Forsaken_Cursed Angel Watchtower 12

by Gilbert, L. B.

  Ash also distributed knowledge equilaterally among the humans whenever he could. When one person could be placed in charge of a certain project or trained in a specific technique, he and Marcus chose four instead. It was Ash’s way of ensuring expertise was not lost should the worst happen and one of the men or women fell ill or died.

  Deaths by disease were thankfully less frequent. Urban farming and proper sanitation had cut down on the baseline death toll. A consistent supply of clean water would help reduce it further.

  Ash continued to give out orders, pitching in and helping his team get a section of the aqueduct in place. When a few ropes snapped, the disruption was minor and quickly resolved.

  Once that was done, he flew up high, checking their progress from a distance. He traced the line of the aqueduct taking shape as it snaked over the last ridge between the grassy fields east and the city’s populated neighborhoods.

  As if sensing his satisfaction, the mocking clang of the emergency klaxon sounded. Shouting to Marcus to stay and keep the workers going, Ash pumped his wings, following the sound. It led him to the center of the city where another disaster awaited.

  A Firehorse had risen.

  2

  Place Vendôme was burning.

  Ash’s eyes swept the square, triaging from the sky. The earthquake had been small, but critically damaging. The steam-powered mill and a few of the apartments that survived demon rule were piles of rubble.

  The twelve-story bronze-plated column that used to dominate the open space of Vendôme was long gone. It had been one of the first monuments razed by the demons.

  At least I don’t have to worry about the column landing on anyone. The massive structure would have killed many. The open space of the square was teeming with humans shouting and shoving each other.

  He’d arrived too late. Hysteria had already set in.

  A few people scattered and gave way when he flew down and landed among them, but the mob was mindless. Most didn’t even notice his arrival.

  “What happened? Where is the fire service?” he demanded, pulling on the arm of the man nearest him.

  “They aren’t here!” The belligerence in the human’s face faded as he recognized Ash’s armored form.

  The weak sunlight bounced off his helmet and visor directly into the man’s eyes. Blinking and squinting, the citizen pointed at the smoking pile that had been the Hôtel d’Orsigny.

  “They say the old man who managed the building is the Firehorse. He was cleaning the upper story when the ground began to shake. The place blew up, but he survived!”

  Ash’s jaw clenched. It was always this way now. Those fortunate enough to survive these disasters were cast under a cloud of suspicion—one that rapidly escalated into violence unless he intervened.

  “You assign blame too quickly,” he bit out. “Now go help the wounded or take yourself off. If the building exploded, it might have been a gas pocket igniting underneath it. There is still danger here.”

  He shoved the man away, herding him in the direction of safety. Beating his wings until he was hovering above the crowd, he felt their eyes on him.

  “I know why you’re here,” he called out, muting the resonance in his voice to avoid driving the weak-minded mad. “You think the curse has struck again. It may have, but I shouldn’t have to remind you that finding the Firehorse and passing judgment is my job—not yours. Vigilante justice cannot stand. If you kill, you endanger your immortal soul.”

  That speech, coming from an angel in full armor, should have been enough to cow the crowd. But the people of Bastille had seen too much.

  “What immortal soul?” someone shouted as the mob shifted and the volume jumped up several notches. “Look around. God has forsaken us!”

  “Yeah! What do we have to lose?” a woman cried.

  “We need to stop the Firehorse before we end up dead, too!”

  A man and woman with soot-streaked faces pushed a huddled form toward him. “We have him! We have the Firehorse. You need to kill him now.”

  The little man collapsed on his hands and knees in front of Ash. He took one look at the human and knew he wasn’t the one.

  All the Firehorses Ash had met had been younger than this. All had been strong and productive people. This small shell of a man was nothing like them. His best years were behind him.

  Ash wanted to throw up his hands in frustration. Years of demon rule had warped the human moral compass and blunted their fear of judgment day.

  This time, he let the unnatural resonance of his voice reverberate in his words. “This man is untainted. Release him.”

  He paused, studying the crowd, letting them feel the menace of his authority before continuing in a normal tone. “God has not forsaken you. If He had, I wouldn’t be before you—and yet, here I am. Now, if you’re not going to help the injured among you, please disperse! I will find the real Firehorse. Go back to your homes.”

  The people who had dragged the old man forward quailed and retreated. Relieved, the hapless human began to cry in earnest. A young girl ran out from the crowd, and helped him move away. Ash watched them go, making sure no others approached the vulnerable duo.

  “Go,” he growled at the stragglers, irritated they hadn’t immediately obeyed.

  His normally patient nature continued to fray as the last remnants of the crowd scattered.

  At least they didn’t throw anything at me. So far, no one had dared, but Ash knew that day was coming. He could feel it.

  Landing, he adjusted the visor of his helmet as he moved toward the edges of the crowd to count the dead. How many had he lost this time?

  A better question might be how many had been worthy?

  A tipping point had been passed. If he hadn’t appeared, the mob would have killed that man. The threat of the curse hanging over their heads was too much for the average human. If he couldn’t find a way to break it soon, he was going to lose the entire populace. Shoring up walls here and there wasn’t enough. People needed hope. Just a kernel would do—enough to ensure eternal salvation.

