Brandon obliged. Beside the huge doors, Thorn spoke loud enough for everyone in the room to hear. “They’re gonna break through that window, and they’re gonna get in here. But I have a plan. I think I can reason with them.”
“What’s the plan?” Brandon asked.
“Look, you heard them call our names. They want us for some reason. They want us alive. So I need you to go out there with me, as my hostage.”
“No way,” Heather said. “Uh-uh.”
“I don’t have time to explain, but this is our only chance. If we stay in here, we’re dead.” As if to illustrate his point, more bullets shot through the glass. A large piece of the window’s upper left corner fell inward. It shattered against the thin carpet.
Thorn grabbed Brandon’s shoulder to reacquire his attention. “Brandon, I want you to know that no matter what happens, I will not intentionally hurt you, or anyone in this room.”
Brandon’s eyebrows furrowed. “What do you mean?”
I made a promise yesterday, that I would find a way to save all of you. I intend to keep that promise now.
Before Thorn could think of an adequate response, even more bullets pierced the glass.
“I say go for it,” Tim said. “But I’ll be your hostage.”
“No, I’ll do it,” Brandon said, looking at Heather. “We’ve got no other choice, hon.”
“Okay, okay,” she said. She embraced him, pressed their lips together, then averted her eyes as Thorn clutched Brandon’s hands and pulled them firmly behind the boy’s back.
“I’m really trusting you with this, Virgil,” Brandon said. “I don’t want to die. I don’t want any of us to die. Don’t screw this up.”
Thorn nodded, then slid the knife up to Brandon’s throat.
Marcus raised the gun in the woman’s—Shannon’s—dead hands the instant he saw Thorn exit onto the small interior balcony above him. Shooting Virgil would do nothing, and Marcus wasn’t about to shoot Brandon—that would ruin his objectives even further. But Marcus needed to appear threatening, for Thorn’s sake. The arrogant fool always thought he had the high ground. No matter. Marcus had put him in his place before, and he’d do it again.
“I’ll kill him!” Thorn called with Virgil’s voice, holding a knife to Brandon’s throat. “I swear I’ll do it!” He continued, limiting his voice to the spirit realm: “Then Brandon will be off getting tested in another Sanctuary. I might even be able to pick off Heather on my way out.”
Manipulating Shannon’s legs to walk, Marcus backed up to the front doors, still chained shut, to get a better view of Thorn and his captive. “Look at you,” Marcus said in the spirit realm, in the most confident voice he could muster. “A rat in a maze.”
Thorn’s eyes darted around the lobby, at the other demons and the human detritus at their feet.
He’s worried that his bold action hasn’t fazed me. Good.
“You must realize by now that the Enemy recycles humans between Sanctuaries,” Thorn said, leaving Virgil’s larynx silent. “If I kill Brandon here, he won’t stay dead.”
This now-obvious fact had alarmed Marcus when Wanderer had told him of it, but the Enemy was a cunning adversary. His “recycling” of humans was nothing more than a cruel trick to spite demonkind. Wanderer had always told Marcus to avoid Sanctuaries, and now Marcus finally knew why: they were a waste of time.
“And now that God knows you’re after these humans,” Thorn said, “you won’t be able to get to them so easily next time.”
“Neither will you,” Marcus said. “And we won’t need them anymore if we kill you here and now.”
“Marcus! Listen to yourself! Whoever you’re working for wants to cover up what I know, and instead of listening to me, you’re blindly doing his dirty work for him.”
“And what is it, exactly, that you know?”
“That the Sanctuaries are for
us
! That God wants us back. Don’t get me wrong: God is a jackass. But you and me, and everyone in this room… we’re all being manipulated by systems put in place to enslave us. To keep us from questioning the world around us.”
Marcus huffed, and turned to his team of demons. Each of them reacted to Thorn as disdainfully as Marcus. Wanderer had hand-picked this team of fiercely loyal demons; none of them would be swayed by Thorn’s spurious assertions.
“What are you doing just standing there, huh?” Brandon suddenly yelled to Marcus. The boy, of course, hadn’t heard any of their conversation in the spirit realm. “He’s gonna kill me!”
Thorn scowled at him. Marcus chuckled, then said with Shannon’s voice: “Enough… Virgil. If you kill him, we’ll kill you. You’ll never make it to the next Sanctuary.”
