I Married the Third Horseman (Paranormal Romance and Divorce)

by Michael Angel

  That’s when I heard it.

  A deep growl. I opened my mouth to say something, anything, but I really didn’t need to. Dora had heard it too, and she paused in her dance, turned, and then 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 to Las Vegas and Colorado slipped out from between the trees and stood in the open space of the clearing.

  Just great.

  It looked like my husband had finally decided to show up.

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  Mitchel’s bear-tiger form let out a roar that must’ve shaken the window fixtures on houses as far away as Santa Fe. Dora, to her credit, didn’t flinch. She moved her hands down in a quick downward, diagonal slash.

  A wall of emerald fire blazed into existence around the entire clearing. The man – the man-thing – that I’d dated, taken to bed, cuddled between my legs, and taken marriage vows with began to pace back and forth outside the barrier.

  He could see that the only way to me was through Dora. Fangs glistened in the moonlight. Razor sharp talons twitched, like some kind of horrific threshing machine come to life.

  Mitchel leaped at Dora. His ebony claws thrashed the air.

  Freeze Frame.

  Yup, this is where we originally came into this story.

  Sorry that we had to detour through all of the intervening stuff. But if you’re like most people, then no matter how good the F/X are, what happens in a fight doesn’t really matter.

  Not unless you know who the players are and what’s at stake.

  Maybe, just maybe, I conveyed it to you by now.

  So thank you, therapy buddy. For hearing me out until I could bring you up to the present.

  Now let’s get back to the action.

  I don’t know about you, but I’m sure as hell hoping for a happy ending.

  …And continue the ‘Final Battle’ sequence.

  Mitchel leaped from the edge of the clearing, his claws thrashing at the air. Dora flung up a hand as he smacked into the wall of flames. The clearing lit up with a crackle of blue sparks. The hair-curling smell of ozone hung in the air like a choking fog.

  Dora staggered, almost falling backward. My heart leaped into my throat. She straightened up, her arms quivering the tiniest bit.

  My husband shifted shape, becoming humanoid again. It was the death-form, the raw, ugly, skull shape of his head under pale colored robes.

  And yet his voice was unmistakable. The same rich, deep tones as I’d heard, hundreds of miles away and (it seemed) decades ago, back in Sundance. But tinged with something hateful. Snakelike.

  “Do not interfere,” he hissed. “Out of my way, witch!”

  “Witch?” Dora raised an eyebrow. “That’s no way to talk to your mother, Mitchel.”

  “The woman is mine!”

  That made me grimace.

  Not ‘Cassie’, or ‘wife’, or ‘honey-pie.’ The woman.

  Dora moved her arms again, performed a few more steps of her dance. She cast a single, fearful glance over her shoulder at me. It told me everything. And my heart froze as I realized the cause of her fear.

  The sun set, extinguishing the remaining ambient brightness around us as effectively as if someone had thrown the kill switch on a set of stage lights. But the stones that Dora and I had set out didn’t make up the difference. Not even close.

  The omphalos were beginning to sputter out. The lights shifted from white, back to green. Then to the dim blue of a stove’s pilot light. Something was wrong.

  Mitchel hadn’t seen Dora’s glance. He hadn’t noticed the stones within Dora’s magical perimeter. But it didn’t matter to him, not one bit. He flung himself at Dora’s fiery shield like a maddened animal.

  I jumped, startled, as lightning and thunder let loose with a ka-THOOM around the plateau. Clouds swirled in upon us, purple and black, advancing upon stalks of lightning. My skin crawled as I got a feeling of déjà vu.

  This was classic Spielberg and Lucas. Uh-huh, and this was the ending of that film they did starring Harrison Ford. Where the evil Nazis got turned into puddles of melted candle wax for mucking about with powers that were way, way beyond their understanding.

  No sheydu swarmed in the sky. No mazikkim lumbered their way into the clearing. Maybe Gabriel had held those things at bay, at least. But Mitchel wasn’t letting up.

