A God to Fear (Thorn Saga Book 5) (16 page)

Thorn’s low spirits were saved from further depression when he spotted Xeres running papers between offices like the world’s most absurdly brawny intern. He towered above the other angels—his bosses, it would seem—so he was easy to track from Thorn’s cover inside the walls and the ground.

Thorn followed him to an isolated section of the complex where pipes dripped brown water into syrupy puddles on the warehouse floor. Parchment littered the place, covering nearly the entire ground, clumped into small masses of rot beneath leaking pipes and water trickling in through the dilapidated roof.

It seemed as good a place as any.

“I used to want wings, like you have,” Thorn said, floating forward out of the wall and revealing himself.

Xeres spun and dropped his papers, which, despite their full size, were still smaller than the hand that had carried them.

“But I’m not so hot on wings anymore.”

Xeres stared, frozen. Lightning flashed outside, illuminating graffiti on the walls and rodents in filthy corners. Thunder followed shortly. The orchestra of dripping water intensified.

Xeres unfolded his wings slightly—a gesture of intimidation. “I do not know you, demon,” he said in his bottomless voice. “You dare to intrude again on this holy quarantine zone? I command you to leave at once, or I shall—”

“Xeres,” Thorn interrupted calmly. “Enough.”

Thorn’s old mentor glared at him from across the warehouse. Thorn drew nearer, drifting through water droplets that fell through his spiritual body.

“You’ve come close enough,” Xeres said, though his tone lacked conviction. His wings sank behind his back as his eyes morphed from angry to fearful. His powerful voice shook with nerves. “If another angel catches us, I will feign ignorance, and I will fight you.”

“Fair enough.” Thorn continued his guarded approach. Seeing this legendary demon warrior as a thrall of the angels again disturbed Thorn, who hadn’t even fully recovered from learning that Xeres was still alive. The wings did suit him, though. Even as a demon, he’d been tall, regal, majestic to behold.

“I need your help, Xeres. I’ve been branded a renegade and a lunatic, so demonkind won’t listen to me. But they will listen to you.”

Lightning struck again, flashing white light through the windows. Xeres, hovering beside a pillar, was momentarily cast into shadow. “They will not listen to a defector.”

“They will listen to
you
. If they merely see you alive, you’ll have exposed the truth that they even
can
defect. Please. I have a friend waiting nearby. We can smuggle you out of this prison and come up with a plan to spread our knowledge.”

Xeres frowned and turned away, so Thorn tried a new tactic. “Do you realize what I’ve been through?” he said. “Two Sanctuaries. I risked my life to save two humans I could use as proof of God’s deception. But Wanderer outsmarted me with deception of his own. Now no one will listen to me. No one wants to see the truth. You know what that’s like, don’t you? You’ve been where I’ve been, in a way.”
But you took the coward’s way out.
“I’ve risked my life again by coming here tonight. Over the course of my journey, I’ve come to believe that we all create our own purposes. We evaluate which purpose will be the best for everyone, and if we’re good, that’s the purpose that we’ll choose. Your purpose, Xeres, can be this. To tell the demons the truth.”

Xeres dithered, then sidled to the outer wall, keeping his head down. He stopped by some exposed drywall and sat on the parchment-encrusted floor, taking care to stay away from the windows—and out of view of the demons perched on rooftops across the street. Even obscured by the rain, Thorn could see their vague forms scampering about.

“That Wanderer is a cunning one,” Xeres said dolefully. “I played right into his hands for so long, with my single-minded hatred for Christianity. I thought my victories were my own, over Cruor, over Kivthes—but Wanderer killed them all. He was grooming me, you see, to lead demonkind on a wild goose chase.”

Thorn nodded. “And wild it was. But we know better now. We know more, and we’re still in this fight whether we like it or not. Would you rather continue as an angel, letting God’s heavenly attendants treat you like a second-class citizen because your wings were once clipped? Or would you rather fight for something again? Something good this time? At the very least, this is a chance to stick it to the God who’s imprisoned you. And to the demons who killed you.”

Xeres buried his head in his hands, then let them slide down his face. He exhaled a shaky sigh. “I killed myself.”

