Thorn Page 4

  It had been this way since the dawn of time, with this horde of devils who were supposedly united against the Enemy. In practice, though, they were all rivals, far from united, each waiting for a chance to stab another in the back for an ephemeral glimpse of glory and power. Thorn knew his kind would have wiped itself out long ago if not for the First Rule.

  Xeres had once wondered aloud why they congregated like this when they hated each other so much. Thorn hadn’t wanted to appear weak, so he shrugged the question off as hypothetical, but he knew the answer.

  They congregated because they were lonely. Constant competition with each other caused demonkind to lack friendships like those that humans had. Their inner thoughts remained within. Even Xeres, the mentor whom Thorn had followed for centuries, who had been the closest thing Thorn had ever had to a friend, had abandoned Thorn in the end.

  He remembered their relationship now as cold and formal, Xeres always preoccupied with his own prestige. Perhaps silently wandering the streets with all these strange demons was preferable to such a loyal but strained friendship… or so Thorn tried to convince himself. Though he was loath to admit it, he missed Xeres.

  As the city slumbered, Thorn exchanged dark glances with his followers and his other demonic brothers in their fancy black clothes, isolated in various sections of the dead downtown landscape. He thought he heard a gunshot from afar, but couldn’t be certain. If it killed someone and a demon was behind it, he would hear the bragging tomorrow.

  Thorn examined the other demons. He was so used to viewing them as his inferiors that ages had passed since he’d really seen them. The Enemy once described devils as roaring lions, but in actuality these thin men in business suits looked more like starving wolves. Many of the less-intelligent demons were indeed starving for human misery. They didn’t have the wits to create it themselves. One of them was visibly salivating even now, at this quiet hour, absurd in his suit.

  Thorn had spent some time on Wall Street in the eighties, just before coming to Atlanta, so he liked to think the spiffy wardrobe he saw his peers wearing was a vestige of that time. Since each demon’s physical perception of the other spirits on Earth was determined by one’s own psyche, Thorn often skewed toward the formal wear of whatever culture he found himself in. Other demons he’d spoken with perceived their peers as animals, as dark clouds, as nude and bloody perversions, or as any number of other apparitions projected by their personal quirks.

  The only universal commonality was that most saw each other as males, despite their asexuality. No one knew why this was, but Thorn guessed it had something to do with a bias toward dominant, powerful bodies, even in one’s foes. Humans might have called it sexist, but Thorn had perceived several demons as female in the past few decades, so he knew that his mind was slowly changing with humanity’s new gender roles. It was too bad; Thorn liked male chauvinism.

  Also—and Thorn really hated this—no demon could perceive others with wings, since the Enemy had shorn the wings off of all of them (with one exception).

  In Heaven, they’d all seen each other as humanlike beings, so Thorn found it strange that many of them, himself included, retained this view despite their hatred for all things associated with the Enemy. God had wanted them to look like humans so they would feel more kinship with humans… or something. Swell plan, Thorn thought. Worked out splendidly.

  So Thorn spent another night ambling through city streets, empty save for the other wolves in suits, these physical manifestations in the spiritual world whom he called his brothers. A loitering army, they waited for the dawn.

  3

  Thorn watched the insane angel drift over empty pews. “It’s healthy for you to admit to your wife that you’re cheating on her,” the angel whispered to the preacher, a jittery young man with a cleft lip scar, who strode back and forth at the foot of the pulpit. “The first step to healing is to be honest.”

  From what Thorn had seen these last few minutes, with the man’s suddenly spoken prayer and the tears he had shed, Thorn believed the man had indeed philandered, and had indeed come to regret it. Fighting the truth with a half-truth was always better than with an outright lie, so Thorn said, “Perhaps honesty is best, but remember how much of this was her fault. Her nagging voice, the weight she gained. She drove you to cheat on her.” Thorn was just guessing at the causes; he didn’t know this man.

