A God to Fear (Thorn Saga Book 5) Read online

  He spent hours drifting about the cage. As the night wore on, he spoke to the guards, begging for them to believe that his recent discoveries were real, but in return they only taunted him, their minds closed to his pleading. At least I’m still alive. At least Marcus hasn’t found Brandon and Heather. But with the Judge out of power, what use were the two humans? Wanderer, at least, clearly thought they were a loose end that needed tying up, and this paranoia was the only reason he was keeping Thorn alive.

  But Thorn doubted that even that loose end presented a risk to Wanderer anymore. Shazakahn might have half-respected the Judge’s word back when he was in power, but the African demons would never believe Thorn alone. Thilial had been right: demonkind’s stubborn beliefs were simply too entrenched. Would they listen even if the angels themselves declared Thorn truthful? If God’s own voice boomed down from Heaven? I’m sure they’d think it was some kind of trick.

  More long hours passed. Dawn must have been approaching by the time Thorn heard a voice whispering loudly, quarreling with one of his cell’s guards. He moved closer to eavesdrop on the guard berating the newcomer.

  “You may not enter. The prisoner’s ideas are poisonous.”

  “Come on, Wex, you know me,” said the Judge. “What am I gonna do? Go full Rambo and bust Thorn out of the most secure building in the city? I just want to say hi. Gloat, as it were.”

  “Marcus would not approve.”

  “Marcus is a cock.”

  The guard, Wex, seemed to consider this for a moment. “He really is.”

  The Judge grinned and raised his hand for a fist bump. “There’s my man.”

  “But no whispering. We must be able to hear everything you say.” Wex accepted the fist bump, then pried himself away from the lattice of demons to let the Judge pass through.

  “Right on. I appreciate it. The next time I’m in power, I’ll buy you an ice cream cone.”

  The Judge floated through the gap in the cell’s wall, then Wex latched his own body back into place behind him.

  Thorn turned away, refusing eye contact. “Leave me,” he said. “You are a coward. I cannot fathom why I thought you could help me when you can’t even stand up to Wanderer and Marcus.”

  “Thorn, chill. I just—”

  “I said leave!” Thorn glared at the Judge and pushed upward. He stretched himself above the Judge in a posture of intimidation.

  “Well, you’re a bit prickly today. Thorny, one might say.”

  “You betrayed me.”

  “Hey, now. You’re the one who went AWOL on us. You think I want to be allied with that scumbag upstairs? He overthrew me! But you have no power, buddy. If I side with you, I might as well put a gun to my head and pull the trigger.” He frowned. “Except that that wouldn’t really do anything, and I don’t know how I’d manage to grab hold of the gun in the first—You get what I mean.”

  “You looked like you were about to try and save me. By the pool in the Sanctuary.”

  “Maybe I was.”

  “You could have stepped up in my defense at any time during all of this, but you didn’t, and look where it’s gotten you. Disgraced in your own city. A lowly servant in Marcus’s court.”

  “They had dirt on me, man. It had nothing to do with you.”

  “Keep telling yourself that.”

  The Judge shook his head, then eased himself down toward the floor made of demons. Thorn relaxed a bit as well. He looked more closely at the Judge and saw that his spiritual form had changed. His skin had always seemed slightly oily, as if he hadn’t showered in a few days, but now the unsettling griminess on his face had cleared. His hair was clean of gel, and his V-neck suit seemed to fit properly for a change.

  “You look different,” Thorn said to him.

  “So do you. Stronger. Cleaner. Not bad for a guy who every demon in the city thought was dead yesterday.”

  Thorn drifted near the small window which, when glimpsed through the web of demons’ arms and legs, allowed a limited view of the tops of some nondescript buildings and the black sky beyond.

  “I haven’t been this low in a long time,” the Judge said. “They took my title, my city. They even took my favorite charge, this corrupt banker who’s always got something disreputable going on at the courthouse. Cohn—you know him, right? My followers can’t do anything. They’re all pissed that Marcus is styling himself as a Judge when he was never an Angel of Judgment. Ha, it’s ironic.”

  “Why’s that?”

