at all. It shall not harm you.”
“Why don’t you pick it up, then?”
“Because I need you to trust me,” Dora said. “Without the feeling of trust, any magical ritual will go awry. So, if I say that this will not hurt you, you must believe me.”
I swallowed, hard. I knelt, reached out. I think I winced as I picked up the soot-and-grime covered silver object. But Dora hadn’t led me astray. The metal felt warm, even hot, but it didn’t singe my skin.
“This tube is actually a ‘scroll vault.’ It can only be opened after it’s been heated,” Dora explained. Wistfully, she added, “It’s from the ancient academies of medicine and magic that used to exist in medieval Persia. They haven’t made anything like this for more than eight or nine centuries.”
“Persia?” I thought back on my Myth-O-Pedia. “But…Circe’s from ancient Greece. Why would she have something like this?”
“You’d be surprised what you can pick up over the centuries. This will sound terrible, but a lot of the ancients – gods, demigods, spirits, and demons – have taken on the status of ‘cultural flotsam.’ Unattached to a currently ascendant pantheon, they drift without direction, unless they can find something that they can do to help them make sense of modernity.”
“Like the jobs you found Circe, and the Sphinx?”
“Exactly. Others find purpose serving the ascendant powers. The mazikkim, for example. They come from an ancient culture which believed that the act of creating someone’s portrait could ‘steal their essence’.”
“Which is why they faded out when I hit them with my camera flash,” I said, understanding. “It wasn’t the flash, it was the fact that I took their picture.”
“Now you know. Go ahead, twist the ends of the container, and shake out the scroll.”
I gripped the edges of the silver tube, where the conical caps made an easy hand-hold. A twist, a click! and one end simply popped off. I shook out a piece of parchment into my hand. The curled paper, marked with splotches of black and red ink, felt waxy in my hand.
“Let’s bring this to one of the tables,” Dora suggested.
We did, and together we unrolled the document, pinning the corners with small rocks to keep it from stubbornly re-curling. I frowned as I looked at its markings; they were all Greek to me. No, seriously. I recognized letters from the Greek alphabet scattered across the page, but it wasn’t like I’d had classes in the subject. A sketchy diagram took up the bottom half of the page. Splotches of ink had been placed in a shape that vaguely resembled the pattern of lights along an airplane runway.
Dora let out a whistle. “No wonder this document was so carefully hidden. It’s written by a monk named ‘Tomasara’, one of the lay brothers of the Eastern Syriac Church. He was a manuscript copyist, back when the Romans still ran things in that part of the world.”
I kept quiet. This could be one of the Da Vinci codes, and I wouldn’t have known any different.
“Tomasara witnessed the only known divorce between a mortal, and an immortal,” Dora said, her voice hushed in awe. “The process is simple, but to witness it – well, immortals wouldn’t want a secret like that to get out, so they added an extra layer of enchantment. Any mortal not directly involved in the ritual should have died instantly. Burst into flames, turned to ash. The usual punishment, for those days.”
“Charming,” I said, trying to keep my voice neutral.
“But Tomasara stumbled upon a loophole.” She tapped a finger on the sentences towards the beginning of the document. “The ritual he observed was a divorce between a man and a sky goddess. It took place in the clouds. The monk saw the whole thing reflected in a lake.”
“Does the rest of it make sense to you?” I asked.
“Sense enough,” she said, giving me a reassuring smile.
Dora went to the side of the fire pit’s hearth, rummaged around, and brought back a pair of cloth sacks. She opened one and shook out a couple of coal-black pebbles, each the size and shape of a bing cherry, into her hand.
“These are holy stones from the shore of my home,” she explained, as she handed me one of the bags. “They’re called omphalos, and they’re rich in magical energy.”
I looked at the stones skeptically. At most, they resembled miniature charcoal briquettes. But at this point, if Dora said that they helped you walk on water, I’d toss a handful into each pocket.
“What do you want me to do?”
“We’re going to place the stones in Tomasara’s pattern, out on the plateau,” Dora said, as she dumped the stones back into her bag with a rattle. She swept a hand over the parchment as it lay on the table. “Why don’t you take the left? I can place the stones on the right.”
“Sure thing.” I hefted the bag to my shoulder.
The setting sun glared into my eyes, making them water as I set about my task and placed each stone where the diagram indicated. A blast of cold air hit me as I went further out into the open area of the plateau. Dora’s drink fortified me, b
ut the wind still cut to the bone.
As I kept digging into my sack of rocks, I congratulated myself for skipping my last manicure appointment. My nerves were frayed enough as it was, and the last thing I needed was to be thinking about how badly my nails were being chipped.
The bottom edge of the sun had just touched the horizon as I set the last stone in place. I got back to the fire pit and draped the blanket back around my shoulders, exhausted. Dora joined me, took my empty bag and tossed it aside with her own. She compared my handiwork with the parchment’s diagram, and then nodded, satisfied.
“Now what?” My voice was a hoarse croak after my throat’s exposure to the cold wind.
“Now I begin the second part of the ritual. A sacred chant, a sacred dance, until the energy of the stones melds with my own and they create what Tomasara called the ‘Gate of Fire.’ At that point, you must answer the question I give you in order to complete the Ceremony of Dissolution.”
“Gate of Fire?” I repeated. “Are you sure this is safe?”
“The ritual’s safe enough, Cassie,” she said, as she limbered up with a few stretches. Dora may have been ancient, but she had the lithe body of a cat. “But there is a risk. When I spin this bit of craft, the spells that are keeping the Horsemen away will fall apart. Be prepared for at least one of them to show.”
And what in Hades or whatever was I supposed to do if they did?
But Dora was done speaking. She bit her lip as she saw how the sun had begun to dip below the horizon. She stepped out onto the plateau, let the wind unravel her tight coil of shiny hair into ebony streamers.
Dora began a liquid, repetitive drone of a chant that rose and fell with the wind. She raised her delicate arms and began to gesture. The gestures, elegant and fluid, gracefully turned into some kind of interpretive dance. And the stones began to glow where they lay on the ground, a pearl-white and green, like the luminescence of deep-sea jellyfish. The glow intensified until the stones began to throw off tiny sparks of light, like embers from a crackling fire pit.
I Married the Third Horseman (Paranormal Romance and Divorce) Page 12
