A God to Fear (Thorn Saga Book 5) (18 page)

He was preparing to call for his followers when he noticed a single demon floating next to one of the angels on the ground. Marcus’s zeal for bloodshed burned even hotter when he saw who it was.

Him.

From this distance, Thorn looked unscathed. Had he fought in the quarantine zone during the attack, like the traitor he was? Or had he arrived afterward to tend to his wounded angel friends? No matter. He’d die with the rest of them.

But who was that standing next to him? It was one of the biggest angels Marcus had ever seen, short of a seraph; he stood at least twice Thorn’s height. Yet despite his size, he looked frail and unhealthy. His back was hunched, his hair missing in places… but he looked familiar. Had Marcus once seen this angel in his haler days?

The angel next to Thorn was gazing upward at the battle in the sky, at the spheres of demons rising toward the angel army, at the slew of demon corpses suspended in the clouds like the remnants of some macabre fireworks display. The other angels near the ground wore expressions of ire, of hate. But Thorn’s accomplice looked more sad than anything.

Neither Thorn nor the angel had noticed Marcus hovering a few hundred feet above them.
I should swoop down from behind, take them unaware, murder them both.
But he feared that angel for some reason. Something dark and vicious clawed at his memory’s periphery.

Before his eyes, the angel flared his wings and shot upward. The wings, each more than two car lengths across, beat powerfully against the roiling wind, flinging great gusts of water droplets outward against the rain. Thorn made no move to follow, nor did the other angels. They just hovered motionless, watching him rise. Marcus, captivated, did the same.

The angel sped upward, circling around a thick bolt of lightning that ripped a fissure in the heavens, blasting a shockwave of rain, air, and sound outward. He twisted through the sky as he climbed to the height of the demon brigades, then wove between them, ascending ever higher.

And then he spoke.

“Demons, hear me!” the angel roared in a sonorous voice that Marcus recognized immediately.

No. It can’t be.

“I am Xeres, the greatest demon lord of all time! You are my former followers, my former brothers, and I will not let you march forward to certain suicide!

“God has lied to you! Lucifer has lied to you! There is no need for anyone to be an enemy of anyone else! This fighting is pointless! It is a waste! So I urge you—no, I
command
you: RETREAT! End this foolishness! Ignore the distortions that have been sold to you and discover truth for yourselves!

“Peace!

“Peace!

“PEACE!”

The sight of Xeres as an angel, blaring orders with his dominating voice, overwhelmed Marcus, and the demon army as well. The orbs of demons started sagging as Xeres soared among them. When he flew close enough for each sphere to see, it collapsed entirely into swirling confusion. Some of the demons tried to hold their positions and some tried to regroup, but others fled downward, or sped after Xeres, or idled in the wet air.

It’s a trick! It has to be another trick. Xeres is dead. Defection is impossible.

The angel army didn’t waste a moment. It charged at breakneck speed toward the confused demons.

“Angels!” Xeres called to them. “You, too, are my brothers and sisters! Do not attack! Do not kill for a baseless cause!”

But Xeres’s words did nothing to the angels. They continued their onslaught. When they collided with the first group of demons, they slaughtered them.

Marcus felt as small as he had when the hordes drove him out of Rome. He grew aware that he was panicking, and it panicked him all the more. His body would not respond to his mind’s commands. The pandemonium he was witnessing among the demonic forces was so far removed from his plans that he couldn’t even remember what his plans had been.
Where is Wanderer? Does he see that his soldiers are perishing by the thousands? Does he care?

Thunder roused Brandon from the depths of sleep. He’d had the strangest nightmare. The wedding had ended in a massacre of its guests, Tim had been shot, then Brandon and Heather had been chased by evil spirits of some kind all night long.

He slid his eyes open, tried to regain his bearings. He was sitting in the passenger seat of a car next to Heather, who looked even more sleepy than he felt. She twisted the key in the ignition a bit, then adjusted the air when it turned on. She noticed Brandon watching her.

“Hey, hon,” she said blearily. “It sure got cold while we slept, didn’t it? How you doing?”

Why was his arm in a cast? The plane crash from his nightmare couldn’t have been real. Could it? “Where are we?”

