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

  Brandon’s feet took him past a huge stately building with a gold-colored dome and on toward a drab monolithic building with neatly landscaped lawn and shrubs but no other distinctive features. He tried to resist again, but he was drawn inexorably toward the structure’s entrance. Four pillars, each three stories high, supported a triangular pediment upon which the word “COURTHOUSE” was engraved. Brandon’s feet walked between a set of some sort of weeping trees, then beneath the imposing portico and inside the building.

  He found himself in a small line of people waiting to pass through a metal detector. Three security officers stood around the machine: one instructing guests to place their belongings in a plastic tray, another officiating the person walking through the detector, and the last scrutinizing the contents in each tray from behind a computer monitor.

  What the hell is this thing controlling me? And why is it taking me into a courthouse? Beneath his fear simmered a weariness of this ongoing string of surreal events. Were it not for the prospect of danger, Brandon would almost be tempted to accept this excursion as normal.

  “Hey lady,” he heard himself say to the woman in front of him, who turned at his words. “I’m rrrrrrrunning late for a court hearing. Can I cut in front of you?”

  Her gaze flitted downward for a moment, and when it rose again, she looked wary. “Sure…” she said, and eased around him.

  Brandon felt the thing inside him growing anxious. His heart was still pounding as fast as when he’d been running outside. “Afraid Heather’s gonna catch up with us?” Brandon asked aloud—surprisingly—of his own volition. His body immediately tensed as the entity in his head tightened its hold on him.

  “Excuse me?” the nearby security officer asked.

  “I said,” Brandon said involuntarily, “I’m afraid the weather’s gonna catch up with us. I always hhhhhhhate when it rains on my… on my court dates. Yeah.”

  The guard glanced outside at the perfectly sunny day, then tossed Brandon a skeptical nod. “Please place any loose items in the tray, sir.”

  “Yeah, okay.” Brandon felt his right hand dig into his pocket and close over his wallet and his keys. He dropped them into the tray, which the officer then rolled beneath the scanner. The officer on the other side of the metal detector motioned Brandon forward.

  As he passed through the detector, Brandon’s eyes caught something unsettling in the courthouse’s lobby. The air was stirring beneath the large lighting fixture in the center. Shimmering forms, each about the size of a person, drifted throughout the large room. He’d seen the same apparitions on his run here, but he’d taken them for heat waves… which made little sense, now that he thought of it, since the city was so cold today. What are those things?

  The thing inside Brandon must have seen them too; he could feel its apprehension. “Don’t make a ruckus in here, kid,” Brandon’s own voice whispered, quietly enough that only he could hear. “They can’t sssssee me while I’m hiding in your noggin. Let’s keep it that way. If they rrrrrealize I’m in here, they’ll fuck you up just as mmmmuch as they will me.”

  Brandon gave in to the thing’s control and decided to roll with the punches. It was as if the universe had homed in on Brandon’s nihilism and set out to convince him that he’d underestimated how absurd the universe actually was. Had one of the security officers suddenly started ranting about the Flying Spaghetti Monster, Brandon wouldn’t have batted an eye. Not that he’d have been able to bat an eye, with this thing controlling his most minute movements. He felt his lungs breathe in, then out, not quite fast enough to ease his shortness of breath.

  The officers cleared Brandon, but they wore strange expressions as his hand gathered his wallet and keys again. Why are they looking at me so suspiciously? Can they sense that something’s wrong?

  His feet stepped into the lobby, then quickly paced across it. After they rounded a corner to the left, Brandon found himself in a long hallway lined with windows to the outdoors. He clipped along down it, moving at least twice as fast as the other pedestrians. Most of the people here either wore the tight blacks and grays of professionals or the shabby, faded clothes of the poor—the lawmakers and the lawbreakers over whom they exercised their power.

  “Don’t look now, kid, but the po-po are following us,” Brandon’s mouth whispered to him.

