I Married the Third Horseman (Paranormal Romance and Divorce) by Michael Angel Read Free Book Online

to seal off a bank vault. To my
complete lack of surprise, with a metallic click , it swung
open on perfectly oiled steel hinges. A warm breath of air, scented
with a magnificent, rich perfume, beckoned me within.
    I had to step high to make it over the
threshold of the vault door. Strong light, much brighter than the
cloud-dimmed skies outside, washed over me, blinding me for a
moment. I squinted, trying to force my eyes to adjust.
    “Hello?” I said, and my voice sounded high,
nervous. Probably because it was. “I’m…I’m looking for someone who
can help me.”
    The face of a woman swam into focus as I
finished speaking.
    Her straight, black hair had the velvety
sheen of a freshly spilled oil slick. It was cropped high off her
forehead, but it hung low around the sides, capped with gold braids
and beads. Her high cheekbones accentuated the slope of her nose,
giving her a timeless, regal look. And her eyes were a mesmerizing
shade of violet. In all, she looked every inch the cousin – heck,
the younger sister – of an early 1960’s Elizabeth
Taylor.
    That was from the neck up.
    From the neck down, she had the body of a
fully grown African lion. That is, if lions had white-and-gray
feathered wings furled up against their backs. She sat on her
golden furred haunches, her tufted tail twitching idly as she
regarded me.
    My brain went into a kind of screen-saver
mode for a moment as it skipped a track on the Cassie Van
Deene’s Life Gone Crazy DVD, Volume II and Counting . Tried to
reconcile what I was seeing with reality.
    The woman resembling Elizabeth Taylor’s
sister smiled, and replied, with a female voice so deep and
powerful, it could have belonged to Darth Vader’s sister.
    “I know who you are, Cassie. I am the mother
of all riddles, and I’ve been expecting you.”
     
     

Chapter Eleven

     
    Getting travel directions from a newspaper’s
quirky advice column hadn’t been on my list of ‘expected things to
do’ this morning. That said, it was positively routine compared to
meeting a mash-up of a creature that looked like the love child of
Liz Taylor and the MGM lion.
    My voice came out in a high-pitched
squeak.
    “You…were expecting… me? ”
    “Indeed I was,” she replied, in that same
husky, feminine voice that I’d have immediately cast as a hard-ass
Secretary of State, or at least a broadcast news anchor. “You
received a summons from Dora, of course. You are quite lucky that,
for whatever her reasons, she has taken an interest in your
destiny. She is among the most far-seeing of us all.”
    “Of us all?” I repeated. Yeah, sorry to sound
like the world’s blondest imitation of an echo, but really my brain
was just catching up to the reality. I fought to bring my voice
back into line. “I meant…I guess I’m not sure what you mean. Who
you are, what this is all about.”
    A deep-throated chuckle at that.
    “Who I am should be evident. I am The
Sphinx.” She pronounced those last two words in such a way that I
could clearly hear the Capital Letters in it. Neat voice trick,
that. “Perhaps you know of me from my history. What you call
‘legend’ today.”
    I racked my brain, trying to recall anything
I knew. I looked around, saw that the room’s bright lights
illuminated a curved ceiling, painted the light blue of a desert
sky I’d seen once over Tucson. One wall of the cavernous interior
had been laid out as a modern-day office, complete with an
executive-sized teak desk, several wide flat-screen monitors, and a
keyboard with teacup-sized letter pads. Directly above the desk
hung a huge copy of the promo poster from the film Cleopatra , complete with king-and-queen sized signatures
from ‘Elizabeth and Richard.’ The remainder of the area had been
decorated with stands of date palms, stone obelisks, and golden
archways covered in painted hieroglyphs.
    What I knew came back to me in a rush.
    “You’re the mythical creature from ancient
Egypt,” I said, after a moment.