Thorn (7 page)

Angels of Learning, Friendship, Justice, Creativity, Death, and all the rest… all of them stormed the Lord’s House. Balthior saw it from his tower, and flew down to observe. Peeking in through a window, he saw God at the edge of the drop, a brilliant molten red and deep blue planet Earth forming behind and below Him. The rebel angels had taken Him by surprise, and He was cornered against the edge.

“You created us to serve You,” they were yelling at Him. “You’re creating humans to love You. Why? Why can’t we demand service and love like You can? What right do You have to selfishness when we are forbidden it?”

The Lord Almighty raised His hand, and in a blinding flash, every angel in the House died.

Balthior was awestruck. He couldn’t believe it. The Father had slain His children. The Creator had destroyed Balthior’s dear friends. He flew back from the window, but his wings were shaking from shock, and he fell to the shimmery golden ground. Marcus and a newly freed Lucifer were approaching with another group of rebels, so he ran to them, waved his arms desperately, and warned them to stop. They retreated, and war enveloped Heaven.

Flying angels grappled with each other, killing and dying as they plummeted across the celestial skies. Immense towers crashed to the ground. The Angels of Death weren’t the only ones dealing death. As millions of His servants perished around Him—both loyalists and rebels—God sat silently in His House on the drop. He could have destroyed the rebels with a thought, but He did nothing, as if He welcomed the violence. Thorn had always wondered if that was when He’d finished designing His beloved humans: during the initial battles which killed over a third of Thorn’s brothers.
A god to be worshiped indeed.

The rebels were disorganized compared to those angels still loyal to God. That loyalty came from blind obedience rather than conscious devotion, so the loyalists cared nothing for themselves, and would readily die for their Creator. The rebels, on the other hand, all had a sense of self. They wanted to live.

In the fiercest moments of battle, as Balthior found himself in the ruins of a destroyed palace grappling with an Angel of Truth, he noticed the archangel Tobrius—God’s right hand, long before Gabriel. Tobrius was poised atop an angelic bronze statue, fending off a horde of smaller rebels, slashing at them with his immense sword. It clanged against the rebels’ weapons, striking, parrying, occasionally cleaving into their bodies and sending a death scream echoing across the mountainside. Tobrius’s back was turned to Balthior.

I could kill him.
Thorn remembered thinking his first selfish thought.
I could be a hero.
With some effort, he had dispatched the angel he was fighting, and had turned to charge at Tobrius.

That was when Marcus called to him. His brother was lying crushed underneath a toppled pillar, wings cut open and limp, legs smashed in. “Balthior,” he called again. “Help me!”

Any rebel Angel of Healing could have mended Marcus. Carrying him to safety would have been a short trip. But Balthior’s chance to slay Tobrius would not last long. As he watched, the archangel leaped down from his statue and began moving away along a rooftop. Balthior turned back to Marcus, and regarded him with a final, sorrowful gaze.

“Brother…” It was the last word Marcus ever said to Balthior as a friend.

Balthior darted across a courtyard, away from his dying comrade, and dashed toward Tobrius. Even now, amidst rattling bus engines and honking cars, Thorn could hear the battle cry resonant in his memory, as Altherios, a rebel Angel of Death, bounded from stone to stone, up to the roof where Tobrius fought. Just paces ahead of Balthior, he slaughtered Tobrius where he stood, and Balthior’s chance at glory was gone.

Balthior searched for Marcus after the battle but could not find him, or his body.

Days later, on whatever vain whim, the Lord Most High finally slithered out from His cave. He raised His hand, and Balthior was ripped from the ground and thrown into a disorienting whirlwind. Other rebel angels flailed all around him, grasping for purchase, all heading in the same direction: down. The force of God’s blast bulleted them to Earth at lightning speed.

Soon after regaining their senses on the young planet, billions of fallen angels noticed each other’s backs, all displaying bright white wounds where their wings had been just moments before. Their bodies had become fully spiritual, with no trace of physicality left. Their Father had exiled them, they slowly realized. Without wings, they had no way to reach the Realm of Heaven again. (In the time since, especially in recent centuries, Thorn often pondered why God had banished demons specifically to Earth. There was a much lower, hotter place where He could have sent them instead.)