  Instinctively, Brandon turned his head around. Indeed, two officers were trailing some distance behind him. One was looking right at Brandon, while the other spoke into the radio clip on her shoulder.

  The thing jerked Brandon’s head back around. “I said not to llllllllook!”

  Brandon’s body suddenly dropped to the floor and his head smacked against the linoleum. His arms shook with painful, uncontrolled spasms. “Augh!” he yelled to the thing. “Stop it!”

  “It’s—not—not me!” his voice barely managed to say back to him.

  The people around him had spread out, forming a circle of alarmed faces. The two officers broke into a sprint.

  But just as quickly, Brandon was back on his feet. He pushed through the onlookers and ran for the next open area.

  “Shit, shit, shit,” Brandon heard himself say. “I’m llllosing you, kid. Uh…” Brandon turned a corner and raced down a new hallway. A paralegal jumped out of the way, several case files spilling out of his arms and onto the floor. “Uh… if I disappear, just outrun the cops, then go up to the seventh floorrrrrrrrr, find the jail cell, and get inside somehow, okay? And tell any demons who pester you to fffffuck off.”

  The shimmering entities—demons?—had caught on to the action. They were swirling all around Brandon as he careened into another entrance foyer. As disheveled as he must have looked by now, no one here paid much attention to him. The officers would arrive here momentarily though. He looked around for a way out, unsure if it was him or the thing controlling him that was doing the looking. Another metal detector stood by an entryway here, and the officers manning it were turning toward him now. He spotted an elevator about twenty feet away.

  Brandon’s leg twitched, jerking sideways. He fell.

  An arm caught him.

  His torso spasmed, but then the being in Brandon’s mind reasserted its control. Brandon’s body stiffened, then stilled.

  “Well hey there, sweet pea,” the woman who’d caught him said. “You almost had a nasty tumble.”

  Brandon examined her. She appeared young, but frizzled graying hair tried to escape from the red bandana encircling her scalp. Peeling sunburn covered her skin, and one eyebrow was inexplicably missing. Her meth-stricken teeth—in the few places along her gums where she still had teeth—were almost as endearing as the tattoo of a winged motorcycle adorning her left arm.

  The motorcycle jacket! Of course! Brandon had forgotten that he’d been wearing the Outlaws jacket this whole time. No wonder the officers had tailed him.

  The biker woman raised her one eyebrow at him. “What’s a good-looking fella like you doing in a fussbudget place like this?”

  “I’m, uh—I’m going to the elevatorrrr.” Brandon’s feet carried him toward it.

  “Well what a kawinkydink! I’m headed upstairs too. Why don’t we ride together?”

  Brandon’s finger pushed the button. Mercifully, the doors opened immediately. He slipped inside just before the officers who’d been chasing him ran into the room. The other officers by the metal detector were yelling at them.

  He felt his body maneuvering so that as the woman walked into the elevator, she stood between him and the pursuing officers, who stopped in the center of the foyer, their gazes swiveling toward the elevator.

  “That’s him!” Brandon heard a familiar voice call from the other side of the room. “There’s my husband! In the elevator!” From the line on the far side of the metal detector, Heather pointed.

  Brandon felt himself grin, raise his hands, then wiggle his fingers in a dainty little wave. At the sight of Heather, hope welled inside him. But then the doors closed, and his finger hit the button for
the seventh floor.

  •

  Thilial rocketed across the Atlanta skyline, so fast that other angels gaped at her from the ground. She had scant time to waste. The Judge. What an idiot.

  She swept downward into the hospital where Amy was recovering, traversing eleven stories in a single second. She reached Amy’s room and jerked to a stop.

  Shelley was sliding a piece across a board game set up on Amy’s bed. Amy lay on her back, her head turned to survey the game board. She looked lucid, which was good; Thilial couldn’t work with her if she had too many drugs dulling her neural connections.

  “Report back to the quarantine zone,” Thilial said as calmly as she could to Amy’s angel guards. “You’re being reassigned. I’ll take over this post for the time being.”