“Are you sure about that?” Thorn said in the spirit realm. “Sure enough to bet your mission on it? You’ve already lost one mark.” Thorn nodded down to the human body that he was currently operating.
Virgil, ugh.
Marcus searched inside himself and found that indeed, he
wasn’t
sure he could stop him if he fled. Thorn’s recent resourcefulness had been uncanny.
“We’re not letting you go,” Marcus said in the physical realm.
“That’s not what I want.”
“Then what do you want?”
“Ten minutes. Let me make my case. Tell you everything. Try to convince you. If you still don’t believe me afterward, we’re still in the same position as now. You have nothing to lose.”
Is this a ruse of some sort?
Marcus hated to give in to one of Thorn’s requests, and he had no interest in hearing the clown prattle on about his conspiracy theories. But if Thorn killed the remaining humans and escaped, Wanderer’s rage would be tectonic in scale. Maybe the best option would be to give in to Thorn’s wishes, at least for ten minutes.
“Ten minutes is good. We can all talk this out,” Brandon said.
Marcus clenched his teeth and shook his head.
At least Hecthes finally turned off that infernal wedding music.
“Ten minutes,” Marcus said to Thorn. “You and me, and the human if necessary. Alone.” He didn’t want his team to hear their conversation. It would inevitably bring baggage from their malicious relationship into the open.
Thorn frowned at Marcus’s request for solitude. Marcus liked that.
•
Marcus strode Shannon’s corpse into a second-story administration room furnished with a reception desk, two cubicles, and a door to the manager’s office. On a window in the far wall, he slid some latches aside. The old window creaked as he opened it, and the white curtains began to undulate in the night breeze. It would be an adequate escape route in the event that Thorn tried to assault him directly.
Thorn entered, Virgil’s arms still clutching Brandon, the knife still at Brandon’s throat. Without even closing the door behind him, he spoke immediately, in the spirit realm. “I’ve been to Heaven, Marcus. I was taken there after you killed me, and told by God Himself that He forgave me. I now have proof that—”
“I don’t know why you guys are doing this,” Brandon said, unaware that he was interrupting, “or what you think you can gain, but it’s not worth it. Please, let us go. We’ll run away and we won’t cause you any problems.” His voice quivered with terror.
Marcus spoke using Shannon’s voice. “Speak plainly, Thorn. Brandon deserves to hear your plea as much as anyone. Maybe you’ll make more sense to
him
.”
Thorn hesitated. “Brandon, we have ten minutes. Give me one or two of them to think. I need to get this right.”
Ah, so the kid is in on it, too.
But would Thorn actually kill him? Knowing his history, Marcus guessed that he would.
“What do you want?” Brandon said to Shannon, ignoring Thorn’s request.
“I want you to give your captor time to think,” Marcus said.
When Brandon closed his mouth and dropped his eyes to the floor, Thorn continued, keeping his voice firmly in the spiritual realm. “God wants to control us, but I have proof that He also wants to reconcile with us.”
“And you would have us reconcile with the Enemy?” Marcus said, also in the spirit realm.
“I would have you open your eyes. The proof is right here before you. Brandon was in the last Sanctuary, and here he is again. If Sanctuaries were really tests for humans, why would God recycle a human who failed? What’s more, you killed me with your own hands. Am I not living proof that the Sanctuaries are for us? How else can you explain my being here?”
“Because He hates us. He taunts us. He’s forced you to ally with Him and you haven’t the nerve to fight back.”
“No, you fool! My very presence here is fighting back! Unlike you, I actually
want
to be able to live a life of my own free choosing. I don’t want to have to choose between your way or God’s way, and if I can—if
we
can use Brandon to expose God, and if we can make public whatever scheme you’re part of that’s trying to keep my knowledge hidden, then maybe we’ll both be able to forget all this fighting and live the lives we want to live. But it won’t happen unless you let me take Brandon to the Judge, and let the Judge verify to the rest of demonkind that I’m telling the truth.
“And how much more powerful would my tale be if
you
stood by my side, Marcus? Imagine if two demons with as much animosity as you and I stood side by side and announced everything we know, with Brandon and Heather as evidence, and Shazakahn and his legions to corroborate our story. We could end the Enemy’s lies and His attempts to control us. We could end the willful ignorance of our brothers. We could finally be free.”
