The Devil's Secret (27 page)

Brandon’s crisp voice sizzled from the headset. “I was asking what Karen’s doing.”

“She’s not coming,” Heather’s voice said, just as clear as Brandon’s.

Brandon shifted uncomfortably in his seat. “What? Did you try to talk her out of it?”

“I don’t think she’s in a mood to be talked out of anything.”

A pause, then: “All right. Where should we go—Knoxville or Charlotte? They’re about the same distance.”

“Charlotte,” Thorn said.

“Works for me. Virgil, strap yourself in.”

Thorn obliged, then settled back in his seat for what was bound to be a bumpy ride. The plane jolted underneath him as Brandon moved it forward, out of the hangar.

“I haven’t been able to contact traffic control or radio navigation,” Brandon said. “Not sure what that means.”

Perhaps that God is shutting out the possibility of new humans being created for this Sanctuary, in preparation for an invasion?
Thorn glanced out the window at Karen, who was plodding deliberately back the way they’d come. He wondered if she would realize that she was thoroughly alone down here. He hoped Marcus didn’t find her, if he still lingered in the Sanctuary.

I should have killed him.
Thorn’s demonic instincts bristled. But he knew he’d have regretted killing Marcus, too.
No matter what choice I make with him, I seem to regret it later.

“Fuel’s good, wind looks fine. Get ready.”

Brandon’s gaze alternated between the instruments on the dashboard and the checklist nestled in his lap. He turned the plane onto the runway, allowing for a spectacular, yet chilling view of the tiny airport at night. A thin layer of fog blanketed the ground across the entire expanse of the airfield. Crisscrossing lines of lights beamed upward through the fog, and still more lights blinked from towers nearby. Not a single sign of human activity could be seen, save for Karen walking back into the fog. Thorn watched her go until the plane’s turning swung her out of view.

“It’s weird that nobody’s here,” Brandon said through the headphones. “Even for this time of night. What’s going on in this town?” He lined the plane up with the reflectors set in the center of the runway. “I don’t see any other planes, so I’m just gonna go for it. Brace yourselves.”

Brandon eased the throttle forward, and the plane rapidly built up speed, bumping as it sped along. A torrent of fog raced by outside. Ominous dark mountains began to move against the backdrop of the stars in the sky. Brandon pulled back on the yoke, and the tense sound of wheels against pavement disappeared. The plane’s nose raised heavenward, and they were airborne.

Thorn watched the airport vanish into a blur of lights in the fog beneath them, then surveyed the vast landscape that opened up as they climbed ever higher. The country club was a small speck of light in the distance, and he knew the church lurked somewhere in the nearby dark.

Where is my body?
Thorn wondered, and tried to calculate the distance. Upon first entering this Sanctuary, he’d abandoned the human body with which he’d been gifted, had left it beneath a tree in an expansive grassy field. After all, it would have been just as vulnerable to the demons’ attacks as the humans’ bodies were, and not as durable—oddly—as Virgil’s corpse. The field lay a few miles southeast of here, roughly toward Charlotte. Thorn would have to time the plane’s passage over that field just right… but would the empty body still be alive, and available for use? Thorn desperately hoped so. He couldn’t very well take Virgil back to Earth. The dead man’s body would likely collapse the instant it left the Sanctuary and entered space where the normal rules of the spirit world reigned. No, if Thorn wanted to continue interacting with Heather and Brandon on Earth, he would need a body of his own. A living body. The body he’d had when he came here from Heaven.

If that damned Thilial hadn’t intervened, maybe I’d have that body already. Maybe we’d be safely away by now.

“I hope Karen’s okay,” Brandon said via the headsets.

“Yeah,” Heather replied.

Thorn leaned forward to peer into the cockpit. While Brandon kept a close eye on the dashboard, Heather watched the ground through the side window. Brandon brought the plane’s nose down, level with the horizon.

Only there was no horizon. No ground, no clouds, no stars. The front windows displayed only blackness.

“What the—?” Brandon’s eyes swept over his instruments as he grabbed the throttle and eased it back. Out the side window, Thorn saw the land’s edge below and in front of the plane. Dirt, trees, lakes, and houses sprang upward from a bottomless abyss, creating new ground as the plane flew over it. The time for action had come.