Although the leader of the Angels of Reason had been respected in the Heavenly City, critical thought had little value in the new demon world, full of hate and fighting and lies and death. Balthior was a beggar from the beginning, and his once-great intellect slowly atrophied as he fought for his place in the world. His need for power and significance was just as legitimate as that of every other demon, for God had deprived them all of purpose. (Of course, God would have told them they’d deprived themselves.)

In those early days, the slow manner in which time passed on Earth had been a constant hardship for the newly made demons. From Heaven they could have seen creation finished in days, but down on the planet, eons dragged by as the Earth’s volcanoes churned and convection formed mountains and continents. For billions of years all they could do was wander and fight grisly civil wars, until finally life began to seep up out of the waters.

Thorn bitterly recalled humanity evolving from the apes. When the demons realized what was happening, that
these
were human beings, they sought their destruction. But even those first groups of cavepeople were precious to God, and He sent armies of His heavenly host down to rain fire on demonkind.

A spiritual war was fought over the plains and waters of Earth, such as Heaven had never known. Notably, all rebel demons had been cherubim. None of the much larger and fiercer—though less numerous—seraphs had joined the rebellion, so despite the demons’ greater numbers, the war was evenly matched. After millennia, both sides had suffered great losses, but the loyalists suffered the greater defeat. After a while, most of the angels had been killed. The demons had won Earth for themselves.

Though they’d been stripped of any powers they’d had, including the ability to influence physical objects, they soon discovered they still held a potent weapon in their continuing fight against God.
To this day
, Thorn realized,
a demon’s one weapon is a lie. A whisper.
He often wondered why God had allowed this.

Demonkind had reveled when it discovered that humans could hear devils’ voices in their thoughts. Demons had nothing else to do, so rather than let eternal boredom overtake them, why not seize vengeance on their Creator by ruining humankind, His other creation? So their endgame became the destruction of all humanity. Most demons claimed this goal as an expression of power, but Thorn knew by looking into his own soul that their reasons lay elsewhere. Deep down, their real desire was for freedom. Somewhere inside, they were still those young angels in Heaven, deprived of identity, deprived of liberty. They wanted revenge, and they wanted to be free. Simple as that.

Thorn felt, as Balthior had, that humans were exceedingly fortunate to have been given a choice to side with or against the Enemy, and even to switch back and forth. They were physical beings, so they had the option to act, to choose. Thus it was vital to keep them complacent, idle.

And then, of course, there was Christ. Thorn hadn’t witnessed the man himself, but he knew other demons who had. Marcus was one of them. Thorn had thought Marcus dead until the 1400s B.C., when he’d resurfaced as the right hand of Xeres, one of the greatest demons of all time. Successful in his conquests, Marcus had forgotten all about Balthior. Thorn had heard that Lucifer had taken a keen interest in Christ as well, but he couldn’t be sure. Nearly as many inconsistent accounts of Christ were gossiped about throughout the demon hordes as were written in what eventually became the New Testament. Thorn had his doubts about both sources, and in fact questioned much of Biblical history’s accuracy. He’d been in Western Europe at the time, and seen none of Biblical history firsthand, save for the Earth’s creation.

Regardless, the sins of angels remained irreversible, according to God. For what reason, Thorn hadn’t a clue. If God had created Angels of Forgiveness, why did He neglect to forgive? This irked Thorn above all else. Whenever he encountered one of the passionate debates about God’s existence, of which humans were so fond, Thorn longed to interject and divulge this truth. As a demon, Thorn had definitive knowledge that God did indeed exist. The only problem, of which humanity remained blissfully unaware, was that God was a divine asshole.

Thorn’s thoughts were interrupted when he came upon the warehouse. The Atlanta Quarantine Zone spanned one square block: a small industrial complex that had been abandoned for decades. Every demon in the city knew the place, and watched it closely (as demons watched all of the world’s angel lairs). Thorn used to wonder why demonkind allowed the few remaining, defeated angels to share Earth with them when killing an angel meant great honor for an individual demon. The angels posed no threat and could easily be slaughtered. But a few surviving angels served as a constant reminder of the demons’ victory—that they could take on God and win. If they killed all the angels, nothing would be left to remind them of their Enemy. It would be almost like they had no enemy, and therefore no purpose. And even devils, who deprived humans of their reasons for being, needed purpose for themselves.