  The angels nodded and departed.

  Two idiot demons hovered above the girls, whispering foul suggestions of rivalry—as if the girls’ friendship could be ruined by playing a board game. “She’s more skilled than you,” one of them said. “You can play this all day, but you’ll never outsmart her. You’re not good enough at this, or at anything.”

  Thilial rushed into Amy’s mind and stretched for control. “Don’t worry, Amy,” Thilial said. “Stay calm.” Amy’s mind protested, but in seconds, Thilial had full control of her body. Even as Thilial expropriated Amy, she regretted that she couldn’t think of a plan better than the Judge’s same scheme: possessing a human in order to influence the physical world. If another angel found out about this, Thilial could very well be locked up with Karthis and his like. That won’t happen though. I’ll be careful. I’ll be safe. She tried not to think about how deeply betrayed God would feel if He knew she was doing this.

  “Shelley,” Thilial said through Amy.

  “What’s up?”

  “Did you get your car back?”

  “Uh, it’s missing a window, but yeah, the cops gave it back.”

  Thilial flung the sheets off of Amy, unhooked her IV and electrode monitors, then gingerly stepped out of bed with her, taking care to move her injured stomach as little as possible.

  “What are you doing?” Shelley said, rising.

  “Get back here!” one of the demons said. “Finish your board game! You have nothing better to do!”

  “Come back!” the other yelled. “We control you! You do as we say!”

  Thilial ignored them all and paced toward the door. “Grab your keys,” she made Amy say to Shelley. “We’re going for a ride.”

  •

  The most innocuous possible smooth jazz music fizzled out of the speaker in the elevator’s ceiling as Brandon and the biker woman rode upward. For the first two floors, Brandon and the thing in his head stared straight ahead. He didn’t say a word. Neither did the woman. Then:

  “I get it. I really do. You runnin’ from your lady. She done you wrong, and you runnin’. Maybe lookin’ for someone else to warm your sheets.”

  Thankfully, Brandon’s mental driver steered him away from a conversation. Brandon said nothing. Another floor passed.

  “So, you like to ride bikes, huh? What else do you like to ride?”

  Brandon cringed internally as he felt his mouth open. “Look, if I hhhhad a sex drive, I’d be very interested in you. But I absolutely do not have one.”

  The woman seemed unfazed by the deflection. “You a one percenter?” she said. “You like to do the tuck all down the freeway? Twist the wick with a cushy back warmer on your bitch pad?”

  “I, uh, I don’t know what that mmmeans. But you’re a lovely person. Really.”

  “You got a little crotch rocket or one of them big, big cruisers?”

  “I’m gay.”

  Silence for a few moments. Brandon didn’t dare turn back to the woman, and neither did the entity in his head. The elevator doors opened.

  Brandon’s body immediately sprinted out of the elevator, down one hallway, then another, past a few startled legal workers. Whatever was compelling him, it knew where it was going.

  But as it turned him down a third hallway, he saw two security officers running toward him. “Ah, dammit!” his voice said. He was spun around, and then he was flying through a series of back offices, past desks, filing cabinets, a coffee machine, and more objecting workers. He soon turned back onto what looked like the main artery of this floor, ran down it to a large set of wooden double doors, and flung them open.

  He was in a courtroom—a rather large courtroom. Rows of seats stretched forward from the back doors to the trial area. They were empty save for a few seats at the front, where spectators sat watching the trial.

  “Objection!” he heard his own voice call out. Soft murmuring spread through the room as the jury and spectators turned to see the newcomer. Brandon tried to apologize and leave, but the thing in his head wouldn’t let him.

  As he trotted toward the judge’s bench, his arm frantically swatted away the shimmering shapes in the air around him; they swooped at him every few seconds. The judge, an imperial-looking woman with posture as straight as her robe was black, bolted upright. “What is the meaning of this?” she barked.

