Forsaken_Cursed Angel Watchtower 12

by Gilbert, L. B.

  Ash was getting a sinking feeling in his stomach. It’s always the ones we need.

  He didn’t need divine guidance to know who the new Firehorse was.

  Didier and Marcus were friends. It wasn’t much, but Ash could at least spare his aide some pain by not telling him until the deed was done.

  “Go back to the train station. I’ll fish what I can out of the sinkhole, but order more supplies to replace that shipment of track.”

  Marcus scribbled on his clipboard. “Yes, my lord, but I will have to check that we have enough ore to replace that steel.”

  “If we don’t, then leave it be for the moment. We need to prioritize the canal and the sewage system.”

  “But what about this?” Marcus asked, waving at the pit.

  The perfect roundness of the hole mocked Ash. Even in a disaster, he could see the stamp of the Creator.

  Pi. Pi is perfect. I am not, he thought, hoping Marcus would understand why he didn’t tell him about his friend.

  “As long that foul water is pouring into the hole and not the city, we leave it be. At least until we can bring in enough filler material—things we can spare like the bad concrete batch.”

  “The one made using the sand from the wasteland?”

  Ash nodded. “I’ll find Didier. Go now.”

  Like the trusting fool that he was, Marcus saluted and waved goodbye as he headed back to the station.

  Ash relaxed the fist he’d been hiding behind his back. His own nails had scored his palm, but the small cut sealed before his eyes.

  Across the river, he could see the humans gathering on the left bank. Speculating about which one of them is the Firehorse no doubt. They were always so quick to turn on one another. In his mind’s eye, they became a pack of wolves baying to the sky, hungry for blood.

  He flew toward them. “This area is unsafe. Go home!”

  “Shouldn’t we find the Firehorse?” one of them shouted.

  “It’s taken care of,” he promised with a heavy sigh. “They’ve been identified.”

  Didier would get the choice Ash had given all the others—all but the child. A quick death at Ash’s hands or the man could take his chances in the wasteland.

  Most of the crowd dispersed, though as always, a small handful stayed to gape at the new landmark in their city. He eyed one or two, searching for troublemakers, an unfortunate necessity. Experience had taught him how to spot them. Up in Heaven, he had been one of them.

  Get moving. Didier had to be his focus. He had to find the man before something terrible happened. Ash glanced at the sinkhole. Something else, that is.

  He will have gone home. Didier was covered in the poisonous muck of the Seine. He would need to bathe and change into fresh clothes. Ash would be able to find him there…if he knew where the man lived.

  Marcus knows.

  Ash swore. Dear God, couldn’t he have one break? Just one?

  The Heavens were silent.

  6

  Marcus was slack-jawed, a lost expression on his shattered face.

  In the end, Ash had no choice but to ask where the Firehorse lived. One glance at his office confirmed his aide had mountains of records. Somewhere in the pile was a log with Didier’s address, but he didn’t have time to look for it.

  He had never been one for the little details. He left the minutia to others, and so was beholden to them.

  Ash cleared his throat, reminding Marcus he was waiting for an answer. If he didn’t get moving, a fire could break out or a meteor could crash into his city.

  Marcus blinked a few times, his voice distant. “Um, I think Didier still lives with his mother on Rue de la Santé.”

  “In Klein’s district?”

  Marcus nodded, looking down at his hands. “Do you really think it’s him?”

  “It makes sense,” Ash muttered. “You praised him to me just the other day.”

  His aide looked up a wrinkle between his pale brows. “Excuse me?”

  “I’ll explain later,” he promised. “I need to find Didier now.”

  Marcus jumped to his feet, touching his arm. “You’ll make sure first, won’t you? I mean, it could be someone else.”

  Startled, Ash patted his aide’s hand. Contact—skin to skin—was considered a base indulgence to his kind. Marcus was scrupulously respectful, so he avoided it at all costs. Until today.

  Ash nodded, his pity stirred. “I’ll make certain first,” he vowed.

