A God to Fear (Thorn Saga Book 5) (12 page)

“We need backup at room 771,” said Prescott into his shoulder-mounted radio as he dragged a flustered Beasley behind a desk. “Shots fired, shots fired. Request backup outside room 771. Suspect is armed, wearing a suit and a black tie. Accomplice in an Outlaws biker jacket. A woman with them—”

Thorn snapped off a shot in the direction of Prescott, but he aimed at the tall office plant next to him rather than at Prescott himself. Then he signaled for his human companions to follow him as he walked sideways toward the elevator.

Amy was the last one in. Thorn repeatedly jammed his thumb down on the “door close” button. He held his breath and muttered what might have been a prayer. After a few tense moments, the door slid shut.

All four of them exhaled simultaneously. Thorn switched the safety on the gun and slid it under his belt, keeping the weapon as a precaution, although he didn’t plan on hurting anyone. “They’ll be waiting for us downstairs,” he said.

“What should we do?”

Thorn thought through his options, of which there was precisely one. He was unwilling to sacrifice anyone in this elevator.
That is, anyone but myself.
“I’ll make a run for it,” he said. “They’ll focus on me. Wait five seconds, then try and sneak out.” Thilial was somewhere out there, apparently on Thorn’s team now. He hoped that even if his own life was lost, he could rely on her to rescue the humans. Then later, perhaps she would take up his cause and search for a way to end the Enemy’s deception.
Or maybe that’s just my own wishful thinking in a moment of desperation.

Thorn continued: “If the cops capture you, the demons will have you right where they want you, so don’t let that happen. You’ll have to find a covert way out of the city, preferably out of the
state
, before the demons find a way to kill you.”

Heather nodded, but Brandon scowled. “Demons? What the hell is going on right now?” he said, and Thorn remembered that no one had explained anything to him yet.

“I don’t want to die again,” Amy said meekly.

Thorn grimaced at her poignant statement. Huddled in the corner of the elevator with her hands on her stomach, she looked like a lost puppy in a snowstorm. Hopefully after today she’d live a peaceful life, free from the crucibles of devils and gods.

“Amy, I want you to go back to the hospital,” Thorn said. “No one is after you. You’ll be fine no matter what happens to the rest of us.”
And I take much solace in that.

Amy smiled. “Good luck. I’d hug you if it wouldn’t break open my stomach.”

Thorn smiled back. The elevator continued to descend, from the fifth floor, to the fourth, to the third. Fortunately no passengers were waiting at any of these potential stops. No alarm sounded, but perhaps the building had still been locked down.

“Was that biker chick hitting on you?” Heather asked Brandon.

Brandon frowned and shook his head. “Yeah.”

“Take off that goddamned jacket, hon.”

“Yes!” Thorn said. “Quick. Give the jacket to me.”

Brandon slid his right arm out of the jacket and held it out for Thorn with his good hand. Thorn’s stomach lurched as the elevator’s downward momentum ceased. He pulled the Outlaws jacket on over his suit just as the elevator clicked into place on the ground floor. Brandon and the two girls pressed themselves against the walls.

The doors slid open.

Thorn shot out of the elevator at a breakneck pace. A bullet hissed over his shoulder so close that he could hear it slice the air. He darted around a corner and wound through another of the endless identical hallways this building seemed to have. More security guards spotted him in seconds.

“Hey, you! Stop right there!”

Thorn kept running until he reached a lobby. It was about a hundred feet wide, with a metal detector at the far end and an information desk lining the side. Humans stood in line at both locations—the building hadn’t been locked down yet.

Thorn bolted for the exit.

The officers on his tail poured into the room after him. “Everyone on the floor! You running! Stop now or we
will
open fire!”

Thorn tried to run faster, but he was unaccustomed to his own body performing the strange motions required for running. He’d fled less than halfway across the lobby when he heard the officers’ shoes squeak on the linoleum floor behind him—stopping to get a better shot, he knew. The humans waiting in line in front of him had all dropped to the ground. The security guards at the metal detector were crouched and fumbling for their weapons.
Just five more seconds and I can make it out…

A volley of gunshots burst from behind Thorn, whizzing through his body and buffeting the metal detector in front of him. Thorn’s legs lost contact with the ground, though he hadn’t stopped moving them. When he glanced down to check his bullet wounds, he found that he had none. The ground was speeding by beneath his feet, as if gravity had suddenly fled from the room. He looked behind him and saw Brandon’s Outlaws jacket fluttering and his own gun clattering to the ground.