The words dropped with such weight that the sagging roof might as well have caved in. Thorn drifted backward at the revelation.
He killed himself?

Had the old Thorn known this, he’d have looked down on Xeres as an asinine weakling, and his memories of his dead leader might not have been so fond. Thorn thought back to that shocking day when he’d found Xeres’s corpse floating above newly built thatch-roofed houses at the center of the reconstructed Cherokee city of Tugaloo. Thorn’s head had been filled with too much ambition at the time to care, but now that he knew the whole story, and now that both he and Xeres had changed so much, Thorn felt a deep pity for him.

“I missed you, Thorn. In the days after. I got wings, I got a new place in Heaven, I was told to forget my old, sinful life. But I kept thinking about you. You were so loyal to me, yet I’d left you behind like the backstabber I was. You could have been good, too. I knew it. I knew you had it in you to join me in the light, but God would never let me contact you, no matter how often I asked Him. I’m so sorry, Thorn.”

Thorn tried to come up with a response, but remained speechless. He’d expected a harsh confrontation with Xeres, not this babbling mess, so he found himself unprepared to deal with his old comrade’s breakdown. All he could do was drift there, listening to the creaking windows and the trickling rainwater.

Xeres looked like he was about to weep, if indeed angels could weep. But instead he glanced up at Thorn with fierce eyes and a trace of a wicked smile.

“I did something bad,” he said. Lightning caught in his eyes, lending them a wolflike intensity. Thorn was impelled to back up a few feet.

“God’s power is not innate,” Xeres said as thunder clapped. “I learned that it could be stolen out from beneath His feet, if one simply knew how. I skirted hellfire, but I filched the most minuscule bit of His power, which was the largest I dared.

“I’d heard you were doing well for yourself in Atlanta. I wanted to see you. So I weaseled my way into an assignment in the Big Peach. Angels work in every crevice of the city, so I needed to be careful. But I followed you. I saw Amy, and how you acted with her.

“I gave you a gift, my dearest friend. A gift that love would unlock. A gift that would lead you back to me.”

You’re beautiful
, Thorn had said to Amy at the nightclub, the first time he’d entered into physical space with her.

Excuse me?
she’d said in return.
Do I know you?

Thorn stared at Xeres and raised a hand to his gaping mouth. Amy seeing him in the flesh had been one of the key events that had set him on his new, more virtuous course. It had bolstered his bond with her, given him hope in the dark months after the Christmas Eve shooting. Thorn might never have wound up in the Sanctuaries had he not cared enough about Amy to save her from Garrett and Shenzuul.

“Your gift almost got me killed,” Thorn said, though he was indeed grateful that Xeres had subtly pushed him to change his heart. He was touched, too, that Xeres had longed to reconnect.

“I did not expect you to show up on my doorstep,” Xeres said. “Your presence here forced me to feign apathy and disgust. When God heard you’d discovered me, He removed me from service here until you entered the Sanctuary. And believe me, Thorn, if He’d found out what I’d done, Hell would not have been the worst of my punishment. I just wanted to be sure you’d make the right choices…”

He stood and paced toward Thorn, who hovered in midair, thoughts of the recent past dashing across his mind. Xeres placed a hefty hand on Thorn’s shoulder, then brought their faces close together. He spoke in a whisper. “Why, Thorn?” Pain saturated his voice. “
Why
did you have to stand up against God? He would have taken you back. We could have been together again.”

Thorn couldn’t look Xeres in the eyes, so instead he looked beyond him, to the water bleeding down the windows. In that moment, Thorn did wish that he’d accepted God’s offer of angelhood.
I wish I’d known that Xeres was a friend who loved me rather than a coward too afraid to help me.

And love it was, or some form of it. Thorn had seldom known what love felt like. The feeling was so tangible, so present, that Thorn was doomed to be cut deeply by it. This love would slip away from him, just like God’s, just like Amy’s.
Will I never find peace? Am I condemned to only ever hold happiness for fleeting moments between panicked fights for survival?

Or will death find me first?

Xeres dropped his immense hand from Thorn’s shoulder to his own side. He looked downward again, then shuffled away, back toward the papers he’d dropped. “I’m sorry, Thorn, but it’s too late. I can’t help you. No one can help you.”

