A Demon in the Dark Read Online Free PDF

Vucion’s attack, he’d fallen to just above the ground with Vucion on top of him, clawing and shrieking. Though Thorn raised his arms in defense, the enemy demon wounded him more than once. Vucion wore Shane’s face like a mask, and the drooling boy tried biting at the air where Thorn lay, hissing all the while.
    Just as the pain grew serious, the Judge twisted Vucion’s head all the way around, then unceremoniously yanked his corpse out of Shane’s mind and tossed it into a stack of plastic pallets. Shane’s whole body jerked, fell, and convulsed violently, foamy spittle flying all around him. Thorn stood.
    “What were you doing, dude? You had him. Why’d you hesitate?”
    Thorn was wondering that himself. He shook his head. Secretly becoming good was proving to be a chaotic kaleidoscope of opposing morals blending and shifting, confusing Thorn to no end. Thorn still wasn’t sure if he even knew how to be good after his eons of vice. Of course I know how , he tried to reassure himself. I just have to do the opposite of what I’ve always done. Becoming a moral being was simply a matter of curbing his old habits. But that was not easily done.
    “You okay?” the Judge asked.
    “It hurts but I’ll be fine.”
    The Judge nodded, then hovered over to Shane, who was starting to recover. The boy sat and glanced frightfully about, as if unsure how he’d come to be in this deserted foundry.
    “What are you going to do with him?” Thorn asked.
    The Judge sighed. “Remember back in the day when possession was chill? No screaming or self-mutilation? You’d just enter the guy’s mind and fuck around. Smooth-like.” He motioned to Vucion’s motionless body. “The crazies aren’t good enough for it. You know the Second Rule only exists for their sake. Sometimes I want to declare possession legal for demons like you and me, the badasses on top of the food chain. We wouldn’t go all apeshit with it.”
    “The other Judges would depose you in a week.”
    “Yeah, go ahead, ruin my fun.” The Judge lifted Vucion over his shoulders and made for the double doors at the building’s front. “I’ll sic some demons on Shane, make sure he’s dead within the month. On the bright side, if he tells anyone a demon possessed him, they’ll think he’s just as crazy as Vucion here was. God damn. That bottom feeders like this think they can get away with breaking the Second Rule after all this time… it blows my mind, Thorn. Blows my fucking mind.”
    As they stepped out into the flat Atlanta sunlight, Thorn recalled his own recent breaking of the Second Rule. He had followed Amy, one of his charges, to a club in Midtown, and found Marcus waiting for them there. The powerful demon had just returned from a triumphant campaign in Africa and vowed vengeance on Thorn for the Constantine affair, so when Marcus and several of his cronies crowded around Amy, whispering ridicule to her, Thorn had needed to defend himself and reclaim his charge. “You’re beautiful,” he had said to her suddenly. And then, for a few brief moments, Amy had seen him. Thorn had somehow entered physical space, and all the demons present had witnessed it. Fortunately, the event had no precedent, so the Judge hadn’t believed the witnesses when they told him the story. In the months since, Thorn had tried to repeat the event with no success. In private, he had whispered words of peace and love into the ears of various humans around the city, but on no occasion had he reentered the physical world. The lone event with Amy still perplexed him—and frightened him.
    It was why he was here now. The Judge may have dismissed the story about Thorn entering physical space, but to satiate the other demons’ calls for blood, the Judge had been forced to nail Thorn on another allegation: the words he had said to Amy. You’re beautiful. Though not technically one of the Rules, whispering anything good to a human was a gross taboo. So despite the prestige Thorn had