I Married the Third Horseman (Paranormal Romance and Divorce) by Michael Angel Page B

suitcase lay tossed in one corner, the handbag in
another. Breakfast pastries on the nightstand.
    Maybe, just maybe, I’d summon up the energy
for a shower and a change of clothes. Right now, the garments I
wore smelled like I’d been doing my best to get a tan by leaning
over a barbecue pit. But I had something else to do first. I tore
apart the newspaper, discarding section after section, until I
pulled out the page with Dora’s column.
    I stared in disbelief.
    The headline in her section cheerily informed
me of the gut-wrenching news.
    Our inimitable advice columnist Dora Pahnn is
off for the week, attending to matters of cosmic importance! Until
she returns, here’s some Dear Abby!
    Abso-friggin-amazing. The one friggin’ time I
needed, really, honestly, and truly needed Dora’s advice, and she
goes off on vacation.
    No, not that, I realized. More like she’s
gone low-profile, underground. Those matters of cosmic importance
applied to a certain blonde from La-La Land. One who was dumb
enough to marry into a family of possessive, homicidal
immortals.
    I tossed the paper off to one side. Put my
forearm up over my eyes and groaned.
    I couldn’t believe it. Just as I was starting
to understand her weird new-age crap, too.
    All I had left was the Sphinx’s riddle, which
I apparently sucked at figuring out as well.
    What is it that looks like a door to some, a
passage to others, a message from those who seek to do evil, and
yet solves all of life’s problems?
    Okay, I knew that there was a way to make a
door look like a passage. Use a forced-perspective technique. I
could make a foyer look like a damned subway tunnel if I
needed.
    But I didn’t think that the answer to the
sphinx’s riddle was a simple camera trick.
    How could a passage look like a message? Let
alone solve every single problem life had on offer, like some
do-it-all whatzit from a late-night infomercial?
    I lowered my arm to my side. Pondered the
riddle for three, maybe four more minutes.
    Then sleep came for me so suddenly, it was as
if I blacked out.
    It was nice. Peaceful, for a change.
    At least until I woke up.
    My eyes fluttered open.
    I’d heard a noise. A deep, crunching sound
from off to one side.
    The room light was still on. I hadn’t reached
up to turn it off before I’d conked out. I didn’t dare turn my
head, but I swiveled my eyes as far as I could to the right. The
window lay open, and the moon had risen far into the night sky.
Maybe I’d been asleep for two, three hours.
    Another sound. A growl, maybe? That was
followed by a familiar-sounding crackle .
    It came from an opened toaster pastry
wrapper.
    Someone or something had gotten into
my breakfast. Visions of the bat-wolf sheydu played in my head with
a chill. Another growl. A raspy chewing noise. Not a human sound,
not at all.
    I slid my eyes over to the left.
    Not knowing what I would see.
    Not even knowing what to pray that I’d
see.
     
     

Chapter Twenty-One

     
    I slowly turned my neck to the left.
Pretended that I was doing a slow-pan with my Cinegraf camera. All
I could do was hope that the creaky springs in the motel’s cheap
mattress wouldn’t give my movement away.
    A tall, muscular man dressed like a medieval
knight sat at the room’s kitchenette table, chowing down on one of
my blueberry toaster pastries. It was almost comical.
    Almost.
    It would have been a lot more amusing if the
knight’s armor didn’t look as if it had been dipped in a pool of
drying blood. The multitude of spikes jutting out from the knees,
elbows, and helm didn’t exactly scream ‘kid-friendly’ either.
    The knight had raised the faceplate on his
helm in order to eat. I stared. As with Mitchel, the skin on the
man’s face had been pulled back. Red-irised eyeballs bulged out of
the bone-white skull.
    A yard-long sword, encased in a red leather
holster – or whatever you called the holder for the damned things –
hung down by his side. The sword’s outline had been etched into