A God to Fear (Thorn Saga Book 5) (7 page)

“Rulebreaker!” one demon yelled. “Traitor!” called another.

Thorn continued speaking over a few more protestations. “If we spread this news to all of demonkind, God’s tests will become worthless. If He truly loves us, as He claims to, He will be forced to leave us alone. We will finally be able to form our own society apart from His tyranny.

“Furthermore, we have all been lied to about the nature of God, and of His religion. Christianity was created not by God, but by one of our own: Wanderer. For evidence of this, we need only to capture and torture him, or any of his closest followers, especially—”

Marcus.
The gaunt demon rose from beneath the judge’s bench at the front of the room. The clamor among the demons grew louder as they sensed a showdown between Thorn and Marcus, two known enemies.

Thorn glanced down at the Judge, who hid his face. Marcus drifted higher and stretched out his arms in a gesture that demanded command of the room. The other demons hushed a bit. Marcus cast a steely frown at Thorn, and it blanketed him in dread.

“You say that God recycled two humans from one Sanctuary to the next,” Marcus said to him. “So what? Even if you can provide the evidence, which I doubt you can, all you’ve proven is that Sanctuaries don’t exist for the humans’ sake—not that they exist for ours.”

“What is this?” Thorn asked to no one in particular. Then to the Judge: “What is
he
doing in your courtroom?”

“It’s not his courtroom anymore,” Marcus said. “His long rule over this city has ended. He is deposed. I am the new Demon Judge of Atlanta, and I am the sole leader of this city.”

Thorn glanced down at the Judge, whose submissive posture suggested that Marcus spoke the truth.

“Wanderer put you here,” Thorn said to Marcus. He suppressed his fear and raised his voice for the whole room to hear. “Deposing the Judge was not just a normal power play. Wanderer has placed Marcus in this position, because Wanderer knew I would come here for help, and he wants to discredit me and end my life. But I say we seize Marcus and demand answers from him! What say you all?”

Thorn’s rally to action was met with silence. The crowd remained still, staring upward at the two rivals, one a plaintiff and the other a defendant.

“They trust me,” Marcus said, “because I haven’t broken any Rules lately, unlike you.”

“Marcus, you’ve seen Brandon and Heather. Stop believing what you
want
to be true and start believing what you
see
. What else could Sanctuaries be for, if not for us?”

Marcus ignored his question and spoke loudly, to the whole room. “You deserve execution, Thorn. But because I am a magnanimous leader, I will grant you a hearing rather than let the masses have their way with you. I will listen to your evidence… if you will tell me where I can find it.” He placed special emphasis on this last clause.

Thorn took a few seconds to realize Marcus’s ploy. He looked fair and generous in front of the crowd, but if Thorn brought Heather and Brandon to him, Marcus would abduct them, then sentence Thorn to death. He cursed himself for being so foolish as to charge in here with his prepared speech. But at least he’d had the foresight to hide Heather and Brandon just in case.

“The angels swear blind allegiance to God, and they are all slaves who fail to see the world as it really is,” Thorn said to Marcus. “You’ve sworn blind allegiance to Wanderer. You are the same as them. None of us, including you, should let ourselves be coerced into the service of someone who wants only to control us. I want to be free. Do you?”

“I am already free. I know what I know, as do we all. We’ve had this discussion before, and I grow tired of it. You are insane.”

Thorn lowered his gaze to look upon the crowd of demons, who stared shrewdly at him and seemed to be genuinely mulling over his pleas. “Do I look insane to you? I am your former leader! I led this city to glory and prestige! Would I say the things I have said tonight if I didn’t have good reason to say them?”

“You’ve always been a self-absorbed psychopath, Thorn,” Marcus said. “We once admired you for it, but we will not follow you into these new delusions. You are beneath me. You are beneath us all. And you deserve to die.”

At a swift gesture from Marcus, several guards rushed toward Thorn. They gripped his limbs before he had a chance to defend himself.

“Marcus, please, be reasonable.”

“Tell me where your humans are, and I will be reasonable.”

An intuition struck Thorn. He threw Marcus a rebellious grin. “You can’t kill me until I give the humans up, can you? Wanderer won’t allow it.”

“I do not take orders from Wanderer.”