  One of Thorn’s more impetuous followers spoke up. “Don’t tell her. Think of all the misery you’ll save yourself and your family. Other church people would hate you if they found out. No one ever has to know.” Thorn smacked the lesser demon for ruining his approach, though the words themselves weren’t bad… if the preacher listened to them. Now with three conflicting suggestions milling about in his head, the man might just forget the whole thing, which was fine with Thorn too. The possibility of bringing down a preacher had excited Thorn and his followers. A few of them gathered around the man now, whispering misinterpretations of popular Bible verses to him—a common tactic. Thorn let them speak for now.

  His injuries now fully healed, Thorn had been stalking through the streets by daylight, to assure the city’s demons he was as strong as ever, when he’d seen the pastor commuting to work with the curious sight of a large winged angel flying along with his car. Thorn and his followers had shadowed them here, to the sanctuary of a small inner-city church, where they’d witnessed the man’s desperate prayer to a God who didn’t listen, and the psychotic angel helping him come to grips with the lies under which he’d been living.

  Thorn knew that the angel was insane not because of what he was saying to the young reverend, but because he was out here. The angel had to know that any of his kind who left the quarantine zone would be slaughtered. And by drawing so much attention to this man, the angel guaranteed he would become a demon’s charge once the angel was dead.

  As if to proclaim his lunacy, the angel screeched at Thorn. “Aaaaaaacccchhhh!”

  A passing secretary saw the preacher pacing alone. “Dan, you need any help?

  “No, I’m fine,” he said, and she moved on. Thorn grinned at Dan’s first step back into darkness, and the angel leaped over the man’s head to his other ear.

  “Do you believe me?” the angel asked him, as if he could hear his voice directly. “Why are you listening to him and not to meeeeeee?” He swatted at the man, and his angelic hand passed right through the pastor’s head. Thorn hoped the situation didn’t deteriorate into the angel upending a pew or flinging Bibles around to grab the man’s attention. If that happened, Thorn might be culpable for provoking him, and thus in violation of the Second Rule. He could kill the angel quickly if it came to that, though.

  The mere thought of a haughty creature such as this influencing the physical world filled Thorn with envy—the Enemy had stripped demons of this ability. Thorn dwelled on this to fuel his anger as he approached the angel casually, projecting confidence. “You think you can read his thoughts?” Thorn said.

  The angel scowled in comical exaggeration. “Only Goooooood can read their thoughts. Are you stupid? God can do whatever He wants.” He tightened his immense wings, then rocketed upward to the rafters. “Lies!” he screamed. “You live under such lies, demon!”

  “What is your name?” Thorn called to the maniac. Oblivious to the spirits’ bickering, the preacher knelt again in prayer. Perched around the room, Thorn’s followers had bloodlust in their eyes. The angel remained alive only because of their deference to Thorn’s right to kill him.

  “Aaaaaaacccchhhh!” the angel squawked back at Thorn from the rafters.

  “Wherever this man puts his prick… was that worth dying for?” Thorn mocked.

  Suddenly, a second angel was with them, on the ground by the podium. Thorn had not seen her enter. She’d probably come up through the floor.

  “Stop!” she cried. “Have mercy, please. He is not well.”

  Thorn’s followers snickered at the newly arrived angel. “Two for the price of one,” Thorn
said, sauntering toward her. “And who are you?”

  “I am Thilial,” she replied. “A cherub from the Atlanta Quarantine. And this is Ezandris.” She motioned up to the ceiling, where Ezandris peered defensively down at them.

  “Looks like Ezandris has gone a little crazy.”

  She nodded. “He came out here to die, but I beg you, let me take him back. You’ll never see him again and I—”

  “No,” Thorn interrupted. “You are mine. Both of you.”

  She took a step back, her worried gaze sweeping around the sanctuary, taking in the small horde of demons. Admiring her powerful white wings, Thorn was piercingly aware of his own small nubs. He idly wondered if other demons saw angels as something different than the white-clad, majestic figures that Thorn’s mind perceived them to be.

  “You’re the leader, I take it?” Thilial said. “I suppose you don’t have enough power yet? Two more angels added to your body count will make you feel important?”

  “Slave,” Thorn taunted.

