A God to Fear (Thorn Saga Book 5) Page 14

  The angels ahead had ceased all movement at the demons’ advance, but they made no defensive moves whatsoever. The buffoons just idled in formation, confirming Marcus’s hunch. They’re just as out of practice at war as we are. I’ll be able to slaughter scores of them tonight. He tried to savor the experience as best he could as he rushed forward to meet his foes.

  The idiot demons who’d blitzed into battle before Marcus gave the order had a thirty-second head start on him. They were nearing the angel’s forward lines now. Marcus counted the seconds passing, eager for the violence that was about to unfold. We’re back for you, you obsequious peons. Your very existence is a mockery of us and our way of life. I will show you no mercy.

  The front wave of demons clashed into the angel army. From Marcus’s vantage, it looked like the angels barely bothered to defend themselves as the demons plowed through them.

  Then, seconds after the initial collision of armies, the entire angelic host disappeared. Over a hundred thousand angels simply vanished, as if the storm clouds had swallowed them up. They left behind only lightning, rain, and a great many confused demons, who continued onward into the empty space that the angels had vacated.

  What deception is this?

  Marcus stopped his advance, letting the rest of his force charge ahead of him. Had the angels somehow retreated, seeing that they were outmatched? Had they been an illusion—a feint from the Enemy to distract from something else? Marcus looked around to all sides, then up to the clouds, then down to the sleeping city far below. He saw many more demons drifting toward the battle, but no battle would take place without the missing angels. Marcus cursed himself for not anticipating the Enemy’s trickery. Perhaps if the angels failed to fight, the demons could still claim victory. But then neither his plans nor Wanderer’s plans would come to fru—

  A great cry went up among the demon horde: hundreds of death wails combining into one. Marcus turned to the leading edge of the demon force, just a quarter mile away. The angels had reappeared around the unsuspecting demon army. The cluster of spirits was so intermixed that Marcus could not discern where the demon army ended and the angel army began. It looked as if the angels had reappeared right next to the demons, then butchered them without warning—indeed, a full half of Marcus’s fighting force now floated lifeless among the clouds.

  The other half exploded into a panic, darting in chaotic vectors in an attempt to flee. Marcus was still trying to comprehend what had happened, and how it had happened so fast. But he would not accept defeat. I must hold them together. We can still achieve victory.

  “Shazakahn!” Marcus called. He flew through the tumult, searching for the African leader. Screaming demons lurched every which way. Marcus impacted several dead bodies in his haste to find help. “Shazakahn! Where are you?”

  “Shazakahn is slain!” came a response from somewhere in the chaos. “We must retreat! Retreat!”

  “No!” Marcus bellowed. “No retreat! Form up around me! We can hold them off! Form up—” An angel appeared—literally out of nowhere—and raised its sword to strike Marcus. Marcus yelped as the cherub brought its sword down, but another demon slammed into the angel at the last moment, saving Marcus’s life.

  Where is Wanderer? We’re getting slaughtered! We need his reserve forces. We need to turn the tide of this battle.

  As the horrific scene unfolded around Marcus, he saw that all of the angels seemed to be using the same new trick that had nearly killed him moments ago. If a demon had the advantage, an angel would vanish, only to reappear moments later with its hands around the demon’s neck or its sword skewering the demon’s midsection. The angels’ new ability flabbergasted Marcus. Even he was forced to admit to himself the futility of fighting an enemy with such a skill.

  What’s more, the winged angels flew much faster than the wingless devils. The demons could not flee. And up here in the sky, they had nowhere to hide. They were too terrified and undisciplined to mount a counterattack. What had begun as a promising battlefield had been transformed into a total massacre in less than a minute.

  Marcus charged toward the ground. It was a mile beneath him, but if he could escape beneath the surface, he’d be safe.

  He’d barely begun his flight, though, when he saw a heartening sign. A new force of demons was rising from the ground! These brigades were well coordinated and arranged in tight spherical formations as they drifted upward—deadly weather balloons rising in the storm. Perhaps this was the force from New York, since Marcus knew of no southern demon force that was so systematized. Whoever they were, they looked to be some twenty thousand strong.