Demons perked up on their rooftops as Thorn neared. Some gave cheerful battle cries while others glowered in envy. At least five hundred were present.
Good. I want word of this to spread quickly.

Thorn floated from the empty road to the complex’s entrance and left Ezandris’s hefty body at the angels’ doorstep. No one came to retrieve it. The angels were notoriously cautious, and seldom showed their faces outside of their own complex. Thorn did, however, notice one spirit’s face behind a window of the main warehouse.
Thilial.
He smirked at her, and hoped for a fight.

“I am Thorn!” he bellowed. “Enemies, this city is mine!” He turned to see curious expressions on the faces of the other fallen angels behind him. “Brothers, this city is mine! Any who seek to take it from me will die!”

No angels came out to fight him. After five minutes he could tell the demons were tired of his yelling. After ten minutes he left quietly.

Later that night, Thorn found himself on the bridge again, bewildered by Jada’s unwillingness to jump. Why would she not choose? There was no reason to stay in a miserable limbo between a happy life and a freeing death. The choice would have been easy for Thorn in her position. He envied her; he envied everything about the humans, and hated them all the more for it.

Did I really consider defecting earlier today? Am I just as suicidal as Jada?

In the distant past, near the beginning, Thorn had overheard the great demon lord Altherios confiding in his coterie that he wanted to die. “What do we have to look forward to?” he had asked them as they watched a volcano spew flame in the distance. “I hate living like this. I’d rather end it on my own terms, in a blaze of glory.” Then Altherios had left them, and told the angels he wanted to defect.

It was a trick. Although angels never accepted a demon back into their fold, they did sometimes—strangely—listen to a would-be defector’s plea. When Altherios was allowed into their midst, instead of begging for a return to angelhood, he abruptly slaughtered many of them, and was soon overcome himself. Despite the suicide, demonkind remembered Altherios as a hero. Thorn was sometimes tempted to join him. Perhaps Ezandris had felt the same longing, to end whatever pain ailed him by going out with a bang.

Thorn realized then why he cared so much about Jada’s case, why he was drawn so strongly to solving the puzzle of why she would not jump. It was because, despite his current struggle for survival, a part of Thorn did wish to die.

Strange
, he thought.
The First Rule forbids killing other demons, but not killing yourself.

He had no one with whom to share this ache. No one to confide in but his charges. “The only real pain,” he said to Jada, only now he started to believe it himself, “is pain suffered alone.”

“In the name of Jesus, I bind you Satan, and I command you to leave this home.”

Madeline did stuff like this all the time, and Thorn and his followers always had a good laugh. She didn’t actually know they were in the room with her, but they’d used her religion to make her paranoid in recent years, so she’d developed the odd habit of “binding” demons whenever she heard a bump in the night. Or during a late-morning nap, as the case was now. She would pray and she would bind, then bind, then pray, sometimes for over an hour at a time. Like all praying, it did nothing, or at least nothing the demons could notice.

“Some people like the idea of demons,” Thorn had once explained to some of his less-experienced followers when they’d asked about Madeline’s eccentricities. “If demons are pulling the strings, then nothing is their fault. They hold no responsibility for their actions.” This was exciting behavior, when a human started blaming all her problems on the devil. In truth, demons usually preyed on desires that were already present; the human was the one who chose to act on those impulses. In their pride, most demons did fancy themselves as the sources of evil, but they were actually just its advocates.

Maddie’s old joints popped as she left her bed and grabbed her worn Bible from her nightstand, sighing as she plopped onto her sofa and began to read the Good Book for reassurance. Her body relaxed, and her breathing grew slower, calmer. The comfort the book gave her bothered Thorn, but better comfort than critical thought. Thinking was the worst virtue, after all, and comfort made it easy for people to ignore problems. This was why demons loved religion’s contenting elements—dogma, arbitrary rules, church culture—while despising its challenging elements—community, family, altruism—which were more genuinely beneficial.