The guards hauled Thorn toward the chambers behind the podium and the rooms farther back where prisoners were kept. “Since they’re still alive, anyone could find them. Anyone could ask the Judge or Shazakahn, and learn that I’ve told the truth here tonight!”

The rising commotion in the courtroom encouraged Thorn. Marcus would not be able to enlist other demons to aid him in his search for Brandon and Heather, lest they discover that Thorn was right.

“You’ll never find them!” Thorn yelled. He laughed spitefully. “But someone else might!” He shouted this last exclamation as an appeal to the crowd.

None rose up to save Thorn, though, as the guards dragged him toward captivity. “Question Wanderer and Marcus! Question all authority! Go to a Sanctuary yourself! The answers are before you, if only you care to search for them!”

Thorn got out the last word just before they pulled him through the wall.

I made my case so poorly
, Thorn lamented in his prison cell, a small chamber used for holding inmates prior to their court hearings. It lay in darkness save for the dim moonlight sinking down from the window. Thorn thought of dozens of things he should have said to Marcus—things that might have persuaded the other demons.
I should have taken more time to think through my speech.

Thorn’s true, spiritual cell was a cell made of bodies. A hundred and forty demon guards had locked their limbs together to create a lattice of spirit bodies above, below, and around Thorn. He tried to plan an escape, but even if he broke through the cell’s living walls, he would never survive the ensuing confrontation with so many demon guards.

He spent hours drifting about the cage. As the night wore on, he spoke to the guards, begging for them to believe that his recent discoveries were real, but in return they only taunted him, their minds closed to his pleading.
At least I’m still alive. At least Marcus hasn’t found Brandon and Heather.
But with the Judge out of power, what use were the two humans? Wanderer, at least, clearly thought they were a loose end that needed tying up, and this paranoia was the only reason he was keeping Thorn alive.

But Thorn doubted that even that loose end presented a risk to Wanderer anymore. Shazakahn might have half-respected the Judge’s word back when he was in power, but the African demons would never believe Thorn alone. Thilial had been right: demonkind’s stubborn beliefs were simply too entrenched. Would they listen even if the angels themselves declared Thorn truthful? If God’s own voice boomed down from Heaven?
I’m sure they’d think it was some kind of trick.

More long hours passed. Dawn must have been approaching by the time Thorn heard a voice whispering loudly, quarreling with one of his cell’s guards. He moved closer to eavesdrop on the guard berating the newcomer.

“You may not enter. The prisoner’s ideas are poisonous.”

“Come on, Wex, you know me,” said the Judge. “What am I gonna do? Go full Rambo and bust Thorn out of the most secure building in the city? I just want to say hi. Gloat, as it were.”

“Marcus would not approve.”

“Marcus is a cock.”

The guard, Wex, seemed to consider this for a moment. “He really is.”

The Judge grinned and raised his hand for a fist bump. “There’s my man.”

“But no whispering. We must be able to hear everything you say.” Wex accepted the fist bump, then pried himself away from the lattice of demons to let the Judge pass through.

“Right on. I appreciate it. The next time I’m in power, I’ll buy you an ice cream cone.”

The Judge floated through the gap in the cell’s wall, then Wex latched his own body back into place behind him.

Thorn turned away, refusing eye contact. “Leave me,” he said. “You are a coward. I cannot fathom why I thought you could help me when you can’t even stand up to Wanderer and Marcus.”

“Thorn, chill. I just—”

“I said leave!” Thorn glared at the Judge and pushed upward. He stretched himself above the Judge in a posture of intimidation.

“Well, you’re a bit prickly today. Thorny, one might say.”

“You betrayed me.”

“Hey, now. You’re the one who went AWOL on us. You think I
want
to be allied with that scumbag upstairs? He overthrew me! But you have no power, buddy. If I side with you, I might as well put a gun to my head and pull the trigger.” He frowned. “Except that that wouldn’t really do anything, and I don’t know how I’d manage to grab hold of the gun in the first—You get what I mean.”

“You looked like you were about to try and save me. By the pool in the Sanctuary.”

“Maybe I was.”

“You could have stepped up in my defense at any time during all of this, but you didn’t, and look where it’s gotten you. Disgraced in your own city. A lowly servant in Marcus’s court.”

“They had dirt on me, man. It had nothing to do with you.”

“Keep telling yourself that.”

