Thorn (2 page)

“And this is my problem because…?”

I should have known better than to come here for help.
Marcus had likely already spoken with the Judge, promising him some reward: important new charges or some human deaths, perhaps. Or perhaps the Judge was genuinely too thick-headed to believe Thorn. “The First Rule,” Thorn said. “No demon may end the life of a fellow demon. Marcus tried to break it. He should die.”

“Thorn, everyone who was there says you did it to yourself.”

This stunned Thorn. How many demons had Marcus bought off? “Do they?”

“They do.”

“I am the greatest of all demons in this city.” Thorn raised his voice again so that those gathered could hear. “I have caused more pain and death than any of you. Why would I lie about this?”

The Judge sighed and shrugged. “Lying is your livelihood, my friend. Even more than it is for any of us.”

At moments like this, Thorn loathed the anarchy in which demons lived. Since they had no law except the two Rules, guilt and punishment were determined at the Judges’ whims. On one occasion, Thorn had witnessed a demon who’d killed three of his own kind set free just for surrendering his charges to a Judge as a gift. Of course, he was killed by other demons a few days later. Thorn often grumbled to his followers that demon society had little need of Judges. The Rules were so widely respected that they practically enforced themselves.

But not this time. In terms of political power, Marcus had been known and revered long before Thorn was even on the map. He possessed vast social resources among demonkind, and had apparently called in some favors. If Marcus wanted to defy the Rules for the sake of vengeance on Thorn, Thorn had no doubt that he could do it, so long as the crime was committed in private, away from Thorn’s followers or even neutral demons who would report it.

Marcus couldn’t have bought off everyone.
If I can stay in public, I will be safe.

As Thorn left the sham of a hearing, an unsettling thought occurred to him. He
had
been alone with Marcus and Shenzuul. If they meant to kill him, why hadn’t they done it then?

Thorn drifted through the night, above houses and trees and over dark green hilltops. Like all demons, he could feel neither wind nor gravity, and his spirit body carried no momentum. So though he sometimes fancied his movements as avian, Thorn’s flight was more like a spider skimming across the surface of still water and less like an eagle soaring through the sky.

When he was sure he was alone, he wandered away from the city and continued for most of the night.

Many miles north and east of Atlanta, beneath a heavy canopy of oak branches, lay the ages-old place where Thorn went to think. He floated down to his refuge, a place so far into the forest that none knew of it but him—not even the humans. Thorn waved his ghostlike hand through the knotted branches as he descended, wishing he could touch them. The physical world was strangely beautiful to him, and though he abhorred it as the Enemy’s creation, it had beckoned to him ever since… Ever since…

The cairns hid in the dark on the forest floor. Some of the rock piles had deteriorated over the centuries, so the remnants of their worn stones lay scattered about the decaying leaves on the ground. Other cairns still stood heavy and solid, nearly the same as when Thorn had seen them made. Most men and women would find the place eerie, and most demons would find it dull, but Thorn found peace here. Each grave marked a memory of a better time.

When he came here for privacy—and privacy was necessary here, lest his secret refuge be discovered—Thorn sat near one cairn in particular, the one with the arrowheads half-hidden under the heavy stones. Near the middle of the field, this grave sat under a break in the canopy, so sunlight hit it during the day. Light was absent now though, both for the burial yard and for the decisions Thorn had to make.

He floated beside the final resting place of the boy he had loved.
No, not love. Just a mistake I made out of confusion. Demons can’t love.
It bothered Thorn that he still had to remind himself of this after so much time. He could not deny the peace he felt when he came here, however, despite the sadness and regret that came with it. Once, he had thought of the boy as his friend. Now he remembered him as he imagined a father might remember a son.

But Thorn had not come to the burial grounds to reminisce. He’d come here for clarity. His dress shoes never touched the ground as he paced, which was really just an imitation of a human walk; floating from A to B while shuffling one’s feet was a curious habit most demons had picked up long ago.