  The Judge snorted derisively and twirled the end of his tie between his fingers. “You know back at the beginning of time, when the Enemy created Angels of Love, Reason, Purpose, and all that?”

  “Yes.”

  “And you know that God didn’t just create those main denominations of angels. He created a branch of angels for literally everything. There are Angels of Cooking Vegetables, Angels of Sedimentary Rock, Angels of Premature Ejaculation. It’s goddamned ridiculous. Hell, for a few decades there was even an Angel of the Soviet Union. Poor bastard.”

  “I’d heard of the Sedimentary Rock guys. There were only four or five of them, right?”

  “Yeah, yeah, yeah. These are all tiny groups, most of them formed before the things they were supposed to supervise even existed.

  “Well anyway, there was this one angel named Galis. At the beginning of time, Galis was the only—one, sole, single—Angel of Manatees. Yes, the Lord Almighty saw fit to create an Angel of Manatees. Problem was, at the beginning of time, manatees wouldn’t evolve for several billion more Earth years. Even still, Galis pored over God’s instructions for overseeing the manatees. He wanted to do his best for those fat little seaweed-chowing monsters, but he couldn’t, because they didn’t exist yet. So Galis waited and waited. Then one day a war started in Heaven, and he was a little annoyed at having nothing to do all the time, so he decided to join the rebels, only to be cast out of Heaven days later.

  “Now, what was a sensitive little angel like Galis supposed to do on primordial Earth, stuck with a rage-fueled gang of battle-hardened demons? Should Galis have waited for manatees to evolve so that he could mobilize an army of evil sea cows to wreak destruction upon the human world? No, it was easier and more realistic for Galis to just tell the other demons that he’d been an Angel of Judgment, so that they’d take him seriously and wouldn’t beat him up. During the Unification War, Galis styled himself as a Judge, and everything went just dandy for him. For a while.

  “Eventually Galis met this asshole named Thorn, who had a buddy named Marcus, who had a boss named Wanderer, who somehow knew Galis’s secret. And Wanderer dredged up some reputable demons who remembered Galis from those days at the beginning of time, and they revealed to the whole damn city of Atlanta that its Judge had once been the one, the only, Angel of Manatees. Needless to say, they laughed him out of office.”

  Thorn gawked at the bizarre tale. The story had touched him though. Dust motes drifted in the moonlight between Thorn and the Judge, whose gaze had dropped to the floor made of impartial demon guards. “I’m sorry, Judge. Truly. But your story only illustrates why we need to end the brutality of demon society, so that we all can live freely.”

  The guards’ dark eyes followed the Judge as he rose and moved toward Thorn. “Let me ask you, buddy. If I were still in power, and I offered to forgive everything you’ve done if you’d just shut up, live your life, and stop thinking so much, would you do it?”

  “No.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because now I know too much to keep quiet. Because I’ve felt the physical world, and I know we can change. Because I want to be good, and none of you will let me.”

  “And how exactly did you enter the physical world?”

  “Oh not you too.”

  “I’m just curious.”

  “It has something to do with Amy. That’s all I know.”

  “That girl you’re in love with?” When Thorn rolled his eyes, the Judge chuckled. “Come on, broseph, don’t deny it
. It’s obvious to anyone who’s ever seen you with her.”

  Thorn just shrugged and turned back to the window. He couldn’t tell whether the Judge wanted pity or wanted to make fun of him, but he would give the Judge no satisfaction.

  “So if I love something, maybe I can enter physical space too?” the Judge said.

  “As if you know anything about love.”

  “I do! I love… I love puppies.”

  “Puppies?” Now the Judge was just being absurd.

  “Yeah, who doesn’t love puppies? Do you think if I found some puppies and thought about how much I love them, I’d be able to enter physical space? Then I could get my prestige back. Tell me your secret and maybe I can set you free.”

  “Or maybe you’ll tell Marcus. Or one of these guards will. Is that why you’re really here? To spy for him?”

  “No! Never. Pinky promise. Or maybe it’s love combined with tragedy that does it? You love her but, like, she’s in pain? And that tips you over into the physical realm?”

  “Why don’t you try it? Imagine a puppy getting brutally murdered.”

  The Judge said nothing, so Thorn turned to him. The Judge’s eyes were clenched shut in concentration.