  Only twenty thousand? Why not send the full force now? Maybe Wanderer had some sort of flanking maneuver planned.

  The angels must have noticed the incoming demons too. They fell back and upward a ways, reforming for the next attack, likely just as aware as Marcus that the demons wouldn’t make the same mistake twice. Heaven’s opening move had left a sobering detritus of demon bodies in the angels’ wake. Did Wanderer send my first wave in to expose the angels’ trap? Did he send us to our deaths?

  Some spirits lingered in the space between armies, hacking away at each other, so Marcus withdrew closer to the ground, near the safety of the other demons. It will not be me who takes the glory for this battle, Marcus realized, though he was glad to still have his life. Some other demon will lead us to victory, and I’ll once again become Wanderer’s errand boy. For now.

  Marcus looked downward to see some angels emerging from the warehouse complex on the ground—only a couple dozen, but enough to worry him. Should they choose to martyr themselves, they could mount an effective enough raid to distract the demon horde from below while the greater angelic force attacked from above. Maybe Marcus could gather some of his surviving followers and massacre this group of cherubim. Maybe he could still carve out his own slice of prestige from this battle.

  He was preparing to call for his followers when he noticed a single demon floating next to one of the angels on the ground. Marcus’s zeal for bloodshed burned even hotter when he saw who it was.

  Him.

  From this distance, Thorn looked unscathed. Had he fought in the quarantine zone during the attack, like the traitor he was? Or had he arrived afterward to tend to his wounded angel friends? No matter. He’d die with the rest of them.

  But who was that standing next to him? It was one of the biggest angels Marcus had ever seen, short of a seraph; he stood at least twice Thorn’s height. Yet despite his size, he looked frail and unhealthy. His back was hunched, his hair missing in places… but he looked familiar. Had Marcus once seen this angel in his haler days?

  The angel next to Thorn was gazing upward at the battle in the sky, at the spheres of demons rising toward the angel army, at the slew of demon corpses suspended in the clouds like the remnants of some macabre fireworks display. The other angels near the ground wore expressions of ire, of hate. But Thorn’s accomplice looked more sad than anything.

  Neither Thorn nor the angel had noticed Marcus hovering a few hundred feet above them. I should swoop down from behind, take them unaware, murder them both. But he feared that angel for some reason. Something dark and vicious clawed at his memory’s periphery.

  Before his eyes, the angel flared his wings and shot upward. The wings, each more than two car lengths across, beat powerfully against the roiling wind, flinging great gusts of water droplets outward against the rain. Thorn made no move to follow, nor did the other angels. They just hovered motionless, watching him rise. Marcus, captivated, did the same.

  The angel sped upward, circling around a thick bolt of lightning that ripped a fissure in the heavens, blasting a shockwave of rain, air, and sound outward. He twisted through the sky as he climbed to the height of the demon brigades, then wove between them, ascending ever higher.

  And then he spoke.

  “Demons, hear me!” the angel roared in a sonorous voice that Marcus recognized immediately.

  No. It can
’t be.

  “I am Xeres, the greatest demon lord of all time! You are my former followers, my former brothers, and I will not let you march forward to certain suicide!

  “God has lied to you! Lucifer has lied to you! There is no need for anyone to be an enemy of anyone else! This fighting is pointless! It is a waste! So I urge you—no, I command you: RETREAT! End this foolishness! Ignore the distortions that have been sold to you and discover truth for yourselves!

  “Peace!

  “Peace!

  “PEACE!”

  The sight of Xeres as an angel, blaring orders with his dominating voice, overwhelmed Marcus, and the demon army as well. The orbs of demons started sagging as Xeres soared among them. When he flew close enough for each sphere to see, it collapsed entirely into swirling confusion. Some of the demons tried to hold their positions and some tried to regroup, but others fled downward, or sped after Xeres, or idled in the wet air.