  He cried out again. This time, the voice that came out of his muzzle was keening, nearly insane with rage.

  “I need her, Mother!” he roared. “Don’t force my hand! I’ll kill you to get to her!”

  “Then try it, if you can,” Dora gritted back. “Don’t keep me waiting.”

  Brave words. But all around us, the stones were guttering out. Like wood coals in the hearth, but placed improperly. Just out of reach of the fuel.

  Placed improperly…

  I got up and looked at Tomasara’s parchment again.

  Looked at it carefully this time. Ignored the words, which were so much scribble to my untutored mind.

  Then a thought occurred to me.

  Tomasara hadn’t witnessed the divorce ritual directly, after all. He’d seen it in a lake. What’s more, the pattern of stones in the Ceremony of Dissolution wasn’t exactly symmetrical.

  It couldn’t be that simple, could it?

  I frowned. Maybe it could. What was it that Dora Pahnn had said about Tomasara? He was a clerical copyist. That’s what he did for a living – copying manuscripts for his Head Abbott, or something.

  A man like that would’ve followed his training and copied exactly what he saw in that lake. The reflection.

  Dora and I had the stones in the flipped, mirror-image of the proper pattern.

  Mitchel hit the barrier again. This time, he used his tiger fangs to bite into the wall of green fire. Flames lit up his skull, turning his visage into a ghastly rainbow of colors, a cartoon character on a rotoscoped acid trip.

  He continued to bite down. Began to peel the wall back, like a dog tearing a tough piece of hide off of a particularly stubborn carcass. Dora stumbled backwards again. This time, she went to her knees before slowly getting back up. Sweat poured from her brow as she raised her hands, magical energy flowing from her palms, trying desperately to hold Mitchel back.

  I couldn’t just sit and watch this anymore.

  One last look at the parchment. I ran out across the plateau. Wind lashed at me, tearing at my throat. Gusts of rain, like needles against my skin. I ignored it all as I kicked at the first little magic stone. Nudged it roughly, into the right order. Then the next. And the next.

  The lights looked like they got a little brighter. I wasn’t sure.

  Now for the other side. A ka-WHAM of lightning as I dashed for the remaining stones. One of the pine trees at the edge of the clearing shattered. Splinters rained down around me.

  Droplets of sticky sap against my cheek. The awful, antiseptic smell of roasted pine cleaner jammed up my nose, down my throat.

  I skidded, fell to my knees. Felt the rough ground shred the knees of my jeans, tear the flesh of my palms.

  A scream from Dora. She fell to her knees. Face pale, arms still outstretched, holding her magical-barrier up as best she could. Mitchel tore chunks out of it now. He pushed his head through, snarling and snapping. In his beast form, he finally saw me. Growled at me. I didn’t flinch away.

  Instead, I crawled the last few feet to the final stone. Touched it. Felt it warm under my fingers, like a freshly printed roll of film. I gave it a nudge, and the magical pattern fell into place with a high-pitched SNAP! that rattled in my ears.

  Dora got up. Color returned to her face. Mitchel roared in frustration as the barrier blazed anew. The stones all around the plateau erupted in light, casting brilliant plumes of red and white flame into the dark sky. The plumes crossed, forming an arc of fire that burned without heat, an aurora borealis brought down to earth, a lake of lava pumped into the backyard swimming pool, hi
ssing and popping and entrancingly beautiful.

  “Now is the time!” Dora shouted, over Mitchel’s animal keening. “Cassandra, do you wish to maintain your bond to the third Horseman?”

  My voice didn’t waver. “Hell, no!”

  “Then deny him, three times!”

  I swallowed, squared my shoulders, and looked Mitchel in the eye.

  “I deny you.”

  He roared, and the very tree branches around us shook.

  “I deny you!”

  Mitchel shifted again. This time, into his human form. The form that I’d first seen and fell for. His white ribbed Princeton sweater, his perfect male form. And his eyes were liquid, pleading.

  “Cassie, please! I fell in love with you. Surely that means something? Surely you could come to love me?”