  Brandon’s body hopped over the barrier between the gallery and the main courtroom, prompting a pudgy old bailiff—well into what should have been his retirement years—to advance on him. Brandon’s fist punched the man square in the nose. The bailiff fell backward. Several gasps escaped from the audience.

  “That’s right, I’m crrrrrrrazy!” Brandon’s mouth said. “I’m crazy, crazy, crazy!”

  “Someone!” the judge called as she backed around her bench. “Restrain that biker man!”

  A rugged-looking guy who’d been sitting in the witness stand, and who wore a white jumpsuit stamped with “DEPT. OF CORRECTIONS,” jumped down and assumed a fighting posture. Brandon’s feet ran the other way.

  A quick glance behind him revealed that most of the spectators had left their seats and were fleeing the room. The prosecution and the defense were packing up their documents in a frenzy. Brandon got a brief glimpse of more security officers fighting the crowd, trying to enter the courtroom, then his body spasmed again and he crashed to the carpet.

  He cried out when his left shoulder hit the ground. Even with the numbing medication, he felt the jolt to his broken arm. The prisoner took the opportunity to lunge at him, reaching for his cast, but Brandon’s leg kicked him. As the man recoiled, Brandon regained his feet.

  The people were retreating quickly, but the air was growing thick with shimmering shapes.

  “Gah! Get away frommmm us!”

  Brandon’s hands swatted at the air again. His feet carried him toward a door in the side of the room, but three more bailiffs ran through it, toward him. “Gah!” His body twisted around, then his feet bounded toward a door at the very back of the room, behind the judge’s bench. “All you humans and demons can kiss my ethereal ass!” Brandon heard himself shouting. “You can go tell Marcus, fuuuuuuuuuuuuuuck yooooooouuuuuuu!”

  He ran into the jury room, then beyond.

  •

  Marcus was floating down Edgewood Avenue with some of his followers, stewing internally over Wanderer’s condescension toward him, when a lone demon—Renthor, Marcus thought his name was—pitched down from the sky toward him.

  “Marcus!” Renthor called, his voice panicked. “Marcus! Chaos at the court! The Judge has possessed someone and is terrorizing the humans there! We tried to stop him, but the court demons won’t let us. He’s their old leader, so they think it’s funny that he’s sunk so low! They want to watch his madness like it’s entertainment!”

  Marcus darted forward toward the courthouse. His followers and Renthor kept pace.

  “He’s there for Thorn,” Marcus said. “Send half our forces to Thorn’s cell. Send the other half to the first floor.”

  “The first floor? Why?”

  “Have them form a grid with their bodies. They need to create a barrier so that Thorn and the Judge can’t escape underground.”

  �
�Very well, half to the first floor, the other half to guard Thorn.”

  “No, you halfwit! Not to guard Thorn. To kill him!”

  Wanderer’s plans be damned.

  •

  Thorn heard the distinctive sizzle of a taser outside his holding cell, followed by a human scream. A key jiggled in the door’s lock. Thorn’s captors were caked around him, three of them holding each limb and Wex holding his head, ready to twist it full around rather than lose his prisoner. The rest of the demon guards had flooded the space between Thorn and the physical cell door. Some of them grunted in anticipation, and others outright taunted their unseen adversary on the other side of the door. Bloodlust burned in their eyes. Like most devils, they rarely got the chance to kill, much less kill a fellow demon.

  It was into this inimical environment that Brandon strode, his shoulders tilted back in such a lazily self-assured posture that Thorn knew the Judge was possessing him even before he poked his own bewildered face out in front of Brandon’s.

  The Judge scanned the room and all its demon guards, who waited for Wex’s order to attack. “Why are they all still here?” the Judge said.

  “Why is Brandon here?” Thorn replied, trying to ignore Wex’s grip on his head. What little of his morale remained now left him as he tried to piece together the Judge’s delusional plan. “You brought Brandon right to Marcus’s doorstep? Is that what all this commotion has been about?”