A God to Fear (Thorn Saga Book 5) (13 page)

“Do it!”

The tires screamed and kicked up smoke as the Judge halted the car by the stairs leading down into the MARTA station. The humans screamed just as loudly when Thorn fell down across their windshield.

“Sorry,” he said, grasping at the wipers for stability.

The Judge turned the car toward the stairs and edged it forward. The sedan jounced and bucked as it pitched downward. A group of five humans at the bottom ran for cover.

“Okay, stop here,” Thorn said when the car had descended just below street view. The Judge stopped the car, sending Thorn sliding down the hood and off the front end. He landed on his feet. “Get out! Quick!”

The humans obliged. Amy groaned and clutched her stomach as she stumbled out of the passenger door. Thorn felt guilty for being the cause of her pain, but he had no time for sentiment. “Hurry down the stairs and get on a train. You only have a few minutes before the police catch on—less than that for the demons. Get off at the next stop, get new clothes, get Amy back to the hospital. Then meet us at the Oakland Cemetery at five o’clock. Go. Now!”

Heather helped Amy down the stairs while Brandon ran ahead underground. Thorn turned back to the Judge, still in Cohn’s body in the sedan’s driver’s seat. “Now back up! Fast!”

The Judge shifted into reverse while Thorn charged up the stairs toward the car. When it stopped up on the road, he grabbed at the handle to open the passenger door, but his hand went straight through it. Amy must have walked far enough away that Thorn had fallen back into the spirit world.
What is it about that girl that shifts me between the realms?

Thorn drifted into the Judge’s car and kept pace with it as it accelerated forward. Two police cruisers raced around a turn onto the street behind it, and myriad demons came with them. In fact, thousands of demons now dotted the city’s skyline. Word had spread, no doubt, and the leeches wanted to locate the action so they could suckle at any death that resulted from it.
Well, you won’t find any death today, boys.
Fortunately, none of the demons seemed to notice the humans’ absence. None broke off to enter the metro station.

“Judge, we’re far enough out from the main horde now. They’re not below us anymore. We can escape underground.”

“Not without Cohn! I spent eight years getting this guy. I’m sure as hell not letting Marcus steal him again.”

“You don’t have a choice. Now come on!”

“I can outrun them all. Don’t worry. I’m a—” The car nearly spun out as the Judge pulled it around a tight corner. Its back tires fishtailed wildly on the asphalt as he struggled to correct its course. “I’m a professional?”

The Judge hit the gas and the car zoomed toward the upper level of an overpass. “We can escape with our lives!” Thorn said. “Don’t be foolish. They’ll catch us if we stay in the car.”

“They’ll catch us? Is that right? Well watch this.”

They reached the overpass. The Judge wrenched the steering wheel and the car veered right, shattering the concrete barrier lining the overpass. The sedan vaulted over the edge.

Thorn winced, grateful that he couldn’t feel the effects of inertia or gravity. As the car fell into some sort of roadside billboard, destroying both sign and vehicle, Thorn decided that the Judge had caused him enough grief. He abandoned the car and retreated straight down under the earth, leaving the Judge to his own devices.

Jill Corrigan was driving her son Jasper to his middle school on a sunny Monday morning, stuck in the usual Atlanta gridlock. Jasper was late for the ninth time this semester. He claimed to be running a fever, but his forehead didn’t feel hot and his grades were suffering, so Jill had decided to force the issue. She would take him to school whether he wanted to go or not.

Jill worried about the friends Jasper had been keeping lately. Some of them listened to punk rock music and watched the adult shows on cable TV. For all Jill knew, it was their corrupting influence that was causing Jasper to miss so much school.
I should never have let Al talk me into moving to Atlanta. It’s too big of a city. There are all kinds of bad people here, and the last thing I want is for Jasper to grow up into some kind of crazy—

The concrete barrier on the overpass above Jill exploded. She screamed as debris rained down on their minivan.

A black sedan plummeted from the overpass, landing on a billboard for the Georgia Aquarium. Sparks zapped outward and metal protested with a shrill cry as half of the billboard collapsed under the weight of the car. Then the sedan smashed front-first into the ground, flattening its engine compartment with a bang that Jill heard like a gunshot even from behind her van’s windows.

