by Joshua Ingle
Marcus huffed, and turned to his team of demons. Each of them reacted to Thorn as disdainfully as Marcus. Wanderer had hand-picked this team of fiercely loyal demons; none of them would be swayed by Thorn’s spurious assertions.
“What are you doing just standing there, huh?” Brandon suddenly yelled to Marcus. The boy, of course, hadn’t heard any of their conversation in the spirit realm. “He’s gonna kill me!”
Thorn scowled at him. Marcus chuckled, then said with Shannon’s voice: “Enough… Virgil. If you kill him, we’ll kill you. You’ll never make it to the next Sanctuary.”
“Are you sure about that?” Thorn said in the spirit realm. “Sure enough to bet your mission on it? You’ve already lost one mark.” Thorn nodded down to the human body that he was currently operating. Virgil, ugh.
Marcus searched inside himself and found that indeed, he wasn’t sure he could stop him if he fled. Thorn’s recent resourcefulness had been uncanny.
“We’re not letting you go,” Marcus said in the physical realm.
“That’s not what I want.”
“Then what do you want?”
“Ten minutes. Let me make my case. Tell you everything. Try to convince you. If you still don’t believe me afterward, we’re still in the same position as now. You have nothing to lose.”
Is this a ruse of some sort? Marcus hated to give in to one of Thorn’s requests, and he had no interest in hearing the clown prattle on about his conspiracy theories. But if Thorn killed the remaining humans and escaped, Wanderer’s rage would be tectonic in scale. Maybe the best option would be to give in to Thorn’s wishes, at least for ten minutes.
“Ten minutes is good. We can all talk this out,” Brandon said.
Marcus clenched his teeth and shook his head. At least Hecthes finally turned off that infernal wedding music.
“Ten minutes,” Marcus said to Thorn. “You and me, and the human if necessary. Alone.” He didn’t want his team to hear their conversation. It would inevitably bring baggage from their malicious relationship into the open.
Thorn frowned at Marcus’s request for solitude. Marcus liked that.
•
Marcus strode Shannon’s corpse into a second-story administration room furnished with a reception desk, two cubicles, and a door to the manager’s office. On a window in the far wall, he slid some latches aside. The old window creaked as he opened it, and the white curtains began to undulate in the night breeze. It would be an adequate escape route in the event that Thorn tried to assault him directly.
Thorn entered, Virgil’s arms still clutching Brandon, the knife still at Brandon’s throat. Without even closing the door behind him, he spoke immediately, in the spirit realm. “I’ve been to Heaven, Marcus. I was taken there after you killed me, and told by God Himself that He forgave me. I now have proof that—”
“I don’t know why you guys are doing this,” Brandon said, unaware that he was interrupting, “or what you think you can gain, but it’s not worth it. Please, let us go. We’ll run away and we won’t cause you any problems.” His voice quivered with terror.
Marcus spoke using Shannon’s voice. “Speak plainly, Thorn. Brandon deserves to hear your plea as much as anyone. Maybe you’ll make more sense to him.”
Thorn hesitated. “Brandon, we have ten minutes. Give me one or two of them to think. I need to get this right.”
Ah, so the kid is in on it, too. But would Thorn actually kill him? Knowing his history, Marcus guessed that he would.
“What do you want?” Brandon said to Shannon, ignoring Thorn’s request.
“I want you to give your captor time to think,” Marcus said.
When Brandon closed his mouth and dropped his eyes to the floor, Thorn continued, keeping his voice firmly in the spiritual realm. “God wants to control us, but I have proof that He also wants to reconcile with us.”
“And you would have us reconcile with the Enemy?” Marcus said, also in the spirit realm.
“I would have you open your eyes. The proof is right here before you. Brandon was in the last Sanctuary, and here he is again. If Sanctuaries were really tests for humans, why would God recycle a human who failed? What’s more, you killed me with your own hands. Am I not living proof that the Sanctuaries are for us? How else can you explain my being here?”
“Because He hates us. He taunts us. He’s forced you to ally with Him and you haven’t the nerve to fight back.”