  “Fool,” she replied. “Tell me, when has any demon’s power lasted more than a few centuries? Where do you think you’ll end up?”

  “With your death on my résumé.”

  “What’s the point of any of it? Where does the quest for power end?”

  “You try to appeal to my intellect? A futile gesture from one whose intellect has chained her to a Tyrant. This is my city, angel. I am Thorn.”

  Her eyes widened in delicious fear. No, Thorn decided after another moment. Not fear. Surprise. She recognizes me. Thorn couldn’t be sure where they’d met before. He tried to remember a public event where he’d been within view of the angels’ quarantine zone.

  A barely audible whisper passed Thilial’s lips. “Stupid little angel.”

  Ezandris flapped his wings and screeched again. Thilial glanced up at him, and Thorn took the opportunity to charge at her. On cue, his followers around the room erupted into action like a swarm of wasps, some circling toward Thorn and some darting up to seize Ezandris. The look of horror on Thilial’s face was perfect, but when Thorn’s arms were almost around her, her wings flared upward, sending her white robes billowing and her body plummeting through the ground. Thorn grabbed at empty space.

  His followers were more successful. Several demons in dress suits crawled all over the howling angel in the rafters, biting and scratching at his wings and dragging him back down to earth. Finding Thilial underground with zero visibility would be impossible, but Thorn would have at least one prize today. His followers restrained Ezandris as he approached.

  “You lost the war!” Ezandris called crazily to them all. “Even though you can’t kill each other. You win the battles but you’ve lost the war.”

  Now Thorn knew for certain he was raving mad. The angels had lost the war, long ago. Less than fifty thousand were still alive, compared with nearly half a billion demons.

  “I’ve lost the war, have I?” Thorn adjusted his tie. “Fair enough. You have God on your side. Give the word and have Him smite me.”

  Ezandris didn’t skip a beat. “God! Smite him!”

  A few of Thorn’s followers peered nervously about, but more of them smirked and sniggered. After a few seconds, the angel grinned an absurdly wide smile, as if the Enemy had indeed slain Thorn. “Why doesn’t He just kill us all now and be done with it?” Thorn asked. “It’s not like He needs us to keep evil alive in the human race. They do that well enough on their own.”

  Ezandris nodded vigorously. “And Othundro says that all you’re good for is augmenting the process, right?” He abruptly shook his head and screeched yet again, as if his own statement distressed him. “Aaaaaaacccchhhh!”

  “God is God,” Thorn continued in spite of Ezandris’s gibberish. “Why doesn’t He create more angels to keep us in line? Or why doesn’t He erase this world and start over from scratch?”

  “Don’t go looking for answers to the big mysteries, Thorn. You’ll find them but they’ll drive you craaaaaaazy.” Ezandris smiled a disconcerting, toothy grin. He chortled and spoke in a strange, almost sarcastic tone. “Isn’t it sad how God just wanted everything to be perfect, and then you all went and ruined it for Him?”

  The madman was dodging Thorn’s questions. Of course. Because they can’t be answered. Thorn pressed on, taunting him. “If God wants everyone to be perfect, why didn’t He just create them that way?” Thorn glanced at Dan, who was still praying silently, and hoped none of these words reached the man. These weren’t sentiments to be shared with humans. That would get them asking questions, and thinking was the worst virtue.

  Thorn paused for a response from Ezandris, but none was given. “Tell me, angel, if His goal is to love humans, why did He create them to be so imperfect that He couldn’t possibly love them without sacrifices?”

  “The apple on the tree—”

  “Don’t give me that apple shit. Big deal. It was just an apple.” Neither Thorn nor anyone he knew had witnessed Adam and Eve’s forbidden consumption of the Tree of Knowledge’s fruit, and he had seen with his own eyes the torpid process of humanity’s biological evolution, but the veracity of the Bible and its Eden story was common knowledge.

  Ezandris was still smiling like a child, as if this debate was the most joyous game. “The apple was a test. He cared about them enough to test—”

  “We devils have more interest in humans than the Enemy does.” Thorn pressed closer to the deranged angel, bringing them nose to nose. “I don’t think He ever really cared about any of this. Why else would He create demons in the first place if He in His infinite wisdom knew we would rebel?”