Thorn unbuckled his seat belt. The back of the plane was clean save for some loose instructional manuals and glass cups, which Thorn tucked into a pouch on the back of one of the seats.

Just as Thorn turned toward the cockpit, a new mountain rose into existence, its highest trees topping out just beneath the plane. Brandon pulled up. Thorn tumbled back into his seat.

“Turn back, turn back,” Heather said, her voice trembling.

“No,” Thorn said. “Turn right, toward that river over there.”
Closer to my human body.
Even as he said the words, a new section of the river popped up into being. Before the water could fall off the edge of the Sanctuary, additional stretches of the river leaped into place, off into the distance.

Brandon yawed the Cessna to the right and toward the river, but his voice grew harsh. “Virgil, what’s happening?”

“Do you trust me?”

“No!”

“Well you’re gonna have to. I need you to get as close to the ground as you can.”

“Okay, yeah, let’s land.”

“No, I need you to get close to the ground, and speed up.”

“What?”

“I’ve been looking out for you two all night. Just trust me this one last time and I’ll never ask for any favors again. Please. If you want to get to safety, this is the only way.”

Brandon exchanged a nervous glance with Heather. Low-hanging clouds gave way to clear air as the plane swooped downward. The Sanctuary’s boundary lay just behind the next mountain.

“Are your seat belts on?” he asked.

“Yeah.”

Thorn crouched just behind the front seats and held on to them tightly.
So long, Virgil. Thanks for all your help.
“Take that pass between the mountains there. See that field? Aim for that.”

“What are you doing?”

“Just trust me. Stay close to the ground. Closer!” The mountains rushed toward them.

“If I get any closer we’ll crash!”

“Speed up!”

“I’m not gonna—”

“If you want to live, speed up!”
Into the boundary!
Past
the boundary!

The plane jolted as Brandon jammed the throttle forward. Heather’s hands clutched her armrests with a viselike grip. The plane’s dashboard started beeping an altitude warning.

The mountains rocketed past, their trees nearly scraping the side of the plane. Beyond the mountains lay a large field of grass, and beyond the field, the empty black abyss of the Sanctuary’s boundary.

In seconds, they’d nearly caught up with the expanding boundary. Thorn looked out the side window and saw the Sanctuary trying to create new space at its edge. But the plane was faster. It torpedoed over the field, out into empty space, and then beyond. Faster, faster…

Heather yelled for Brandon to stop the plane. Brandon started to ease back on the throttle, but Thorn reached Virgil’s hand forward and held the lever down. The plane’s alarms grew louder, emphatic.

“What are you doing, Virgil?” Brandon shrieked.
“What the fuck are you doing?”

“God demands that we all make a choice tonight,” Thorn said calmly. “Here’s mine.”

For an instant, Thorn saw the bright whites and the deep blacks of the Corridors. Then the plane spun around him. Inertia wrenched Virgil out of his grasp, hurling the dead body against the front windows. They shattered. Screaming followed, then the tearing of metal, then fire.

Thorn swung through the blinding smoke into the cramped cockpit. He drew near to Heather’s face and found her unconscious. “Wake up!” he said. But any influence he might have had over her in the Sanctuary was gone, because they weren’t in the Sanctuary anymore. He shouted at her again, yet her eyes remained closed and her lungs kept inhaling smoke.

Thorn flew to the pilot’s side and peered through the sooty air. Brandon lay unconscious as well. Though the skin of his arm hadn’t torn, his left humerus was bent at the center, at a sickening angle. Blood welled beneath the skin at the break. And—
No!
—blood covered Brandon’s whole head and face. Thorn instinctively moved his hand toward Brandon’s mouth to check for breath, but Thorn had only his spiritual body now, and felt nothing.

“Hon?” Heather said faintly.

“Heather, get Brandon out of here!” Thorn said in a plain demonic whisper, which seemed so feeble compared with the power his whispers had carried in the Sanctuaries. It’d be a wonder if Heather even heard him at all.

But she soon came to her senses, coughing. “Hon? Brandon, honey, talk to me.” She unbuckled her seat belt. Gravity pulled her down through Thorn, toward Brandon. She yelped at the fall and her arms flailed upward, wrapping around her headrest just in time to prevent a full drop. Avoiding Virgil’s corpse, she braced her feet against the pilot’s window, then crouched down to see the grisly sight of her motionless husband.