Marcus briefly considered that Thorn’s musings might be valid. Briefly. But even if Wanderer was lying to demonkind, even if he’d sent Marcus here to silence Thorn’s newfound knowledge, Wanderer’s motives could only lie in affronting the Enemy. And Marcus could get behind any cause that harmed the Enemy. Besides, if Wanderer didn’t want to share every detail of his plans with his followers, who was Marcus to blame him? Marcus would certainly never share all his own plans with his own followers.
However…
He slowly paced toward Thorn. “Thinking is the worst virtue, and you’ve thought your way into breaking all three of our Rules. But if you could think just a little harder, Thorn, you and I could make a deal.”
“A deal? How so?”
Passing one of the cubicles, Marcus ripped a photo of someone’s family off of a tack. “It’s so easy to control the physical world here in the Sanctuaries, I can almost forget that it’s impossible to do on Earth. For every demon except you, that is.”
Thorn’s eyes sank.
“You’ve entered physical space on Earth on two occasions,” Marcus continued. “Tell me how you did it, and I’ll let you and all your little humans go.”
Thorn turned his gaze back up to Marcus’s and held it. Had their mutual animosity lit the space between them aflame, they might both have stayed staring at each other while the building burned around them. Brandon fidgeted with his hands, sneaking glimpses at their strange behavior out of the corner of his eye.
“I’m good at lying,” Thorn finally said. “I would love to lie to you now, and I could very easily. But if I lied about this, you’d think I was lying about the rest of it. So I’m being fully honest with you, Marcus. I do not know how I entered physical space.”
“Then you are going to die.” Marcus ripped the photo of the family in two, then in four, then in eight. He flicked them into the air. Brandon gulped as they fluttered downward.
The curtains whisked against each other as they waved in the breeze. An air conditioning unit deactivated and its background hum vanished. Somewhere in the distance, an owl cried out a predatory screech.
Brandon chimed in: “Well if you’re not gonna say anything, I will. We’re all just innocent people…”
Marcus tried to tune him out as Thorn began speaking in the spirit realm.
“I hate you,” Thorn said, so softly that Marcus strained to hear him.
Marcus stepped forward. “What’s that?”
“I said I hate you,” Thorn said louder. “I hate all of you. Conspiring against me when I’m in power. Conspiring against me when I’m brought low. Conspiring against me when all I want is for you to know the truth. All the misery you’ve caused humans through the years. All the misery you’ve caused yourselves through your shortsighted ignorance.”
Thorn looked up then, and Marcus saw fearsome contempt in his eyes.
This is the same gaze with which I’ve scrutinized him so many times.
Marcus found it disconcerting.
“I want you to know, brother,” Thorn continued. “And that is the last time I will ever call you brother. I want you to know that if I succeed here tonight, I wasn’t fighting for your freedom, or for that of any other demon. I was fighting for myself. You’ve cut me off so irrevocably that I feel no kinship with any of you. And if you continue to willingly blind yourselves, I feel no pity for you. It’s your own blindness and bloodlust that condemns you to a life of strife and pain. You’re so purely, unconscionably evil that when I look back on the Enemy expelling us from Heaven all those ages ago, I can’t help but think that maybe He was right.
“I hate you, and I hate all that is demoniac. I’d kill every last one of you if I could, Marcus. I hope you all die and go straight to the Enemy’s bottomless pit. I was just there. And I can’t wait to meet you there again someday.”
Marcus considered making Shannon imitate a human yawn, but even that wasn’t worth the effort. He let a few seconds pass so that Thorn could have his moment. The air conditioning whirred back to life.
“Are you done?” Marcus finally said to Thorn.
Thorn broke eye contact. “I suppose I am.”
“Good,” Marcus said. Then he called out the open window behind him. “Do it!”
The demons waiting outside must have heard him, because two seconds later, he heard glass shatter as the window in the boardroom blew out.
“No,” Thorn said. He dropped his knife and ran, leading Brandon back down the hallway toward the boardroom.
•
Just as Thorn ran up to the boardroom’s huge wooden doors, they burst open. Karen darted out. She tripped, stumbled a bit, then stood straight and still. One of Marcus’s demons hovered above her, hypnotizing her; Thorn was too late. He felt Brandon’s arm pull away. When he spun around, he saw that Marcus had caught the boy by his other wrist. Marcus forced him into a compromising position, with his arms behind his back.