“No, you fool! My very presence here is fighting back! Unlike you, I actually want to be able to live a life of my own free choosing. I don’t want to have to choose between your way or God’s way, and if I can—if we can use Brandon to expose God, and if we can make public whatever scheme you’re part of that’s trying to keep my knowledge hidden, then maybe we’ll both be able to forget all this fighting and live the lives we want to live. But it won’t happen unless you let me take Brandon to the Judge, and let the Judge verify to the rest of demonkind that I’m telling the truth.
“And how much more powerful would my tale be if you stood by my side, Marcus? Imagine if two demons with as much animosity as you and I stood side by side and announced everything we know, with Brandon and Heather as evidence, and Shazakahn and his legions to corroborate our story. We could end the Enemy’s lies and His attempts to control us. We could end the willful ignorance of our brothers. We could finally be free.”
Marcus briefly considered that Thorn’s musings might be valid. Briefly. But even if Wanderer was lying to demonkind, even if he’d sent Marcus here to silence Thorn’s newfound knowledge, Wanderer’s motives could only lie in affronting the Enemy. And Marcus could get behind any cause that harmed the Enemy. Besides, if Wanderer didn’t want to share every detail of his plans with his followers, who was Marcus to blame him? Marcus would certainly never share all his own plans with his own followers.
However…
He slowly paced toward Thorn. “Thinking is the worst virtue, and you’ve thought your way into breaking all three of our Rules. But if you could think just a little harder, Thorn, you and I could make a deal.”
“A deal? How so?”
Passing one of the cubicles, Marcus ripped a photo of someone’s family off of a tack. “It’s so easy to control the physical world here in the Sanctuaries, I can almost forget that it’s impossible to do on Earth. For every demon except you, that is.”
Thorn’s eyes sank.
“You’ve entered physical space on Earth on two occasions,” Marcus continued. “Tell me how you did it, and I’ll let you and all your little humans go.”
Thorn turned his gaze back up to Marcus’s and held it. Had their mutual animosity lit the space between them aflame, they might both have stayed staring at each other while the building burned around them. Brandon fidgeted with his hands, sneaking glimpses at their strange behavior out of the corner of his eye.
“I’m good at lying,” Thorn finally said. “I would love to lie to you now, and I could very easily. But if I lied about this, you’d think I was lying about the rest of it. So I’m being fully honest with you, Marcus. I do not know how I entered physical space.”
“Then you are going to die.” Marcus ripped the photo of the family in two, then in four, then in eight. He flicked them into the air. Brandon gulped as they fluttered downward.
The curtains whisked against each other as they waved in the breeze. An air conditioning unit deactivated and its background hum vanished. Somewhere in the distance, an owl cried out a predatory screech.
Brandon chimed in: “Well if you’re not gonna say anything, I will. We’re all just innocent people…”
Marcus tried to tune him out as Thorn began speaking in the spirit realm.
“I hate you,” Thorn said, so softly that Marcus strained to hear him.
Marcus stepped forward. “What’s that?”
“I said I hate you,” Thorn said louder. “I hate all of you. Conspiring against me when I’m in power. Conspiring against me when I’m brought low. Con
spiring against me when all I want is for you to know the truth. All the misery you’ve caused humans through the years. All the misery you’ve caused yourselves through your shortsighted ignorance.”
Thorn looked up then, and Marcus saw fearsome contempt in his eyes. This is the same gaze with which I’ve scrutinized him so many times. Marcus found it disconcerting.
“I want you to know, brother,” Thorn continued. “And that is the last time I will ever call you brother. I want you to know that if I succeed here tonight, I wasn’t fighting for your freedom, or for that of any other demon. I was fighting for myself. You’ve cut me off so irrevocably that I feel no kinship with any of you. And if you continue to willingly blind yourselves, I feel no pity for you. It’s your own blindness and bloodlust that condemns you to a life of strife and pain. You’re so purely, unconscionably evil that when I look back on the Enemy expelling us from Heaven all those ages ago, I can’t help but think that maybe He was right.
“I hate you, and I hate all that is demoniac. I’d kill every last one of you if I could, Marcus. I hope you all die and go straight to the Enemy’s bottomless pit. I was just there. And I can’t wait to meet you there again someday.”