Traffic, which had been slow, now stopped completely. A few daring drivers ventured out of their vehicles to snap pictures of the wreck, but most—including Jill—stayed within the relative safety of their cars. Jill heard sirens approaching.

As smoke surged out from beneath the sedan’s mangled hood, a man crawled feet-first out of the driver’s side window. He stumbled out onto the ground, and Jill saw that he was in his fifties, with not much hair. He wore nothing but a pink bathrobe. Soot stained his wide-eyed face. His mouth dropped open as he gazed at the dozens of people who sat frightened in their cars, watching his bewilderment.

The man turned to the billboard behind him. The Georgia Aquarium logo and a giant sea turtle remained intact on the left side of the sign, but on the right side, a huge manatee had been cleaved in two, with only its head remaining.

The man, dwarfed by the billboard, bellowed a furious howl. He raised a clenched fist at the billboard. “You follow me everywhere, don’t you?” he screamed. “Goddammit! I hate—I fucking loathe—goddamned motherfucking piece of shit manatees!”

Now
Jasper’s
jaw dropped at the stream of cussing. Jill quickly covered his ears.

“FUCK YOU, MANATEE!” the madman said, jumping frenziedly as he shrieked. “YOU DESERVED IT!”

The onlookers just stared. Jill was about as confused as she could possibly be.

A police car shot past Jill’s minivan on the road’s shoulder and screeched to a stop near the raving man. Another cruiser sped in from the other direction. Once they’d assumed flanking positions, their occupants immediately opened their doors, took cover behind them, and aimed their weapons at the crazy guy.

“Get on the ground! Hands on your head!”

The crazy guy turned to them. He sighed—a casual sigh of mild annoyance—and shrugged. Then his eyes glazed over for a second.

Then he recoiled as if suddenly surprised by the sight of the police. “Whoa!” he said, raising his arms high. “How’d I get here? Did you see the aliens? Did you fucking idiots see the aliens who put me here?”

Jill didn’t stay to see any more. She pulled onto the shoulder, did a hasty three-point turn, and drove back toward the previous intersection.

“Mom, that was intense,” Jasper said. “What was that?”

“That,” Jill said, “is why we’re moving back to Kansas.”

Thorn and the Judge drifted among gravestones in late afternoon. Neither spoke. Thorn sensed that the Judge had grown just as dispirited as him.

The humans were late, by nearly an hour. Had the police found them? Had Marcus?
I should have stayed with them.
Thorn had chosen the centuries-old Oakland Cemetery as a meeting place because of its quietness, its innocuousness. No one would look for fugitives here. But perhaps it was too far out of the way. Perhaps fatigue had claimed the humans before they could make the walk. Thorn knew this was unlikely, though, when he looked up at the Atlanta skyline and saw how near it was.

He floated past a cluster of Confederate headstones, worn from erosion and draped in lichen, and wondered if he’d met any of the men buried here, or caused any of their deaths. How many bodies in how many graves around Atlanta—around the world—could be traced back to Thorn’s actions? Jed and his victims were freshest in Thorn’s memory; but before that was Jada, and then Madeline, then Jamar, and on and on into the distant past. Months ago Thorn would have bragged about his body count, but now shame had replaced his pride.

Why did I never come here before, back when I loved death as much as any demon?
Thorn’s only memories of cemeteries were of the funerals held in them, when he and his peers had preyed on the misery of the bereaved. Most demons never came to these forlorn places—one reason why Thorn had chosen this as a hiding place—and Thorn was only now realizing how strange this was, given demonkind’s fondness for death. Thorn remembered being bored by cemeteries, since they existed only as a marker of past victories and offered little opportunity for future conquests. But perhaps there was more to it. Perhaps cemeteries reminded demons of their mortality, just as they did for humans. Perhaps these bleak plots of land filled with dead people reminded demons of the futility of their life’s work. Looking out at the headstones and monuments, at the parched grass and the barely legible and long-forgotten names, Thorn could not think of a more depressing reward, nor a more apt punishment, for demonkind than a cemetery.

Especially the one where Flying Owl lies.

Tours had ended for the day and the last tourists were leaving the cemetery. Thorn and the Judge stayed low, but Thorn hadn’t seen another demon in over an hour, so being spotted was unlikely regardless. They moved into the oldest section of the cemetery, near the front, past a mausoleum embellished with two large, verdigris-coated vases on pedestals at its entrance. It was then, to Thorn’s immense relief, that they saw Brandon and Heather approaching down the path.