Did I really almost die tonight?
Having lived since the dawn of time, Thorn had expected to see time’s end as well, since demons, as spiritual entities, could not age as humans did. He had thought that he didn’t particularly like his life on this earth, but earlier tonight, faced with the end menacing over him, he found that he dreaded death as much as any human.
What would have happened after I was gone?
Some other ambitious demon would surely have taken his place. His charges would have been tossed to the wind, picked up by who knows. Would his name have been remembered as one of the great demons, like Xeres or Wanderer? Would he still have been feared hundreds of years after he was gone? Or even ten years after he was gone? Thorn was the greatest in one city, true, but Atlanta was only one city out of all the cities on earth.

With Marcus prowling Atlanta, Thorn would have to fight to escape a bitter demise.
This is bad. Very, very bad.

As he knelt beside the boy’s grave to pay his respects for the thousandth time, he thought through his options. If he fled the city for a new stomping ground, the demon world would think him a coward, and his fearsome reputation would be lost. Even if he changed his name to ensure his safety, Thorn wasn’t sure he could bear living a meager life again. On the other hand, if he stayed in Atlanta and asserted his power, Marcus would find a way to kill him, sooner or later. Thorn would have rallied his followers to banish a lesser foe from the city, but facing such a well-respected enemy as Marcus, this option was closed. Thorn even considered staying here in the woods. He’d be safe here, but unfulfilled. What purpose would his life have, with no humans to torment?

Even
with
us as your fodder, what purpose does your life have?
the dead boy under the cairn seemed to ask him. Thorn ignored the imagined jab. He already knew what he had to do.

Jada would be the hardest human to kill. She hadn’t cracked in all the years Thorn had afflicted her. Amy would be quite a loss, but a necessary and easy sacrifice. Jed would be trickier, although even if Thorn failed with him, the cancer would take him soon enough. Madeline would be a piece of cake. Thorn had other charges, but these were those with whom he was most often seen, and hence most known for. Luckily, Thorn was between high-profile charges at the moment; otherwise he’d be burdened with the additional stress of causing a celebrity’s death.

If Thorn wanted to skip town and have any hope of preserving his reputation, he had to find a way to kill his four main charges first, hopefully by Christmas Day, just a week from now. Such a sudden fire sale of death would cement Thorn’s lasting repute, and serve as a pointed and memorable end to his time in Atlanta. If anything, it would make him even more popular when he came out of hiding and reclaimed his name once Marcus had been dealt with. Demons loved death above all things, after all. And since killing each other was illegal, a human’s death signified the most momentous demonic act.

Thorn left the dead boy and went back to the city.

“Buy it,” Thorn whispered to the woman with the leather purse.

She eyed the turquoise blouse more closely.

“You deserve this,” Thorn continued. “It will make you happy.”

The blouse was a harmless thing, as was everything else in the mall. “It’d look so good with those jeans you just got at Bloomingdale’s.”

She nodded as if in agreement, but she didn’t take the upscale top off the rack.

Thorn drifted around to her other ear. “You need this. You don’t have enough blue-green in your closet. Your gal friends will like you more and so will men. Buy it.”

She did.

Thorn reminded himself that there was no unimportant temptation, just tasks with more glory and less glory. Let Marcus keep his impressive yet tasteless African genocides.
All
immorality was social currency. Not only mindless barbarism, but more subtle ventures too.
I cause more of it, I’m rich. I cause less of it, I’m poor. It’s as simple as it’s always been. No one in the civilized world will look down on me because I’m not as violent as Marcus.
American vanity had done immense damage in the world, and more subtly. Marcus’s genocides would never have been allowed to happen if Westerners hadn’t been busy shopping at the time. And that vanity was the doing of Thorn and his followers—at least in Atlanta.

Leaving the woman, Thorn passed under some plastic mistletoe and a string of lights that was half-deactivated. In the mall’s main walkway, he kept his distance from Shenzuul, whom he’d been tailing. Currently, the idiot was trying to distract a man into choking on his fries in the food court.

What a fool, aiming constantly for death
, Thorn thought.
As if a human would actually listen to such an obvious ploy. No, better to tempt him into ordering a third helping of fries while reminding him of a negative personal issue, so he’ll get used to turning to food for comfort. A life wasted on self-pity would have a longer-term effect on his friends and family than a sudden death would, and would be easier to pull off.