  Unlike other angels, Ash didn’t believe suffering magically transformed man’s nature. Bury a human under a shit ton of strife… and the reality was that most of them broke. They lost their faith. It was hard to blame them. Not everyone could be Job.

  Ash had finished blessing the injured when he felt a presence. Pivoting on his heel, he scanned, half-expecting to come face to face with a demon or one of the Host. Instead, he locked eyes with a young woman.

  Her brown and gold eyes bored into his for a moment before he broke contact. Something about them seemed familiar…

  It’s a common eye color in these parts, he reminded himself. The girl was a stranger.

  He shifted his gaze over the rest of the crowd in search of the source of his disquiet. No tentacled monster preyed at the edge of the square, no smirking Raphael mocked him from the corner of his eye.

  Relaxing his subtle battle stance, Ash decided he had imagined the strange feeling. Even his kind could get stressed. A millennium or two of being barred from Heaven was enough to make even an angel daft.

  A shout went up. Ash turned to see the fire service make their way down Rue de la Paix. They dragged their steam-powered fire engine through the thinning crowd at the edge of the square.

  Ash flew to meet them. “Start here,” he said, pointing at the modest two-story buildings on the opposite side of the square.

  They were recent additions. The buildings stood in place of the Ritz Hotel, a favored haunt of demons when they’d been in power. So many unspeakable things had happened under that roof that the citizens of Bastille had demolished the Ritz themselves right after the overthrow of the king.

  After the fire brigade began their work, Ash herded the few remaining humans away from the ruins of the Hôtel d’Orsigny. He still needed to check the foundations for cracks and toxic fumes.

  It was one of the many topographical changes caused by the Collision. Once a safe and reliable
source of energy, natural gas was now a threat—one that could ignite at any moment. Pockets of it were trapped under the streets, waiting to escape into homes and businesses to smother entire families or explode with a random spark.

  Putting his back into it, Ash removed the debris from the explosion site, going over the foundation carefully for signs of another pocket. He’d just cleared the basements when he heard the second blast in the distance.

  3

  Smoke and dust obscured Ash’s vision as he dug through the debris of the St. Louis Hospital’s collapsed second story. If he didn’t miss his guess, this was where one of the old surgical suites had just been reopened.

  So much knowledge had been wiped out with the Collision. All digital information had been destroyed. Electromagnetic pulses rendered computers inoperable, their data unrecoverable. Books were used as kindling by human survivors or burned in bonfires under the demon king’s reign. Most of the population was now illiterate.

  Getting back the medicine they lost seemed an impossible task. Antibiotics, painkillers, and surgery more complicated than stitching a wound were pipe dreams after the liberation. With basics like sanitation and food supplies scarce or nonexistent, trying to preserve anything more than rudimentary medical care was a low priority.

  Only the most basic and brutal techniques of emergency medicine remained. Jagged stitch scars were commonplace among humans. Amputation had returned in force as a standard treatment. Many who would have lived died from infections that could have been cured with a few shots of penicillin.

  But in the last couple of months, there had been signs, tiny seeds of hope. Scavengers had found an old repository of medical texts cached in a sparsely occupied tenement. His guess was that the building had once been overflow storage for a defunct medical school.

  Marcus had the books copied and disseminated to the few field medics who’d survived the uprising. One—a woman named Madeleine Brès—had fallen on them with greater enthusiasm than any of the others. She’d made real strides since, using what she’d learned to remove an infected gallbladder. More recently, she treated a burst appendix successfully.

  It was Madeleine who’d organized the reopening of the surgical suite, Ash remembered, a sinking feeling in his stomach.

  There was something he was missing.

  It was just a room. Ash hadn’t thought it would make much of a difference. But he’d been wrong. Too much progress and we’re sent reeling back. He cursed, picking his way through the rubble.

  A foot wearing a rough leather shoe was sticking out from beneath the remains of a wall. Ash threw a metal beam to the side. He was relieved to discover there was still a leg attached to the foot of an intact male body. The victim was wearing makeshift surgical scrubs.

  Ash pulled the man out, taking care to avoid further damaging the fragile human. The man groaned as Ash set him on the floor.

  The nurse coughed, his lips parting. “She touched it, and it exploded.”

  Ash frowned, adjusting his helmet to better see the man’s eyes. “Who?”

  “Dr. Brès. She touched the oxygen tanks, and all hell broke loose. It has to be her.”

  The Firehorse. Unlike the old man at Place Vendome, this made sense. Like the others before her, Madeleine was relatively young, strong, and capable.

  Ash swore under his breath, picking up the man and cradling him in his arms. “Is she still here?”

  “I don’t know. The blast shook the room, but I was just past the doorway in the hall. I fell, and heard screaming inside. But when I tried to move the wall, it collapsed on me.” The man grimaced, and his eyes rolled back into his head. He was unconscious again.

  Someone had survived this blast as well—long enough to scream at least. Ash would lay odds on that person being Dr. Brès.

