A God to Fear (Thorn Saga Book 5) Page 21

  Not as many demons were out whispering today as would have been here in the past. Thorn saw a couple of them hovering above the pirate girls, trying to route their play into a fight, and another drifting near two mothers who were reprimanding their children by the swing set. Thorn took special note of the five demons floating under an elm tree beside the park, observing the proceedings with all the envy of childhood outcasts who wanted to play. They made no effort to cause others pain; they only watched. And their jealous eyes rested not on the whispering devils, but on the gleeful children. Certainly, not all of demonkind would listen to the truth—especially in areas far removed from Atlanta—and the news would take time to spread. But here, Thorn could already see changes taking place.

  Thorn’s guest journeyed in across the soccer field to the west. For a minute he appeared as a dark speck against the bright green grass, but soon his features grew clear: his funeral suit, his tall and gaunt build, his brow furrowed in ire. He drifted like a vulture above the playground, glaring at the children as if he might swoop down and snatch one up, then fly off with it as its parents screamed behind him.

  Marcus floated through the monkey bars as he approached Thorn, who pocketed his hands lest their shaking betray his nerves.

  “Thank you for meeting me,” Thorn said.

  Marcus stopped a dozen feet away from him. “I do so only to demonstrate that I’m not afraid of you. That my beliefs in a purely demonic society make me stronger than you.”

  “In light of recent events, have you at least considered that the claims I made about god and the Sanctuaries were indeed correct?”

  “Pfff.” Marcus made a dismissive gesture. “You are cunning, Thorn. I will give you that. But I see right through your conspiracy. Somehow, you and your cronies have fabricated evidence to support your delusional musings. I’ve even heard a tall tale that you were God for a few minutes. Ha! Yet here you are with none of his powers, the same conniving Rat that I’ve always known.”

  Thorn said nothing, and with some effort, he remained composed. He would not give Marcus the satisfaction of an altercation. In truth, he had little left to argue about. “I will find out how you did it, and I will expose you for the conceited liar that you are,” Marcus said, blind to Thorn’s pacifism. “I will kill you a third time, and a fourth, and however many times it takes. And even if your efforts to dissolve our society are successful, we’ll have no First Rule anymore. No one will be left to stop me from murdering you in broad daylight.”

  “Marcus, I—”

  “No! You do not get to speak! Your words are poison, and I will not have them enter my ears. I will never believe as you do, and neither will the rest of demonkind. We will never compromise! We will crush your precious humans, and we will—”

  “Mommy, why’s that man so angry?”

  Marcus froze at the words from the little girl, who stood under one of the playground’s pavilions a stone’s throw away. She gazed at him with a mixture of puzzlement and fear, as did her mother, who quickly took her daughter’s hand and led her away.

  Marcus looked down at his feet. They were planted firmly in the dirt, but by the panic in Marcus’s eyes, he may as well have been standing in acid. The other demons gaped. One of them, trembling, fled beneath the ground.

  Marcus’s gaze searched frantically for Thorn, and swept right past him. Kids across a whole fourth of the playground had ceased their fun to stop and stare at the weird man in a suit who had suddenly appeared in their midst. When Marcus started to stumble backward, away from the curious young eyes, Thorn decided that he’d had enough. He reached out with his mind and brought Marcus back into the demonic realm.

  Marcus bolted upward a few feet after the sudden loss of gravity, overcompensating as Thorn had often done. His head darted around until his eyes found Thorn. The trepidation in them was, Thorn had to admit, more than a little gratifying.

  “What was that?” Marcus asked, sounding oddly out of breath for a spirit who had no lungs.

  “A gift,” Thorn said. “A friend once gave it to me, and I thought I’d pass it along to you.” Marcus just stared dumbly, so Thorn continued: “That was the last time it’ll happen to you until you learn to feel love for another. But when that happens—when you finally empathize with someone who is different from you—you’ll have the gateway into the physical world that you’ve wanted so badly. Then you can cause all the mayhem you want. Of course, at that point, I don’t think you’ll want to cause any.”

