Sanctuary (9 page)

Thorn raced through the study into Cole’s bedroom, then around to the bedroom doors. He threw himself against them, but they didn’t budge. “I’m here to protect you!” he yelled through Virgil’s dead vocal chords as he used Virgil’s body to shake the doors violently.

“Shut the fuck up,” Brandon said from the other side of the doors.

“You don’t have to worry about me!” Thorn said. “I’m not the problem. The, uh, the rape, the drugs, the baby, your relationships. We need to focus on those.”

When no response came, Thorn returned to the study. If they kept him confined in here, he’d have to find another way downstairs by the time the police arrived. He gazed through the window at the ground a hundred feet below. It looked like a very long drop. Even if the demons outside didn’t notice his fall, Virgil’s body would shatter and become useless to him.
How else can I get down?

Worse, the humans weren’t listening to him. Perhaps he’d come on too strongly.
I’m panicking
, Thorn realized.
I need to calm down. Return to my usual rationality.

He tried to focus on calming his body. Or rather, his
bodies
. Shenzuul’s followers had raked both of them with wounds. The damage to Virgil’s dead body was negligible, since the demons could barely touch the physical world by themselves, but Thorn’s own spiritual body ached in steady pain.

He flexed Virgil’s hand again and marveled at the alien sensation. Taking control of a cadaver in this Sanctuary was a wholly new experience for him.
Possessing
Amy on Earth had felt like hijacking a body and fighting its host for control, but this, with Virgil, felt more like
puppeteering
. Thorn could control the corpse, but he never got the sensation that he
was
the corpse. Even to a seasoned demon such as Thorn, it was quite macabre. He longed to return to the more familiar world of Earth. And though he tried to forget it, he longed for a physical body of his own, like he’d had when he first entered the Sanctuary. Like he’d had yesterday, in the field at Piedmont Park, and months earlier, in the nightclub…

“You’re beautiful.”

Thorn forced the memories from his mind. They offered no aid for the task at hand. He listened through the wooden study doors to Brandon’s and Cole’s muted voices.

“Nice work, man. We make a good team, huh?” Brandon’s voice was much friendlier than it had been moments ago. He was trying to gain something from Cole.

Something thudded heavily against the door—Cole pushing Brandon? “Is what Virgil said true? Is what Crystal said true, Brandon? Rape? You tried to hurt her downstairs?”

“Of course not, man. They’re fucking crazy.” Then Brandon let out a small yell and someone thudded against the door again.

“What the hell’s been going on?” Cole said. “Tell me the truth.”

“I have no idea.”

A few moments of silence, then Cole called out to the living room. “Crystal?”

“I think she left,” Brandon said.
She left? To go outside?
That was bad. Now getting out of here was even more urgent. Thorn paced toward the far side of the study, where a sliding glass door led to the condo’s main balcony. With the mosquito screens in place, he’d be safe out there for a few minutes… or so he hoped.

“All right, you stay here and watch Virgil,” Cole said.

“How about
I
go get her instead?”

Thorn heard the distinct sound of someone spitting. He guessed Brandon was the target.

“You make me sick,” Cole said.

Thorn rushed onto the balcony, shut the sliding door behind him, then rushed to the locked glass doors by the living room, where he could see Brandon following Cole. Brandon almost entered the foyer with him, but Cole pushed him back, and interestingly, that little nudge stopped Brandon in his tracks. Hopefully it meant that Brandon still had some genuine concern for his friendship with Cole.

Thorn was about to use Virgil’s fingers to rap on the living room window when he heard a ripping noise behind him. He turned and rested Virgil’s fingertips on the thin screen separating him from his enemies outside. They’d been so quiet that he’d almost forgotten the thousands of them floating nearby, watching, listening, waiting for a chance to strike. One of them was trying to scratch a hole in the screen, and was actually succeeding, albeit very slowly. Another demon was scolding him, saying that Thorn would just go back into the study if he thought they’d attack him out here. “Better to wait and listen,” the demon was saying. “Let him reveal his weaknesses.”

Thorn frowned at their bickering—it sounded so casual, like an offhand argument he might have had with Shenzuul earlier this week. Thorn knew exactly what they all were thinking, on the outside looking in at him, because he himself had been in the wolf’s position for much of his life. He’d grown unaccustomed to playing the rat.