  It’s a trick! It has to be another trick. Xeres is dead. Defection is impossible.

  The angel army didn’t waste a moment. It charged at breakneck speed toward the confused demons.

  “Angels!” Xeres called to them. “You, too, are my brothers and sisters! Do not attack! Do not kill for a baseless cause!”

  But Xeres’s words did nothing to the angels. They continued their onslaught. When they collided with the first group of demons, they slaughtered them.

  Marcus felt as small as he had when the hordes drove him out of Rome. He grew aware that he was panicking, and it panicked him all the more. His body would not respond to his mind’s commands. The pandemonium he was witnessing among the demonic forces was so far removed from his plans that he couldn’t even remember what his plans had been. Where is Wanderer? Does he see that his soldiers are perishing by the thousands? Does he care?

  •

  Thunder roused Brandon from the depths of sleep. He’d had the strangest nightmare. The wedding had ended in a massacre of its guests, Tim had been shot, then Brandon and Heather had been chased by evil spirits of some kind all night long.

  He slid his eyes open, tried to regain his bearings. He was sitting in the passenger seat of a car next to Heather, who looked even more sleepy than he felt. She twisted the key in the ignition a bit, then adjusted the air when it turned on. She noticed Brandon watching her.

  “Hey, hon,” she said blearily. “It sure got cold while we slept, didn’t it? How you doing?”

  Why was his arm in a cast? The plane crash from his nightmare couldn’t have been real. Could it? “Where are we?”

  “We’re at the warehouses Thorn told us to go to. We’re safe, I think. You can go back to sleep.”

  Thorn? The name jogged Brandon’s memory, and he recalled that his nightmare was real. He closed his eyes and tried to fall back asleep, or maybe to wake up.

  He couldn’t.

  •

  A demon rammed into Thilial—perhaps by accident, because she felt no pain from any assault. She tumbled end over end through a small cloud, passing several skirmishes on the way. One demon, screaming in murderous rage, charged at her as she sought to reorient herself. It spun before her, bottom to top. Only by sheer luck did she manage to decapitate it before it attacked. Eager to leave the fighting for a moment, she flew straight up…

  … only to find the city of Atlanta above her, on the ground! She shook her head, trying to make sense of her positioning, but the sky around her was so crowded with spirits and clouds and disorienting lightning blasts that she couldn’t make sense of the visual overload.

  Thilial drew her wings inward and dropped down into the physical realm. The warfare vanished, and gravity instantly told her which way was down. She adjusted her body so that her feet faced in that direction.

  When she climbed back into the demonic realm, she found herself in the midst of thousands of dead demons, drifting like abandoned rag dolls on a night sea. This must be where the first skirmish happened.

  The bodies wouldn’t disappear for a few more days, so Thilial, disgusted, decided to disappear. She sprang up into the angelic realm, and the vista around her transformed into a surreal panorama. The doomed demon army took on russet hues. The angels winked in and out of true color as they took brief respites in the angelic realm—or used the realm to facilitate an attack—then blinked back into demonic space. Some angels, like Thilial, were waiting unnaturally long to rejoin the battle.

  She’d tried to revel in the warfare. Justice was finally being served to these vermin, and that was something to celebrate. But Thilial had been created in the 1500s; she hadn’t been present for the great battles of the distant past. This mass killing was a new experience for her, and she found it abhorrent at a visceral level. Talking about killing God’s enemies was one thing, but being here in person and actually participating in the extermination…

  Thilial knew that there must be a better way to achieve God’s goals. This was deeply, deeply wrong, especially in light of so many demons heeding Xeres’s plea to retreat. He tried to open their eyes, and many of them listened, but we’re killing them anyway. If they will not fight and we rush to slaughter them, who is truly the demon, and who the angel?

  “Thilial!” a commanding angel called from the safety of the sidelines in the angelic realm. “Get back into combat!” His severe eyes went even further, warning Thilial, Or you’ll rot in Heaven’s prisons for eternity.