Thorn grimaced at a newspaper lying on a food court table. The murder-suicide that should have been his had made the front page: but just a small column on the bottom left. And Travis had survived a self-inflicted gunshot wound! The child had lived as well. In Thorn’s hands, all three humans would have died, and the murder would have been brutal enough for a headline.

“The new
Call of Warfare
game is probably over at the game store,” Thorn whispered to a passing teenage boy who looked like a gamer. “You deserve it. Your mom should buy it for you.” Thorn did not often stoop to petty consumerism, but he needed to keep track of Shenzuul, and tempting people to buy things they didn’t need, with money they didn’t have, was a perfect cover. Thorn blended well with the myriad of other demons at the mall today doing the same thing, and had evaded Shenzuul’s attention so far.

According to Thorn’s followers, Marcus had not been seen since last night at the house. Thorn had sent the demons he trusted most out searching for Marcus, but none had found him so far.

Thorn had also asked his followers to continuously stay near, to be witnesses in the event that he was attacked, or killed and the First Rule violated. As he drifted across the mall, they followed him from a distance in all directions, masquerading as regular demons concerned only with trivial temptations.

Thorn hovered past a line of parents and children and demons waiting to see Santa, and laughed silently as he wondered what the parents would think if they could see the devils whispering in every ear. Even scarier, what would Santa do?

Thorn appraised his wounds and was pleased to find them healing well.
Did I really almost die last night?
He couldn’t shake his new and uncomfortable awareness of his own mortality. His monotonous life had seemed so never-ending that he’d forgotten it could actually end. With the First Rule in place and the Enemy forever cowering behind His heavenly veil, Thorn should easily have had millions of years left on Earth, and his pick of humanity during that time. He was one of the greatest demons, after all. He deserved it.

Confident that Shenzuul was just passing time and that Marcus was not on his tail, Thorn left the mall for the first of his charges. At nineteen years old, Amy wasn’t exactly challenging, but like fries in the food court, she was Thorn’s comfort food. Ever since Amy was six years old, he’d whispered to her to console himself when his other charges’ temptations weren’t going as well. With no father, an unstable mother, a pudgy body, and desperate insecurities—that last one thanks to Thorn—she’d always been an easy target. Hopefully she would continue to be so. He had less than a week to provoke her to suicide.

As Thorn approached Amy’s mom’s second-floor apartment—an ugly place in the wrong side of town, with a loud freeway passing directly overhead—he saw a flashy pink convertible gleaming out front. The car’s presence puzzled him until he saw Lexa, Amy’s friend from college, in the driver’s seat. Kelly sat next to her, and Amy in the back. Their lips were moving. Thorn passed through the car’s walls and listened to Lexa prattling on as usual.

“—that I was gonna sing it, and Gina heard it from her, so now Gina’s gonna sing the same song as me, and I’m like seriously unprepared with a backup.” Amy fidgeted while idly eyeing the clouds outside. Lexa checked her lipstick in the mirror, then smacked the gum she seemed to always be chewing as she continued to jabber. “I mean it’s
my
Christmas party. And I’m artistically on a whole other level than Gina. I should be able to showcase my voice without being compared to her hot mess of a performance, right? And when I told her that, she says, ‘It’s just karaoke.’ Seriously! Can you believe that? Like I’m gonna have ‘just karaoke’ at my party. It’s not like I’m having people sing because, oh I don’t know, I’m fucking good at it and want to show off. I mean don’t theatre majors usually have singing at their parties in college? Or is that weird?”

Amy jerked out of her daydreaming and grasped for a response. She seemed worried that Lexa had noticed her inattention, so Thorn leaned toward her ear and added, “She doesn’t like you. You need her but she doesn’t like you.”

“Uh… maybe not,” Amy told Lexa.

Lexa took that as a definitive
no
. “Good. I don’t want anyone thinking I’m weird. Just stay away from Gina, okay? We’re better than her, and you seriously don’t need her as a friend. I mean don’t tell her that. I don’t want to look like a bitch. But it’ll be good if we just kind of drift apart from her. This isn’t the first time she stole one of my ideas, you know.” She turned back to Amy for approval to continue, but Amy was gazing outside again. “Are you listening?” she asked Amy. “You agree with me, right?”