  It wasn’t a difficult promise to make. The curse rarely left them guessing.

  * * *

  Didier’s house in District Thirteen was a small but well-built thatch cottage. His mother was a widow with no other children. To make matters worse, she was mostly blind with severe cataracts.

  “I haven’t seen my son today,” the woman lied.

  Despite her infirmity, she looked hale and healthy, unlike so many others in this neighborhood. Her son had taken good care of her. Ash didn’t want to think about how she would fare without him.

  “I need to speak with him.”

  The woman felt around the kitchen table until her hand landed on the back of a rickety wire-frame chair. She sat down. “Is this about his work? Marcus was by the other night for the noon meal, and he was full of praise for Didier’s efforts.”

  “I understand he’s doing well,” Ash confirmed. “But I think you know that is not the reason I’m here.”

  The woman blinked her sightless eyes. Her face crumpled. “He’s a good boy. A son a mother could be proud of.”

  The impulse to spare her feelings was strong, but he couldn’t lie. She had to prepare herself. “I’ve come to realize the curse only takes our best,” he said.

  His words of comfort only made her sob louder. “Is there anyone else you can stay with?” he asked. “Someone no one here knows?”

  Shaken, the woman wrung her hands. “Why?”

  Because if the people learned Didier was a Firehorse, her neighbors would probably turn on her. Guilt by association. Ash could no longer trust in man’s better nature anymore…maybe he never could.

  “If you don’t know of anyone who can take you in, go to Marcus. Do you know where he lives?”

  “His quarters are in Belleville…with you.”

  “Yes.” That was close enough. He lived in the top-floor apartment of a three-story building, while Marcus kept rooms on the bottom. None one lived in between. Didier’s mother could have one of those apartments.

  “I don’t want to go,” she whispered, running her hands over the scarred table.

  “It’s temporary,” Ash said, hoping it wasn’t a lie. “Take what you need for a few days. Maybe you will be able to return here soon.”

  He couldn’t promise more. It was time for him to leave. He’d given Didier enough of a head start.

  With a murmur of thanks, he departed, blotting out the woman’s suffering as soon as he exited the building.

  Ash felt the chill autumn air rush around him. He embraced the cold, letting the icy touch freeze him inside and out. War is easier than this.

  A sneaky little voice asked him why was he bothering anymore. For every Marcus and Didier, there were a dozen or so members of the mob or worse—a Titouan or Mazarin.

  Forcing his feet to move, he breathed deeply of the tainted air. It tasted like grease, and not the good kind. He closed his eyes, aching for the fresh tang of clean mountain air and blue skies.

  He frowned, looking back at the cottage as a thought struck him. The woman inside hadn’t been surprised to see him. Sure, she’d been upset, but not shocked. Almost as if someone had warned her he’d be coming.

  Which meant Didier was aware he’d been cursed, and, somehow, he’d accepted it.

  Most Firehorses were in denial even as entire buildings fell around them. And so far, only one disaster could be attributed to Didier. His sudden departure—his mother lying for him—was too strange.

  Flexing his hamstrings and glutes, Ash crouched before launching himself into th
e air. He began to scan the neighborhood from above.

  His eyes followed each male of Didier’s age and height, the few who were out at this hour. There was no sign of anything unusual until he flew higher.

  There. A fast-moving pair was making its way up Boulevard Saint-Jacques. He recognized Didier’s sandy-blond head. The other figure was smaller and hooded. They rounded a pile of stones and dry brown shrubbery, disappearing from sight.

  Mystified, he streaked down, landing a few paces from the stones. There was nothing behind them. It wasn’t until he pushed the dry branches aside that he saw the hole.

  Ash curled up his wings, folding them so they tucked in and melded with his body. No longer encumbered by the huge appendages, he squeezed through the narrow opening, dropping lightly onto the ground below.

  He made his way down the tunnel until it opened into a wider passage. He was in the catacombs, he realized with a start. The subtle glow of bleached bones was unmistakable to his superior night vision.

