I Married the Third Horseman (Paranormal Romance and Divorce) (17 page)

And it
was
all right, you know. Moms
can do that. It’s some kind of superpower that they have,
concentrated right in the heart.

I’m sorry if this is getting too much like
the three-hanky picture off the Hallmark Channel for you, therapy
buddy. It’s just that…come on. How many of us really get that
second chance to say what we want to, to someone we love who’s
passed on?

I wish I could tell you all about the things
we reminisced on. All those hours we’d have spent catching up on
those silly things that we always mean to say to the people we care
about and never quite do, because the right greeting-card moment
didn’t just materialize out of the friggin’ air. But I can’t.

We didn’t have the time to talk all that
much. There were dark things approaching. Things that needed to be
done.

“Mom,” I said, after I’d wiped my eyes clear
of tears for the umpteenth time on my cloth napkin, “is this…I
mean, are we in heaven, then?”

“No, dear,” she said, shaking her head. “I’m
the only one dead here, after all. We’re at our summer home,
outside of Boulder, Colorado. But it
is
very nice in the
autumn.”

Gabriel cleared his throat. “I’m sorry to
interrupt, but…”

Mom nodded in agreement before speaking
again.

“My husband’s right. I would give anything to
be able to spend more time with you. But it’ll have to wait. You
need to know a lot of things, and fast.”

I nodded, listening intently.

“Gabriel fell in love with me,” she
continued. “We were married on the Thantos family ranch, just about
the time you went to Chiapas City to film
Machupo
. By the
time you showed up at Sundance, Mitchel had seen how happy we were
together. Now, keep in mind that the Horsemen are spirits, but
they’ve spent millennia in human forms of one sort or another. That
shapes them, makes them desire and crave things they did not
before.”

“Like human company.” I realized.
“Companionship. Romance. Sex.”

“That’s right. Mitchel realized that he
wanted a wife of his as well. But he couldn’t just have anyone.
Like all brothers, they compete with each other. Sometimes it’s a
friendly thing. Others times, not so much.”

That was true. I remembered how easy it had
been to goad Raphael using an example of Mitchel’s scorn.

“So Mitchel decided that he didn’t want just
a human’s soul…but a real, live human being. And what better way to
one-up Gabriel than to marry the
daughter
of his brother’s
wife?”

My knees trembled again, once it had all
become clear to me. Why Mitchel would never agree to let me go.
Because it would humiliate him in the eyes of his family. Better to
have me chained to him for eternity, to slowly be wooed to love
him.

Or to be manipulated into it. Forced into it
via torture, or sorcery, or God-knows-what-else to remove my free
will.

Forever.

“And that’s why,” Mom concluded, “if you want
to annul this marriage, you need to get on your way. And you need
to do it now.”

Without even a stop for me to brush out my
bed-hair or put on a speck of makeup, Mom and Gabriel hustled me
down a flight of marble stairs. I took the steps hesitantly at
first, remembering the twinge of pain in my ankle from last
night.

“It’s okay,” Mom reassured me. “When I got
rid of those clothes of yours last night, I borrowed a scroll of
healing magic from Gabriel. That sprain you picked up should be
completely gone by now.”

I couldn’t argue. I didn’t feel so much as a
twinge. Gabriel spoke up as we reached the ground floor.

“This way to the garage, please,” he said.
“Cassie, I did my best to shield my efforts to rescue you from my
siblings, but it was only a matter of time before they pierced my
veils. They’re on the way here now. Which means that you need to be
on the road as soon as possible.”

I listened intently as we walked through the
sprawling first floor of Gabriel’s summer home. Unlike the cowboy
theme of the Thantos ranch, his dwelling had been done up in a
style that Frank Lloyd Wright would have recognized: long, clean
lines of rooms with only a few pieces of art-deco furniture. The
architecture was inspiring, as was the color scheme. That is, if
you liked the variances between the colors of ebony, coal, raven,
jet, and onyx.

“You mean, you can’t just whisk me there?” I
asked. “Perhaps my mother and I could–”

“Cassandra, think about it,” Mom said, “if we
could have used Muerta to bring you directly to Dora Pahnn, then
we’d have done it last night.”

“Dora’s one of the most powerful and wisest
of the ancient beings,” Gabriel added. “Right now, she’s shielded
herself by blocking any of my family’s powers from operating in her
domain. That, alas, includes mine. Your mother and I will remain
here. First to decoy my brothers, and then to fight them, if
necessary. I should be able to delay them for several hours, but no
more.”

“Any time you can give me, I’ll use it,” I
promised.

“So you’ll have to drive, and fast. The
powers that my brothers and I hold grow stronger once the sun is
down. And it’ll take you until late afternoon to get to Taos from
here.”

“Well, if you can lend me a car, I can
lead-foot it down there.”

“We can do one better,” he replied, as we
walked into a cavernous garage.

The parking bays were all empty, save for the
one at the end. A silver Porsche Boxster sat in the far bay,
looking almost as good as new. A splotch of flat gray primer
mottled the passenger door like the scab over a cut.

“Gabriel was able to return and recover your
car,” Mom explained. “I showed him how to repair the damage to the
car frame, the engine, and the windshield. We weren’t able to match
the exterior paint yet, but other things took precedence.”

“Believe me, I’m grateful,” I said, as Mom
pressed a button on the wall, and the garage door hummed as it
rolled up. Hazy sunshine flooded the interior.