The stunned wail that burst from her mouth struck Thorn deeply. Her face contorted into a grimace. Her posture went limp. “No, hon. No, no, no.” She pulled his torso back up against the seat and embraced him.

She immediately pulled back. “Breathing. You’re still breathing. Okay.”

Relief pushed itself upon Thorn, but he wouldn’t let himself feel it. Brandon was clearly in critical condition, and Thorn had no way to get him medical treatment.
You knew the risk
, a dark part of Thorn said to him.
And now you’ve killed yet another human for the sake of your own ambition. Was it worth it, Thorn?

At least the humans still existed here in the Corridors. Thorn hadn’t been sure they would. For all he’d known, they might have vanished into nothingness upon leaving the Sanctuary.

Thorn rose through the plane’s hull.
Through
it! As much as he’d enjoyed the power he’d had in the Sanctuaries, passing his spiritual body straight through a wall again felt nearly transcendent to him.

Hovering above the Cessna, he surveyed the scene of the crash. The plane had weathered the impact well enough, save for the fractured wing and the mangled nose. A rip in the metal stretched halfway around the tail, and the hull near the pilot bent into a concave bowl. The oval of broken glass strewn about the floor of the Corridor was mirrored by a circle of rising smoke pooling beneath the ceiling.

Thorn gazed down the Corridor. In one direction, the black and white hallway seemed to stretch to infinity. In the other direction, a yawning hole gaped in an otherwise empty wall, its edges gleaming with scintillating spiritual energy, protesting Thorn’s breach of the Sanctuary’s boundary.

Thorn glided through the hole, back into the Sanctuary. The hole looked the same from this side, except that it hung suspended in midair, six feet above the grassy hillside. The boundary had tried to stretch beyond the hole Thorn had punctured in it, with mixed success: to the left or right of the plane-sized hole leading to the Corridors, the landscape stretched to the horizon, where the beginning of an orange sunrise beamed its light upward onto violet clouds; but directly behind the hole, a cone of darkness stretched toward the sunrise, as though a giant flashlight of space and time had cast its light onto the rupture, sending a shadow of nothingness off into the distance.
I broke the Sanctuary
, Thorn thought with a bit of smugness.

Thorn flew away from the hole at full speed, toward the direction of the waning nighttime. After a quarter mile, he could see the tree where he’d left his own human body. He swooped down beneath the branches to examine it.

The pallor of death hadn’t touched its toned skin; its chest still rose up, then down. The body had continued living, unaware that it possessed no mind to give it consciousness. Thorn shifted down inside of it.

Reclaiming ownership of his own physical body stunned him for a moment. This was a far different experience than possessing a human on Earth, or a cadaver in a Sanctuary. The sudden rush of senses washed over and through him. The burning crimsons of dawn appeared more real, more tangible when seen through human pupils. The scent of night-blooming flowers, the light breeze caressing his skin—even the sweat beading against his brow and the dryness in his mouth made him feel full and invigorated. It felt like a long-lost part of himself had been suddenly restored.

It felt like coming back to life.

Thorn wiped away a tear that had begun to form in his eye. He had no time for sentimentality. Rising to his feet, he adjusted the formal suit that the body had been wearing when he first entered the Sanctuary—the same suit Thorn had imagined himself wearing during his frantic flight from Heaven. Amy’s blood had crusted onto its front, but Thorn tried not to think of her. Instead, he turned back to the hole in the boundary…

… and a knife plunged into his chest. On instinct, Thorn thrashed at his attacker, but his fists hit only soft white feathers. Wings?

Thorn’s fresh blood spilled down his stomach, mixing with Amy’s dried blood. He tried to stem the flow by pressing his hands up against the wound. The knife itself lay on the nearby grass, discarded by whoever had attacked him.

With his free hand, Thorn shielded his eyes from the sun, trying to make out the silhouetted figure beating its wings against the morning air. The lone angel couldn’t have come from God’s army—those cherubim would travel together, as a unit. But why would Thilial have done this, after she promised to leave him be?

Success had seemed so close. He’d had only to get Brandon to a hospital, then to convince the Judge to join him in his fight. Amy’s death might have counted for something after all.