  Nuh-uh.

  I screamed my final words of the ritual at the apparition before me.

  “I! DENY! YOU!”

  Mitchel didn’t scream, didn’t beg, didn’t plead anymore.

  He simply stared, sadly, and his eyes filled with tears.

  A final rumble of thunder, and the storm around us stilled. The clouds stopped moving in their Wrath-of-God nightmare swirl. The wind died down, and one by one, the radiance from each omphalos stone winked out.

  The clouds did a fade-dissolve, and soon the clearing was bathed in the clear, milky color of moonlight.

  Mitchel shifted back into his bear-tiger body.

  He raised his blunt, furry muzzle to the moon and let out a mournful howl that rang out against the heavens.

  And with that last note of despair, he turned back to the tree line.

  Silently, he loped off into the darkness of the night.

  Chapter Thirty-Three

  As soon as my husband – my ex-husband, that is – vanished into the trees, I felt my knees buckle. A jolt of pain as I all but collapsed to the ground. I felt like I’d just run the New York City Marathon.

  Hell, I felt like each and every friggin’ person jogging in that damned marathon had just run over me.

  I felt drained. I felt weak. I felt…relieved.

  I stared at the bright ivory coin of the moon as it rose over the treetops, lost and entranced by it until I felt a warm hand on my shoulder. I looked up at Dora’s kind face. She helped me to my feet.

  “Well, now,” she said, “that wasn’t so bad, was it?”

  I snorted. “You’re kidding me, right?”

  She nodded, and a twinkle of mischief danced in her eyes.

  “As a matter of fact, I am.” She guided me back over to one of the tables outside her cabin. We sat down next to each other on one of the padded wooden benches.

  Dora tsked as she looked at my torn jeans, the scrapes on my hands and knees.

  “I’ll have to put something on those scrapes for you,” she said. “We don’t want them getting infected.”

  “Sure, perhaps you have some other wonder herb to heal scrapes and cuts?”

  She gave me a wry look. “Actually, I was thinking of bandages and peroxide.”

  “I appreciate it,” I said, and then, seeing no other way to bring the subject up, I decided to blurt it out. “Dora, I need to know something. You’re the…mother of the Four Horsemen?”

  “Only in the metaphorical sense.” Dora looked off into the distance. And then a lot further than that. “I was a foolish young girl, a long, long time ago.”

  I thought of Circe and the Sphinx then. How they referred to Dora as ‘one of the oldest’ among them.

  “Do you mind if I ask how long ago?”

  “Back when the only structures the Egyptians built were out of straw and mud,” she said softly. “Back when men were just learning how to put down their history, by pressing the tips of reeds into little clay tablets.”

  I stared at her. Like I said, she still looked young.

  “I was a maid at the most sacred temple in the land,” she continued, “at a place which would someday be known as the Oracle of Delphi. I was given charge of an alabaster chest that the Oracle said contained four great evil spirits. But like I said, I was young, foolish. I was curious. Too curious. And late one night, when the temple guards and priestesses had gone to the spring festival to drink the sacred wines of the Peloponnese, I opened the chest.”

  I sat up as my mind finally made the connections.

  “Dora…Pahnn,” I said slowly. Just like with Tomasara’s parchment, I flipped the portions of her name around in my mind. I let out a breath in wonder. “Pandora? That was your legend, the one where you opened the box?”

  “Indeed. And ever since that ancient time, I’ve had to live close to where the brothers choose to settle. To keep an eye on them. To make sure they don’t run any more wild than they do.”

  This was all too much for me. “I…I guess that I don’t know what to say.”

  “Say that you’ll stay for some more tea with me,” Dora replied simply. “It’s been a long, long while since I’ve had company I can really talk with.”

  I blinked. “I’d love to.”

  Unbelievable. As if in a daze, I joined Pandora, the Honest-to-God real life Pandora of Greek myth, for tea at her cabin.

  I grinned at the thought, and it was the first real smile I’d had on my face in what felt like forever.