“I also made sure that your GPS was in
working order,” Gabriel said. “You should follow the directions, of
course. But that will only take you as far as Dora’s mailbox.
You’ve got a walk ahead of you after that. Follow the trail up the
mountain. It ends at Dora’s place.”

I grimaced. Several hours of driving,
followed by a hike. Uh-huh. Well, at least it explained why Mom had
outfitted me with jeans and shoes better suited to cross-country
travel than the heels I wore around the office.

We all stopped by the driver’s side of the
car. I opened the door. The interior had been vacuumed and cleaned
of any stray shards of glass from last night’s events. The
comforting smell of Piña Colada air freshener wafted up from the
passenger cabin.

“I should thank you, for everything you’ve
done,” I said, turning to face Gabriel one last time. He gave a
kind of ‘aw shucks’ expression that was absolutely endearing as he
spoke in turn.

“I wouldn’t have let my brothers harm
you.”

“No. That’s not what I meant.” He looked at
me for a moment, puzzled. “I meant to say that…well, whatever else
happens, thank you. For giving me my Mom back. At least this one
last time.”

“Don’t say that, Cassie,” Mom gently
admonished me. “Whether in this state or no, my soul is always with
you.”

“You know what I mean,” I said, trying to
laugh. Trying not to burst into tears again, as a matter of fact.
My mother did the same. We embraced, I kissed her, and for that
moment, all was right with the world.

“Get going,” she urged. “Before we both start
crying again. You’re the big director in our family, after all. Two
crying scenes in a movie is one too many, unless you’re trying to
sell anti-depressants.”

That’s my Mom for you, always the
sentimentalist.

I got in the car, started up the motor, and
backed the Porsche out of the garage and into a freshly blacktopped
driveway. The view was stunning.

Gabriel’s place perched halfway up the side
of a lone mountain peak. Ahead of me stretched wide, open plains.
Off in the distance, a gray line dotted with the tiny shapes of
cars marked the freeway.

That was the ‘good’ part of the view. The
‘bad’ part was the charcoal-and-sandstorm colored storm cloud just
cresting the mountain’s peak behind the house. Based on my past
experience, I wanted to be long gone before the powers behind that
thing struck.

I put those thoughts out of mind as I brought
the car around to face the street. A last glance back. Mom and
Gabriel (sorry, it’s going to be a while before I can even wrap my
head around the whole ‘my step-dad is Death’ thing) smiled as I
gave them a last wave. They waved back.

I gunned the motor and zoomed down the road,
before my eyes threatened once again to brim and spill over.

Hey, therapy buddy?

Stick with me for this last part, okay?
Because I have a hunch that I’m really going to need someone to
lean on.

I drove due south on Interstate Route 25 like
I had the demons from hell after me. Well, not quite. Now that I’d
met a few different beings from various kinds of ‘myths’, I didn’t
know what Holy Texts to believe anymore.

So I didn’t know where the demons after me
were from, exactly. It could have been Hell, it could have been
Rome, ancient Egypt, Celtic Britain, or New Jersey. And in truth, I
didn’t drive more than fifteen miles over the speed limit – and
even then, I kept a sharp eye out for the highway patrol.

My new step-father was out there, holding off
the first three Horsemen of the Apocalypse. So I doubted that he
was going to be available to help me get out of being pulled over
and given a ticket by a traffic cop. That could delay me at a
critical moment, more likely than not resulting in my capture and
the death of whoever was around me.

If I had any doubts as to the seriousness of
the matter (and I didn’t), they were erased by the time I reached
the Denver city limits. Boulder had disappeared over the horizon by
the time I heard it.

Several flashes of light in my rear-view
mirror. Followed by a teeth-rattling set of
booms
. Shrieks
of tires as shocked drivers pulled over, forcing me to swerve
around them. I couldn’t blame anybody. If I hadn’t known what was
going on, I might have thought a gas main exploded, or that some
group of madmen were pulling off an act of terrorism.

Not five minutes later, I passed a set of
fire trucks and ambulances racing along the other side of the
freeway towards Boulder. Twenty minutes after that, a pair of
fighter jets rocketed north, leaving cottony white contrails in the
sky.

Two more hours passed. I stopped for gas and
a run to the restroom at a little Mom n’ Pop station just outside
of Pueblo. I got a ‘damn yuppie’ vibe off of the two owners when I
didn’t stop to chat. I didn’t mean to be rude, but let’s be honest,
I was sort of in a hurry.

Mother Nature hadn’t made up her mind about
the day yet. Patchy sun, some drizzle, and at the moment, a
patchwork quilt of clouds settled over the freeway. The pump had
just kicked back, telling me the tank was full, when I watched a
small flock of birds in the distance draw closer.

A cold chill skittered down my back as I
realized that these ‘birds’ had abnormally large heads. And they
were moving as fast as those jets I’d seen earlier. I hung up the
pump nozzle and ducked behind my Porsche.

The station was an older-style one, with a
70’s style sun awning that draped over the pumps like a lean-to. So
I was pretty sure that they hadn’t seen me, or my silver sports
car.

The sheydu, who were flying high enough to
remain mistaken for birds – at least to the casual observer – split
into two groups, one circling to the east, the other to the west. I
waited until they’d each vanished over their respective
horizons.