  Thilial dropped back into the demonic realm, and color was restored to the tens of thousands of fighting spirits. She raised Fear in a defensive posture. Maybe if I keep moving, and strike only in self-defense, my superiors won’t notice that I’m avoiding the fray.

  She began a wide circular motion around the perimeter of the fighting. From this distance, the battle looked like an enormous glob of churning particles drifting in the sky. When viewed from afar, the horror and violence inside that glob seemed almost forgettable. She didn’t know those angels or those demons, dying by the hundreds. From out here, they were just spectacle. She again attempted to force herself to see this as a necessary—

  Scathing pain burst across Thilial’s back. She tried to flee from whatever had caused it, but two hands closed around her head, preventing her escape. She grabbed the hands just as they tried to twist her head into a snap. In doing so, she dropped her sword.

  Fear toppled forward out of her reach. She summoned all of her strength to strain against the hands of whatever demon was behind her.

  The demon abruptly released her head and delivered two sharp blows to her side. Thilial’s hands, having been pushing against the demon’s, thrust outward, throwing her whole body off-kilter. She struggled to right herself.

  Panicked, Thilial scanned for her attacker, but somehow, he’d vanished. She turned to look for her sword, and spotted it—in the hands of an angel who was speeding away from her.

  An angel? Was this who had attacked her? What reckless angel would betray his own kind in the midst of such a victory over demonkind?

  Pain radiated from Thilial’s back and throbbed through her body. Her wounds felt grave. I should retreat. I need to get back to Heaven.

  As she floated there, a kilometer above the ground, trying to climb into the angelic realm, she watched her attacker flying downward. He was just a fleck in the darkness now, but Thilial could still see her sword in his hand.

  As unconsciousness wrapped its blanket around her mind, Thilial’s last thoughts were of fury at the angel who’d crossed her, and confusion over the fact that he had only one wing.

  •

  Thorn had rushed into the fray to defend Xeres from several attackers—mostly angels—but Xeres seemed to be handling them himself. He disappeared and reappeared, outflying some and flinging others away with his mighty arms, wounding a few but killing none. Thorn could do little but watch.

  While escaping the assault on the quarantine zone, Thorn had feared for his life. The demons all knew him to be a traitor, and the angels all knew him to be a renegade—the target of G
od’s manhunt. If not for Xeres protecting him from the spirits in the compound, Thorn would have been slain.

  Then, floating next to Xeres beneath the battle, watching him gaze up at the carnage, glimpsing the change in his eyes when he saw the death being wrought by the war he’d neglected to prevent, Thorn had felt hope for the first time in days.

  And now the angels were dashing that hope to pieces, murdering every demon in sight. Could this order truly have come from God? He was vain and relentless, true, but in Heaven, His desire to save demonkind had seemed genuine. Could He truly be terminating the entire demonic race just because some of them had learned that He still wanted them back? Was God so callous, so insecure?

  As Thorn was trying to make sense of it all, he noticed two familiar beings near the outer edge of the chaotic battle. Wanderer was attacking Thilial! The hoary old demon hit her twice in the side, then swooped around her and grabbed her sword. He raced downward toward the ground.

  Paralyzed, Thilial flickered away into the angelic realm. From this far away, Thorn could do nothing to help her, especially not when she’d fled to the realm above his. But what was Wanderer doing out in the battle? Why had he risked his own safety like that? Shouldn’t he be huddled in a safe house somewhere, dispatching orders from behind several lines of defense?

  “Thorny!” the Judge called from behind him. “You’re alive! Holy hell, dude, you started a war!”

  “Judge! Follow me! I need your help!” Thorn veered away from the main battle and set himself on Wanderer’s trajectory. The angels’ victory seemed imminent; the disorganized demons stood no chance. But seeing Wanderer’s stealthy incursion, Thorn discerned that this confrontation with the angels couldn’t possibly be his entire plan. No, Wanderer was much too cunning for that. This battle had to be a diversion from something else.