I Married the Third Horseman (Paranormal Romance and Divorce) (19 page)

“Because I need you to trust me,” Dora said.
“Without the feeling of trust, any magical ritual will go awry. So,
if I say that this will not hurt you, you must believe me.”

I swallowed, hard. I knelt, reached out. I
think I winced as I picked up the soot-and-grime covered silver
object. But Dora hadn’t led me astray. The metal felt warm, even
hot, but it didn’t singe my skin.

“This tube is actually a ‘scroll vault.’ It
can only be opened after it’s been heated,” Dora explained.
Wistfully, she added, “It’s from the ancient academies of medicine
and magic that used to exist in medieval Persia. They haven’t made
anything like this for more than eight or nine centuries.”

“Persia?” I thought back on my Myth-O-Pedia.
“But…Circe’s from ancient Greece. Why would she have something like
this?”

“You’d be surprised what you can pick up over
the centuries. This will sound terrible, but a lot of the ancients
– gods, demigods, spirits, and demons – have taken on the status of
‘cultural flotsam.’ Unattached to a currently ascendant pantheon,
they drift without direction, unless they can find something that
they can do to help them make sense of modernity.”

“Like the jobs you found Circe, and the
Sphinx?”

“Exactly. Others find purpose serving the
ascendant powers. The mazikkim, for example. They come from an
ancient culture which believed that the act of creating someone’s
portrait could ‘steal their essence’.”

“Which is why they faded out when I hit them
with my camera flash,” I said, understanding. “It wasn’t the flash,
it was the fact that I
took their picture
.”

“Now you know. Go ahead, twist the ends of
the container, and shake out the scroll.”

I gripped the edges of the silver tube, where
the conical caps made an easy hand-hold. A twist, a
click!
and one end simply popped off. I shook out a piece of parchment
into my hand. The curled paper, marked with splotches of black and
red ink, felt waxy in my hand.

“Let’s bring this to one of the tables,” Dora
suggested.

We did, and together we unrolled the
document, pinning the corners with small rocks to keep it from
stubbornly re-curling. I frowned as I looked at its markings; they
were all Greek to me. No, seriously. I recognized letters from the
Greek alphabet scattered across the page, but it wasn’t like I’d
had classes in the subject. A sketchy diagram took up the bottom
half of the page. Splotches of ink had been placed in a shape that
vaguely resembled the pattern of lights along an airplane
runway.

Dora let out a whistle. “No wonder this
document was so carefully hidden. It’s written by a monk named
‘Tomasara’, one of the lay brothers of the Eastern Syriac Church.
He was a manuscript copyist, back when the Romans still ran things
in that part of the world.”

I kept quiet. This could be one of the Da
Vinci codes, and I wouldn’t have known any different.

“Tomasara witnessed the only known divorce
between a mortal, and an immortal,” Dora said, her voice hushed in
awe. “The process is simple, but to witness it – well, immortals
wouldn’t want a secret like that to get out, so they added an extra
layer of enchantment. Any mortal not directly involved in the
ritual should have died instantly. Burst into flames, turned to
ash. The usual punishment, for those days.”

“Charming,” I said, trying to keep my voice
neutral.

“But Tomasara stumbled upon a loophole.” She
tapped a finger on the sentences towards the beginning of the
document. “The ritual he observed was a divorce between a man and a
sky goddess. It took place in the clouds. The monk saw the whole
thing reflected in a lake.”

“Does the rest of it make sense to you?” I
asked.

“Sense enough,” she said, giving me a
reassuring smile.

Dora went to the side of the fire pit’s
hearth, rummaged around, and brought back a pair of cloth sacks.
She opened one and shook out a couple of coal-black pebbles, each
the size and shape of a bing cherry, into her hand.

“These are holy stones from the shore of my
home,” she explained, as she handed me one of the bags. “They’re
called
omphalos
, and they’re rich in magical energy.”

I looked at the stones skeptically. At most,
they resembled miniature charcoal briquettes. But at this point, if
Dora said that they helped you walk on water, I’d toss a handful
into each pocket.

“What do you want me to do?”

“We’re going to place the stones in
Tomasara’s pattern, out on the plateau,” Dora said, as she dumped
the stones back into her bag with a rattle. She swept a hand over
the parchment as it lay on the table. “Why don’t you take the left?
I can place the stones on the right.”

“Sure thing.” I hefted the bag to my
shoulder.

The setting sun glared into my eyes, making
them water as I set about my task and placed each stone where the
diagram indicated. A blast of cold air hit me as I went further out
into the open area of the plateau. Dora’s drink fortified me, but
the wind still cut to the bone.

As I kept digging into my sack of rocks, I
congratulated myself for skipping my last manicure appointment. My
nerves were frayed enough as it was, and the last thing I needed
was to be thinking about how badly my nails were being chipped.

The bottom edge of the sun had just touched
the horizon as I set the last stone in place. I got back to the
fire pit and draped the blanket back around my shoulders,
exhausted. Dora joined me, took my empty bag and tossed it aside
with her own. She compared my handiwork with the parchment’s
diagram, and then nodded, satisfied.

“Now what?” My voice was a hoarse croak after
my throat’s exposure to the cold wind.

“Now I begin the second part of the ritual. A
sacred chant, a sacred dance, until the energy of the stones melds
with my own and they create what Tomasara called the ‘Gate of
Fire.’ At that point, you must answer the question I give you in
order to complete the Ceremony of Dissolution.”

“Gate of Fire?” I repeated. “Are you sure
this is safe?”

“The ritual’s safe enough, Cassie,” she said,
as she limbered up with a few stretches. Dora may have been
ancient, but she had the lithe body of a cat. “But there is a risk.
When I spin this bit of craft, the spells that are keeping the
Horsemen away will fall apart. Be prepared for at least one of them
to show.”

And what in Hades or whatever was I supposed
to do if they did?

But Dora was done speaking. She bit her lip
as she saw how the sun had begun to dip below the horizon. She
stepped out onto the plateau, let the wind unravel her tight coil
of shiny hair into ebony streamers.

Dora began a liquid, repetitive drone of a
chant that rose and fell with the wind. She raised her delicate
arms and began to gesture. The gestures, elegant and fluid,
gracefully turned into some kind of interpretive dance. And the
stones began to glow where they lay on the ground, a pearl-white
and green, like the luminescence of deep-sea jellyfish. The glow
intensified until the stones began to throw off tiny sparks of
light, like embers from a crackling fire pit.

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.

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.