He turned back toward the living room and tried to ignore the demons’ squabbling.
Focus on the humans
, he told himself.
They’re what’s important now.

On the far side of the living room, Cole had disappeared into the foyer. Thorn hadn’t heard a ding from the elevator, but the window’s glass could have muted the sound. Thorn had been relieved earlier when he’d realized that he—and therefore his adversaries—couldn’t push the elevator’s buttons, but that meant nothing when the humans kept going downstairs like this.

Brandon’s voice was barely audible through the glass: “Human nature,” he called after Cole, as if the platitude could excuse his actions. Thorn guessed that meant that Cole was leaving via the elevator. Fortunately, the elevator wasn’t quite in view of the windows, so the demons outside might not have guessed that Cole had gone downstairs. For all they knew, he was hiding in the service hallways.

“Human nature,” Thorn repeated loudly, to get Brandon’s attention.

Brandon looked down at Cole’s spittle on his shirt, then turned hostile eyes toward Thorn.

This one would be the hardest to save. His rejection of all empathy was strikingly deep-rooted. Thorn had both witnessed and reared these sorts of people back on Earth, time and time again. The framed posters of Tony Montana and Patrick Bateman in Brandon’s room had tipped Thorn off to his personality even before he’d listened to him speak. Thorn knew from experience that people like Brandon often idolized nihilistic psychopaths so much because psychopaths don’t care what other people think of them. And Brandon likely fancied himself one of them because he cared so
desperately
what other people thought of him, and disliked this weakness in himself.

… Unless he actually
was
a nihilistic psychopath, which remained to be seen. Thorn doubted it though. In his experience, nine times out of ten nihilism was just a veneer meant to cover up a deeper motivating force. To win Brandon over, Thorn would have to work past the surface-level excuses and appeal to whatever that deeper force was.

Brandon meandered into the living room, then toward the kitchen, away from Thorn on the other side of the glass. When he removed his soiled shirt and threw it on the table, Thorn noticed two old scars in the center of his back that looked like bullet wounds.
Curious.
The guy must have had a tough life. Brandon winced as he fingered one of the bruises on his face.

“Ever think about getting a little place for yourself on the beach?” Thorn asked.

Brandon eyed him incredulously, then walked right up to the sliding doors. A pale flower blossomed as his breath fogged up the glass in front of Thorn, who remained still, not flinching at the bait of intimidation. “If you didn’t kill Heather, what happened to her?” Brandon said, his voice much clearer so close to the window.

Thorn ignored the question. “It wouldn’t be too expensive. Start saving up now and you could have that house in a few years. Find a girl you jibe with, move in together, settle down. You don’t have to own the world to be happy.”

Brandon snickered and shook his head. “Cole’s the settling down guy. Not me.” He turned back to the kitchen.

“Then maybe it’s better to leave Cole and Crystal behind.” Thorn watched as Brandon opened a kitchen drawer, shuffled through it, and removed a handgun from the bottom.
Dammit.
“Either way, you’ll have to sacrifice some things you like, of course. But that’s your choice.”

Brandon kept his eyes on Thorn while he checked the gun’s magazine. The bullets couldn’t hurt Thorn, but the menacing gesture troubled him nonetheless: it meant that Thorn’s efforts were failing. “Even if your own pleasure is your ultimate goal, Brandon, cooperation with other people is what will bring that about. Not intimidation. Not power over them.”

“What do you want from us?” Brandon said. “You’re a crazy fuck, but it’s obvious you think you’re doing us a solid. Why is that?”

“Because I see you for who you could be. Not for who you are.”

Brandon chuckled and waved his gun at Thorn. “I
could
be a porn star, man. If Cole opened his blind fucking eyes.” Brandon spotted Crystal’s purse on the floor. He snatched the handbag lackadaisically then started digging through it.

“Do you want to die a lonely man?” Thorn asked.

Brandon discarded a gossip magazine, a hairbrush, and some pens, then kept digging through the purse until he found Crystal’s wallet. He removed a fifty-dollar bill and pocketed it, then continued rummaging. “Does it matter?” he said.

“Well
I
don’t want to die a lonely man.”

“Hate to break it to you buddy, but me, you, and Mother Fucking Teresa… The party ends the same way for everyone.”

“Who says it’s a party?”

“Everyone but you.”

“Who says it ends?”