  “Really?” Thorn said.

  The Judge opened his eyes. “I mean, puppies getting brutally murdered would be awesome.”

  “But you said you love puppies.”

  “Yeah, I love puppies.”

  Thorn noticed several of the guards glancing quizzically at the Judge. After a few awkward moments, the Judge waved a hand and abandoned the issue. “I honestly expected I’d die millennia ago,” he said. “It’s a joke that I’m still here. If this is the end of my long reign, I might as well embrace it.”

  Moonlight slid from the Judge’s feet up toward his face as he floated forward to join Thorn near the window. They gazed out upon their city together.

  “I would have let you be good,” the Judge said. “If society had let me let you. You know, I don’t think any of us really want to be evil. We just live in an evil system where anyone who acts differently is shunned or ignored.” He sighed heavily. “But I’m a demon, Thorn. Through and through. All I’ve ever wanted was to be a badass and kick the Enemy’s butt when I could. So do you know what I say when change is introduced into the world I helped build? The change that you’ve been riding like the world’s tiniest wave?”

  Thorn huffed, slunk downward, and curled his arms around his knees. He was in no mood for this taunting banter.

  “In the face of such change,” the Judge continued, “I say, ‘Why the hell not?’”

  Thorn glanced up in surprise at the sleazy demon in the V-neck suit, who flashed a devilish grin then flipped on his sunglasses and spoke in a murmur. “Fear not, Thorn. The Angel of Manatees is here to save you.”

  “No whispering!” Wex yelled.

  The Judge floated back toward the lead guard. “Sorry, sorry. I’m done here anyway. Let me out and I’ll go clip Marcus’s toenails or something.”

  Wex obliged, untangling himself from the other demons. The Judge glanced back at Thorn, winked over the rim of his shades, then drifted away through moonlight and shadow.

  •

  Marcus felt annoyingly insignificant next to these great demon leaders from across the South and East. Next to him floated Blethmohn, from Augusta, whose knack for subtle perversions of familial relationships was legendary. Above the toilet hovered Gorhrum, the obscenely fat demon leader of New York City, who was a pig, completely unsubtle in every way; yet Gorhrum owned charges who ran the world’s largest child pornography network, and other charges who’d caused several nationwide financial recessions, so despite his base nature, demons across the world admired him. Even Shazakahn had stayed in town when Wanderer asked him to; he was perched above a towel rack, looking down on the rest of them. A dozen or so other demon leaders lurked around the ornate bathroom, at the top of an old Midtown high-rise condo that reminded Marcus of Cole’s condo from the Miami Sanctuary.

  But all the greatness in the room was dwarfed by the one-winged demon in the shower, hovering over a pudgy man in his fifties. A sole light from overhead fell onto Wanderer’s shoulders, but his downturned face remained in shadow. His hands rooted about inside the naked man’s mind as the man relaxed under steamy water.

  “This man is Gregory Cohn,” Wanderer said to the gathering of demons. “Mr. Cohn was the former Demon Judge of Atlanta’s prized charge. He’s sold toxic assets to unsuspecting investors, demeaned his underlings so he could rise to power, and created a small empire on the backs of the weak. Mr. Cohn is my kind of man.” Several of the demons snickered at this. “You all know how I like to put wicked people in power. And put wicked, loyal demons such as yourselves in power as well. We need to get more charges like Mr. Cohn here, and consolidate the world’s wealth and power with them.”

  In truth, Marcus had been the one who’d won Mr. Cohn for Wanderer. Marcus had returned to Atlanta in the wake of Wanderer’s takeover and learned that the Judge’s most loyal followers had clustered around this esteemed banker as a last stand. And despite the injuries that Marcus had suffered at the hands of Thorn, Wanderer had sent Marcus to fight those followers off. Meanwhile, Wanderer himself entered the Bristol Sanctuary to deal with Thorn. And Thorn chopped off his left wing. Unbelievable.

  Marcus was amazed that Wanderer had managed to slaughter that traitor Paxis and escape through a transit door with only one wing. A fresh stub now protruded from Wanderer’s clothing where the wing had been just hours before. Marcus’s own wounds were far from healed, but with Wanderer having lost a wing, he could scarcely gripe about his own pain.