  …and let’s have one more take of the final scene.

  Pan to a shot of Cassandra Van Deene. Miss Cassandra Van Deene, that is. Medium-length shot, then dolly in for her close-up.

  She closes her eyes for a moment, inhaling the night air, as if she is smelling that most elusive of scents: freedom.

  Keep on the close-up as her eyes open.

  Let the audience watch as Cassandra gazes off into the distance, her face aglow for the first time with excitement.

  At what the future may hold for her, now that evil has been banished from her life.

  Now that she is her own woman once again.

  Yes, I know this all sounds corny, therapy buddy.

  We’ve all seen endings like this at the movies.

  That doesn’t make it a bad ending, though.

  Not in the least.

  Fade to black.

  # # #

  Meet Michael Angel

  Michael Angel's worlds of fantasy and science fiction range from the unicorn-ruled realm of the Morning Land to the gritty 'Fringe Space' of the western Galactic Frontier. He's the author of the bestselling Centaur of the Crime, where C.S. Lewis meets CSI. His many books populate shelves in languages from Russian to Portuguese.

  He currently resides in Southern California. Alas, despite keeping a keen eye out for griffins, centaurs, or galactic marshals, none have yet put in an appearance on Hollywood Boulevard.

  Find out more about his latest works at:

  www.MichaelAngelWriter.com

  A special request from the author…

  Word of mouth is crucial for any author to succeed. If you enjoyed this book, please consider leaving a review where you purchased it. Even if it’s only a line or two, it would make all the difference and be very much appreciated.

  Very Truly Yours,

  Michael Angel

  New Book Preview

  Enter the World

  of Michael Angel

  Centaur of the Crime

  Dayna Chrissie, the leading Crime Scene Analyst for the LAPD, enjoys nothing more than finding the one clue that can solve a crime.

  The day she finds a golden medallion on a body that’s been dumped at a downtown construction site, she doesn’t think much about it. Until that medallion transports her to the magical kingdom of Andeluvia. Dayna discovers that she’s been summoned to solve the murder of the realm’s king, before war breaks out between Andeluvia and the Centaur Kingdoms.

  When the trail of evidence leads from Andeluvia, back to LA, Dayna must bring all of her forensic skill to bear in order to solve the case. The price of failure? A war that will kill millions and devastate both lands.

  Hope she works best under pre
ssure.

  CENTAUR OF THE CRIME

  By Michael Angel

  Chapter 1

  Just my rotten luck.

  In the movies, when crime scene analysts arrive at the site of a murder, it’s usually deep in some dark, woody glen. Or, if the murder takes place in an urban area, cops from film-land know enough to hang around on the edges, quiet and respectful like mourners at a funeral. Call it in, set up the yellow tape, and get-the-heck-outta-the-way so my work space stays pristine as fresh-fallen snow.

  That no-touchee mojo wasn’t working for me today.

  I couldn’t get something as simple as a body lying up by the Hollywood reservoir, or down one of Topanga’s blind slot canyons. The crime scene I’d been called in to work had enough cops snooping around to put on a St. Patrick’s Day parade.

  I parked the van at the curb and squinted through the grimy windshield and the glare of the noonday sun, trying to make sense of the site. The body of an adult white male had been discovered lying atop a heap of rubble, smack in the middle of a newly demolished city block.

  The rectangular piece of property was an ankle-turning warren of shattered concrete blocks, tangled steel rebar, and patches of common mallow. The weed’s flowers filled the air with a dusty, nose-tickling scent like ragweed pollen.

  California low-rise buildings bordered three sides of the block. Two were clinker-brick apartment buildings that sported rickety metal cage balconies jammed to bursting with curious onlookers. The third was a decrepit office building that some thoughtful ethnic Angeleno had decorated with a multicolored spray-paint mural of the Aztec God, Quetzalcoatl.

  Quetzo appeared to be giving everyone at the crime scene the finger, but then I’ve never been good at interpreting urban art.