Brandon’s eyebrows furrowed at a folded piece of paper he found in Crystal’s purse. Thorn squinted through the glass, and was just able to make out three printed words that stood out on the bottom of the page: Brandon’s full name. A few seconds later, he realized what it was: a paternity test.

“
I
say it ends,” Brandon responded.

“Brandon, you’re going to have to make a very important choice tonight. At least choose something in Crystal and Cole’s best interests. You may be surprised to learn that that choice will be in your best interest, too.”

Brandon just stood there, fixated on the paper, shaking his head—more in fear than in anger, from the looks of it. Thorn offered a final plea before departing. “Please let me in.”

“Shut it, Virgil.”

“I’m not Virgil.”

Brandon savagely chucked the purse at the sliding glass door, startling Thorn and cracking the glass a bit. Thorn realized he was just making Brandon’s temperament worse, so he sighed in acceptance and checked again that both sets of sliding glass doors were sealed tight. Then he moved to one of the mosquito screen panels, where his numerous foes were waiting for him just outside. He would need to move fast. Fortunately, since they were all still congregated up here near their prey, they likely hadn’t seen Crystal go downstairs, and Cole after her. That would give Thorn a slight head start.

He made the mistake of looking down.
Wow.
The jump would have been easy if Thorn had only his spirit body to worry about, but gravity put a whole new spin on things. The swimming pool, so large when Thorn had descended into it earlier, now seemed little more than a glowing blue ember in the night. Without having to worry about minor damage to Virgil’s body, Thorn could push its muscles and connective tissues beyond their normal limits, but this… this would test those limits.

As Thorn began to remove the screen, another demon pounced up from beneath it. Thorn had been expecting this. He flung the demon and the screen aside and leaped up onto the balcony railing. As the demon army rushed toward him, he readied himself to leap from the balcony. He checked behind him one last time to be sure that Brandon was safe inside—

And then saw the face of the demon who now stood inside the balcony.

Marcus drifted upward and stretched his body to its maximum height. His eyes were stern and intent, hungry, blazing with the hatred of a two-thousand-year-old grudge. His gaunt body braced itself to charge.

Thorn had expected to run into his old foe sooner or later, but horror took him nonetheless. This wasn’t simply a rival who’d come here to finish the job he’d started in Atlanta. This was Thorn’s death staring down at him.

Marcus flew toward Thorn at full speed. Thorn reacted with lightning swiftness, leaping backward through the opening in the screen. He and Virgil’s corpse plummeted through the demon army and down, down, down toward the pool.

Tears welled in Crystal’s eyes as she again walked toward the lobby. The rape, her fight with Cole, the guard’s insanity, Heather’s death… Heather’s goddamned death. All of this was finally registering emotionally. And despite Brandon’s wrongs, Cole had left Crystal in a heartbeat to help his old buddy contain Virgil upstairs. At that moment, she had known she’d never be safe with Cole as long as Brandon was still around. Cole would never truly take a stand for her.

He yelled at Brandon, though, and he did try to protect me
, Crystal reassured herself. But the only reason she’d needed protection in the first place was that Cole had never put Brandon on a leash. “Don’t try to save him,” Heather had said. Well, that wasn’t going to happen anymore. At least not tonight.

Heather.

Crystal’s only real friend here, her source of comfort during these hard times. Dead. And why? Who had killed her? Had she killed herself? Could the same thing happen to Crystal? How would she protect herself if she needed to?

She passed
Paradise Lost
right where she’d left it earlier, but opted to pick up the knife she’d dropped instead. The book’s pages remained crumpled against the cold floor as she made her way to the service hallway, which she knew contained an exit to the front. She tested the push handle and found to her relief that Virgil hadn’t locked it.

Outdoors, the wind had subsided. Heather’s car still rested under the overhang at the lobby’s entrance. A whole symphony of chirping crickets mingled with the soft roar of midnight traffic spilling through the trees around the condo: the sounds of Crystal’s hometown welcoming her back from her hapless vacation to Cole’s world. Whenever Crystal had been lonely in that world, she’d gazed out from her bedroom window at these same high-rises towering across the street. Now as always, she thought of the hundreds of people up in those tall buildings, living their own stories along with her. So close, yet she would never know them. Crystal liked to imagine another girl across the way, staring back at her and yearning to connect, to make a new friend, to help someone like her make it through another day. Crystal hoped that girl was better off tonight than she was.