“We’re at the warehouses Thorn told us to go to. We’re safe, I think. You can go back to sleep.”

Thorn? The name jogged Brandon’s memory, and he recalled that his nightmare was real. He closed his eyes and tried to fall back asleep, or maybe to wake up.

He couldn’t.

A demon rammed into Thilial—perhaps by accident, because she felt no pain from any assault. She tumbled end over end through a small cloud, passing several skirmishes on the way. One demon, screaming in murderous rage, charged at her as she sought to reorient herself. It spun before her, bottom to top. Only by sheer luck did she manage to decapitate it before it attacked. Eager to leave the fighting for a moment, she flew straight up…

… only to find the city of Atlanta above her, on the ground! She shook her head, trying to make sense of her positioning, but the sky around her was so crowded with spirits and clouds and disorienting lightning blasts that she couldn’t make sense of the visual overload.

Thilial drew her wings inward and dropped down into the physical realm. The warfare vanished, and gravity instantly told her which way was down. She adjusted her body so that her feet faced in that direction.

When she climbed back into the demonic realm, she found herself in the midst of thousands of dead demons, drifting like abandoned rag dolls on a night sea.
This must be where the first skirmish happened.

The bodies wouldn’t disappear for a few more days, so Thilial, disgusted, decided to disappear. She sprang up into the angelic realm, and the vista around her transformed into a surreal panorama. The doomed demon army took on russet hues. The angels winked in and out of true color as they took brief respites in the angelic realm—or used the realm to facilitate an attack—then blinked back into demonic space. Some angels, like Thilial, were waiting unnaturally long to rejoin the battle.

She’d tried to revel in the warfare. Justice was finally being served to these vermin, and that was something to celebrate. But Thilial had been created in the 1500s; she hadn’t been present for the great battles of the distant past. This mass killing was a new experience for her, and she found it abhorrent at a visceral level.
Talking
about killing God’s enemies was one thing, but being here in person and actually participating in the extermination…

Thilial knew that there must be a better way to achieve God’s goals. This was deeply, deeply wrong, especially in light of so many demons heeding Xeres’s plea to retreat.
He tried to open their eyes, and many of them listened, but we’re killing them anyway. If they will not fight and we rush to slaughter them, who is truly the demon, and who the angel?

“Thilial!” a commanding angel called from the safety of the sidelines in the angelic realm. “Get back into combat!” His severe eyes went even further, warning Thilial,
Or you’ll rot in Heaven’s prisons for eternity.

Thilial dropped back into the demonic realm, and color was restored to the tens of thousands of fighting spirits. She raised Fear in a defensive posture.
Maybe if I keep moving, and strike only in self-defense, my superiors won’t notice that I’m avoiding the fray.

She began a wide circular motion around the perimeter of the fighting. From this distance, the battle looked like an enormous glob of churning particles drifting in the sky. When viewed from afar, the horror and violence inside that glob seemed almost forgettable. She didn’t know those angels or those demons, dying by the hundreds. From out here, they were just spectacle. She again attempted to force herself to see this as a necessary—

Scathing pain burst across Thilial’s back. She tried to flee from whatever had caused it, but two hands closed around her head, preventing her escape. She grabbed the hands just as they tried to twist her head into a snap. In doing so, she dropped her sword.

Fear toppled forward out of her reach. She summoned all of her strength to strain against the hands of whatever demon was behind her.

The demon abruptly released her head and delivered two sharp blows to her side. Thilial’s hands, having been pushing against the demon’s, thrust outward, throwing her whole body off-kilter. She struggled to right herself.

Panicked, Thilial scanned for her attacker, but somehow, he’d vanished. She turned to look for her sword, and spotted it—in the hands of an angel who was speeding away from her.

An angel?
Was this who had attacked her? What reckless angel would betray his own kind in the midst of such a victory over demonkind?

Pain radiated from Thilial’s back and throbbed through her body. Her wounds felt grave.
I should retreat. I need to get back to Heaven.

As she floated there, a kilometer above the ground, trying to climb into the angelic realm, she watched her attacker flying downward. He was just a fleck in the darkness now, but Thilial could still see her sword in his hand.

