Faith of the Divine Inferno - Leslie Thompson (best short novels of all time TXT) 📗

something tragic.
“He got dysentery and died while we were on the road home.”
“I’m sorry.”
“Why? The man was an ass. It was a miracle that he lived long enough to hit puberty,” I snorted. The man I spoke of had been my thirty-fourth husband, a merry man who liked war and women. When he wasn’t chasing hapless peasants around with his axe, I found him rolling around a haystack with one kind of slut or another. Sometimes it was a slut and a whore. Maeric had always been a lucky bastard; until he got dysentery, that is.
“But you were married to him,” Shaw said lamely.
“Marriage wasn’t the same then as it is now. A woman wasn’t her husband’s companion, she was his property. We hadn’t been given any choices of husband either. Most of us married whoever we were told to marry. Those poor women no one wanted eventually went homeless or became prostitutes,” I told him. “I married Maeric because I had to if I wanted to continue to live with people and travel without getting raped every other day. Trust me, Maeric had been an okay man for that day and time, but if he hadn’t gotten sick and died, I would have strangled him myself.”
“Oh.” Shaw didn’t know whether he should be shocked, apologetic, or laugh his ass off. So he drank down another beer. “How many times have you been married?”
I took a moment to make a rough count. “I’ve been married somewhere around seventy times.”
Shaw made an exclamation that would have offended me if I had been monotheistic in any way, shape, or form. Lucky for him, I am pagan bordering on atheist so all he got was a scowl from me. “Watch your mouth.”
“Sorry. Seventy marriages are mind boggling. How in the hell did you pull that off?” Shaw grinned at me like a maniac. I took the fresh beer he had gotten from the refrigerator out of his hand and poured it down the sink. If I didn’t want him puking on the kitchen floor, then it was time to cut him off. He didn’t stop me; he simply leaned against the counter with a lopsided, expectant expression and waited for me to answer him.
“I’m over two thousand years old.” I spoke slowly so that his addled brain could keep up. “It isn’t that difficult if you think about it.”
“I guess not. Did you love any of them?”
I wasn’t going to answer that question, it was far too personal. I had loved my first husband; he had been the only one of my choosing for the next fifteen hundred years. After that, I married whoever was most convenient, or whoever I was pushed at for political and financial reasons. Sometime after the Renaissance I had been given a little more freedom in spouses since I had acquired a massive fortune and was not a member of the royal elite of any country.
“Did all of your marriages end in death?” That was a loaded question. Shaw wanted to know if I’d been divorced seventy times or if I had stayed in each marriage and watched my husbands die or if I had widowed myself.
“Sometimes I left if the neighbors were getting suspicious because I wasn’t aging. Sometimes my husband got a filthy disease and I left before someone thought to accuse me of murder or witchcraft. Once in a while I killed them if they were really asking for it. Only a few times did I did stay until they died of old age.”
Shaw was back to giving me that horrified look that meant he didn’t know what to do with the information I had given him. I should have let him keep his beer. Puke on my floor is preferable to the expression of shock and pity he was wearing now. “How do you deal with it all?”
“You get used to it, eventually.” I replied truthfully. I will admit that the first hundred years of watching those I knew and love grow old and die had been the hardest of my life. Once I got used to the knowledge that this was the way it was, I protected myself by refusing to get too close anyone. Marrying men I didn’t particularly like was a way to blend in without getting hurt. It hasn’t always been easy, and I’ve been known to get dangerously attached to a person from time to time, but it does get better.
Between my morose answers to his questions and Shaw’s odd state between buzzed and smashed, the mood had become sad and awkward. Shaw changed the subject by circling around to his original question. “So what was Attila the Hun like?”
“He was like any other barbarian of the day. He was burly and smelly and liked to kill stuff but hated to bathe. Attila was merely more aggressive and smarter about it and so he got to be king.” I shrugged. The pizza and beer, combined with a couple of days without sleep was catching up to me. I needed to go to bed. I eyed Shaw and found him still staring at me with a strange mix of sympathy and astonishment. I considered offering to drive him home, but I knew that I would fall asleep at the wheel at some point during the trip and crash my pretty car. Besides that I wasn’t sure if I’d pass a sobriety test if I got pulled over, and it would be inconvenient to lose my license over a DUI. Calling a cab for him wasn’t out of the realm of possibilities, but I didn’t know where Shaw lived and I doubted that he’d be able to make it through his front door without falling over.
While I had pondered the problem, Shaw had moved without my noticing until I was blinking at his chest. Startled, I craned my head back to look him in the eyes and thought, ‘Wow, he is really tall.’
He touched my face lightly, tracing the curve of my cheek and jaw with his fingertips. When I didn’t protest he took another small step forward until there was only a hard breath’s distance between us. I remained as still as I could to keep from spooking him, feeling my face heat with the flush of excitement and listened to my heart speed away in the cage of my chest. His hand moved until his fingers caught in my hair and he bent his head. I went up on tip toe to meet him halfway and to leave no doubt in his mind that I wanted him to kiss me.
His lips were soft and almost chaste against mine as he buried his fingers in my hair and gently held me. I let my fingers trail across the hard muscles of his chest under the thin fabric of his shirt and delighted in the heat radiating from his flesh. My mind quickly turned to more lascivious things, and I decided that I’d rather not engage in them on the hard kitchen floor or on the counters where I prepare my food. Shaw let me go as I stepped out of his embrace and turned to leave. After a few steps I realized that he was not following me, and I turned to find him where I had left him, looking chagrined.
“Are you coming?” I asked him over my shoulder. A brilliant smile stretched across his face and warmed his handsome features. Gods he was sexy when he did that.
Without answering, he hurried forward and took the hand I offered and went with me into my bedroom.
What happened next is not what you think. Obviously I have the moral fortitude of a gerbil on boner pills, and I had every intention of carrying out my promise to Shaw, but alas it was not meant to be. Several days spent in a faerie Mound combined with half a pizza and too much beer overwhelmed him and put Shaw snoring on his back before I could get his clothes off of him. It was probably just as well. He seems the type to stick to a woman like an industrial adhesive after a passionate exchange, and I didn’t know if I liked him that much, yet.