  Marcus was shaking. Thorn couldn’t tell if he was fearful or enraged.

  Thorn floated closer to him and spoke as compassionately as he could. “You don’t have to believe what I believe, Marcus. All I ask is that you step outside yourself, try to understand ideas contrary to your own, and consider.”

  Marcus backed away from him, his eyes wide. “What deviltry is this? You seek to humiliate me? You seek to become the greatest through new, freakish sorcery?”

  “No. It’s better for us all to become the greatest together than for me to become the greatest alone. If we want to move forward, brother, we need to stop trying to beat each other and start trying to help each other.”

  And perhaps that was Thorn’s purpose, the same as Thilial’s. To help others in ways in which I was never helped. To create a world free from god, Karen. A world free from demons, Brandon. To create a world for us. For all of us.

  Thorn was through with spirits, though. He wished them the best, but they would have to build their new world themselves. Because the new world that Thorn would help create… lay elsewhere.

  •

  “I’m going to turn myself into a human,” Thorn explained to the Judge as they floated above the tables at an outdoor restaurant downtown. “Permanently this time.”

  The Judge raised a finger to the bridge of his sunglasses, then eased them down so he could look Thorn in the eyes. “For realsies? That’s a pretty big move.”

  “Yeah, well, the fate of the humans is important to me. I’ll be more able to help them if I’m one of them. Plus, I’d like to look after Amy without being pestered by demons and angels.”

  “Amy, huh?” The Judge slid the shades back onto his brow, then looked out over the crowd of humans munching on their early dinners. “I guess every rose really does have its Thorn.”

  Thorn laughed at that, but his laugh was cut short by a more sincere sentiment.

  “Am I ever gonna see you again?” the Judge asked. “You feel like my sidekick now. Like the next time the bad guys have me cornered, I’ll just have to lay down and die, because you won’t be there to back me up.”

  “Perhaps that’s when you’ll see me again.”

  “When I’m dead?”

  Thorn smirked.

  “Ah! Ah! You laugh now, but seriously, man. Am I gonna have to wait sixty years till you’re an old wrinkly dude on his deathbed to have any hope that we can bust some nuts together again?”

  Thorn grimaced. “I don’t think that phrase means what you think it means.”

  “Whatever. You know what I’m saying.”

  “Well, sixty years isn’t long. I just need some time away from spirits, to think, to discover who I really am and want to be. You’re a likable guy, more or less. Or even lesser.” The Judge flipped him the finger. “I’m sure you’ll make new friends quickly enough, Judge. The bad guys will have nowhere to hide once you’re running this town again.”

  “Judge, jury, and executioner,” the Judge said in a deep voice, then formed his hands into gun shapes and fired a few shots—”Pew, pew, pew!”—at the crowd.

  “That’s the spirit.”

  “I’ll send ’em straight to the pits of Hell. Pending the results of a fair trial, of course.”

  “You know,” Thorn said, “I found Hell. The actual Hell. It has its own realm of existence, right in the iron-nickel ball at the center of everything. Who knew, right?”

  “Oh, I could have guessed. I traveled to the center of the Earth one time out of sheer
boredom, in our realm, naturally. You know what I found there?”

  “What?”

  “A guy running really, really fast on a giant hamster wheel, trying to keep the planet spinning.”

  Thorn chuckled at the goofy image. Relaxing like this and being able to laugh for a change were luxuries that Thorn would not soon take for granted. He would indeed miss the Judge, but his departure was for the best. Thorn had no doubt that demon culture would fragment into countless sects again, in light of the recent revelations. Wars might even be fought. But there were others to fight those battles. Thorn had done his job. The truth was known. And he had other duties.

  Across the crowd, Thorn noticed the person he’d come here to see: Darnell, the street preacher Atlanta’s demons had been trying to corrupt for years. Thorn had spotted him a few blocks away, walking in this direction, and he’d seen Darnell perform at this restaurant before, so he’d asked the Judge to join him for one last Darnell sermon as a demon. Thorn looked forward to meeting Darnell in person sometime in the coming weeks.

