I Married the Third Horseman (Paranormal Romance and Divorce) (9 page)

What did you ask, therapy buddy? ‘What’s a
sting?’ Oh, let me explain.

A
sting
is a short bit of music that
filmmakers use to ‘punch up’ the mood of a scene.

Which kind of sting are we talking about
here?

Well, it sure as hell wasn’t the
‘wha-wha-wha’ that’s used to punctuate a pratfall.

If Mitchel had been standing over me with a
knife, ready to do his version of the shower scene in
Psycho
, then it’d have been one of those hair-raising
glissandos
done on the violin. The kind all the hack
directors use when the serial killer’s about to pounce on and
fillet the young couple making out in the cabin by the haunted
lake.

“Cassie,” Mitchel said, “let’s talk first.
We’ve got things to discuss.”

Okay, no string-shrieks, then.

Mitchel sounds like he’s about to reveal
something new and possibly unsavory. So we need the sting used when
the plot’s about to thicken:
Dun-dun-DUN!

Mitchel approached me slowly, hands out, as
if he were approaching an easily startled animal. But as he came
within arm’s reach of me, I took a step back. I honestly don’t know
if it was a conscious thing, or my nervous system had been
hot-wired by my recent experiences to stay the friggin’ hell away
from him. He saw my movement, sighed, and put his hands down by his
side. He still spoke in the rich tones of the Lexus and whiskey ad
pitchman, this time tempered by a slight tentativeness in his
voice. The sound of a reproachful, sorry husband.

The question remained:
was any of it
real?

“Cassie,” he began, “I’m glad that I found
you. I’ve been worried.”

“I’m sure you have,” I said flatly. “How did
you find me?”

“I didn’t bug your car, if that’s what you’re
thinking. Nor did I set up surveillance cameras in secret,” he
said, alluding to what I’d done back at our condo. Yeah, like I was
going to feel the
slightest
bit guilty about that. “Since
our marriage, we share a bond. My family and you. It pulls at us,
directs us to one another over time.”

I remembered how I’d felt some kind of bond,
like a little filament of fishing line, tugging like an invisible
leash at my neck. It made me shudder to think about it. Mitchel
must have seen the dismay on my face, for he quickly moved to
smooth that part over.

“It’s a very subtle thing,” he said
soothingly. “It’s not like your species’ GPS, after all. It won’t
tell me or my brothers exactly where you are. I came across your
scent in Burbank, of all places. Knew you’d been to see the Sphinx.
Since Circe’s long been her closest friend, it was logical to try
and find you out here.”

“Okay, you were right,” I shot back. “Good
for you. You get a gold star. So what?”

“So what? Cassie, I want you back. In a way,
it makes me glad that you did see Circe, that you talked with the
Sphinx.”

“Oh? Why?”

“Because now you’ve met others of my kind.
The eternal. The immortal.”

“Only because I forced the issue,
Mitchel!”

“I know, and I’m truly sorry.”

I let out a snort, crossed my arms and turned
my back on him. Mitchel crossed the gap between us and laid his
warm, strong hands on my shoulders. I closed my eyes. Smelled his
familiar, reassuring, masculine scent, the light musk of the
cologne he used each and every day. His hands felt perfectly,
utterly human.

“I am sorry, Cassie, and I promise never to
hold back something like that, ever again. I was…” Here, he paused
as his voice caught for just a split second. “I was worried that if
you knew what I was, that you’d have never understood, that you’d
have run in terror.”

“I wasn’t exactly happily strolling away the
last time we parted,” I said, though my own words lacked the angry
conviction of earlier.

“What I do isn’t pleasant,” he agreed
mournfully. “I can only hope that you’ll accept me again, in time,
as a husband. I cannot help what I am. Think of me as a…well, as a
force of nature.”

Mitchel’s words made sense, in a way. His
words were like a siren song to me.
He
didn’t choose to be
born to his job, after all. Really, how could he help what he
was?

“I don’t know, Mitchel. What you do…how can I
love someone who does what you do? It feels like…I don’t know, like
I married the King’s Royal Executioner or something.”

“Don’t feel that way. I can take care of you,
your friends, your family. I can keep them safe from harm. Be with
me, Cassie. You’ll never have to worry about so much in this world,
ever again.”

I screwed my eyes shut, tried to sort out the
swirls of emotion within me. I thought of his warm body next to
mine. His gentle touch. The times he’d come out to be with me on
each of my film shoots, seeing me through all the things that the
world had thrown my way before we got engaged…

Something went
CLICK
as the projector
bulb went inside Miss Slow Learner’s brain.

I reached up and brushed Mitchel’s hands off
my shoulders with twin
slaps
. I turned, and I swear that my
eyes could have burned a hole in him. I had to work to unclench my
jaw, work against the rising riptide of anger I felt.

I should have known. Should have sussed it
out. At the very least, I should have figured it out once the
judges for our divorce started coming down sick, each and every
time our hearing date came up.

“If you can do that, if you can ‘protect’ me
and those I hold dear?” I gritted, “Then you’re not a force of
nature, not entirely. You can
control
this power of
yours.”

My husband’s expression remained locked in a
poker-faced grin as I went on.

“And if you can control this, then you
brought disease and death, to each and every country that I
visited. You
purposely
ruined my film career, made it so
that I couldn’t find work after we were married!”

“You just have to see,” he said, almost
cooing. “I had to, Cassie. I had to. Because you had to realize
that there was a better way. To be under my protection. Dependent
on
me
, not by the sweat and toil of your own brow. That’s
what it means to be my wife. To embrace your femininity. So tell
me: do you finally understand?”

Do you finally understand?

My husband, this thing I married, had finally
revealed what he thought of our relationship. About my part in this
‘divine union.’

