I Married the Third Horseman (Paranormal Romance and Divorce) (25 page)

“Exactly where someone would hold a sword by
the handle,” I noted. “This ties up with what I’ve been thinking
about. The guy’s weird skin pattern comes from wearing chain mail.
Maybe this is some kind of dueling club? One that’s into, I don’t
know…medievalism? Live-action role play?”

“If so, they ain’t doing it right. You want
to know what caused that awful wound on John Doe’s chest?”

I nodded. Shelly smiled as she spoke
again.

“So would I. The boys in the lab have no
clue.”

No clue? What the hell blew open this guy’s
chest?

“I read your notes, Dayna. Your nose is
pretty darn good. The lab backs up your findings of sulfur,
potassium nitrate, and wood ash. And get this—the wound was almost
completely cauterized. High heat, charring of surface tissues. No
way was this done with a conventional firearm.”

“No way it could’ve been…” I mused. My voice
trailed off as Shelly’s voice dropped a full octave lower and
became deadly serious.

“There is one more thing,” she said coolly.
“It’s why I wanted to talk to you in private down here. Detective
Esteban said that you found a small artifact on the body. Something
made of gold. But you didn’t list it on the exhibits turned in to
us. Care to fill me in, before department security gets
involved?”

I looked at her helplessly and wrung my hands
for a moment. I still wasn’t sure what was going on with that
damned medallion. But Shelly was my friend, my ally. If anyone
could help me save my job over this snafu, this bit of black magic,
it was her. I drew the medallion out of my pocket and held it up.
It glittered warmly in the bright rays that streamed in through the
skylight.

Then the medallion did more than glitter.

A delicate ringing filled the air, echoing
off the walls of the morgue. It began to get brighter in the room,
much brighter. In a few seconds, the medallion blazed with a
white-yellow radiance like I was holding a miniature sun in my
hand.

“Oh my lord!” Shelly exclaimed. “Dayna, what
are you doing? What’s going on?”

“I’m not doing this!” I shouted back, but my
voice seemed swallowed up by the ringing, by the radiance of the
star in my palm. The light wasn’t hot, not really, but I could feel
pulses of energy coming off the medallion like the heavy swells of
an incoming ocean tide. I didn’t dare move—I was worried that if I
tried to get rid of the medallion, that I’d end up putting it into
my pocket, and right now I didn’t want the effing thing
anywhere
near my crotch.

I squeezed my eyes to slits, but the
brightness penetrated right through my lids. Right then, a
horrible, ticklish sensation crawled up and down my skin. I let out
a scream that would’ve done credit to a Hollywood B-movie actress
who’s found herself in a horror movie. One with a scene where she
gets a boatload of spiders dumped on her.

And then it was as if the floor itself melted
away under me. Like it turned into a bottomless void of white
light. I fell into the void as I continued to scream, tumbling end
over end into a nothingness that seemed to stretch on forever.

Laundry taken off the clothesline.

That’s the first scent I encountered as I
swam back to consciousness.

I lay on something that was feather-soft. A
mattress, I guessed. I felt the slick coolness of sheets covering
my body. I didn’t open my eyes. I remembered falling, that I
must’ve taken a tumble. What’s more, I was a week behind on my
wash, so the fresh linen smell meant I wasn’t in my bed. I listened
for the tell-tale electronic beeps and hums of a hospital room.
Nada. Zip. Zilch. Someone nearby coughed gently. I froze. A sigh,
and then a voice spoke from somewhere above and to my right. The
voice sounded deep, chesty, and yet surprisingly gentle.

“Are you awake yet, perchance?”

That got my curiosity going.

Perchance?
Did I hit my head and end
up in a Jane Austin three-act play? I half-expected to see a
brooding, darkly handsome Byronic man with wild locks of hair and a
stylish nineteenth-century jacket.

I opened my eyes.

I lay under a set of satin sheets the color
of fresh cream. The sheets were neatly tucked into the sides of a
four-poster bed. The room was an elegantly done up affair, with a
vaulted ceiling, eggshell-white stone floor, and a pair of ornately
carved wooden tables that squatted on either side of the bed.
Tapestries made of brightly colored fabrics done up in whorls and
stripes draped each of the walls, save the one closest to my bed.
Instead, a triple set of bay windows let in bright wedges of
sunlight. The edges of the windows, like the furniture and the tips
of the four bed posters were marked with gilded fleur-de-lis
accents.

Let’s just say that Louis XIV would’ve found
it homey.

The man standing next to my bed—looming over
it, to be precise—was a brooding, darkly handsome Byronic man with
wild locks of hair. He wore a stylish cloth jacket the color of
sangria wine, punctuated with bell-shaped silver buttons.

That was from the waist up. From the waist
down, he had the body of a well-built chestnut draft horse.

I squeezed my eyes shut again.

“Whoever you are, you’re not going to believe
this,” I said, trying to keep my voice from shaking, “but I think I
must’ve hit my head. Like, bad.”

“I’m certain that I would believe you,” the
man said.