  The mob wasn’t technically wrong to look at the survivors of the disasters they were plagued with. It was the insidious nature of their burden. How else could the Firehorse continue to wreak havoc if they died in the first few instances of manifesting the curse? He’d probably find Dr. Brès had been at Place Vendome earlier that morning.

  But Dr. Brès wasn’t here now. The only body inside the room was crumpled next to the surgical bed. Judging from the hospital gown, it was the intended patient. There was no sign of anyone else.

  I have to find the doctor.

  Ash tightened his grip on the nurse and took to the air, flying them outside through a gaping hole in the wall. There he found Clement, the hospital administrator. A temporary triage center was in the process of being set up in the dirt courtyard in front of the building.

  “How many are unaccounted for?” Ash asked.

  Clement started and stuttered. He was an able man, dedicated to healing, but like many others, he was intimidated by Ash.

  He waited quietly as the doctor stumbled over his words, missing the days when he could interact in anonymity. Now that humans knew what he was, he had to make allowances for their fear and awe. Being addressed by an angel—even one of the fallen—was enough to make anybody founder.

  “We found all b-b-but the patient and the doctor,” Clement finally said.

  “N-nurse Addy was assigned to that floor, along with Julien, who was assisting Dr. Brès with the surgery,” he added more clearly, gesturing at the injured man in Ash’s arms. “Addy is dead. The blast crushed her when the ceiling gave way. Some piping knocked a hole through her head.”

  It spoke to the level of carnage they’d all grown accustomed to that Clement didn’t even blink as he related that last bit of information.

  “I found the patient,” Ash replied. “He is also dead. But I can’t find Dr. Brès.”

  Clement moaned, his hands flying up to rub against his receding hairline. “This is a disaster. The council will be furious. The patient was one of theirs—the overseer of District Four, Tulloch. He’d had a heart attack last year. He wanted Dr. Brès to operate. She was going to put in a stent.”

  That was news. Madeleine had made a lot of progress if she was conducting cardiac surgery.

  The final piece of the puzzle fell into place, something Ash should have seen long ago. Madeleine Brès wasn’t just important to him and her patients, but to progress as a whole.

  That’s why they were struck down. A Firehorse wasn’t just a productive citizen who happened to be cursed. It had never been random.

  Putain. He needed to deal with this revelation later. The council would have to wait as well. He had a Firehorse to find.

  “They’ll be here soon, Klein and the others,” Clement said, looking at him hopefully. “They will want to speak to you.”

  “I have other matters to attend to,” Ash said repressively, aware the director wanted him to break the news about Tulloch. “I will leave you to relay my message. Make sure they don’t leave without offering aid. You’re going to need to shift your operation. Tell them to allocate one of the new hive buildings for you.”

  Unless they were pushed, it could be days, perhaps weeks, before the council acted. The city needed this hospital too much for them to dally.

  He scanned the rapidly filling lawn. Men and women were laid out by the able-bodied among them. Children, too, were part of the group. His eye fixed on a dark-haired little girl being helped into a bed and covered with blankets. His Firehorse—the one he thought of as his—she had been close to that age.

  “The patients will need immediate assistance,” he said flatly. “Tell the council I ordered it. I will find them later. And don’t mention Dr. Brès is missing.”

  “Why?” Clement was genuinely puzzled. Then his eyes widened. “Oh no! Is she the one?”

  “Unless you want a mob on your hands, I suggest you keep your voice down,” Ash hissed, leaning over Clement menacingly.

  Ash checked to make sure no others were in earshot. Fortunately for him, the other humans were giving them a wide berth.

  “Help the survivors. Do your job,” he continued. “And when the other council members come, t
ell them what I said about helping—and nothing more. Keep your nurse Julien quiet when he wakes up. No volunteering any details and no conjecture about the Firehorse from either of you. Even if the council members ask you directly.”

  The quailing man nodded, stuttering his agreement as he scrambled away. Ash watched him retreat, already regretting the act of intimidation.

  Stop it. All his years alone on earth had made him soft. His place was above, not among humans. Getting too close to them, being friendly, undermined his authority. To maintain his distance, he used go-betweens like Marcus to pass on his orders, speaking directly to men like Clement only when he had to. And on occasions like this, threatening them.

  It was a necessary and temporary stopgap. Even if Clement and Julien kept their mouths shut, the speculation about the Firehorse would continue. But hopefully, Ash had bought himself time. He had to find Dr. Brès before a mob rose and came for her.

  It was better to die by his hand than theirs—much better.

  The truth rent his soul to pieces, but death was inescapable for the doctor now. She was the Firehorse, the focus of the curse. Like the ancient Asian legend from which this curse took its name, the bad luck would be centered around her for as long as she lived. The chain reaction of death and destruction wouldn’t stop until Madeleine Brès was dead.

  The blasts at Vendome and the hospital were just the beginning. It could take hours or days, but more disasters would follow. It could be another explosion, a fire, or a flood. Regardless of the form the curse took, there would be no hiding that fact it had struck again.

  Somewhere on the second floor of the hospital, the fire burned through a support, sending another section crashing down. Ash flexed his wings, spreading them with a snap. He shot into the air, scanning the ruins of the hospital with angelic focus.