  The network of tunnels and passages had run underneath most of pre-Collision Paris. When the cemeteries overflowed in the late-eighteenth century, people filled the spaces with the bones of their dead.

  People had taken tours and snapped pictures, he remembered. Death was always fascinating when it wasn’t a part of everyday life.

  But given the instability of the terrain in the last decade or so, this subterranean network was unofficially a no-man’s land now. No one in their right mind came here for fear of being buried in a cave-in. In fact, Ash would have bet most of the entrances to the underground network had been obliterated in this part of the city. A small quake near the Paris observatory a few years ago had done a lot of damage.

  Except you never bothered to check.

  A winking in and out of retreating torchlight ahead stopped his self-recrimination. The part of Ash that was created for battle rose to the surface, his every instinct sharpening for the hunt.

  His feet pounded the dirt floor of the narrow passage. A blur of winking skulls laughed at him as he streaked past.

  The noise of his pursuit alerted the people he was chasing. Ahead of him, footfalls sped up, but they were no match for his preternatural speed. He gained ground and was almost on them when they turned, banking left. Ash was forced to slow down as the tunnel narrowed unexpectedly.

  Even without his wings, he could barely manage. His shoulders brushed the wall, their breadth dislodging femurs and rib bones in the skeleton-lined passage. Ash turned to his head, continuing to push forward in a crab-like crawl until he couldn’t anymore.

  He was caught at a bottleneck, a space where the tunnel almost closed before opening wide into a small pocket cavern. At the opposite end, an arch was partially blocked by debris. The opening gap appeared too small for people. Nevertheless, his quarry was managing just fine.

  “Go!” The hissed whisper rang in his ears with a strikingly high melodic tone.

  The hooded one was female.

  Ash squeezed past the constriction trapping him. He jumped, spreading his wings for a few heartbeats. His body sailed over the open space of the cavern. He landed on the opposite side with a thump.

  Ash was too big to fit through the narrow arch, even turned on his side, but he’d managed to get one arm through. He was holding the cloth of a hoodie in his hand.

  Someone screamed—Didier was shouting, but the hood Ash had grabbed hold of wasn’t the man’s. Ash had caught the female.

  She twisted to face him, trying to wrench away from his grasp. It was the girl from Place Vendôme, the beauty who’d stopped his heart.

  The wide brown eyes of his mystery woman were flecked with green and gold. They flared as the sound of her pounding pulse reverberated through his ears. For an instant, his heart and hers pulsed in unison until she wrenched away. He was left holding the discarded black sweatshirt. She’d sacrificed the garment to get away.

  His last glimpse of her was of her wide eyes staring at him, fear shifting to confusion before she pivoted and fled, melting into the darkness.

  7

  She had vanished into the deathspace of the catacombs. So had Didier. They’d evaded him.

  That was almost as shocking as the fact he was lost. Ash had tried to force his way past the arch, only to bring it and part of the ceiling down on top of him. Using his superior strength had only made the cave-in worse.

  Ash forced himself to breathe shallowly and slow his heart rate with a calming chant. It was only when he was utterly still, his movement molasses slow, that he was able to wiggle one hand, and then the other, free. Sliding on his belly, he crawled out from under the rubble. By the time he was free, Didier and the mystery girl were long gone.

  He’d tried to follow their trail, but the catacombs were a warren. The interconnecting tunnels used to stretch hundreds of miles in length in the Pre-Collision era. He wasn’t sure how much of the network was still intact, but clearly it was more than he’d thought. It had only taken a few dozen turns before he’d lost any trace of them.

  Unbelievable. How had this happened?

  Ash was made to hunt. Angels possessed superior strength and hearing. He could detect minute disturbances in the air, an ability that allowed him to track demons fleeing from God’s wrath. But the air around him was confused. Whatever ripples he could sense were faint and came from too many different directions. He tracked one after another only to find small human nests, abandoned nooks, and small chambers with old clothes, broken dishes, and trash. He even found the remains of an old rave—a pre-Collision event that used the grinning skulls and bone-lined ossuary as a backdrop for parties.