The Judge shook his head, then eased himself down toward the floor made of demons. Thorn relaxed a bit as well. He looked more closely at the Judge and saw that his spiritual form had changed. His skin had always seemed slightly oily, as if he hadn’t showered in a few days, but now the unsettling griminess on his face had cleared. His hair was clean of gel, and his V-neck suit seemed to fit properly for a change.

“You look different,” Thorn said to him.

“So do you. Stronger. Cleaner. Not bad for a guy who every demon in the city thought was dead yesterday.”

Thorn drifted near the small window which, when glimpsed through the web of demons’ arms and legs, allowed a limited view of the tops of some nondescript buildings and the black sky beyond.

“I haven’t been this low in a long time,” the Judge said. “They took my title, my city. They even took my favorite charge, this corrupt banker who’s always got something disreputable going on at the courthouse. Cohn—you know him, right? My followers can’t do anything. They’re all pissed that Marcus is styling himself as a Judge when he was never an Angel of Judgment. Ha, it’s ironic.”

“Why’s that?”

The Judge snorted derisively and twirled the end of his tie between his fingers. “You know back at the beginning of time, when the Enemy created Angels of Love, Reason, Purpose, and all that?”

“Yes.”

“And you know that God didn’t just create those main denominations of angels. He created a branch of angels for literally everything. There are Angels of Cooking Vegetables, Angels of Sedimentary Rock, Angels of Premature Ejaculation. It’s goddamned ridiculous. Hell, for a few decades there was even an Angel of the Soviet Union. Poor bastard.”

“I’d heard of the Sedimentary Rock guys. There were only four or five of them, right?”

“Yeah, yeah, yeah. These are all tiny groups, most of them formed before the things they were supposed to supervise even existed.

“Well anyway, there was this one angel named Galis. At the beginning of time, Galis was the only—one, sole, single—Angel of Manatees. Yes, the Lord Almighty saw fit to create an Angel of Manatees. Problem was, at the beginning of time, manatees wouldn’t evolve for several billion more Earth years. Even still, Galis pored over God’s instructions for overseeing the manatees. He wanted to do his best for those fat little seaweed-chowing monsters, but he couldn’t, because they didn’t exist yet. So Galis waited and waited. Then one day a war started in Heaven, and he was a little annoyed at having nothing to do all the time, so he decided to join the rebels, only to be cast out of Heaven days later.

“Now, what was a sensitive little angel like Galis supposed to do on primordial Earth, stuck with a rage-fueled gang of battle-hardened demons? Should Galis have waited for manatees to evolve so that he could mobilize an army of evil sea cows to wreak destruction upon the human world? No, it was easier and more realistic for Galis to just tell the other demons that he’d been an Angel of Judgment, so that they’d take him seriously and wouldn’t beat him up. During the Unification War, Galis styled himself as a Judge, and everything went just dandy for him. For a while.

“Eventually Galis met this asshole named Thorn, who had a buddy named Marcus, who had a boss named Wanderer, who somehow knew Galis’s secret. And Wanderer dredged up some reputable demons who remembered Galis from those days at the beginning of time, and they revealed to the whole damn city of Atlanta that its Judge had once been the one, the only, Angel of Manatees. Needless to say, they laughed him out of office.”

Thorn gawked at the bizarre tale. The story had touched him though. Dust motes drifted in the moonlight between Thorn and the Judge, whose gaze had dropped to the floor made of impartial demon guards. “I’m sorry, Judge. Truly. But your story only illustrates why we need to end the brutality of demon society, so that we all can live freely.”

The guards’ dark eyes followed the Judge as he rose and moved toward Thorn. “Let me ask you, buddy. If I were still in power, and I offered to forgive everything you’ve done if you’d just shut up, live your life, and stop thinking so much, would you do it?”

“No.”

“Why not?”

“Because now I know too much to keep quiet. Because I’ve felt the physical world, and I know we can change. Because I want to be good, and none of you will let me.”

“And how exactly did you enter the physical world?”

“Oh not you too.”

“I’m just curious.”

“It has something to do with Amy. That’s all I know.”

“That girl you’re in love with?” When Thorn rolled his eyes, the Judge chuckled. “Come on, broseph, don’t deny it. It’s obvious to anyone who’s ever seen you with her.”