Above these items, a horde of a thousand furious demons opened like the maw of a single giant organism, reaching out to swallow Thorn. A lattice of demons were in the process of locking limbs across the floor, preventing Thorn from escaping underground—an ancient demonic battle tactic that Thorn hadn’t seen used combatively in ages. As the demon swarm closed in, Thorn almost decided to retreat back toward Amy, so that she’d trigger his reentry into physical space. But for the sake of her safety, he turned back to the outer wall and zoomed upward. The demons were forming another lattice along the building’s walls, but Thorn was moving too quickly. He surged up through several more stories, dodged through his adversaries, and emerged into the sun.

The crazy guy in the suit who claimed to be Brandon’s lawyer booked it out of the elevator. Somebody shot at him, but he kept running. He’d told them to try and sneak out, but Brandon didn’t see how that was possible. Several security officers were knelt with guns trained on the elevator. From both sides of the door, two more officers spun around and aimed weapons at Brandon.

“We give up,” Brandon said simply. “We surrender.” He looked at Heather to make sure she agreed with him. She sighed in disappointment and nodded.

“Out into the hallway. All three of you.”

Brandon stepped out and saw that some officers were still trying to clear pedestrians out of the area. They were focused especially on one group of twenty, all wearing relatively tacky or threadbare garments—obviously not the crowd who worked here. They were all huddled around someone at their center.

Heather noticed them too. “Is that the guy who was knocking at the apartment?” she said.

Brandon looked closer, and sure enough, the man in the pink bathrobe with the receding hairline who called himself the Judge—or was it Cohn?—stood at the center of the crowd. His hands were full of money, and he was passing it out freely.

The guards tensed as the crowd drew closer. The two near Brandon moved behind him.

“A thousand for you, and a thousand for you, and a thousand for you,” Cohn was saying, a smile shining across his face. “Bless you, my peeps. Take it all. I don’t want it anymore. I’m a changed man. You all need this more than I do.”

His blue-collar assembly hooted and clamored for more of his cash. “Everyone, you need to leave this area, now!” yelled one of the officers, but even his loud voice couldn’t carry over the hubbub. As the gathering passed Brandon and the women, Cohn stepped discreetly up to them.

“Would you two like some money?” he said as the indigent folks reveled around him.

“Sir, we have a situation here,” said the officer behind Brandon. “I’m gonna ask you to please leave the area.”

Cohn responded by punching him in the face. Hard. He jabbed the other guard in the stomach, then kicked both men after they’d fallen. Amy yelped, but the crowd’s presence had hidden the beating from the views of the other officers.

“Damn right we have a situation,” Cohn said to the incapacitated men on the floor. Then he addressed Brandon and Heather. “Blend in with the crowd, okay? Be leaves on the wind.”

Cohn turned his back to them, flung all his money up into the air, and squawked at the top of his lungs, “I have a grenade! I have a grenade, and a bazooka, and nerve gas, and some darts! And I’m gonna blow us all up!” He cackled maniacally.

Wads of bills in their hands, the people around him screamed and ran erratically. Cohn himself sprinted down a hallway unguarded by security officers.

Brandon looked to Heather for guidance.

“You heard the man,” she said. “Blend in.”

Thorn dived into an apartment complex. The many stories rushed past him so quickly that all he could see were brief glimpses of the startled demons inside—the lower-class demons who hadn’t been told about the excitement at the court, most likely. He abruptly stopped at the first floor when he saw that demons had latticed the ground beneath him again.
Damn!
They reached up to grab him, so he took off.
There aren’t enough of them to keep this up forever.
But Thorn wasn’t sure he could keep the chase alive much longer either. Everywhere he fled, the demons swarmed after him, closing in, a living cloud of corruption.

He spiraled out of the apartment building, intersected a church’s bell tower, then spun around toward the court’s parking garage. Hundreds of people were running across the street away from the courthouse. Security officers shepherded them, and Thorn could hear sirens in the distance.