Marcus considered making Shannon imitate a human yawn, but even that wasn’t worth the effort. He let a few seconds pass so that Thorn could have his moment. The air conditioning whirred back to life.
“Are you done?” Marcus finally said to Thorn.
Thorn broke eye contact. “I suppose I am.”
“Good,” Marcus said. Then he called out the open window behind him. “Do it!”
The demons waiting outside must have heard him, because two seconds later, he heard glass shatter as the window in the boardroom blew out.
“No,” Thorn said. He dropped his knife and ran, leading Brandon back down the hallway toward the boardroom.
•
Just as Thorn ran up to the boardroom’s huge wooden doors, they burst open. Karen darted out. She tripped, stumbled a bit, then stood straight and still. One of Marcus’s demons hovered above her, hypnotizing her; Thorn was too late. He felt Brandon’s arm pull away. When he spun around, he saw that Marcus had caught the boy by his other wrist. Marcus forced him into a compromising position, with his arms behind his back.
Heather and Tim exited the boardroom onto the indoor balcony; demons hovered above them as well, whispering to them. Thorn heard cheering from downstairs, then saw the two remaining demons—and the corpses they manipulated—stroll in through the front doors that had been chained shut the last time Thorn had seen them.
Heather, Karen, and Tim stood still in front of him, docile, their faces blank.
“I know your tactic is to string things out,” Marcus said to Thorn through Shannon’s voice, “so I won’t let you do it any longer. Drelial, do you still have the gun?”
Puppeteering a human body, Drelial arrived at the top of the stairs. He walked around the railing toward the group and waved his gun for them to see.
“Kill the father,” Marcus said.
“No!” Brandon yelled. He struggled against Marcus, but Marcus held him tight. “No! Hey! Hey, stop!”
Tim had fallen too deep in his demon-induced trance to realize what was happening. Thorn moved Virgil toward him, but one of the demons swept up behind Thorn and held him back.
Drelial ambled casually up to Tim, then shot him in the forehead. Tim’s body collapsed into a heap on the ground.
Brandon, strangely, stayed completely silent. His mouth dropped open though, and his face contorted into an expression of absolute agony. He dropped to his knees and let his head fall. Marcus seemed to be supporting most of Brandon’s weight via his grip on his hands. The demon who’d been whispering to Tim donned a smug expression as he drifted above the man’s body.
Thorn quickly thought through any possible avenue of escape, no matter how far-fetched. Is there any option I’ve overlooked? Anything at all that could save us?
“Can I shoot the next one?” the demon restraining Thorn asked.
“You may,” Marcus said. “Drelial, give Amos a turn.”
Light blood spatter from Tim covering his human’s arms, Drelial grabbed hold of Virgil and Thorn. Amos whisked over the railing, then sped back up the stairs with a corpse of his own.
“That’s riiiiiiight,” Drelial muttered to Thorn. “This is the end of the line for you. I’ll give my regards to your followers back in A-town. Maybe I’ll catch up with some of your charges. Kill ’em. Rape ’em. It’ll be a blaaaaaaast.”
Amos grabbed the gun Drelial had left on the ground. “Paxis,” Marcus said to the demon controlling Karen. “The older woman is next. Leave her be. Let’s hear her scream before we kill her.”
Paxis nodded, then drifted away from Karen, who blinked, regaining her bearings. She took in Brandon weeping on the carpet, then turned to Heather beside her, then spotted Tim’s motionless body.
Karen didn’t scream—she gasped. Her eyes grew wide, but she didn’t tear up as Brandon had. She looked like she didn’t know what to do, like the sight of Tim’s body was too much for her, too overwhelming to comprehend. Frozen in place, she continued to stare at him.
Now is the time. If this is the end of the line, I’m taking Marcus with me. Thorn tensed, preparing for action.
“Ah, not much of a show,” Marcus said through Shannon’s voice. He turned to Thorn. “You’ll give us a good show though, won’t you? Demons as proud as you never go quietly.”
Thorn kept his face grim, firm. He’d give Marcus no satisfaction. And soon, he’d give Marcus death.