  As distinguished and unabashed as if he’d been invited here by the restaurant’s owners themselves, Darnell paced beneath the outskirts of the wide awning hanging above the tables, then set his wooden box down in the street just beyond the corner curb. Perhaps that was as close to the restaurant as he was allowed to come. Nonetheless, he cleared his voice to speak.

  “How you fine folks doing tonight?” Darnell said in an uncharacteristically chummy tone. He even smiled at the dining crowd. As usual, a third of his captive audience perked up, a third ignored him, and a third scowled at him. “I’ll only take a minute of your time,” he said. “I’d like to talk with you about something that’s always popular here in the good old U. S. of A. I’d like to talk with you about freedom.” When the din of restaurant chatter threatened to overwhelm his voice, Darnell shouted, “Freedom!” He earned a few more glances, and one man’s cry of, “Let us eat!”

  Darnell continued. “Of course, you can’t have freedom when you’ve got people in charge of you telling you exactly how to think, exactly how to behave. You can’t have freedom when good people let bad ideas grow big and powerful by not asking questions. When you follow whatever you’re told is true and you never ask why it’s true, then how do you know what you don’t know? How do you know you’re not living under someone else’s thumb?”

  Two demons, one at each of Darnell’s ears, whispered to him. But most of the demons who were scattered about the area turned to listen to the man—for once.

  “Some people like to tell you that if you’re not with them and their ideas, then you don’t matter. But wow… Wow! What a waste of everyone’s time and energy, trying to gain all that power over each other. We only have so many resources. Why waste them all trying to keep other people beneath us? Why not work together on something better? Something like… like learning?”

  Darnell swept his hands out over the crowd. His affable voice grew more powerful, his grin a bit wider, demanding even more attention. As best Thorn could guess, at least half of the restaurant’s patrons were now watching Darnell, even as the managers in the open kitchen dialed for the police.

  “Knowledge, my friends, is inextricably linked to freedom. The more we know, the better we can see through the lies of anyone who wants to manipulate us. If we plug our ears and hold our eyes shut tight, and the only thoughts we ever think are the ones already inside our heads, we may as well chain our arms and legs and walk back into slavery. So open your eyes. The strange and the new are not as scary as you’ve been told. Open your ears, and you might hear something that changes you into a better woman or man. Swim in the sea of ideas, of knowledge, of reason. This sea is deep and it is warm and you are welcome any time.

  “Swim, my friends, and be free.”

  Darnell gave a small bow to the crowd, some of whom clapped lightly. As he stepped down off of his box and picked it up, the people returned to their food and their conversations, and the restaurant grew clamorous again. The demons took a bit longer than the humans to return to their routines. Many drifted in place, caught in the still wake of the powerful address.

  Thorn turned to the Judge. “What’d you think?”

  “Meh. I could do better.”

  Thorn shook his head at the joke… if it had indeed been a joke. He watched Darnell marching away at a measured pace, as if the police had never once been called on him. In spite of all the times he’d been booed, he’d lost none of his dignity or aplomb.

  Just as Darnell walked past the end of the awning, a man at the table there stood up to greet him. Thorn took a few moments to recognize him. Joel?

  Thorn hadn’t realized until now that the wayward doctor was present. He drifted closer to hear the conversation as Joel shook Darnell’s hand.

  “—was a really great speech,” Joel finished saying.

  “Thank you, thank you, I do my best,” said Darnell.

  As Thorn neared, he saw that Joel had abandoned a fresh and steaming fajita dish, a nearly full bottle of wine, and a date who looked fifteen years his junior.

  “I’ve seen you around town,” Joel said. “You always draw a crowd, but I can never tell if they like you.”

  “Neither can I,” Darnell said, laughing.

  “Well, I thought it was great. Where do you come up with that stuff? Are you trained as an orator?”