I stared at him like he was a completely new
kind of loathsome, alien thing.

“You didn’t want me to depend upon the ‘sweat
and toil’ of my brow? Mitchel, that was my life! My ability to...to
create, to bring my art, my visions into the world! We are
through!
I’ll walk through fire to get my divorce from
you!”

I turned away from him, tears of anger
flooding my eyes, stalked towards the doors that led into the main
theatre. Through my blurred vision, I saw that the
Performance
In Session
display was still lit, but I hardly cared
anymore.

That said, the little blonde hairs on the
back of my neck all prickled and stood at attention as I heard my
husband’s voice rasp out in something just over a growl.

“Don’t you turn your back on me, Cassie! You
are mine!”

I risked a glance back. Wished I hadn’t.

Mitchel’s form melted, like runny wax from a
candle held under a blowtorch. It was horrific and eye-popping at
the same time. Even more so because I knew it was real. His body
shifted, changed into something with a toothed snout and taloned
claws like a shambling grizzly bear the size of a bulked-up Chevy
Suburban. His tuxedo vanished, replaced by a coat of shimmering,
shiny white fur slashed through with black stripes.

I stared for a moment. I’d rocked the bed
with that creature so damned hard that the creaky box springs under
the mattress had out counted the beats. Mitchel reared up and let
out a roar that put the tiger in Circe’s bedroom to shame.

What did I do?

Let’s just say that Mama Van Deene didn’t
raise her daughters to freeze up.

I followed it up with a rather dainty (by
comparison) scream of my own and ran as fast as I could. Arms
outstretched, pure terror threatening to overwhelm me, I burst
through the theatre doors.

I almost tripped over my own two feet as I
dashed down the crowded theatre’s main aisle. A few people in the
audience let out startled gasps or cries of amazement as I passed
by. Most turned to look at me, but without any special alarm. I’m
pretty sure that Mitchel’s roar, not to mention my entrance, was
assumed to be part of the act.

The rows of plush red theatre seats, packed
almost solid with patrons, sloped down to a stage decorated around
the sides with carvings of olive trees. Circe, resplendent and
glittering like a multi-faceted diamond, stood in the center
spotlight. She paused in the midst of her act, which involved her
standing atop a huge white Siberian tiger. While surrounded by a
ring of tawny male lions. Who were themselves surrounded by a ring
of bright orange tigers.

The doors I’d come through exploded in a rain
of wood and plaster as Mitchel’s shining white bear-tiger form tore
through the too-small entrance. Predictably, the audience dissolved
into a chaos of screaming, running people. I fought my way through
the crowd that seemed to instantly materialize in the aisle as
people jumped from their seats and ran for the side exits.

Circe, to her credit, merely frowned, as if
she were annoyed that someone had stolen her Oscar-worthy moment of
glory. Her eyes gleamed as she raised one hand, pointed at the
Mitchel-creature, and spoke a single sentence to her big-cat
entourage.

“Take care of that ruffian!”

A chorus of snarls rose from the stage. I
shrieked as I fell to one knee. Felt the swish of air as Mitchel’s
forepaw grasped where I’d stood a moment ago. In unison, the lions
and tigers (no bears, oh my!) leapt from the stage and piled on
Mitchel, tearing and snarling!

The mass of animals rolled to one side,
crushing theatre chairs and tearing up wide swathes of carpet. A
howl of pain from Mitchel. A lash of one mighty paw, and a pair of
lions went flying. The big cats hit one of the second-story viewing
boxes, splintering the olive-tree designs, and landed with a
crunch
. The animals shimmered into the still forms of two of
Circe’s men.

I rolled, pushed my way through the last
people fleeing from the carnage. Circe came to the edge of the
stage, grasped my hand, and hauled me up. A whimper, followed by a
crash, and a tiger landed in an unconscious heap on the boards next
to us. Circe pulled me backstage as the tiger turned back into a
broken, bleeding man. Mitchel roared again, smashing yet another
lion to the floor with a bloody, oversized paw. Clearly, Circe’s
animal-men weren’t going to hold him back much longer.

She didn’t hesitate as she took me around to
the private lipstick-red elevator that had brought me to her
backstage demesne in the first place. We got inside and she pressed
the button marked
GARAGE
. The doors closed with a
ding
, and as we began to move, she slid open a compartment
below the buttons. A tiny touchpad folded out; Circe placed a
fingertip to the sensor, which glowed green. I heard a click, and
the compartment hummed as it extended a case the size and thickness
of a Gideon hotel-room bible.

“Take this,” she said, and I grabbed it,
stuffed it into my now stuffed-to-bursting handbag. Said handbag’s
handles were now twisted into a pretzel shape around my shoulder,
but at least I hadn’t lost the damned thing when Mitchel had
pounced after me. “It contains an atomizer filled with the water of
the River Mnemosyne. Quite powerful. Whatever you spray it on, it
will make others forget that the item even exists. You’ll also find
a compact, but I wouldn’t use it for your makeup. Medusa’s last
gaze is contained within the compact’s mirror.”

“I know about that one,” I said, my breath
puffing from my lungs as if I’d just run a marathon. “I saw
Clash of the Titans
. The original, the re-make, the
re-imagining of the re-make, the re-boot of the re-imagining…”

“Then I believe that shall do. And finally,
there is a parchment, contained in a silver scroll tube. Please do
your best not to lose it, darling. It contains the only known copy
of the instructions of a ritual. Specifically, the ritual by which
the union of a mortal and an immortal can at last be
dissolved.”

“I won’t lose it.”

“I should hope not. Dora must get these
instructions, to perform this ritual before your husband or his
brothers get their claws back on you. If they recapture you, I
suspect that they will find a way to make your enchantment
unbreakable, even by a fellow immortal.”