When Marcus saw he’d get nothing from Thorn either, he shook his head and turned back to Karen. “Go ahead, Amos.”
Thorn fixated on Marcus, on his hatred for Marcus, and summoned all the strength he could muster. Then, all at once, he knelt and thrust his arms out sideways. The sudden motion freed him from Drelial’s grasp. Thorn sprang forcefully up from the ground, onto a surprised Shannon and Marcus. He wrapped Virgil’s arms around Shannon’s neck and carried her to the balcony’s floor.
This is it, old friend. This is where we die.
Before Marcus could retaliate, Thorn pulverized his midsection with three heavy blows. He reached his hands toward Marcus’s head—but a bizarre sound stopped his movement before he could finish it.
Marcus screamed.
Not a battle cry nor a death wail, but a blood-curdling scream of utter horror. The kind of scream Marcus had wanted from Karen. The fear of death was plainly written in his eyes. But when Thorn peered more closely, he saw that Marcus was looking not at Thorn, but behind him.
Thorn turned.
Thilial stood tall in all the glory of her Heavenly white robes, her wings extended to their full, menacing length, her hand clutching the biggest, ugliest sword Thorn had ever seen. Drelial’s dying spirit lay skewered on it.
“Help,” Drelial croaked to Marcus.
With a flick of Thilial’s sword, she cleaved Drelial in two. Her eyes bored directly into Thorn’s as she did it, and those eyes said, This was meant to be you.
The other demons charged.
Amos grabbed Thilial’s left wing and dug his teeth into it while the other three attacked her torso. She curved her sword through the air, missing the demons. They clustered around her, forcing her to fight them with her hands.
Thorn turned back to Marcus, but found only Shannon’s empty body. Marcus had fled, and was nowhere in sight.
When Thorn turned back, he immediately ducked beneath a blow from Thilial. Even with four demons on her, she’d managed to leap forward and strike at Thorn. Her momentum carried her and the demons over the balcony’s railing, then down to an audible crash on the lobby floor.
Thorn turned his attention to the three surviving humans, who were surveying their surroundings with confusion, probably wondering why their aggressors had just dropped unconscious. “Hurry!” he said to the humans, through Virgil. “Run outside and get to safety. Somewhere they can�
�t find you.”
Karen was slow to react, and Brandon was still sobbing about Tim, but Heather, despite having just noticed Tim’s body herself, grabbed the other two by the arms. “To the stairs in the back,” she said. Brandon and Karen seemed to snap out of their stupor long enough to realize they had a chance to escape. They let her pull them along. By the time they turned a corner out of Thorn’s sight, all three of them were running at full speed.
Thorn stood and peered over the edge of the railing. In the lobby below, Thilial swung her sword at one of the demons, missing again but slicing through the glass and plastic of the awards case, sending sharp debris flying across the lobby. The demons fought brutally, never giving her a moment’s rest. But she did have the sword, and she fought vigorously, if not expertly.
Thorn ran back into the boardroom, past the conference table, straight to the other end of the room, where he leaped out of the blown-out window. Only one story to fall this time, thankfully. He landed on Virgil’s feet and didn’t even break a bone.
Nearby, the three humans he’d rescued were climbing into a golf cart. Thorn ran to them.
“Hey!” Karen called. “Back off!”
Thorn raised his hands, but continued his approach. “I’m unarmed. Please. Let me come with you.”
“Not a chance. Back off!”
“Hold up, hold up,” Heather said. “Isn’t he trying to help us? What’d you see in there, hon?”
Brandon marched right up to Thorn, then socked Virgil in the face. Thorn feigned injury. “What kind of plan was that?” Brandon yelled. “Huh? You just stand silently in a room for ten minutes then let them kill my dad? What the fuck were you thinking?”
Hands trembling, tears rolling down her face, Heather rested her hands on her husband. “Hon, my dad’s probably gone, too. A lot of people are gone. But let’s not focus on that right now, okay? We need to leave.”
“I’m so sorry,” Thorn said to Brandon. “I wasn’t thinking straight. But I’m coming with you.”
Brandon and Karen scrutinized Thorn with incredulous gazes. He jumped into the golf cart. “Let’s go. They’ll find us here.”