Man? Or would that be ‘stallion’? No, a
centaur? A centaur stallion?

“I somehow doubt that.”

“Relinquish your doubts,” he said. “My name
is Galen, of the House of Friesain. I was tasked with summoning
you.”

“Yes, you certainly did a good job, I am most
definitely summoned.”

I cautiously opened my eyes. Yup, Galen still
looked like a centaur.

My gaze flicked down low. Very low. Not
ladylike, I know, but see where you look the next time you wake up
with a centaur standing next to your bed.

Whoo. Galen really
was
a stallion.

“I swear,” I said, as I sat up and rubbed my
eyes with my knuckles, “Galen, if I find out that someone laced one
of my ginger snaps with lysergic acid, I won’t rest until I’ve
hunted them down and…I don’t know, keyed their car, shaved their
cat. This is really wild.”

“Surely you’d think so,” Galen said
agreeably, “but you’re not under the influence of any substance,
fair or foul. This is reality. One should accept it.”

I looked down at myself. Someone had
thoughtfully removed my scrubs, but I still had on the violet top
and open cardigan I’d started the day wearing. That probably
convinced me more than anything else that I wasn’t tripping on acid
or having any sort of nervous breakdown.

To triple-check that I wasn’t dreaming, I
pinched myself on my arm. Hard. Yeah, it hurt. I blinked again,
shuddered, and then rubbed my arms as I looked at the rest of
Galen, House of Freeze-Sane a little more closely.

His equine body and tail matched the dark
brown color of the hair on his human head. Muscles bulged under the
skin of the horse body like bunches of the kind of rope they use to
keep ocean liners tied firmly to the dock. Interestingly, all four
of his legs were fringed with long, silky black hair below what I
think they called the ‘knee’ on a horse.

“Okay,” I said cautiously, “I’ve really got
no choice but to accept what I’m seeing here. I’m…well, I’m sure as
hell not in Kansas anymore, I guess.”

I threw the covers back and got shakily to my
feet. Galen reached out to steady my shoulder, and I accepted his
help. I placed my hand on his for a moment. His skin felt warm,
dry, and completely human. Though the clip-clop sound of his hoofs
on the stone floor as he took a step back was utterly alien. It was
a real mind-bender.

“No, you are not in ‘Kan Sass’ anymore, Dayna
Chrissie,” Galen said with a smile. He gestured towards the windows
at the far end of the room. “You’ve been summoned to Good King
Benedict’s palace, the capitol of the land of Andeluvia. For the
moment, you’re the honored guest of Grand Duke Kajari.”

For the moment. I pushed that thought aside
and asked the more pressing questions on my mind.

“How’d you know my name, Galen?”

He shrugged. “It was printed on the badge
hanging at your belt.”

I sighed. “Okay. So, how did you bring me
here?”

“I set a pair of enchantments on a medallion
of King Benedict’s reign,” Galen replied. “One was to bring you
here, to our world. The other was a
geis
, what we call a
‘spell of obligation’. To ensure that the medallion wasn’t
lost.”

“Yeah, about that,” I said wryly. I fished
the damned thing out of my pocket and held it up in my palm. “Can
you, I dunno, revoke that? I don’t want to have to carry this thing
around like pocket change for the rest of my life.”

“Certainly.” Galen covered my hand with his.
He spoke a word or two of some guttural, Nordic-sounding tongue. I
felt a tingle in my palm, and then I felt the strangest sensation
yet. A ‘snap’ like a cord of filament line around my wrist had just
been cut. “There, now you should be able to throw the medallion
away.”

I cocked my arm as if I was about to fling
the little golden disk away—and then I curved my arm so that I
stuck the medallion back into my pocket. Galen started. His
nostrils flared and he flicked his curly chestnut tail. I pulled
the coin back out and tossed it to him.

“Just kidding,” I said. Galen stared at me
for a second before breaking into a grin. I returned it. “So,
you’re the magic guy here, are you?”

“I’m the wizard for the court of Andeluvia,
yes.”

“Well, then I suppose that you were ‘tasked’
to bring me here. Care to fill me in on what King Benedict had in
mind?”

“That would be quite difficult,” Galen said,
and his face took on the brooding aspect that I’d expected to see
from someone who could’ve stepped off the set of
Fantasia
and into the world of
Wuthering Heights
. “You see, that’s
goes to the heart of why you’ve been summoned.”

“Oh?” I didn’t like where this was going.

“You see, Good King Benedict’s been
slain.”

“Slain. Ah.”

“Yes. He met his end two days ago.” Galen
gestured with a sweep of one mighty arm. “It’s imperative that we
unravel the mystery and expose whoever murdered him.”

“Imperative?”

“Oh, yes!” He stomped one of his black
forehoofs in emphasis against the stone floor with a loud
clack
. “Why else would we need the services of a crime scene
analyst?”

It figures. No one ever invites me anywhere
for the sparkling conversation.

The full manuscript for
Centaur of the
Crime

can be found at all major eBook
retailers.

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