Free A Demon in the Dark by Joshua Ingle Page B

with which Shenzuul had caused the young man’s death appalled Thorn and struck him with a sudden wave of reflection. This apprenticeship the Judge had prescribed would augment Shenzuul’s brutality with Thorn’s cunning, lending a sharp edge to a previously blunt weapon. This is not just something harmless to endure , Thorn now saw. Shenzuul had great potential for destruction, and to use him as part of Thorn’s cover would make Thorn complicit in that destruction. How did I not see this before? What kind of monster am I creating?
    Ever the proud student, Shenzuul grinned widely when Thorn did not respond. He had stumped the teacher.

5
    Rays of sunset shone through a break in the oak branches onto the group of old burial sites on the forest floor. Centuries of weathering had all but destroyed some of the cairns, but the one Thorn cared about—the one directly underneath the break in the canopy—had remained strangely unaffected, as if the spirits of the plants and animals had protected it. Flying Owl’s family would have liked that thought. Thorn paced briskly around the boy’s final resting place.
    He had come here to avoid Shenzuul, had avoided him all day, but now his refuge in the woods held little peace. Whereas this place usually soothed Thorn’s mind with thoughts of better times, today it reminded him of past mistakes and warned him not to repeat them.
    He found himself wishing he could use his powers of persuasion on another demon. One soft whisper in the Judge’s ear as Thorn might whisper to Amy or Joel, and his punishment with Shenzuul would be withdrawn. A pleasant fantasy.
    But now that Thorn saw the road to ridding himself of Shenzuul, he knew how uneven it would be. Shenzuul would have to meet disgrace in the Judge’s eyes. Thorn could try convincing the Judge that Shenzuul had nothing valuable to teach him, that their deal would not be profitable for him… or perhaps it’d be easier to convince him that Shenzuul was too thick to learn subtlety, and by extension too thick to teach the Judge what he wanted to learn. Thorn knew the Judge had eyes and ears among Thorn’s own followers, and would be kept up to date on Shenzuul’s progress, or lack thereof…
    If only I could relive my life and stay on good terms with Marcus from the beginning. Then I would still be safely unaware, and none of this would have happened.
    “No,” Thorn told himself. “I refuse ignorance. No longer will I trade the pursuit of knowledge for the maintaining of safety.”
    His inner voice seemed to silence, but soon nagged him with an old, troubling question. What was Marcus doing in that tent, anyway? Marcus has never been an innovative thinker, but if he was really trying to depose Xeres, he would still have taken a more reliable approach. Something else was going on.
    The demons who’d been present that night avoided all talk of Constantine’s battle at the Milvian Bridge. Thorn speculated that they wanted to forget the strange events surrounding it—namely Constantine’s sudden return from death’s doorstep and the murder of the demon sentries before they could warn the others that the battle had begun. As much as Thorn valued knowledge, he had long since abandoned his attempts at puzzling out this particular mystery. It couldn’t be done, at least not with the limited information Thorn had had to work with. So he’d been content to stay in the West, where he’d been safe from Marcus’s vengeance until Xeres’s supposed death. Even then, news of Xeres’s demise had spread at a pleasant snail’s pace, since demons had none of the instant-communication technology humans did. Thorn had known the news would adopt the ring of a tall tale by the time it had crossed the Atlantic, and that therefore decades, possibly centuries would pass before Marcus learned that Xeres was actually dead and came after Thorn. He’d hoped Marcus had forgotten the whole ordeal.
    Was my guard down because I grew lazy, or because