  The demon horde hadn’t bothered much with this space. What novelty was there in skull-lined passages and monuments when Hell was literally paved with them? Entire buildings in the internal regions were built of bone and blood-soaked cobb. To a demon, this French curiosity was a pale imitation of home, so the abandoned network—deadspace—was left intact by them. The same could not be said for humans.

  In the immediate aftermath of the Collision, the demons laid waste to the population. The tangled web of ossuary tunnels had expanded exponentially as legions of the dead joined their ancestors in eternal rest, at least until the curse made the area unsafe. Then it had faded from memory.

  This subterranean world had always made Ash uncomfortable. He was a creature of wind and sky. Even the perpetually tainted air above was preferable to the closed stillness down here.

  His route took him past one of the elaborate crosses made of human skulls. Stepping past it, he tried to ignore the macabre display, but his overheated angelic brain kept processing the bone, fitting teeth and ocular orbits into the proper configuration until they were recognizable human faces.

  He was doing a better job of ignoring them until he turned a corner and came face to face with the bleached pate of Robespierre, a ringleader of the revolution and an instigator of the Reign of Terror.

  Ash narrowed his eyes at the skull, impulsively using the one-fingered salute humans still favored for total dicks.

  Time dragged as his search continued. He had no idea how long he’d been down in the catacombs. I need to start carrying a watch. Digital ones still didn’t work, but the classic wind-up ones did, although their best still lost minutes a day.

  If he’d been human, this would be around the time he would start panicking. Thousands had lost their lives after becoming lost down here. In fact, he’d already passed a few of those poor souls. They were easy to distinguish from the other remains. The bones lay as they had fallen, not in the orderly piles and arrangements made by humans past.

  Starvation or death by dehydration wasn’t a concern for him, but he could spend ages lost down here. In the meantime, his city would suffer. He had to find Didier and the girl before the council leaders inflicted lasting damage.

  Ash needed to get his bearings. He shouldn’t have lost them so easily. I’m rusty, he thought with a scowl. He’d lived in secret so long his powers had a
trophied.

  Remember your training. Angels were created by the Maker with their abilities intact the way a robot was programmed. But Ash’s kind were supposed to practice and hone those skills.

  Quiet inside, quiet outside. Raphael’s voice echoed in his head without his trademark smirk. The archangel was an ass, but he’d been an excellent commander. He’d been the one to teach Ash the deep meditation techniques that were the foundation of his hunting and warrior ability.

  He let go, relaxing again. His mind scanned the air for those little ripples that would indicate human movement.

  Nothing…except. He opened his mouth, the coppery tang so faint he might have been imagining it.

  Magic. It was only a trace, but it was there.

  Magic had a half-life close to the lifespan of a snowball in hell. If he was detecting traces of it, that meant a spell had been cast recently.

  But all the witches were dead. They had been hunted down after the Collision by both demons and humankind.

  His stomach tightened in apprehension. A witch had been, albeit indirectly, responsible for the end of the world. But Ash had seen too much to believe that all were the unholy evil creatures rabid priests and prophets painted them as. They were the scapegoats of the apocalypse.

  We hunted them, too. He couldn’t name an angel who would hesitate to kill a witch on sight.

  He had to get moving. The hint of copper in the air was fading even now. Time was running out. Spurred by the reminder, he began to run.

  * * *

  The trace led him to another nest. Blankets and tin cans were folded neatly next to a lantern with a little oil left in the reservoir. He studied the water-tight space. The entrance to the small cavern was a few feet above the ground, protecting it from the periodic flooding that plagued many of the other passages around him.

  Ash squeezed out of the entrance, his boots covered to the ankle in water. The trace of magic was still there, prodding him forward.

  Signs of human habitation weren’t rare down here. But most of them were old—pre-Collision. The vast majority of people were too close to death as it was. They avoided this place. But over the centuries, there were always exceptions.