I Married the Third Horseman (Paranormal Romance and Divorce) (4 page)

Mitchel locked his eyes on his younger
brother with a hostile scowl. Gabriel silently stood his ground,
and I felt something dark, something feral pass between them. Like
two predators sizing each other up.

Finally, Gabriel moved slightly to one side
as Mitchel stepped forward, put his arm around me protectively.
When he spoke, his warm, deep voice was unchanged, as if he hadn’t
a care in the world. Only his eyes remained glacier-cold.

“I see you’ve been chatting with Gabriel,”
Mitchel said, “I should have warned you about him, he’s a real
smoothie.”

I looked back and forth between the two
cautiously. “Now, Mitchel, he was a complete and total
gentleman.”

“He just wants you to think that. Believe me,
every
woman on the planet has a date with him at one
point.”

Gabriel shrugged expressively. “It’s true, I
can’t deny that.”

A throaty chuckle came from the man on
Mitchel’s right. He was tall, imposing, with a flushed-looking face
like a cliff of red granite. His sweater had a scarlet shield with
a sword on it. Opposite him stood a shorter, rail-thin man with
haunted-looking eyes that said
I need a cuppa java, stat
.
His shield was black, and had a set of scales on it. I think that
meant that he was a Libra.

“Allow me to introduce my two older
brothers,” Mitchel said. He indicated the slighter man first,
followed by the other. “This is Uri, and where you think you see a
towering wall of muscles, that’s actually our eldest, Raphael.”

“Charmed,” Raphael said.

“My dear,” added Uri, “Mitchel and Gabriel
have superb tastes.”

I blushed a little right then, but what can
you do when you’re surrounded on all four sides by hot guys? Even
Uri wasn’t bad looking in the slightest. He just had a more haunted
look than the others, with eyes by way of Gary Sinese.

Mitchel led me through a wooden gate and we
made our way through the crowd of revelers, smiling and nodding to
everyone who knew us. Well, everyone who knew
him
. At least
four or five people came up to shake his hand in person, each
making appreciative sounds over me. A trio of women who looked like
three generations of the same family gave a collective swoon as he
waved to them.

And way out at one of the tables in the back,
for a moment I spotted Gabriel with a platinum blonde hourglass of
a woman. She wore dark glasses and dabbed at her eyes with a cloth
as Gabriel leaned over to whisper quietly in her ear. I held back a
snort. Mitchel had been telling the truth, Gabriel seemed to be
quite the lady killer.

But even that moment of annoyance faded away
in a heartbeat. The man I was with this evening —
my
man
— smiled at me, and everything else sort of faded away
in a dreamy dissolve frame. A cool evening breeze waltzed through,
tickling my nose with the smells of night jasmine, freshly worn
leather, cologne infused with bergamot. And then the aroma of ribs
and chicken cooking on the grill filled the air, making my mouth
water.

“I’m so glad you invited me,” I said. “Your
brothers seem like interesting people.”

“They certainly are,” he agreed. “We don’t
get together much unless we’re working together on a project.
Gabriel travels pretty much all over the map, but you won’t see Uri
or Raphael staying in the States that much. Uri does a lot of work
in Africa and India. Raphael’s pulling overtime in the Middle
East.”

“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.

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 was 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.