  Darnell held out his hands, palms up, in a gesture of humility. “I’m just another traveler on the road of life. If no one else is saying something that needs to be said, I say it.”

  “It spoke to me. It did. I really appreciate what you do. And hey.” Joel dug through his pocket and procured a business card holder. He slid a card out for Darnell to take. “I own a restaurant up in Midtown. It’s all indoors, but if you want the curb out front, you’re welcome any time.”

  Darnell’s poise faltered a bit as he plucked the business card with his fingertips. He stared at Joel with what looked like surprise heavily tainted with suspicion. “Really?” he asked.

  “Absolutely,” Joel said.

  Darnell’s face alternated between wariness and glee, and Thorn wasn’t sure which would win. But Darnell was beaming by the time he slipped the card into the pocket of his weather-beaten pants. “I may just take you up on that.”

  The two men said their goodbyes. Now Thorn was more excited than ever about entering human society. Whispering positive thoughts to his charges was one thing, but actually knowing and growing with these people he’d once studied… Thorn could scarcely wait.

  “I think I’m going to leave now,” Thorn said to the Judge, who’d floated up behind him.

  The Judge didn’t look too happy about that, but he shrugged anyway. “All right man, it’s been real.”

  The Judge moved toward Thorn, so Thorn reached out his hand to shake. But instead of shaking hands, the Judge widened his arms and embraced Thorn tightly. Thorn stiffened at the awkward display of friendship. “No, don’t fight it, Thorn. Don’t fight the love. Hug it out.”

  Thorn endured several more seconds of the hug before the Judge let him go. “I won’t miss your hugs,” Thorn said.

  “And I won’t miss your sunny disposition.”

  Thorn grabbed the Judge’s hand and shook it. “You have my deepest gratitude, Judge. And I mean that from the bottom of my heart. You’ve been an essential ally, and a good friend.” Thorn had been hoping for an apology from the Judge for his role in hindering Thorn’s progress, back before he’d decided to assist Thorn. Given the productive relationship they’d developed since then, Thorn was surprised that he hadn’t yet received that apology.

  But it seemed he wouldn’t be getting it now, at their last goodbye; the Judge only nodded. “You’ve been a pain in my ass. In a good way.” And perhaps that was as much of an apology as Thorn would ever get. The Judge waved farewell and backed away through the restaurant’s oblivious patrons, their tables, and their food.

  “Be good,” Thorn called to him as a final
request. “We’ve fought too hard for either of us to return to our old ways.”

  The Judge backed through a waitress balancing several plates of food, then toward the restaurant’s outer wall. “Well, you know,” he said, lowering his sunglasses a bit, “playa gon’ play.”

  He winked at Thorn, then disappeared inside.

  •

  Thorn flew over Atlanta one more time, solemnly aware that if he wanted to do so in the future, he’d need an airplane. This city had been his home for over two decades, and although he intended to stay here for the time being, the uncomfortable feeling that he was leaving his home forever welled within him. He meandered past the skyscrapers of Downtown, then Midtown, then Buckhead, then curved back around to drift over parks, metro stations, the stadium, and all that traffic that he’d have to get used to. Plenty of other demons threw him foul glances on his journey, but Thorn didn’t mind. Perhaps the next time he saw them all, they’d have changed their minds about him, and about what he’d done.

  When he’d finished his sightseeing, Thorn descended to an isolated corner of the lake at Piedmont Park. The sun was sinking behind the skyscrapers in the distance, casting oranges and reds to dance together in the water. The only two humans in sight were a couple leaning against each other in the gazebo out in the lake. It seemed as good a time as any.

  Thorn summoned one of the few remaining remnants of god’s knowledge, and just like that, he was human. His body jolted as gravity pulled him downward an inch and his feet landed on the ground. He breathed in deeply. After pondering for a few minutes whether he was certain about this course of action, Thorn steeled his resolve and destroyed the knowledge that could change him back to a spirit.