Thorn prepared for the unpleasantness of trying to possess one of them in order to communicate… but then he saw that Amy was with them, wearing a T-shirt and cargo pants, trying and failing to look normal, her teeth gritted in pain. One of her hands was trying to cover the blood seeping through her shirt.

“Warn me if any demons are near,” he said to the Judge, then drifted forward until he felt gravity tug his shoes down onto the brick walkway.

Brandon and Heather gasped at Thorn’s sudden appearance.

“What is she doing here?” Thorn said, his angry whisper so loud that it barely qualified as a whisper. “Her condition will grow more serious with every minute she’s out of the hospital.”

“Chill out,” said Heather. “We tried. The hospital’s full of cops. They saw Amy on the courthouse’s security footage and recognized her from the news. They know she’s involved with us.”

“So what? Have her make up a story, say we abducted her, whatever. Something that’d make her look innocent, since she
is
innocent.”
And since no one would believe the truth.
“It’s more important that she lives than that we avoid the police.”

Heather paced to Thorn and tapped him on the chest. “Look. You’ve dragged us through some serious shit the last two days. We’re so tired we can’t think straight. Both Brandon and Amy passed out before we even reached the hospital. We couldn’t call an ambulance, so I stole some water bottles and we rested in a park for a while. I had to steal clothes for Amy, too. We barely know what’s going on—what your priorities are, what ours should be. Cut us some slack, okay?”

Thorn calmed himself. She was right, of course. He’d reacted too harshly. Amy looked almost as bad as she had on the night she’d been stabbed, though. And it was Thorn’s fault that her life was once again in jeopardy.

“Amy, do you have your cell phone on you?”

“Yeah,” Amy said frailly.

“Heather, I’m sorry for my outburst. But can you please call a taxi for Amy?”

“None of us have money to pay.”

“The driver won’t know that. And I’m sure the police will be happy to pay once she returns to the hospital.”

“Okay. Fine.”

Heather turned to leave, but Thorn stopped her. “And Heather?”

“Yeah?”

“I’m sorry that I was imprisoned. I’m sorry that the Judge had to be the one to find you.”

“Yeah, well… thanks.” She smiled a grim little smile and patted him on the shoulder, then took Amy’s phone and walked past several rows of gravestones.

Thorn sat next to Amy on a short brick wall, and Brandon moved to examine some of the stone monuments around the graveyard.

“Amy,” Thorn said. “Do you need any water? Is there anything I can do?”

“You can thank me,” she said weakly but playfully. “It was
me
who saved
your
butt for a change.” She stuck her tongue out at him.

Thorn laughed.
At least she’s in good spirits.
“I’m so sorry about all this. I didn’t know Thilial would possess you like that.”

“Who’s Thilial?”

Thorn shook his head, wondering how to explain his winged accomplice. “A friend, I think,” was all he could manage.

He would have touched Amy—perhaps hugged her—had he not been worried about hurting her or spurring her into any type of movement. The less she moved, the better.

He wondered how he looked to her, and to the other humans, in physical form. Did they find him fearsome, average, strange? Now that he’d experienced having a physical body of his own, he understood how humans could so easily develop an overly critical posture toward their own bodies, as Amy had. Thorn had glimpsed himself in mirrors on a few occasions during the last few days, and was always surprised to find how similar he looked to how he imagined himself to look.
Yet another odd quirk of God’s creation? Or perhaps He’s trying to tell us that we, in some small sense, create ourselves.

“What’s it like being a demon?” Amy suddenly asked, as if she’d read his thoughts. The level of comfort with which she spoke to him hadn’t bothered him at the hospital, but now, with her wound worsening, it gave him pause. Most humans would not have been so comfortable around a demon.

Thorn searched for words. No one had ever asked him that question before. He decided on an analogy that a human might appreciate. “It’s like the most grueling job you could possibly have, where you can’t clock out, the workday never ends, and all your coworkers are gunning for your position twenty-four hours a day. If you blink, they’ll take it. And the company you work for literally has plans to destroy the world. You tried to play along for a time, but after a while, you just can’t do it anymore. You can’t look your coworkers in the eyes and tell one more goddamn lie. You feel like a monster. And a moron.”