As unconsciousness wrapped its blanket around her mind, Thilial’s last thoughts were of fury at the angel who’d crossed her, and confusion over the fact that he had only one wing.

Thorn had rushed into the fray to defend Xeres from several attackers—mostly angels—but Xeres seemed to be handling them himself. He disappeared and reappeared, outflying some and flinging others away with his mighty arms, wounding a few but killing none. Thorn could do little but watch.

While escaping the assault on the quarantine zone, Thorn had feared for his life. The demons all knew him to be a traitor, and the angels all knew him to be a renegade—the target of God’s manhunt. If not for Xeres protecting him from the spirits in the compound, Thorn would have been slain.

Then, floating next to Xeres beneath the battle, watching him gaze up at the carnage, glimpsing the change in his eyes when he saw the death being wrought by the war he’d neglected to prevent, Thorn had felt hope for the first time in days.

And now the angels were dashing that hope to pieces, murdering every demon in sight. Could this order truly have come from God? He was vain and relentless, true, but in Heaven, His desire to save demonkind had seemed genuine. Could He truly be terminating the entire demonic race just because some of them had learned that He still wanted them back? Was God so callous, so insecure?

As Thorn was trying to make sense of it all, he noticed two familiar beings near the outer edge of the chaotic battle. Wanderer was attacking Thilial! The hoary old demon hit her twice in the side, then swooped around her and grabbed her sword. He raced downward toward the ground.

Paralyzed, Thilial flickered away into the angelic realm. From this far away, Thorn could do nothing to help her, especially not when she’d fled to the realm above his. But what was Wanderer doing out in the battle? Why had he risked his own safety like that? Shouldn’t he be huddled in a safe house somewhere, dispatching orders from behind several lines of defense?

“Thorny!” the Judge called from behind him. “You’re alive! Holy hell, dude, you started a war!”

“Judge! Follow me! I need your help!” Thorn veered away from the main battle and set himself on Wanderer’s trajectory. The angels’ victory seemed imminent; the disorganized demons stood no chance. But seeing Wanderer’s stealthy incursion, Thorn discerned that this confrontation with the angels couldn’t possibly be his entire plan. No, Wanderer was much too cunning for that. This battle had to be a diversion from something else.

And whatever it was, Thorn was going to stop it.

A few blocks away from the angels’ quarantine zone stood the Atlanta Fellowship of Faith and Freedom, a five-story-tall megachurch that Thorn had frequented during his days as Atlanta’s top demon. A white, bottom-lit cross monument rose before it, twice as tall as the church, stretching up into the storm as if challenging the heavens themselves. Perhaps in answer, lightning struck the huge white cross as Thorn and the Judge approached.

“Don’t do it, Thorn,” the Judge said again, yelling above the wind and rain. “Wanderer scares the bejesus out of me. We lost this battle. Let’s just go back to the nest and rethink our options.”

Thorn said nothing and continued ahead. He was through with running and hiding. This would end tonight, one way or the other.

The Judge finally shut up as they neared the fourteen glass doors at the church’s entrance. They floated through, past the church’s bookstore, its gym, and its breakfast restaurant. The lights here had been dimmed for the night, as had the lights in the main auditorium.

This massive, central room seated at least three thousand people, maybe four. Curved rows of cushioned movie theater seats tiered outward from the stage, stopping well short of the back wall, lest they inadvertently encounter any suffering that might lurk in the streets outside. As Thorn crept through this rear area, vacant but for its Tuscan pillars and voguish carpet, he looked up to the banners exclaiming “Hallelujah!” and “Hosanna!” and “Prepare Ye the Way of the Lord!” hung from the room’s expansive dome ceiling.

Thorn could barely read the words, however, because the air was so thick with demons. Many thousands of them hovered between the dome and the chairs, spanning back into the darkness at the edges of the room. They took note of Thorn’s presence, but didn’t move to intercept him. Some of them even withdrew as Thorn approached, making a path for him. He recognized a few who’d been his own followers only last week. Now they sneered at him with the rest of the waiting army. He heard a few growls and a few snickers, but the most frightening aspect of the throng was its relative silence. These demons stared malice at him, and as he marched toward the front of the auditorium, he felt his own death growing ever more inevitable. He briefly turned around to make sure that the Judge was still with him.