The Devil's Secret (28 page)

Thorn could feel his consciousness waning, his body pulling his spirit downward into oblivion. So he strained against it, and with severe effort, he separated his spirit from his body. The body collapsed into a puddle of blood.

When the angel swept in front of the hole in the boundary, then touched down on the hillside, Thorn saw that it wore not the white robes of an angel, but the stiff funeral suit of a demon. A striped suit, with a matching fedora.

Thorn settled into shocked stillness. He tensed as he stared at… “You,” Thorn stammered. “You’re behind all of this. Behind Marcus.”

“I didn’t want to come in here, Thorn,” Wanderer said, his craggy face scowling. “I didn’t want to risk my life and all my plans in the face of an army of angels, but you left me no choice. I can’t let you leave here. It’s long past time for you to die.”

Thorn’s mind erupted with bits of information, trying to connect Wanderer’s involvement to all that had happened to him these past few months. How thoroughly was Wanderer enmeshed? Why had he gone to such great lengths to hide God’s desire to forgive any demon who demonstrated eagerness to defect?

Tonight’s events, at least, became immediately clear.
He wanted to silence me. He wanted to contain the information that I’m still alive and that I have two humans with me who’ve been alive in another Sanctuary.
That’s
why he sent Marcus and the others. He needed a team of dogmatic fools who wouldn’t question what he told them about me.

“The Miami Sanctuary,” Thorn said. “Did you orchestrate that mess, too?”

Wanderer nodded. “When I heard you’d redeemed yourself in the eyes of the Enemy, I guessed you might come after these two eventually.” He motioned back toward the hole in the Sanctuary’s boundary, behind which Heather stood, supporting a barely conscious Brandon. “You do have that awful predilection for independent thought, after all, and a willingness to challenge the status quo.”

Thorn shifted back down into his dying body. “Heather!” he called as loudly as its bleeding lungs would allow. “Run! Down the hallway! Get out of here!”

“Okay, what’s happening?” Heather said. Could she see the blood from this distance? “Who are you? What’s this weird hallway?”

“It’s a Corridor. You need to go down—”

“Where does it lead?”

“Everywhere. Find the United States, then Atlanta. Get Brandon to a hospital, then go to the Fulton County Courthouse. Go! Run!”

That last exclamation taxed Thorn’s body to the limit. He pulled away from it just before it died. Heather seemed confused, but she heeded Thorn’s words, and helped Brandon away, back toward the crashed plane. Thorn noticed the edges of the hole creeping inward, slowly closing the gap that he’d punched in the boundary.

Wanderer stood calmly between Thorn and Thorn’s escape. “How far do you think they’ll get, even if they find their way to Atlanta? I’ll have them killed within minutes of their arrival.”

“Thilial will be watching from Heaven,” Thorn boasted, although he had no way of knowing whether he spoke truth. “She’ll notice if anything happens to them.”

“Ha. Thilial. What a mistake that was. No, she hates demons. No one’s gonna help you, Thorn.” He drifted toward Thorn, but stopped when Thorn dared to advance on him.

“I single-handedly took down half the team you sent,” Thorn said. “I can take you too.”

Wanderer chuckled at the bluff, then flexed his wings—wings that could take him up into the angelic realm. Using such an ability, Wanderer would quickly best Thorn in a fight.

“What do you hope to gain from this?” Thorn said. “In Atlanta, you told me that you have a plan. What’s your plan?”

Lucifer shrugged. “To do to the new world what Othundro did to the old world. Simple as that.”

Wanderer’s reply made no sense to Thorn, but he was starting to untangle the Devil’s web on his own. As he glimpsed the brightening sky behind Wanderer, he remembered another dawn long ago, when the dying Emperor Constantine had struggled to get inside his medicine wagon, the future belief systems of the Western World resting on that one man’s death or survival. He remembered Amy, wounded and dying in Heaven, and God’s offer to pardon her even though she’d never believed in Him. He remembered Thilial’s apparent love for Amy, and Thilial’s appreciation of Heather. He remembered Thilial trying to advocate for reason among the Cherokee in her story. He remembered Heather’s words during her argument with Karen: “Why would God value faith?”

And then the answer struck him. The missing piece of the puzzle that had eluded him for all these months.

The best lies contain a morsel of truth
, went a popular demonic saying. This applied to the smallest white lies, and to the rare far-reaching lies that permeated most human cultures. But Thorn could scarcely fathom a lie so big that all of God’s creation—even, in a way, God himself—had bowed to it. He looked into Wanderer’s eyes, and now he saw more than petty selfishness. He saw more than the lust to destroy and the hatred for God that all demons shared.

Thorn saw genius in those eyes. Sick, perverted genius. At some point, millennia ago, Wanderer must have noticed humanity’s impulse to create superstitions to explain the unexplainable world around them. They needed to feel safe and in control, and claiming to know more about the world than they actually did allowed them to feel that way. Any intelligent demon knew this about human superstitions. But it had taken a true genius to see that the ultimate spite against God would be to create a superstition in God’s own name, and spread it throughout the world.

Clouds basked in the yellow of dawn, grass rustled in the wind, and the two demons faced each other on the surface of the withering Sanctuary.

“God didn’t create Christianity,” Thorn said to Satan. “You did.”

I owe loads of gratitude to Robert Eichenberg, Robin Ingle, Marissa DePasquale, and David Sigurani for their feedback and encouragement during the writing of these Thorn books. Extra special thanks goes to Fedor Steer, whose dedication to this project and willingness to give continued criticism over the span of years is humbling and greatly appreciated. Thank you, Fedor, for offering your sharp eyes to these books from the very beginning—and for lending your face to their covers! Thanks also to Reid Nicewonder, for challenging me to always think deeper.

The largest slice of my Thank You pie goes to David Gatewood, whose deft editing took my raw story and raised it to the next level. David, thank you for your honesty and your keen insight, and for helping me craft these books into something truly special.

Last but certainly not least, thank
you
, dear reader. You’re the reason I write. Without you taking a chance on my books, their stories are just thoughts in my head that I happened to scribble on a page. Thank you, from the bottom of my heart.

Joshua Ingle is a pathologically curious sci-fi and fantasy geek. The Thorn Saga is his first series of books.

Learn more at
www.joshuaingle.com
.

Connect with Josh at
www.facebook.com/joshthestoryteller
.