  Still, Marcus had fought hard to obtain this Gregory Cohn, so he felt he deserved to keep him as a charge. Wanderer should have had no claim to the man. Eons ago, when devils had outnumbered humans, competition amongst demonkind had been exceedingly brutal; Marcus had once seen twenty demons battling over a single man. Now that the human population had grown, about twenty people existed for every demon, and demons couldn’t possibly get to them all. The result was much less competition over any individual human.

  But even though the harvest of humans was plentiful, Mr. Cohn was of a rare crop indeed. Marcus wanted him for himself, almost as badly as he’d wanted to know Thorn’s secret to entering physical space. Almost as badly as he’d been wanting to usurp Wanderer’s power for the last several thousand years.

  Wanderer eased his hands out of Mr. Cohn’s mind, then drifted through the shower curtain into the company of the other demons. “My sources in Heaven tell me that for the first time in ages, the Enemy is mobilizing against us.” The demon leaders jeered, circling around Wanderer, some urging him to do battle with the Enemy once more. Wanderer gestured for them to be silent. “The angels didn’t spot me in the Sanctuary, so I know they’re not mobilizing because of my involvement. I believe they’re mobilizing because of Thorn. They want him dead—him and anyone he’s talked to. I tried to avoid this consequence, but someone…” He shifted his gaze onto Marcus. “Someone disappointed me, twice.”

  Marcus glowered. He didn’t see how Wanderer could blame him for failing to kill Thorn when it was Wanderer who was now forcing Marcus to keep him alive.

  And why were Brandon and Heather still so important to Wanderer? If Heaven had already declared war, why not just forget about them, kill Thorn, and end his slander? All other demons—including the elites in this room—would forget about the two measly humans in the face of a renewed war with Heaven anyway. Yet Wanderer insisted that Thorn be kept alive, and tortured, until he provided the location of the humans.

  Wanderer continued: “I called you all here on such short notice as a contingency. We need to rally as many demons from as many cities as we can get. We need as many as can travel to Atlanta immediately. A new war with the Enemy is dawning, and its first battle will be waged here. And we will shock the Enemy with how strong we’ve grown since our last war. We will entomb Him beneath a mou
ntain of the corpses of His angel slaves!” The demons cheered for Wanderer, and Marcus’s envy deepened. “Toward this end, I have begun my long-awaited yet inevitable ascent to greatness, and I have taken Atlanta for myself. The Judge has been brought low, and Thorn, of course, is imprisoned and waiting execution, which will happen once we locate those humans of his. So join me in terrorizing this city. Join me in—”

  “Wanderer,” Gorhrum interrupted.

  Wanderer spun toward the obese demon. “Gorhrum! You dare interrupt me, the leader of leaders?”

  “I dare indeed,” Gorhrum said. “I was just wondering where your charge went off to so suddenly.”

  He lifted a pudgy finger toward the shower, which was still turned on, steam rising from behind the curtain. But the bathroom door was open now, and Mr. Cohn was gone.

  6

  The broken bone in Brandon’s arm had looked ugly, all purple and swollen, but fortunately it wasn’t a serious break and didn’t require surgery. The doctors had injected some local anesthetic, which nestled Brandon into a relaxation that—after gritting his teeth against the pain for the past hour—felt positively transcendent. They’d then set the bones, bandaged the arm in a cast, and eased the cast into a sling. Over the course of the procedure, Brandon felt his heartbeat slow and his breathing return to a normal rate. Fatigue began to chisel away at his consciousness, and he realized he hadn’t slept in over twenty-four hours. Add in a wedding massacre, Dad’s death, and a plane crash, and it’s a wonder I haven’t passed out.

  And what had caused that plane crash? To where had he stumbled in the darkness afterward? He remembered Virgil barking commands at him, and he remembered stumbling upon a radiant doorway in the darkness, but his brain was probably creating memories to explain his trauma. In time, a more accurate picture of the accident would likely form in his mind. Had he even crashed in a plane? Heather had said it was a plane, and so he’d told the doctors it had been a plane. But maybe it had been a car after all. Why was I flying my plane again? Was anyone else hurt?