Xeres’s words were true, Thorn realized painfully. As the storm roared outside, he watched his last hope walk away. He wanted to run after Xeres, to plead with him as he’d done when he’d first tried to defect. But Thorn knew when Xeres had made up his mind. He couldn’t bring himself to say goodbye, so he simply lowered himself beneath the squalid floor, through the building’s foundation, then into the earth.

And now what?
Thorn had no obvious options left. The angels hadn’t discovered Heather and Brandon outside yet, but they could no longer be used as proof of anything. He could flee with the Judge back to the demon nest, but that solution would only be temporary, and he could never live with himself if his own need for concealment caused the nest to be discovered and attacked.

Then the worst case scenario presented itself: Thorn could approach one of his enemies and beg for clemency. It was unlikely that either God or Wanderer would give him any, but at least it was better than dragging anyone else into—

Something
bumped into
Thorn. He reeled backward, tensing at the shock of hitting something underground. Was he somehow human again? No—if he were, he’d be crushed and suffocating in the dirt that surrounded him. Besides, Amy wasn’t nearby.
Then what could it have been? Another spirit, perhaps?

“Hello?” Thorn said, then moved to a new position, in case the other spirit was hostile and decided to attack. Seconds passed, but no response came. Thorn’s eyes saw only darkness. He cautiously reached a hand into the unseen space before him. “Who’s there? Judge? Is that you?”

Silence.

Angels had no reason to travel clandestinely underneath their own compound, so the other entity had to be a demon. But why would a demon, other than Thorn, be skulking beneath the angels’ quarantine zone? And what were the odds of Thorn bumping into him? Thorn had traveled underground countless times during his billions of years on Earth. Encountering another spirit beneath the ground was exceedingly rare, save for times of battle when entire armies of spirits would launch surprise attacks from below.

Thorn paused on that thought. He turned it over a few times.

Thorn darted up through the dirt, past the warehouse’s foundation, and back into the expansive room. Xeres had gathered his papers and was nearly through the far door.

“Xeres!” Thorn called.

Xeres turned and addressed Thorn with frustration. “I’ve said everything I have to say. It’s best if you—”

He stopped speaking when three demons leaped up from beneath the floor between the two of them. The devils quickly took in their surroundings. Two rushed for Xeres, and the other examined Thorn. He knitted his eyebrows, likely confused that another demon was already inside the room. Then his eyes widened in recognition of Thorn, and he blitzed forward, howling a shrill war cry. Even as the three demons sped across the warehouse, dozens more poured upward from the ground, all around the room.

“What’s the meaning of this?” Xeres shouted to Thorn. “What’s happening?”

Thorn braced for combat as his attacker surged forth. He called to Xeres: “I think the quarantine zone is being attacked!”

A bolt of lightning tore through the sky just meters away from Thilial, shot through the company of angels to which she’d been assigned, and splintered into a half dozen arcs that snaked into other storm clouds below. Thilial yelped and flapped her wings backward, as did several of the other angels. She looked downward as the last glimmer of the bolt sizzled away. Huge beads of rain poured from the heavens above, falling through Thilial’s body—and the bodies of the other hundred thousand angels—toward the Atlanta ground some two kilometers below. The height dizzied Thilial, as did the immense scope of the army around her.

The angels gathered back into formation, then proceeded on their journey downward. Thilial watched the grim expressions on their faces, all squinting and scrunched as if against the rain and the lightning. She waited for one of them to meet her gaze in consolation, or at least in solidarity, but none did. She did not know these cherubim, nor they her, but they would do battle side by side tonight.

Gleannor, the brute, had gotten her way. The demons preparing to attack had given Thilial’s rival all the ammo she’d needed to convince God to send His angels to war. God had declined to even grant Thilial an audience after He heard of her involvement in Thorn’s escape from the demons. After all, she’d aided the enemy. And Thilial was now carrying out her resulting sentence: serving as a lowly foot soldier in what was to be the first major conflict between angels and demons in over a thousand centuries.

“He blames you for the demons’ mobilization to war,” Gleannor had explained to Thilial, in chains on the doorstep of God’s House. “You claim to desire peace, yet if you hadn’t let Thorn go free—twice—war would not be necessary.”