Chapter 18

I didn’t like that The Children had my phone number. I didn’t need to be available to them whenever they got a wild hair up their ass and decided to talk to me. It had only been a week since they made first contact and I was already sick of them. I stood in the middle of Shaw’s living room, waiting for him to finish his shower and change into clean clothes as I scowled at the text message I had received from Alejandro.
Get out now. The Divine Inferno is coming for you. Come to the safe house ASAP.
I went to the front window and peeked out between the blinds to the street beyond. Shaw lived in an eighty year old duplex near Druid Hills that was surrounded by massive old oaks and pretty, flowering bushes. The sun was well above the horizon so most of his neighbors were engaged in the daily routines of vapid labor to earn the wages that made their semi-comfortable lives possible. The street was empty and quiet without a sign that someone was out to get me.
A sharp bang echoed from the back of the house and startled me badly enough that I jumped three feet into the air. With my heart hammering in my chest and my mind buzzing with curiosity, I hurried through the breakfast nook and into the tiny kitchen as the door vibrated with the force of someone pounding on it. There was a mousy woman holding a toddler on the other side.
“Is Phil here?” she demanded in a high, shrilly voice. Her large eyes were owlish with fright as she scanned the room behind me in search of Shaw.
“He’s in the shower-”
“Please let me in!” The woman pushed past me before I could answer and slammed the door closed behind her. She stared breathlessly at it for a moment, and then her small hand whipped out and locked the deadbolt and then the knob for good measure, but it still wasn’t enough to make her feel secure. She practically sprinted to the front door and locked that as well. Her hand was shaking when she lifted the chain and slid it into the runner and then she sat on the couch and burst into tears.
The toddler squirmed and whined to get down and the woman let him go, though she snagged his shirt in her fingers to keep him close. The boy didn’t seem to mind, he took to examining the darkness under the couch.
“Are you okay?” I asked, uncertain of what to do with the unknown woman. She shook her head and wiped tears from her cheek with her free hand.
“Could you call the police for me, please? I left my cell phone at my house when I ran.” Her voice trembled nearly as badly as her hands so it was difficult to