  Ezandris just shook his head at that, like Thorn was the saddest case in the world. His eyes showed pity, and for a brief moment he appeared sane. “You think you are the liars.” He smiled wanly, and the glint of lunacy sparkled in his eyes again. “You’re not the liars.”

  Thorn reached a hand toward Ezandris and snapped his neck. In actuality, no neck was there to snap; the physical violence was an illusion, as were all things physical in the spirit world. The death behind it was real, though.

  Thorn was so infuriated, he wished the angel had fought back. Some angels would still fight for their lives. Thilial probably would have. Now all that was left of worthless Ezandris was a body that would melt away into the ether over the course of a few weeks.

  After leaving the cheating preacher to a small troupe of his followers, Thorn hoisted Ezandris’s body over his shoulders and began dragging it across town to the angels’ warehouse. A public parade with an angel’s body is just the thing to make Atlanta’s demons think twice before betraying me to Marcus. So the spirits came and went, floating above and around the spectacle to see what the fuss was about. Thorn’s followers declared his might to the passersby. Ezandris’s wings were so huge behind him that Thorn thought he must look half an angel himself.

  Unpleasantly, Thilial’s words continued to clank around in his head. What is the point of all this? To destroy the Enemy and all He cared about, of course. But Thorn had to admit to himself that his will to do so had been thinned by the cycle of time. As the centuries passed, he had occasionally grown jaded toward demonic infighting and power struggles, and even toward the harming of humans. The boredom had sometimes given way to malaise; for a long period, Thorn had roamed the earth with no goal or purpose, yet with an empty longing in his soul. Then decades later, as if returning from a long sleep, Thorn would come to feel reborn, reinvigorated, ready to tackle anything, eager to play the power games once again. This cycle had played itself out hundreds of times over many millennia, until Thorn was as comfortable with it as humans were with breathing.

  But the cycle of time had become monotonous. Thorn often dreamed of some great change, like slaughtering the remaining angels, abolishing the Second Rule and directly terrorizing all humanity, finding a way to attack Heaven again, or discovering another human like the Native boy and—

  No. Don’t think about Flying Owl. Not now.

>   Although Thorn had fallen from prominence many times before, he grew accustomed to his high stature each time, and always found himself loath to relinquish it. Perhaps this time I should just accept it. Perhaps that would make the transition easier. Besides, the winds of change will eventually bring me back to power, as long as I keep seeking it. But to Thorn, even the pursuit of power was rote now. Why do I pretend to care about it so much? Just because I know nothing else? The shadow of his recent brush with death still lingered behind him. And before him lay the shadow of his potential demise at Marcus’s hands. The two shadows covered his mood in a deep gloom. “What’s the point of any of it?” the angel had asked him. In the face of death, Thorn wondered if his life’s work was indeed worth the effort. Temporary prestige in exchange for infinite loss… it felt like a classic deal with the devil. Could a devil make such a deal with himself?

  Against his better judgment, Thorn’s thoughts wandered to forbidden territory, and he fantasized about the impossible. Defection. Becoming an angel might bring Thorn peace, freeing him from worries about power struggles and the constant competition that came with demonhood. But Thorn was disgusted with his own soft heart for even considering this. The Enemy was cruel and vile, and for whatever conceited reason, He had declared the sin of angels to be irreversible, and defection impossible, all while doting on His precious humans who could be pardoned for all wrongdoing. For what was in the grand scheme of things a minor offense, all the rebel angels had been banished to a life of nothingness as demons on Earth, with only nothingness to anticipate at the end of time. Humans, sometimes just as evil as demons—out of their God-given free will!—could be forgiven. But demons were damned. No fallen angel could ever rise again. Thorn bitterly resented this, as did all demonkind.

  Except for the defectors. Occasionally, after a great time had passed since the last defection attempt, a foolhardy demon would get the idea that the Enemy might welcome him back after all. So he would try it, would be rejected by the angels, and would then be murdered by the other demons.