He dodged two demons who tried to attack him head on. He scanned the crowd.
Come on, come on, please tell me you guys made it out okay.

There!
He spotted a black luxury sedan parked crookedly on the sidewalk. Heather was just climbing in.

Thorn pushed his wingless body as fast as it would go, fending off demons left and right, above and below as he zigzagged his way toward the car. Even before Heather slammed the door behind her, the sedan’s wheels spun violently, scattering grass and dirt from the road verge across the evacuees behind it. The car bounded off the curb, its tires squealing when they hit the asphalt.

Thorn identified Gregory Cohn in the driver’s seat, his window rolled down.
Huh? Did the Judge steal him back from Marcus?

As Thorn approached behind the car, his suspicions proved accurate. Cohn glanced out the open window and shouted, “Well hey, Thorn! Déjà vu!”

“Look out!” Thorn yelled. The sedan swerved to avoid a garbage truck passing in front of it. It caromed off of the truck’s rear, shearing off one of the car’s side mirrors, then righted itself back in the center of the road, past the red light it had just driven through.

“Do you even know how to drive?” Thorn called ahead, ducking beneath a web of twenty latticed demons flying at him.

“How hard can it be?” the Judge said.

Where the hell is Thilial? The Judge can’t handle this by himself!

“Thorn!” Marcus’s voice boomed from somewhere in front of them. Thorn looked up. Two blocks ahead, a wall of demons was coalescing, ten stories high, and likely far underground as well. The massive horde from the courthouse bore down on him from behind, ever closer, and a steady cluster of demons continued to fly beneath him, ensuring he couldn’t retreat under the earth. “You’re through, Thorn!”

Thorn feared what would happen to the humans if the demons nabbed the Judge and the car suddenly found itself being driven by a disoriented Cohn. He brought himself forward to hover directly above the sedan as it sped inexorably toward the demon wall. “Stop the car!” Thorn yelled. “Tell the humans to run for it!”

“Hell no! We’re gonna ram ’em!”

Ram them?
The Judge truly was a lunatic. Thorn had to gain control of that car. He’d have to try to possess Brandon or—

“Who are you talking to?” Amy’s soft voice came from the car. “Is Thorn outside?”

Thorn had half-forgotten that Amy was inside the car, too. At the sound of her voice, he felt pangs of affection and protectiveness, each as potent as the other. And by now, Thorn knew exactly what would happen to him as a result of those feelings.

“Oh, fu—!”

The wall of demons vanished in an instant. Gravity jerked Thorn’s newly physical body downward and slammed it against the roof of the car. He flailed for purchase.

Police sirens blared. As Thorn struggled for a grip, he glimpsed a police cruiser just three blocks away, screeching through a sudden turn toward the Judge’s car. Its sirens screamed even louder as it sped toward them.

“Don’t worry, I’ll lose ’em!” the Judge said, and the sedan veered sideways—right into a chain-link fence. The fence flattened under the force of the impact, and Thorn clenched his hands against the grooves above the driver’s side window, struggling to keep from being yanked off of the car.

The car bounced across a dilapidated abandoned lot, half full of cracked concrete, half full of rutted clumps of brown grass.

“Can—you—do—any—thing—right?” Thorn yelled from bump to bump.

“I can possess a human really damn well!” the Judge said. “Look at Brandon. Not a scratch on him!”

The car crashed through the fence on the other side of the lot, flinging Thorn two feet upward as the car hurtled over the gnarled metal. When he crashed back down to the roof, he heard Brandon shout in pain inside the car.

“You are supposed to
save
these humans, you know,” Thorn said.

“Chillax, I’m a professional.”

“Clearly. Are there any demons at the MARTA entrances we’ve been passing?”

“No, but there’s a Hindenburg’s worth of them coming up behind us and—Shit!”

The Judge swerved right, down a back alley between two buildings. Thorn nearly fell off this time.

“What was that?”

“Demons! I just got past that big wall of ’em. I think.” He called backward as they sped out of the alley: “That’s what you get for judging the Judge! Ha ha!”

“Turn into the MARTA station three blocks ahead. Down the stairs so no one can see us.”

“You want me to drive
into
a subway station?”